Derby Day (48 page)

*

Among those gentlemen of the press came Mr Pritchett of the
Pictorial Times
, who had taken the precaution of going down to Epsom by train the night before and reserving rooms at the Perch, Ewell, three months previous.

‘It’s a thing I always do,’ he explained to his assistant, who sat meekly at his side as the train rattled through the Surrey twilight. ‘Why, there was one year when that Priestley of the
Illustrated
came at the last minute, found every room taken, had to spend the night under a hedge on Banstead Common and turned up with loosestrife in his hat.’ The train was rather full of people – gentlemen in black-cloth suits on their way home from the City, other men clearly bound for the racecourse with mysterious packages under their arms – and Mr Pritchett regarded them with a caustic eye. ‘Now’, he instructed the meek assistant, ‘there will be a great deal for us to do and you had better listen carefully. First you must call at Mr Dorling’s house for a copy of the racecard. They’ll tell you it ain’t ready, I daresay: if that’s the case, say that Mr Pritchett of the
Pictorial Times
wants one special. Then you’re to go to Pickering’s stables at Cheam village for word on Septuagint. If the place is shut up, well, it can’t be helped. As for tomorrow, here’s my instructions. If anyone from the
Illustrated
wants to know where I am, you ain’t seen me and can’t tell. And look out for impostors. There was a chap came up one year, said he was Lord Mancroft, the owner of Zebedee and had a tale to tell, and would you believe he wasn’t Lord Mancroft at all? Don’t go near the card tables or the refreshment tents under the hill – you’ll have your wallet taken and it shan’t be me that fills it again – give the fellows at the grandstand gate a shilling when you come to fetch me after my luncheon and if anyone gives trouble say you are on a particular errand for Mr Pritchett of the
Pictorial Times
, and see how that suits …’

*

As for the principal players in this drama, they are still widely dispersed. Mr Dorling sleeps soundly in his bed, leaving the last preparations to his subordinates, although Mrs Dorling is still hard at work making curl-papers for her daughters and granddaughters. The owners, and part-owners, and the vague-eyed men who have what is known as an ‘interest’, are dining at their inns, rather subdued and querulous and liable to argue their bills. Their jockeys are smoking pipes in stable yards, exchanging final words with grooms and attendants and setting out their gear. Mr Happerton has forsaken both dinner and the society of Mr Mountstuart and sits alone in his room making calculations with an ink-pen on the back of an envelope: such is his air of zealous concentration that the cigar between his fingers keeps going out and has to be relit from a spill kept ready on a saucer. Major Hubbins is at the Brood Mare, very comfortable with a glass of sherry, some devilled chicken and a biscuit. Rosa is in Mount Street setting out her things for the morrow. Very lavish and fine they look, lying on the coverlet of Rosa’s dainty bed, and Rosa’s maid thinks that she never saw so much silk and muslin and convent lace in her life.

In Belgrave Square Mrs Happerton goes to bed early, having tucked old Mr Gresham away earlier still. Nokes is nowhere to be seen. Captain McTurk is still in his eyrie above Northumberland Street, and Mr Masterson with him, although candles have had to be called for. Mr Hopkins the secretary has fallen asleep in his chair, although on this occasion quite naturally, and there is fresh information, just arrived, which may have some bearing on tomorrow’s affairs. Mr Glenister is at his lodgings wondering what costume might be thought suitable for a racecourse and settling in the end for a linen coat and a soft hat. In Lincolnshire, where the rains have started up again, Miss Ellington stands at the window staring out into the warm, sodden night. Captain Raff is – who knows where Captain Raff is? Captain Raff does not know himself. In Richmond Jemima has long since retired to her fragrant pillow, but Mr Pardew still sits in front of the empty fireplace, hands pressed down against his great knees, musing on his opportunities. The stick rests a foot from his side.

Derby Day: Begun

The most astonishing, the most varied, the most picturesque, and the most glorious spectacle that ever was or ever can be, under any circumstances, visible to mortal eyes
.

Illustrated London News
, 1863

THE DAY DAWNS bright and clear, more or less. The grey clouds that have hung over Dorking and Reigate pull away northwards and the land opens up: field upon field, like the squares in a patchwork quilt. Over Charnwood the mist gently disperses in little wisps and eddies, like spun sugar borne on the air. From this height – the Hogsback say, from which it is possible to see all the way to London – everything resembles something else. The little villages – Banstead, Coulsdon, Ewell – look as if they were made with the bricks from a child’s nursery. The rivers are thin blue lines. The Queen of Brobdingnag, were she paying a call in Epsom High Street, would be an ant. And across the land, even at this hour, move occupying armies. There are caterers’ wagons out over the edge of the concourse and a forest of tents to accompany the pastrycooks and beer-sellers and roast-beef providers that Mr Dorling has seen fit to accommodate there. Early carriages are joined up axle to axle, with gentlemen in loud waistcoats and cockades in their hats breakfasting off sandwiches and boiled eggs covered up in handkerchiefs. There will be no racing for seven hours, but the visitors are unabashed.

A gentleman can do a great deal on Epsom Downs if he has a mind. He may go and lose his money at thimblerig, or he may go and drink rum shrub at sixpence the half-pint. He may stop and admire the acrobats and the tumblers and the sellers of prints of famous horses, or he may purchase a tract from one of the serious-looking frock-coated men and read about the Angel Gabriel’s flaming sword and Lot’s Wife, the implication being that Epsom is a modern Gomorrah with all its patrons ripe to be turned into pillars of salt. He may go and ogle the ladies in the carriage ring – there are not so many of them yet, as the morning is rather young – or he may go and see what the Old Firm, William Latch, The Black Swan, Shoreditch, has to offer him in the way of odds. There are a score of bookmakers and their clerks here already, and more arriving every moment to jostle for places on the hill, all of them highly picturesque – dressed in suits of violent check, with ties made out of yards of flaring green silk, field glasses slung over their shoulders and boots with heels three inches high. The policemen, walking two by two among the multiplying crowd, are tolerant. A man has to be very outrageous, or drunk, or vicious, to get himself arrested on Derby Day. Somewhere on the edge of the crowd there are trumpets sounding. A carriage with a ducal coronet on the door rolls by, past a banner announcing that, in a tank specially designed for the purpose, Miss Delavacquerie, whom the illustrated papers have been admiring this past fortnight, will dive for soup plates at twelve o’clock sharp. The sun continues to rise into the summer sky.

*

In Derby week the Epsom landlords make no difficulties about the sharing of rooms, or overcrowding, or the smuggling of additional guests up the back-stairs, and there were at least seven young ladies arraying themselves in print dresses and feathered hats or combing out their back hair in an upstairs chamber of the Spread Eagle. An eighth, who still lay face down upon her mattress, was thought to be rather spoiling the fun for the majority.

‘I declare, Bella, you had better get up unless something ails you. You’ve been lying there like a bolster this past half-hour.’

‘I never felt so bad in my life. You must go on without me.’

‘What? And lose your place on the hill?’ This remark was somewhat obscured by a mouthful of hairpins. ‘Why, the chaps from the Bag o’ Nails said to be there bright and early. And there’s your odds to take on Tiberius, too.’ The party from the Spread Eagle were very sweet on Tiberius, and several of them wore his colours – these were quarters of blue and green – on the sleeves of their dresses.

‘I don’t want any odds on Tiberius,’ Miss Nokes announced from the pillow. ‘Catch me throwing my money away.’

‘Why’s that, Bella?’ said the other girl. ‘Why shouldn’t you back Tiberius when everyone says that Baldino can’t stand the hard ground and that other has injured himself?’

‘Why?’ Miss Nokes wondered, finally consenting to raise her somewhat livid face to the light and beginning to pull on her stockings. ‘Because he is going to lose, that’s why. Haven’t I told you a dozen times? Master’s put all his money on Septuagint, which you will too, if you’ve any sense.’

Sobered by this evidence of the sporting world’s rapacity, the party went down to breakfast.

*

Mr Pritchett of the
Pictorial Times
strides purposefully through the crowd gathered beneath the hill. He is a tall, thin man, as tall as the bookmakers in their steeple-heels, and like the bookmakers carries a pair of field glasses slung around his neck. As he strides he throws out observations to the meek young man who follows a yard behind him, with a pencil in one hand and a notebook balanced on his hip.

‘… Blessed if there isn’t ten thousand people here already … You’d better give me the grandstand tickets, Johnson’ – Johnson is the name of the meek young man – ‘for I don’t trust you not to lose ’em … Heavens, there is that Miss Abercrombie from the Theatre Royal. I wonder she dares show her face after Sir John Fortescue threw her over when his wife found the billet-doo under the antimaccassar … Ugh! The look of those Gypsies. I wonder Dorling lets them in. Some nonsense about common ground, I daresay … Who is that fellow in the gig who keeps waving at me, Johnson? Is it Lord Cardew? Not his lordship, you say …? Well, the impudence of these people is astonishing. Here, you had better take this down:
Among a spirited and genteel crowd, whose early arrival at the course betrayed their especial interest in the outcome, I observed the delightful and accomplished Miss Abercrombie of the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, exquisitely dressed in
– just run up to her carriage in a moment, will you Johnson, and see what the woman is wearing –
The Duke of Grafton, who granted me the honour of several moments’ conversation, recalled that this was his forty-fourth Derby and that he had first been taken here on a pony by his grandsire in ’26 when, as he wittily put it, Lord Egremont’s Penguin swam home in fine style
– you had better check that in
Ruff
, Johnson –
Lord Egremont, as my readers will remember, once fought the old Duke in a duel, but His Grace assures me that he bears no grudge …’

*

There are a number of convenient ways of approaching Epsom from London. Depending on your taste, and income, you may hire a phaeton, a gig, a barouche, a four-in-hand, a brake, a Tilbury or a donkey-cart. You may make the journey in a single stretch – it is fourteen miles from Trafalgar Square – or, in the manner of many an honest traveller, you may stop along the route – at the Swan at Clapham, or the Bell at Sutton, at both of which places you may very well end up so becalmed that you find yourself asking the name of the winner from the crowd surging back after the race is done. Old-fashioned people take the railway to Surbiton and walk the intervening five miles with good grace. Only in the last few years has an enterprising railway company constructed a line that comes right up to the Downs. Mr Happerton had sent a groom up to Mayfair for Rosa. The man arrived promptly on her doorstep at eight o’clock but was compelled to wait half an hour in the kitchen by the maid.

‘Mr Happerton distinctly said I should be fetched at nine,’ Rosa told him crossly as she came downstairs in a hat that had taken a Hay Hill milliner nearly a week to concoct.

‘We had better be off direct, ma’am,’ said the groom, who had a pretty good idea what Rosa was, and did not like it. ‘Else you and he will miss your place.’

‘Well, if that is what Mr Happerton says I am very grateful to him,’ Rosa observed. ‘Where is the carriage?’

But there was no carriage, only a cab hired from the rank a furlong away, in which the groom proposed to carry her to Waterloo. At this Rosa frankly sulked, but there was nothing to be done about it. The cab bowled away through Mayfair, along empty streets where water carriers were out damping down the dirt, and came eventually to the station, where a great crowd of people swarmed over the concourse – young men, mostly, but with girls’ dresses showing spots of colour in the grey morning. Here, safely accommodated in a first-class carriage and with a porter to tip his hat to her, Rosa began to recover her spirits, but the route from Waterloo to Epsom is not very inspiring. They passed by open spaces filled by cranes, old iron, stacks of railway sleepers and giant gasometers rising fat and black in their cages and altogether dwarfing the distant church spires. At Clapham Junction there were horsey men lining the platform in grey overcoats with race glasses slung over their shoulders. They dawdled by bits of common, and then the houses began again, with sordid little gardens coming up to the track and white clothing set out to dry over the currant bushes, and Rosa wrinkled her nose. But then, after an hour, they came to Epsom, where the groom stepped up smartly from his third-class compartment and led her along the platform to where a gig stood waiting.