Derby Day (49 page)

‘Where is Mr Happerton?’ Rosa wondered, who had expected her lord and master to be there to meet her.

‘Mr Happerton sends his apologies, only he has particular business with the horse. I’m to drive you to the course, ma’am, if you’ll step up.’

The gig swept off into a pleasant lane, overhung with chestnut trees, where the white blossoms stood up like candles, and thence up a long hill leading to the Downs. The crowd made way for the vehicles, and the young men in blue and grey trousers and their girls in white dresses turned and watched a tall drag ripe with London fashion and a brake filled with fat girls in pink dresses and yellow hats. The cottage gates were crowded with folk come to see London going to the Derby. At last the trees stopped and they came out onto the hilltop in a flare of sunlight, on a patch of worn grass where a pair of donkeys were tethered.

‘Is this the Derby?’ Rosa asked, in a voice like a little girl’s. ‘Where are all the people?’

‘You’ll see them presently, ma’am,’ the groom volunteered. His attitude to her had softened, and he explained that the white building was the grandstand and that the winning post lay a little further beyond the hill.

‘Where is the start?’ Rosa wondered.

‘Where you see that clump. They run through the furze right up to Tattenham Corner.’ A vast crowd seethed over the opposite hill, and beyond this she saw open downland rising to a belt of trees which met the horizon. ‘They comes right down the hill and finishes up opposite to us. By Barnard’s Ring. The police will push them right back, don’t you fear.’

They pressed on into the heart of the crowd, past a boy on stilts eight feet high who lowered his cap to receive the flung pennies, and along the rail where rough men lay asleep with pipes in their mouths, and there, miraculously it seemed to Rosa, was Mr Happerton, with a red rose in his buttonhole, reaching out his hand to her, dismissing the groom, who thumbed his hat, took the proffered sovereign and vanished on the instant. He took the reins with one hand and her arm with the other, so that she stopped thinking of the sun’s heat burning through her muslin gown, or the dullness of her journey and the sordid little gardens of Clapham that had so disgusted her, and began, slowly yet gratefully, to give herself over to the pleasures of the day.

*

Along the rail, stretched out between poles, hung strips of bleached white linen, stitched with gold and silver letters.

Jack Dobbs. Marylebone. All bets paid

Tim Wood’s famous boxing rooms, Epsom

Henry Allen, Commission Agent, London

‘On the Derby, on the Derby, I’ll bet the Derby. To win or a place, to win or a place. Seven to one bar two or three. Seven to one bar two or three. The old firm, the old firm …’

*

Having thrown balls for coconuts, inspected a lady who claimed to be the fattest woman in Surrey and sampled the beer at the refreshment tent, the party from the Spread Eagle had all but reached the summit of the hill. Theirs, however, was not a harmonious spirit.

‘Gracious, who is that snivelling? What have you got to cry about, Bella, I should like to know?’

‘It’s none of your business.’

‘If it’s that chap from the Bag o’Nails you’re mooning over then you’ve no worries on that score, for Joey Norris that works in the bar says he is a police detective.’

This, for some reason, was not to be borne, and after a half-minute or so of name-calling – very edifying to the surrounding crowd – the two women went tumbling down the hill together while the onlookers whooped and cheered and a nearby bookmaker offered short odds on ‘the ’un with the pink dress’ – this was Miss Nokes – emerging victorious, which, with several handfuls of her adversary’s hair as a trophy, she eventually did.

*

Society is supposed to have turned homogeneous these days, and all the people the same: the same tradesmen in their neat houses; the same shabby clerks streaming across London Bridge to the City; the same fat aldermen jowling their dinners at Guildhall banquets. But the people at the Derby are never the same. There are swells in frock-coats with German dolls, bought from the Gypsies, tucked into their hat-brims. There are tiny, starved boys urging Mr Dorling’s racecards – ‘Dorling’s genuine card list’, ‘Dorling’s correct cards here’. There are butchers’ wives from Shoreditch, in vulgar ribbons and their stays out, enjoying the spectacle. There are apprentices in cheap imitations of the fashion, being gulled out of their sixpences at thimblerig. There are persons in the last extremity of poverty huddled up in ditches, recumbent by the rail, or frankly begging along the course.

Amongst the crowd march the personalities on whom Epsom depends for its savour: Mr Dorling, who has come down from his grandstand to supervise the selling of his cards and shake his head over the error that has seen ‘Jezebel’ printed with only two ‘e’s; Sir John Bennett, who is not Sir John at all, but a jeweller from Cheapside who saunters along on his cob drinking the health of anyone that asks him; old Mr Maccabee, who has been at the Derby sixty years and remembers the Prince Regent strolling with his friend Mr Brummell. And just as every ramification of society is represented, so each has an echo in the attractions of the fairground. There are peep shows of St James’s Park with the Horse Guards out on parade; Spanish bull-fights; the House in session. And all the while the buzz of a thousand conversations and shouted odds and tipsters’ jargon coalescing into a single, unintelligible roar. ‘Blue to win, and the favourite to be beat … On the Der-by, on the Der-by … The Paradise Plate for all-comers.’ This last is a mock-race advertised by some evangelical girls dressed as bookmakers with ‘Salvation’ and ‘Perdition’ on their satchels.

*

‘Of course,’ Mr Pritchett tells his assistant, ‘the crowds are nothing like what they used to be. It is that d——d electric telegraph. Folk can find out the result now without leaving their parlours. Why, I remember taking two hours to walk a mile once, and there were people who never got there at all. It is very different now … See that carriage there? That is the Earl of Tredegar, if I’m not much mistaken. The tall man with the eyeglass. Now, just you run up to the coachman, give him this half-crown and tell him that if His Lordship has an opinion on the race, then Mr Pritchett of the
Pictorial Times
will be very glad to hear it.’

*

Captain Raff, turning out of a country lane into the approach to the hill, and not quite knowing how he had got there, fell into the body of the crowd as if it were the most natural thing in the world. The great press of humanity interested him, and he accommodated the rhythm of his walking to theirs. The fact that he had become part of the Derby crowd – a place he had been a dozen times before – registered only faintly with him. Then, after a moment, his eye began to pick out landmarks: a white-painted cottage, larger than its neighbours, that aggrandised over the road; an outhouse where men sold beer and pitchers of lemonade. Although he did not notice it at first, there were others like him in the crowd: gaunt and unnaturally weather-beaten men with their faces bent on the road and not much shoe-leather. A woman came distributing tracts and pressed one into his hand. Several of the people near him who had been similarly blessed ground the slip of paper angrily beneath their feet or tore it in two, but Captain Raff, holding it up to his face, learned, somewhat to his surprise, that each step on the path to Epsom Hill was a step along the road to perdition, that on the grass square beyond Mr Dorling’s grandstand lay a hell on earth, and that Tiberius – the tract had been printed before the odds had lengthened – was a snare of the Devil’s that would see him damned.

*

‘There’s that Pritchett of the
Pictorial Times
,’ Mr Priestley of the
Illustrated London News
said to the confidential friend who accompanied him. ‘Gracious, what a liar that man is. You know how he is always talking of Mr Yates and the Garrick and how he dines there and is wanted for the committee and so forth? Well, I was at supper there with Lord Plinlimmon only the other week, and no one had heard so much as the mention of his name. Now, who is that young man with him? Somebody’s illegitimate son, I’ve no doubt … Good day to you, Pritchett. A fine morning, indeed. You came down yesterday, I take it? A wise precaution. Now what do you think of Severus? There was a man in the office yesterday positively begged me to put a ten-pound note on him. Remember me to His Grace, won’t you, if you see him.’ And Mr Priestley and his friend passed on towards a part of the course where, let us hope, there were no liars and nobody’s illegitimate sons.

*

Major Rook (late of the Hussars) and Mr Pigeon bowl up in an open carriage, the cost of whose hire will be charged up to Mr Pigeon’s account at the Park Lane livery stables, which is already pretty considerable. With them are Maria, a blooming young lady of thirty-one who gives out that she is twenty-four, and a mincing old woman named Miss Chitterlow. Miss Chitterlow is Maria’s companion and they live in the neatest little house off the Row. As for Maria, there is no need at all to say what she is.

‘Law, Rook,’ Maria says now, peering languidly down at the throng of passers-by. ‘That’s Lord John there in the tall hat, surely?’

‘Nonsense,’ says Rook. He is a solid-looking man of forty with a hard grey eye. ‘It’s Tom Bowling who I took for two hundred sovs at the St Leger three years back, and devilish unhappy he was about it too. Now, see here Fred, you positively must decide who you’re to back. You shan’t hold off any longer, indeed you shan’t.’ There is a wonderful jocularity about Major Rook as he makes this observation. ‘Now, which shall it be?’

Fred – Mr Pigeon – is a faded young sprig of twenty-two, with a feeble little attempt at side whiskers and ever so many thousands of pounds at his account with Messrs Rowdy & Son, Cheapside, and a complexion the colour of cold boiled veal because he
will
sit up until four in the morning playing
écarté
, smoking cigars and indulging in other manly pursuits with Major Rook.

‘Pendragon’s a pretty name,’ Maria says, who has perhaps received some hint in this matter from Major Rook.

‘Nonsense, Fred,’ Major Rook demurs, with the ease of a man who has half a dozen of Mr Pigeon’s notes of hand in his breast pocket (for if young men of twenty-two sit up playing écarté with Major Rook they will lose their money – that is all there is to it). ‘I was at Tattersall’s the other day, and Rawlinson – you’ll recollect him, I daresay – said that the Duke had put a thousand on The Coalman.’

Poor Mr Pigeon. He has already been induced to drink three brandy-and-sodas and an unspeakable liqueur at the Bell at Cheam, and his poor weak head is giving him as much trouble as his poor weak eyes in the sun, but he is still in awe of Major Rook, just as he is of Maria, Miss Chitterlow and the little house off the Row, which has been furnished entirely at his expense. Major Rook chose the armchairs, and the wine – and the servants. There is nothing that Major Rook, with his spotless white shirtfront and his hard grey eye, can’t turn his hand to if he’s a mind. And so Pigeon (he is one of those Hertfordshire brewing Pigeons, you know, whose papa died and left him a fortune in the 3 per cents) nods his weak little head and says he don’t mind a bet, and Maria laughs and takes a sniff at her scent bottle, and Miss Chitterlow marvels at all the people, and Mr Trant, Major Rook’s particular friend, who just happens to be strolling in the vicinity of the carriage, comes up to shake Mr Pigeon’s hand and register the stake (Mr Pigeon wants it to be £200, but Major Rook says d——, he has that on himself and he is a poor man, so why not make it £400?) and another little brick in the wall of Mr Pigeon’s ruination is quietly cemented down.

*

What sorts and conditions of men are gathered here! Entire families – meek papa, flustered mama, half a dozen children in short jackets or their best pinafores – come down from Sutton and Cheam and Dorking to see the fun. Grave old North Country gentlemen with faltering steps, very much put out by the glare of the sun, who would surely be much better off by their comfortable hearths with their wives to tend them. Mysterious lonely women, not so very young perhaps, nor yet so very old, whose eyes flit shrewdly around them as they prowl the course. Soldiers in scarlet tunics with gay girls on their arms. A Treasury Lord with a vigilant secretary at his side and a determination to back his friend Lord Trumpington – whose estate adjoins his own in Hampshire, you know – to the hilt. Mr Savory the prize novelist, whose last book,
Whimsicalities
, Mr Dickens is thought to have admired, is there, and Lorriquer, the fashionable poet, whose
Attic Dawns
caused such a stir among the reviewers, simpering into Lady Delacave’s carriage and ogling her daughters, together with fifty thousand people whose names will never appear in a newspaper, unless it is the section reserved for court proceedings, whose lives are unsung and whose destinies unworthy of report.

*

Major Hubbins was made much of at the Brood Mare. The landlord himself brought him his breakfast muffin, and his whip, cap and colours were reverently returned to him by the landlord’s daughter from the salver on which they had lain for the admiration of the establishment’s guests. There was a crowd of well-wishers at the door to see him off – the landlord absolutely scorned his attempt to settle the bill – an injunction ‘not to forget the old place’ once his victory was won – and a fly to take him to the stables at Cheam. All this was very gratifying to Major Hubbins, but it did not heal the injury that he thought had been done to him. He thought – and one or two enquiries among the cognoscenti at the Brood Mare had convinced him of this – that, in some sense, he had been made a fool of, that Mr Happerton had hired him to ride Tiberius because he expected him to fail. Major Hubbins did not consider himself to be a virtuous man. If asked, he would have declared that the profession he followed excluded virtue by its very nature. Certainly, in his forty years in the saddle he had colluded in various little conspiracies that, in certain company – not necessarily very choice – he would happily have admitted to. He had ridden horses that he knew to be unsound. He had cheerfully lost races that a little more dexterity on his part might have won. Most of that two hundred pounds that lay in the bank had been honestly come by, but a certain proportion of it had not.