Derby Day (22 page)

‘It is nothing very much. You would not, I think, find it suited to Tiberius.’

‘Wouldn’t I? Well, we shall see.’

And with that, Mr Happerton raised his hand in the most friendly manner, turned on his heel and left Mr Davenant to his cold, damp gunroom, his gathering darkness and his ancient musket.

*

‘That’s a fine red mark you have on the side of your head, Raff,’ Mr Happerton said as they passed one another in the stable yard. ‘I wonder who put it there?’

‘Red mark be hanged,’ Captain Raff said, in what for him was a tone of quite unaccountable fury.

*

Miss Ellington’s father had always said that a young woman should have her resources, and so the governess had hers. There was her
Christian Year
, which she read at a little in the early mornings, and there was Mrs Brookfield’s novel, which she had by her chair after supper. There were her walks in the garden and in the pasture that lay behind the wood, and there was the drawing-room piano, whose keys, to be sure, were very stiff and yellow. And then, looking through a trunk which sat in the corner of the schoolroom, she found a box of watercolours and an ancient brush or two of black horsehair, which was a source of satisfaction to her, as she had used to paint, both at home – Mr Ellington said she did very well but would do better to clean her brushes – and with her dear girls in Warwickshire. The reds and blues and yellows were all dried up, alas, but as Mr Glenister truly remarked, seeing her at work upon a view of the garden, all one needed for a prospect of Scroop Hall was green, brown and grey. And so with her books, and her walks, and her easel, she had her occupations, which was a comfort.

And then there was Evie, who was the greatest occupation of all. Having had the opportunity to observe her, Miss Ellington could truthfully say that she was a dear, sweet girl – affectionate, confiding, altogether without malice or guile, but that there was nothing to be done with her. Miss Ellington devised a scheme of study that she thought might entice her: a picturesque scene or two from history that might awaken her curiosity; a little parable or two from nature to make her smile. But it was no good at all: she could not understand it, and the pain of this want of understanding reduced Evie to utter misery. And so the scenes from history and the parables from nature had been given up, and they sat and looked at picture books, and played at spillikins, and talked. Or rather Evie asked the most peculiar questions, plucked from nowhere, like a cloud pulled out of the sky, which it was Miss Ellington’s task to answer as best she could. Thus, on a cold morning, with the wind rushing through the tree-tops and the windows rattling in their frames:

‘Where is Pusskin?’

‘Pusskin is dead.’

‘Why is he dead?’

‘Why, Evie, we have spoken of this.’

‘Will Pusskin go to heaven?’

‘Pusskin was a good cat and shall have his reward.’

(Which, by the by, Miss Ellington believed to be true, whatever Mr Fitzgerald may have said in his book about the afterlife being an exclusively human resort.)

Another time – it may have been the same morning, when the wind had abated a little – they were looking at an illustrated paper, full of sketches of ladies’ fashions, toxophilites drawing their bows, &c., and she asked, quite mournfully, while pointing at one of these Dianas fixing an arrow to her string:

‘Is that my mama?’

‘You know very well that it is not your mama.’

‘Why does my mama not come?’

‘You know, Evie, that she cannot.’

‘Where is your mama? Is she here?’

‘Alas, she is like your mama, Evie. She is gone from us, and will not come back.’

And then, looking through the trunk in which Miss Ellington had discovered the boxes of watercolours, which was very deep and capacious and would not yield up all its secrets at once, they found a pile of clothing, very ancient, and, she believed, dating from a time sixty or seventy years ago. A time when ladies wore gigots, and paduasoy, and marvellous bonnets from which you would hardly think there were room for a human face to stare out. And so, having nothing else to amuse them, it wanting an hour until tea and the servants gone out, they stopped up the door and arrayed themselves in some of this finery: Miss Ellington in an ivory muslin that might have done for a countess’s daughter in the time of old King George, and Evie in a wide-brimmed hat with an ostrich feather on its brim that, when they touched it, broke into three pieces. They fetched mirrors and stared at themselves in wonder, for it was the drollest sight, after which they hastened to put the things away, for it seemed to Miss Ellington – although she could not say exactly where the fault lay – that they had done wrong, and that it would have been better not to set these ghosts a-caper.

For this was a house of ghosts. There were the pictures of Mr Davenant’s ancestors in their frames, and there was the portrait of Evie’s mama upon the dining-room table. Miss Ellington asked Mrs Castell, who had known her, what manner of woman she was, and received the answer that Missus was the gayest, spiritest lady she ever saw, and, though it was not her place to say so, worth two of Mr D. The wind swept in from the east – from Jutland, Mr Glenister said – with nothing to stand in its way but sea and sky. The trees wavered in the rushing air and the dogs barked in the stable yard. Miss Ellington asked Hester whether she did not think this was a very lonely place and the girl said that she had served at one time in a great house on the coast that had been closed up for the winter while the family was away, with only an old housekeeper for company, and that the two of them went to bed each night at seven and rose at five and saw no one except the grocer with his cart, who called once a week. It seemed to Miss Ellington that such a life must be insupportable, but no, Hester said she had known girls who had gone further and fared worse, and if one trusted in one’s Maker – Hester was a very religious girl – all would be well.

Remembering what her papa had said, Miss Ellington resolved that she should make a study, and the things she should make a study of would be their guests, Mr Happerton and Captain Raff. Miss Ellington wondered a little at the propriety of this, but then remembered that we were all of us subject to the observation of those we move among, and were not, she thought, much wounded by it. Besides, what was she to Mr Happerton and Captain Raff, who were London visitors – as different to the people in Lincolnshire as a dish of peas was from one of the mangel-wurzels that lay in Mr Davenant’s fields – who were concerned only with Tiberius, and when they quitted Scroop, which Mrs Castell said she believed they would do next week, would bear not the faintest recollection of us back to the metropolis with them?

Of the two, she preferred Captain Raff the less. Mr Glenister, who was amused by him, she thought, said he was an ‘old buck’, an expression Miss Ellington had never heard before. Why did she not like Captain Raff? Because he fidgeted over his dinner, and swallowed his wine in great gulps, and gave the maids very knowing looks (indeed Hester said she had boxed his ears for some familiarity, and certainly there was a great red weal on the side of Captain Raff’s face). To be sure he was very civil to her, raised his hat – a very dirty hat that any other gentleman would have had cleaned – when they met about the place, called her ‘Miss Ellington’ and so forth, but she did not believe the civility well-meant.

There was a particular conversation that she had with Captain Raff once when they met by chance at the side gate of the house.

‘Why, Miss Ellington, you are looking uncommon fresh today. You will think I am waiting here on purpose, I daresay.’

‘I think nothing of the kind, sir.’

‘A doosid warm day I call this.’ (In fact there was a great wind blowing in from across the wold.) ‘What do you say to a turn about the garden?’

‘It is very cold, Captain Raff, and I am on my way to the schoolroom.’

‘Ah, I daresay you think I’m a sad sort of man, Miss Ellington.’

‘I think nothing of the kind, sir.’

At which Captain Raff gave an extraordinary wink, like Mr Punch at the seaside immediately before the stick is brought down upon his head, and skipped off along the path in his dirty little boots, so that she almost wished she had a stick herself with which she might belabour him.

Mr Happerton, meanwhile, had won what Miss Ellington’s papa, talking of his Oxford days, would have called ‘golden opinions’. He quite melted Mrs Castell’s heart by presenting her with a box of preserved fruits, and when he sat in the drawing room reading the newspaper Hester and Dora listened out for his bell as if the Prince of Wales himself were quartered there. His letters were brought in ever so humbly on a salver, and there was a special bottle of port in the cellar which he was most insistently urged to try of an evening. For herself, Miss Ellington thought Mr Happerton a loud, cheerful kind of a man, very appreciative of all that was done for him, very civil to those around him, and yet, she thought, rather calculating. He had a trick of reckoning them up which was not wholly agreeable, like a shopkeeper pricing up a turtle for his window: a glance at Mrs Castell; a glance at Evie; a glance at Hester as she balanced the dinner plates on her arm. He had a way of looking at things as if they were not to his taste and he wished to alter them: a glance at the stable yard and the midden that lies beyond it; a glance at the apple trees in the orchard by the kitchen garden; a glance at Mr Davenant’s ancestors in their frames.

Miss Ellington’s papa would have said that he was not a gentleman, and yet there was, she thought, no general agreement as to of what gentlemanliness consists, and a man might drop his aitches and sit altogether woodenly at the dinner table with his mouth open and still be very highly regarded.

Every day or so the post brought a letter to Mr Happerton which was thought to be from his wife, which he read very attentively and then made a spill of it for his cigar or threw it straightaway into the fireplace, where sometimes it was not wholly extinguished by the flame. At these moments Miss Ellington sometimes had a great urge to gather up the fragments and examine them. He was always striding about the place, pacing the garden, putting his nose into the bins that were kept for the pigs, or strolling over to the church to talk to the sexton as he stood digging, or walking into the village on some private errand that was never revealed.

‘Why is it’, Miss Ellington asked once of Mr Glenister, as they sat in the schoolroom, where he had come to bring Evie a bag of sugarplums that he had bought in Lincoln, ‘that Mr Happerton should wish to make copies of Mr Davenant’s signature?’

‘Is that what he has been doing?’ Mr Glenister demanded, with a sharpness of tone she had not previously noticed in him.

So she explained about her coming upon him in the study, his being called away, the piece of paper that lay on the desk, &c.

‘Well, he is a sly one,’ Mr Glenister remarked, laughing as he did so, but not, as Miss Ellington thought, without some dissimulation, and she laughed too, though not quite knowing why she did so.

And then came a very strange and peculiar incident, which Miss Ellington thought would exercise them far more than whether they liked Mr Happerton and if he sat in the study copying Mr Davenant’s signature.

*

The noises came from outside in the stable yard: a high-pitched cry of anguish; the slam of a door; feet moving rapidly over stone. Then came other voices and other doors banging in their wake. There was someone coming rapidly up the main staircase, and Mr Happerton, who had kept at his toilet, and was now calmly dipping his razor carefully into his shaving-water, was not at all surprised when the feet stopped before his bedroom door, the door was thrown open and Captain Raff, his coat even more dishevelled and his face turned scarlet from the unwonted exercise, fairly flung himself onto the carpet at his feet.

Though he knew that nothing short of an earthquake would have induced Captain Raff to invade his sleeping quarters at ten past eight in the morning, Mr Happerton’s first response was that of anger.

‘What the devil do you mean, Raff, bursting in here like a dervish? What on earth is the matter?’

‘Cut!’ Captain Raff pulled himself up from the carpet, where he had come to rest almost on his knees, and repeated the word two or three times. ‘Cut!’

‘Cut? What is cut? I very nearly cut myself with this razor when you came crashing in. What do you mean?’

‘The horse,’ Captain Raff gasped, like a fish hauled out onto the towpath. ‘Cut. Stabbed. Slashed.’

And then Mr Happerton put down his razor, threw on his jacket, and with the lather from his shaving preparation still clinging to his jaw ran out of his room, down the staircase and through the back parts of the house to the stable yard, with Captain Raff – now very much out of breath and quite wild-eyed – following behind him.

In the stables all was confusion. The rail that stood before Tiberius’s stall was half thrown down and the horse stood quivering behind it with his hoofs stamping nervously on the straw. A lamp had been turned over and was leaking oil onto the floor. Jem the stable boy stood half-in and half-out of the stall, not liking to approach any nearer, such was the horse’s agitation, but making placatory gestures with his hand.

‘Here, maister,’ Jem shouted, giving Mr Happerton a nod. ‘I’s’ll not come close if I were you. There ain’t no knowing what he might do. Look, he have kicked half his stall away already. Hand us that blanket, will ye, that’s on the straw there.’