Derby Day (44 page)

Mr Pardew said that he should be delighted to do business with Mr Zangwill, knowing that gentleman of old, and the two bills were written, stamped and signed. One of them Mr Pardew stuffed into the inner pocket of his coat. The other Mr Happerton was about to place in his desk drawer, but Mr Pardew shook his head.

‘No,’ he said. ‘If I take a second bill to Zangwill it will be all I can do to raise two hundred. You can send me the rest in cash. After the race.’

Mr Happerton gave a queer kind of half-smile. ‘You seem very certain of my success.’

‘I don’t say that you will win. I said only that you will be successful.’ There was a sheet of blank notepaper on Mr Happerton’s desk, and he picked it up and scribbled something on it. ‘Here is the address.’

‘There are people in London who would give a great deal of money for this,’ Mr Happerton said.

‘And for things which I could tell them,’ Mr Pardew said. ‘But shall not.’

Inside Information

It has frequently been remarked how in the days before the Derby race, London society is altogether broken up and dispersed. Gentlemen are no longer at their places of business, but at Epsom; ladies disappear on errands; great houses are given over to cats and caretakers; and servants are everywhere triumphant
.

A History of the Derby
(1867)

IT WAS A Sunday evening in Belgrave Square, a week before the great race, and exceedingly quiet. On the further side, towards Victoria, a carriage was delivering guests to an evening party, and a faint – a very faint – sound of music could be heard drifting on the early summer air. In a house on the eastern corner somebody lay dying, and there was packed straw down in the street and a muffler hung over the doorknob, but these precautions were quite superfluous: it was exceedingly quiet. Northwards in the direction of the park the light was bleeding out of the sky in crimson and purple flourishes in a way that Mr Turner might have painted, but there was no Mr Turner to see it, no one at all, except a pair of elderly ladies with umbrellas over their arms – for May can be so very inclement, you know – and Watts’s hymnals in their hands walking to evening service, and a policeman benevolently surveying them as they passed.

In Mr Gresham’s mansion, upon whose upper windows the light darted and flashed like knives, something of a holiday spirit prevailed. Mr Happerton had gone down to Epsom two days before and not been seen since. Old Mr Gresham still shuffled about the house, drank his tea in the drawing room and asked after his newspapers, but as the servants remarked to each other, lor’ bless you,
he
was no trouble. The great dining room was shut up and the chandelier extinguished under brown paper, pending refurbishment. The butler and the old housekeeper were recruiting themselves at Margate, and in their absence Nokes, Mrs Happerton’s maid, reigned supreme. Mr Happerton’s letters – a great many of them – were piled up on a silver salver awaiting his return. Mr Gresham’s newspaper was taken away and ironed the moment it came through the door. There were other accomplishments which perhaps only Mrs Happerton noticed. Miss Nokes’s distinguishing mark, it may be said, was her unobtrusiveness. She came in and out of a room with a step so soft that people wondered how a woman weighing eight stone and standing five feet two inches could move so silently. She hovered in hallways with an almost frightening assiduity. No bell rang without her hearing it; if you walked up a staircase you would see her coming down it, and vice versa – Mrs Happerton found her very useful.

At present her usefulness to Mrs Happerton was merely vicarious, for Mrs Happerton, too, was away from home. Robbed of its human traffic, the house assumed an aquamarine air: the deep banks of shadow welled up in the hallway like water, and the shafts of sunlight that issued in from the high windows were lost in it and subdued, so that Nokes might have been a fish moving quietly on its placid current, or perhaps only some siren of the seabed, gone off to her silent cavern where the bodies of drowned mariners repose, to gnaw a bone or two. In fact, just at this moment Nokes was not quite alone. She was sitting in the basement kitchen, with a teapot steaming on the table before her and the half of a Dundee cake on a pewter plate, opposite a tall, dark-haired gentleman in a tremendous waistcoat and a billycock hat, which he preferred for some reason to keep on indoors, and exchanging what is known as ‘chaff’.

‘Nice little crib,’ the gentleman now said, casting his eye around the table, its profusion of pans, ironmongery and stacked china, and rattling his tea cup in its saucer. ‘Very.’

‘Get on with you,’ Nokes retorted. She was not quite easy in her manner, and glanced occasionally at the little cluster of bells that hung over the doorway.

‘Nothing like a house that’s shut up,’ the gentleman continued, ‘with the fambly away, the skivvy to gammon about, and no one to answer to except yourself.’

‘There’s an old gentleman lying asleep up two pair of stairs.’

‘And can ring his bell if he wakes up, and very likely be attended to, I shouldn’t wonder.’

‘Sauce,’ Miss Nokes said. She was about thirty, with a severe expression somewhat softened by these juvenile flourishes. There was a silence, during which each looked surreptitiously at the other. ‘I dare say you’d sooner be at the Bag o’ Nails along with the other chaps.’

‘I can’t say that I should. Too much talk about horses, you know, which is all very well if you’re a betting man. But I’m not, you see. Feminine society, that’s what I prefer. Who’s the old gentleman that’s asleep upstairs?’

‘Mr Gresham, his name is, and that’s his tea you’re drinking.’

‘Well, fair play to the old gentleman. Thought you said your mistress was called Happerton?’

‘So she is. Mrs Happerton is his daughter – lives here with her husband while the old gent’s ill.’

‘Ill is he? What’s the matter with him?’

But Miss Nokes was not interested in the infirmities of her employer’s father. Instead she produced an illustrated magazine and drew her friend’s attention to the female costumes depicted within, unpicked a brooch from the front of her dress and invited him to inspect it, and, as these manoeuvrings went on, relaxed the severity of her expression a little.

‘That Happerton’s a racing man, isn’t he?’ her friend enquired.

‘Owns Tiberius,’ Miss Nokes conceded. ‘That he’s brung down from Lincolnshire.’

‘Think he’ll win?’

‘Thought you said you weren’t a betting man.’

‘I’m not. But there are fellows who’d like to know.’

‘The less they know about it the better’ – this very pink-faced.

All this went on for nearly half an hour, as the bells ringing the faithful to evening service sounded across the square and the shadows rose higher into the stairwells, and the kitchenmaid pursued an errand in the attics, and was very pleasant, but that by the end of it Miss Nokes looked less like a fish and more like an angler. Then, unexpectedly, a bell jangled loudly in its bracket, and Miss Nokes started up guiltily from her comfortable chair.

‘That’ll be the old gentleman wanting his tea.’

‘Old gentlemen don’t mind being kept waiting, I dare say.’

But Miss Nokes was determined to do her duty. Pouring some water from a kettle that stood on the range into a teapot and arranging pot, cup, saucer and milk-jug on a tray, she set off up the kitchen stairs. Her friend, whose name was Allardice – though this was not the name Miss Nokes knew him by – smiled to himself, took another piece of Dundee cake and crumbled it between his fingers. Presently, this occupation having failed him, and with his billycock hat jammed down over his forehead, he too set off up the stairs and presently emerged into the great hall of the house. It was quite empty, and having assured himself that Miss Nokes was attending to Mr Gresham, he began on a tour of the lower rooms.

It was remarkable what interested him. He took no notice of the pictures on the walls of the drawing room, or the half-empty decanter that Miss Nokes had omitted to return to its tray, but he spent several minutes turning over Mr Happerton’s letters in their tray, and a little blue notebook propped up at the end of a bookshelf went into his pocket. All the while Mr Allardice kept his ear cocked for descending footsteps. He had just wandered into the hall to examine a pile of horsey appurtenances that were lying in a heap by the grandfather clock when there came the noise of a cab pulling up at the door, and a sharp-faced but undeniably pretty woman could be seen stepping down from it onto the pavement.

Mr Allardice turned on his heel and went rapidly back into the drawing room, where he took the precaution of hiding himself behind one of the drawn-back velvet curtains. A bell jangled again, nearer at hand. Realising that his idyll with Nokes had come to an end, along with his chance to inspect Mr Happerton’s letters, a part of Mr Allardice was all for disappearing down the kitchen staircase and up the area steps as soon as was convenient. Another part, however, told him not to be hasty, and instead he kept his place behind the curtain, and his eye trained on the door. For perhaps five minutes silence prevailed. Then came a noise of footsteps in rapid transit; two voices, one high to the point of stridency, the other meekly subdued, in conversation; and another set of footsteps drawing nearer by the second. The door of the drawing room was thrown open and Mrs Happerton strode over the threshold.

Plainly there was some urgency in Mrs Happerton’s sortie to the drawing room, for she was still wearing her bonnet. Advancing into the centre of the room, she saw the decanter on the table – as redolent of mischief to a vigilant householder as a broken window-catch – and sniffed at it. But it did not seem to Mr Allardice that she was much interested in the thought that her maid had been recruiting herself with spirituous liquor, and that her air of preoccupation had quite another source. There was a little earthenware mug in her hand, steam rising from its lip, which she now set down upon the sideboard. Mrs Happerton now reached into one of the sideboard’s compartments and brought out a jar of brownish powder in which Mr Allardyce thought that he detected cinnamon or possibly arrowroot. ‘Nightcap for the old gentleman, then,’ Mr Allardice thought, watching Mrs Happerton stir the powder into the milk.

And then Mrs Happerton did what, to Mr Allardice, jammed into his hiding place behind the curtain with the back of his head squashed up against the window pane, seemed a peculiar thing. Going across to a neat little desk by the bookcase, she took a key from the bunch that hung from the wall to one side of it, unlocked one of the desk’s several drawers and, looking very cautiously to right and left of her, produced a little green sack, whose fastening she now opened, and a pinch of whose contents she now sprinkled over the contents of the mug. She then rapidly shut up the desk, put the key back on its ring and, carrying the mug very carefully before her (just as if it was a candlestick, Mr Allardice thought to himself) went back out of the drawing-room door. He heard her feet moving up the staircase, and then they pattered away into nothing.

Mr Allardice came out of his hiding place and looked around the empty drawing room. In replacing the key that opened the desk drawer, Mrs Happerton had – very unhelpfully, he thought – stood directly in his line of vision, but he was an experienced man with keys and a moment or two’s experiment had the drawer open and the sack in his hand. The grey and faintly sandy powder inside intrigued him. He rolled a speck or two on his finger and sniffed it cautiously. He weighed the sack in his hands and, finally, took an empty matchbox from his pocket and shook a little of the powder into it. A bell was jangling somewhere in the middle distance, but there was no sign of Miss Nokes. ‘No one at home,’ he said out loud. The kitchen, to which he returned a moment or two later, was quite empty. There was still some tea in the pot and he drained off half a cup of it and crammed another slice of Dundee cake into his mouth as he went. ‘Bella Nokes,’ he said to himself, with what might have been a faint rustle of amusement. And then he was gone up the area steps, into the square and out among the people coming back from evening service, nodding at a policeman who stood motionless on the street corner as the crowds swarmed around him and seemed in some quaint and mysterious way to acknowledge him. And Miss Nokes, returning finally to the kitchen, found only the empty tea cups and the last fragment of Dundee cake on its salver and the unfastened door swinging gently in the breeze.

*

‘Well, we have half a dozen samples of that man’s handwriting in a notebook, at any rate,’ Captain McTurk remarked to Mr Masterson. ‘Thank Allardice for that.’ They were sitting in the office high over the ostlers’ yard examining the items brought back from Belgrave Square.

‘He has not compromised himself, I hope,’ Mr Masterson wondered. ‘No banns being read, or anything of that sort?’

There had been an occasion when Mr Allardice’s professional zeal had very nearly resulted in a breach-of-promise suit.

Captain McTurk smiled. ‘There is no doubt about it,’ he said. ‘Happerton is the man who wrote the fragment of the letter which was found on the cellar floor. Look here – see how he curls his “a”s. It is quite distinctive.’

‘I dare say it is,’ said Mr Masterson, who was of all things a realist. ‘And yet it might have got there quite innocently you know.’

‘A scrap of a letter found in a basement next to a jeweller’s strong-room the morning after he is discovered to be burgled! How so?’