Derby Day (39 page)

Later that evening, when Evie and Miss Ellington were sitting in the drawing room playing at spillikins, with Mr Happerton and Mr Glenister talking together in the corner, Mr Davenant appeared suddenly in the doorway, said something in an undertone which sounded like an apology, shook Mr Happerton’s hand, gave Evie a very longing look, which she, staring up from the tray on which the pieces were set out, quaintly returned, and then was gone. Mr Glenister started from his chair, made as if to follow him and then recovered himself and resumed his conversation.

On the next day he was gone: his bed had not been slept in, Mrs Castell said, who had the care of it; his study locked up and the key vanished, but no sign of anyone behind the window; no trace of his whereabouts inside the house or out of it. At first no great fright was taken at his absence. Somebody remembered that the horse fair at Sleaford fell on that day, which he was in the habit of attending; Hester recalled that he had asked for his boots to be brushed on the previous night, which was thought significant in this respect. But then, at teatime, when no word had been heard of him and a neighbour, back from Sleaford, reported that he had not been seen there, a council of war was held in the kitchen, at which Mr Happerton, Mr Glenister, Mrs Castell and Miss Ellington discussed what ought to be done. ‘He has gone on one of his walks, I daresay,’ Mr Glenister said, ‘but all the same it is inconvenient of him not to have given us notice.’ ‘I confess I did not like the look on his face that time yesterday,’ Mr Happerton said, who of the two perhaps seemed more anxious. ‘What do you suppose is in that study of his?’ The key still not being to hand, Mr Happerton and Mr Glenister broke down the door, but there was nothing there – only a great mass of papers thrown over the desk, and – which Mr Glenister said privately that he wondered at – a Bible open on a chair. But when Miss Ellington ventured in there later she found a miniature of Mr Davenant done when he was a boy cast on the floor with its frame cracked that alarmed her greatly.

There was a wind that evening, and a storm that flattened the tops of the trees in the wood and smashed a chair that had been left out on the lawn into matchwood, and Mr Glenister said that it was a bad night to be out in, but he had no doubt that Mr Davenant had taken shelter somewhere. Miss Ellington was left with the task of comforting Evie, whose distress was very pitiful to see, although it seemed to the governess that what had happened was in some measure beyond her understanding, that she grasped at its shape in the air above her but could not bring it down. This thought had occurred to Mr Glenister. ‘Do you suppose she knows?’ he asked Miss Ellington at one point, who said that she thought she did, whereupon Mr Glenister brushed up his moustaches, offered to dance a hornpipe, imitate a pig, &c., all impostures that generally had Evie shrieking with laughter, but on this occasion fell sadly flat.

On the next morning Mr Glenister had his men search the estate and make enquiries in Scroop, but all to no avail. There was another storm that night, and a great rattling of windows – the trees dancing up beyond the panes like a forest of imploring hands – but Mr Glenister said nothing about it being a bad night to be out in.

And then came a curious time at Scroop, quite three days at least, of people going about their tasks in the most regular way, but knowing all the while that a great cloud of disquiet hung over their heads, the post earnestly examined but bringing nothing, the least stir of gravel on the drive calling faces to the window to see who might be coming and what they might bring.

On the evening of the third day they found Mr Davenant in a little stream that runs to the north of Scroop, drifted up against a copse of alder trees that hangs over the water. Miss Ellington saw him lying on the rail, by which they carried him up to the house, his face all white and mottled from the river.

He had a little scimitar paper-knife in his hand, which she remembered from his study.

His eyes staring up at nothing.

And now they were all as lost as he …

Part Four

Mist

The weather is so very bad down in Lincolnshire, that the liveliest imagination can scarcely apprehend its ever being fine again
.

Charles Dickens,
Bleak House
(1853)

AT GLENISTER HALL the mist is rising. For half an hour now Mr Glenister has stood by the window in his study watching it roll up from the fields behind his lawn, and Edgard Dyke, which lies to the back of his birch wood. There is always mist in Lincolnshire. Even on fine summer mornings it lurks in the spinneys and the water meadows’ edge: a dense white halo, ghostly, like fine-spun cotton. The local myths and legends are full of it. The
Gesta Daemonorum Lincolnensis
, a monkish scribble on the flyleaf of a tenth-century psalter kept in the vault of Lincoln Cathedral, talks of a great fog clouding the sky from
Sliofor ad Luthe
, which Mr Glenister, who has seen the psalter, thinks is the land between Sleaford and Louth. Out of this fog, according to the author of the
Gesta
, a winged steed, coal-black and with flaming eyes, periodically emerges to gallop the night sky with a pack of spectral hounds yammering at his hoofs. There are similar myths in Norfolk, forty miles away beyond the Wash; antiquaries – Mr Glenister is a member of the Lincolnshire Society – think them derivative. It is the Pegasus of the Lincoln psalter who rode here first, out across Spurn Head above the grey North Sea. But it is a second black horse, which interests Mr Glenister now: Tiberius, in point of fact, who only a fortnight hence will be taken down to London for the great race. For reasons he cannot quite fathom, Mr Glenister has determined to be present, even if – Derby Day being what it is, and no lodgings to be found within a dozen miles of Epsom – it means staying in a London hotel. It is all to do with Mr Davenant, he thinks, Mr Davenant and, more generally, the tribute that the dead exact from the living, in this case the obligation to travel a hundred miles to watch a horse run in a race that will last two and a half minutes in front of a hundred thousand people.

There is something ominous about the mist, Mr Glenister feels, watching now as another dense cloud or two comes stealing up from the birch wood, if not uncanny. A human figure suddenly engulfed by it – he has seen his keeper so surrounded – does not disappear but is rendered frailer and less substantial. The idea of frailty makes Mr Glenister think of Mr Davenant, on whom, since the body was brought up from the stream on a rail ten days since, he has not ceased to focus his mind. It is known to everyone – everyone, that is, except the Coroner, who charitably diagnosed mischance – that Mr Davenant destroyed himself. And it is thought, from the evidence of a paper found in Mr Davenant’s study, that it was Mr Davenant in his rage and misery who attempted to destroy Tiberius, killing the thing he loved so that no one else could possess him, or perhaps did not mean quite to destroy him, or he would have chosen a better time and a better weapon. To Mr Glenister, who reads books and newspapers, who is a Lincolnshire man but with affiliations beyond the flat fields and the lowering sky, all this is curiously symbolic. The world is changing, he thinks, and it is leaving Mr Davenant and his sort behind. It is not enough, now, to live in a house that your grandfather inhabited, in sight of fields that his grandfather walked, in a periwig, for there is a tide sweeping over the Lincolnshire flats that no amount of ancestry can damn or divert. Tiberius, Mr Glenister thinks, is caught up in this tide, although a part of him knows this to be nonsense, for gentlemen have always run horses and crowds come to watch them, if not at Epsom Downs then elsewhere. And now, by destroying himself, Mr Davenant has made that tide run a little faster, ensuring that a crowd of other things will be swept away on it just as he has been swept himself.

It is only ten days since Mr Davenant slipped into the stream – whose banks, as the Coroner pointed out, were caked in mud and unusually steep – and already he has been buried, and memorialised in the
Lincolnshire Chronicle
, and if not forgotten then is of no account in the new arrangements that mysteriously prevail. The will was read out at a lawyer’s office in Lincoln to an audience consisting of Mr Glenister, Mr Davenant’s brother, Mr Happerton and his London attorney, and was, everyone very soon agreed, quite otiose, seeing that Mr Happerton had in his pocket a bill of sale of the Scroop property with Mr Davenant’s signature on it. ‘It is all to do with that horse, I suppose,’ Mr Davenant’s brother remarked, with whom Mr Glenister subsequently ate his lunch. ‘There is more to it than that, I think,’ Mr Glenister said, not knowing what he could decently say in such circumstances. ‘And this Mr Happerton,’ the cousin complained. ‘How did he come to get such a hold on him, I wonder?’ ‘He should never have begun that lawsuit, I fear,’ Mr Glenister said, again not liking to say all he knew. ‘Poor Sam,’ Mr Davenant’s brother lamented. ‘Ruined for a horse and a sandpit that someone dug up in one of his fields. It is very hard.’

The rooks do not trust the mist, Mr Glenister notices. At the first hint of it they return to the tree-tops. These, Mr Glenister thinks, look like the masts of fog-bound ships. In winter the Humber would resemble a forest, were it not for the clanking hulls. And yet, for all Mr Davenant’s brother’s complaint – he is resigning his Fellowship to be married and perhaps needs the money – Mr Happerton has, in the matter of the will, been surprisingly gracious. The incidental legacies – £30 to Mrs Castell, a carriage clock to Hester the housemaid – have been handed over. Mr Glenister himself is already the proud possessor of a steel engraving of the Battle of Culloden, at which some Davenant is supposed to have distinguished himself. To the starker questions – what will happen to Evie and Miss Ellington – there is, as yet, no answer. Mr Happerton is at Epsom: the fate of his tenant’s child and her governess is of little moment to him. Doubtless, like the servants’ wages and piles of mouldering timber, it will be dealt with at the proper season. Mr Glenister has discovered, somewhat to his surprise, that he is to be Evie’s guardian. He is not certain how he feels about this, liking Evie but wondering whether this liking may not be stifled by her constant proximity.

Since her father’s death Evie has fallen into a decline, rambling around the place like a pale white ghost and having to be brought back from woods and meadows into which she has strayed. Mr Glenister, whose advice has been sought, has suggested that laudanum should be mixed into her milk. But one cannot always go on administering laudanum to a fourteen-year-old girl, he thinks. He wonders what it would be like if Evie came to live at Glenister Court, and foresees a future of cats persecuted by her ineffable love, white muslin in hasty transit over the wet grass, the red eyes which remind him of a rat’s staring up from the kitchen table. It is all a question, Mr Glenister feels, of determining where responsibility lies.

Just at that moment there is a knock at the study door, and the maid opens it to reveal Mr Silas, the Sleaford attorney, raising his legs, one knee at a time, in a kind of jogging motion, and twisting his hat in his hand. In the past few weeks Mr Glenister and Mr Silas have become remarkably intimate, in so far as intimacy can ever exist between a Lincolnshire squire and the deacon of a Dissenting chapel. Mr Glenister knows that his late father, a Canon of Christchurch, would have refused to enter a room if Mr Silas sat in it. There are people who say that Mr Silas, whose feet are still moving nervously up and down as if he walked some invisible treadmill, is another part of the tide sweeping in across Lincolnshire and the world beyond it, but Mr Glenister thinks not. There have always been Mr Silases, he believes, demure but self-conscious little men skipping about the coat-tails of the great, and not so great, and charity (in Mr Silas’s case expediency) requires that they should be honoured. Mr Silas, he sees, is somewhat changed from his usual appearance, and the difference lies in his dress, specifically in the substitution of his black jacket with a kind of antique frock-coat, frogged and emerald green, but with a hint almost of purple. Mr Glenister thinks his father would have been seriously offended by Mr Silas, with or without his coat, whereas his son is merely amused.

‘Come in, Silas,’ he says now. ‘It is very good of you to come and see me.’ The coat, he finds, is too big to be ignored. He cannot avoid looking at it, nor can Mr Silas avoid the slant of his gaze. ‘That is a very extraordinary garment you have on.’

‘I don’t know that it’s so very remarkable,’ Mr Silas says nervously. ‘But then, us attorneys are always supposed to go about like rooks, you know.’

‘You have not brought Mr Jones with you, I think,’ Mr Glenister says, looking into the doorway as if Mr Jones might still be lurking in the corridor.

‘Well – no. Jones is a very useful man, you know, but when the business is confidential, I like to come on my own.’

Mr Glenister is suddenly aware of colour, both in the room and without it. The imperial sheen of Mr Silas’s frock-coat; the red wax seal on the sheaf of legal documents he now takes out of his case; a damasked chair-back; the whiteness of the mist, now receding a little on the virid grass. The
Gesta
, he recalls, has the same variegated palette: black hounds, red eyes, golden stars flung over the horizon. Mr Silas, meanwhile, is stirring in his chair. Without Mr Jones to cajole and bully he is less sure of himself, and somewhat humble. The legal documents are strewn across his lap.