Derby Day

by D. J. Taylor

  AND SO IT was settled, and she was to go to Lincolnshire, and be governess to Mr Davenant’s daughter, and live in a great windy house that looked out over the wolds where there were more rooks than Christian folk: that was what Eliza said when Miss Ellington told her, although naturally she meant only to be kind. And when the letter came for her, although she had long expected it, Miss Ellington went out into the garden and was so very sad, thinking that she should never see the dear friends she had made there again, until Mrs Macfarlane seized her hand, and told her not to be a goose, as there was nothing here for her to do. Seeing the sense in this – for Eliza was to be married, and Jane to go to Miss Brotherton’s at Warwick and the schoolroom all emptied – and remembering what her mama had always told her, that she should be brave, Miss Ellington went inside and busied herself, played at ombre and read to old Mrs Macfarlane out of the newspaper, and Mr Macfarlane, coming in from his business, told her that she was a dear good girl and that they never should get along without her, and that a bedroom should be kept ready against her return, so that she altogether broke down, in spite of her best resolves, and shed tears all over the County Chronicle as she read.

  ‘You will be a country girl now, you’ll see,’ Eliza said, ‘with nothing to stir you but sheep and mangel-wurzels,’ and Miss Ellington said she could not see the difference, as they were very quiet and genteel here, and saw almost no one. ‘In any case it is not for a fortnight,’ Jane said, thinking to cheer her, ‘and we can be very jolly in that time.’ Yet Miss Ellington had to allow that the two weeks hung heavy on her hands, and though countless small recreations were proposed for her – a visit to Kenilworth, an excursion in Mr Murray’s carriage, he that was to marry Eliza – and though she professed to enjoy them, her heart was not in the business. She supposed it was always so, and that the soldier who is to be posted to India gets no pleasure from his furlough. She knew she got no pleasure from hers.

  ‘You are a sad girl, Annie, for all that you profess to be gay,’ Eliza had once told her, and Miss Ellington supposed that she was right. Certainly there was a moment as she sat in her room assembling her things when she was almost overcome with melancholy, for each had some pleasant association: the Christian Year that Mr Atherton had given her when she made her first Communion, and Macaulay’s essays that had been her father’s, a comforter that Jane worked for her one December and everyone thought was for Mrs Macfarlane. But then, having stowed these articles away, and reflected on her circumstances, she felt suddenly more bold and thought that there were other places in the world than Warwickshire and other folk than the Macfarlanes, for all their kindness, and that it would be a relief to get away from that odious Mr Murray, who had once taken her hand and tried to kiss her. She determined that she should make a list of her accomplishments, which her papa always said was the sovereignest way of inspiring confidence in a young woman.

  Of my appearance I perhaps ought not to speak, other than to say that I am twenty-three years old, five feet four inches in height (‘a maypole’ Mama used to say in jest, who was only four feet ten) and with hair that ill-natured people would call red but I should style chestnut.

  Of my capacities, I might say that I have a sound knowledge of English grammar, and its peculiarities, an undoubted proficiency in the languages of France and Italy, and a little, a very little, Latin.

  That I have studied English history from the date of the Saxon invasions to the Restoration of his Majesty in 1660.

  That I have travelled in mathematics to the pons asinorum and beyond it.

  That I am generally considered to have a fair contralto voice, can sing rounds and glees, accompany at the pianoforte, play at ombre, preference and other games.

  That I lived fifteen of my years in Thirsk, where Papa had his practice, two in Leicester at Miss Engledow’s establishment, and the rest in Warwickshire.

  That I have read a good number of Mr Dickens’s novels, and Mr Tennyson’s poems, Mrs Chapone’s letters and Mr Chambers’s Cyclopedia.

  That a gentleman once proposed for me, but that, seeing the connection could not possibly be advantageous to me, and would be even less so to him, I declined his offer.

  There! Miss Ellington wrote, with the ink spilling out of the pen onto her fingers, I think I have said enough.

  *

  Miss Ellington bade farewell to the Macfarlanes as they clustered around their veranda, with the station fly waiting at the gate, and old Mrs Macfarlane, who could not leave her chair, waving from the parlour window and Eliza saying that she never would forget her, and Mr Macfarlane smiling, and even Harrison the gardener, whom she had never loved, looking up from the far lawn to bob his head. The carriage rattled along the newly Macadamed road and into Warwick, and the figures whom she tried her hardest to keep in view faded away to nothing, and for all her semblance of good spirits she felt what she oh so often felt, that she was all alone in the world with only God to guide her.

  *

  Lincoln, where Miss Ellington’s train took her, was a very clerical town. She thought she had never seen a place so full of clergymen: the station forecourt was quite black with them, and Mr Alloway said it was hardly possible to throw a stone without hitting a minor canon on his way to early service. Mr Alloway was a friend of Mr Macfarlane’s, commissioned to give her luncheon, and this passed off very pleasantly in a great high dining room looking out over a languid river, where Miss Ellington ate oysters, which she never did in her life before. Mr Alloway, whom she thought a very civil man, was greatly interested to hear that she was to work for Mr Davenant, and remarked that she should want for her wages, as that gentleman was sorely pressed. ‘And what of his daughter,’ she asked, ‘whom I am to teach?’ But Mr Alloway only shook his head and said that she should see what there was to see when she saw it.

  There was a gig to take her to Scroop – it was but fifteen miles – and as Mr Alloway handed her into it she looked up to see the spire of the cathedral with grey clouds massed behind it and the birds whirling through the pale sky – a melancholy sight, it seemed to her, to which all the clergymen who hopped and croaked about like human versions of the rooks were welcome. And so she sat in the gig, with her feet above the trunks, and took stock of her surroundings. Such a country as this she never saw, and as unlike their dear Warwickshire as it was possible to conceive. Nothing to be seen but low, flat plains, with the wolds rising away in the distance, the waters out over the bright green grass and a breeze blowing in from the east across the tops of the brown hedgerows, so that it would not have been strange to peep between the fence posts and see Lady Dedlock out a-wandering. Nothing to be heard but the cries of the birds and the sough of the wind, the rattle of the transom and the horse’s breath. Something of her feelings must have communicated themselves to the driver of the gig – a very picturesque gentleman in a moleskin jacket and gaiters – for there came a moment when he grinned and said he hoped she was not tiring of the view. ‘No indeed, sir,’ she said, ‘for I have seen nothing like it.’ And so they went on, past mouldering piles of beet and turnip racked up at the roadside, and mournful little turnings into nowhere, and shy farmhouses huddled under grim fir hedges, meeting no one save a farm cart or a squire on his cob, while the wind blew and rain began to fall, and she unfurled the umbrella that Mrs Macfarlane had given her and was thankful for its shelter.

  Presently the gig jangled along a little cindery path, past an inn nearly suffocated by the weight of thatch that lay upon it, and the driver announced with great solemnity that ‘Here be Scroop’ as if they were approaching the Haymarket rather than a dozen little cottages, a tumbledown old church with the stone falling into the road, and a dismal green that seemed more in the river than out of it. She could see the roofs and turrets of the hall in the distance, beyond a patch of woodland, and here the gig bounced and tumbled first along a terrible dirt track and then a long gravel drive that led up to a great grey house, with the water dripping from its eaves and the rooks raging in the elm t
rees yonder. Here on the steps two gentlemen stood talking, to one of whom the driver, who doubled as postman, handed a letter and a newspaper, before depositing her trunk on the ground, and she supposed that one or other of them would assist her, only neither of them did, but hurried away in a very emphatic manner into the house, leaving her with her baggage upon the stones. And all this – the grinding motion of the gig, the melancholy of the surround, the unyielding flatness of the land, the incivility of her hosts – made her wish most fervently that she had not been fetched there, and that she was safe in Warwickshire with her dear girls, or reading to old Mrs Macfarlane out of the newspaper, or even talking to that odious Mr Murray, such was her desire to see a familiar face and not the dismal hedge-tops of Lincolnshire waving in the wind and the rooks taking flight into the great wide sky.

  *

  It was a bad time to come to Scroop, Mrs Castell observed, for the master – she pronounced the word ‘maister’ in the drollest way – had lost his money and the house would very likely be sold up. This was said at tea, which seemed to Miss Ellington a very curious meal and not at all like the genteel refections of Warwickshire, where the bread and butter rarely came in inch-thick slabs placed threefold upon your plate, or the bohea brewed up so strong that it required equal amounts of milk to make it palatable. Still, she allowed that they were very comfortable in the kitchen, with the fire glowing beside them and a candle or two spilling light onto the great oak table at which Mrs Castell presided; and in the conversation that followed, although the Lincolnshire dialect was unintelligible to her, she learned much about the circumstances of her arrival. The gentleman who had driven her from Lincoln was Mr Jorkins. (‘That Jorkins,’ said Mrs Castell, with an infinite contempt. ‘Wife dead and two babbies to raise,’ Hester added, who perhaps had her hopes.) Mr Jorkins had brought a letter, its author unknown, by which Mr Davenant had been much put out, and which had closeted him in his study with his confidential friend, Mr Glenister (‘All on account of that horse’, Dora suggested, and was immediately shushed by Mrs Castell). Who was Mr Glenister, Miss Ellington asked, and received the answer that he was ‘a gentleman who lived near by’ (Dora), ‘Mr Davenant’s friend as is heeded by him in all things’ (Hester). Dora and Hester had each of them great white faces and hair done up in sausage curls, which was not a fashion that they knew on the streets of Kenilworth.

  They had not been long at tea when Mr Davenant himself arrived in their midst, carrying a piece of paper which he instantly threw into the kitchen fire. He was, Miss Ellington decided, a rather short, grave-voiced man, perhaps forty years of age, with a singular manner. When he saw her he at once commanded her to stay in her chair, from which she was on the point of rising, and apologised for the bad grace with which, as he acknowledged, he had greeted her arrival. Had she had a pleasant trip from Lincoln? He hoped that she had not been incommoded by that Jorkins, who was a shocking bad driver of a gig, as everybody knew. He said he was hungry, took one of Mrs Castell’s mighty slabs of bread and butter, but left it crumbled on his plate. He accepted a cup of tea, on which he complimented Hester, who had brought it, but left half of it untouched, and Miss Ellington wondered what he had to vex him and why he looked at the tea things, and the fire, and Mrs Castell’s Madonna front (which altogether failed to conceal the grey curls behind it) as if they were the most mournful prospect in the world.

  When the tea was finished, and Hester had cleared away the leavings, and Mrs Castell stoked up the fire, which she did in a furious way, as if she smelt unseen enemies hidden behind the coals, Mr Davenant proposed that she might like to see his daughter, and so, behaving in a very polite way, opening and closing doors with an extreme punctiliousness, which courtesy quite won her over after his previous ill manners, he led her into the hall of the house and thence along a winding corridor on which hung the portraits of some very dismal old ladies and gentlemen whom Miss Ellington supposed to be his forebears. ‘You will find that my daughter is not quite all that she might be,’ he said as they approached the corridor’s end, with what she took to be a little catch in his voice, and she remarked that she liked all children and wanted only to serve them, whereupon he gave her a sad look and said that he would be very grateful indeed if she could find a way to serve this one.

  Miss Ellington had barely time to remark the singularity of these words when, opening the door with a little silver key he produced from a chain that hung around his neck, he led her into a small, gloomy chamber, the window of which looked out onto a wild, windy garden, all quite gathered up in the long shadows flung by the house. Here, in a chair, quite silent, with her hands folded in her lap, sat a girl of perhaps fourteen, with an odd, twisted face, very pale eyes and the whitest hair Miss Ellington ever saw. There was a scattering of toys on the carpet before her, and a jigsaw that looked as if its pieces had never been disturbed. ‘This is Evie,’ Mr Davenant said, and the girl, who had taken no notice of their coming into the room, now started up at the mention of her name, gaped at the sight of her father standing in the doorway and plunged towards him, so that he caught her hand and secured it in the crook of his arm.

  ‘Here is Miss Ellington, Evie,’ he said, in a voice too loud for the room, and the girl looked at her, wildly and without comprehension, like Caliban, she thought, first glimpsing the visitors to Prospero’s island. ‘I am pleased to meet you, Evie,’ she said, imitating Mr Davenant’s stentorian tone and putting out her hand, and the girl took it very shyly between her fingers and indeed would have kept hold of it had Mr Davenant not told her to give it up. The sight of her was a horror to Miss Ellington, but she enquired, as brightly as she could, ‘Is this where Evie spends her time?’ and Mr Davenant said that hitherto she had been accustomed to sit in the kitchen, under Mrs Castell’s eye, but that there was an old schoolroom, at the top of the house which he had had put in order. All this time the girl was regarding them with bold, unyielding eyes, darting out of a skin so white that it was all one could do to determine where flesh ended and hair began. And then the wind rushed under the door to set the candle a-flicker, a footfall sounded in a passage far away, and Miss Ellington thought that she should not like to be Evie Davenant, here in this great lonely house in Lincolnshire, with the waters out across the meadows and a strange lady come halfway across England to quench her spirit.

  That night they dined in a great shabby dining room under a dusty chandelier. The child sat with them, but took no interest in the food on her plate. She had a toy – a rag doll, very miserably stitched up – that she twisted about her face and neck in a disagreeable manner. Mr Davenant talked very freely before her, at the same time keeping up a pretence that she understood what was said. ‘My daughter has been looking forward above all to your coming,’ he said at one point. ‘Is that not so, Evie?’ And Evie, thus appealed to, ran the rag doll along her cheek and looked at it very eagerly. ‘And I have been looking forward to it very much too,’ Miss Ellington replied, ‘for I am sure Evie is a good girl who will repay her teaching.’ ‘She is a very good girl,’ Mr Davenant said again, and Evie, hearing him speak, balanced the doll on her shoulder in a way that was half comic and half terrible. Outside the wind was raging against the window and the trees lashed at the panes like so many wooden fingers.

  After dinner Mrs Castell took Evie away to bed – she treated her very tenderly, Miss Ellington noticed – and she and Mr Davenant sat alone at the great table built for a dozen. ‘You will perhaps have gained some idea of my daughter’s accomplishments,’ he said, and she bowed her head, not thinking there was anything she could decently say. ‘She must of all things be kept quiet,’ he went on. ‘Have her wants and fancies attended to. I am sure I do not need to explain. Mrs Castell knows her better than I.’ ‘I am sure,’ Miss Ellington said, feeling that she could not stay silent, ‘that she is very loving.’ ‘Loving?’ He repeated the word. ‘Eh? Oh yes, I have no doubt she is, in her way,’ he said, and the look on his face was very poignant to behold. ‘And now, Miss Elling
ton, we had better see if they have provided for you, etcetera.’ After which Mrs Castell marched her away to an attic room under the eaves, to which her boxes had already been carried, informed her that candles were expensive and scarce, and, it being about nine o’clock, and the rural habit to retire early, left her to her own devices. And so she lay awake, listening to the rain beat upon the window, and the mice scuttle in the roof, and some sharp, insistent noise which terrified her until she discovered that it was her own breath rising in the night air, and wished very much that she were back in Warwickshire with a silent lawn beyond the window rather than a great wild garden, and a grandfather clock ticking comfortably behind the door.

  *

  As to their establishment there in Lincolnshire, Miss Ellington discovered it to be a very modest one. Three indoor servants, two men to work the stable yard and Mr Curbishley to oversee them was the limit of Mr Davenant’s staff. Once, Mrs Castell said, there was a butler and a kitchenmaid and a regiment of gardeners, but all that was gone along with Mr Davenant’s money, and now Mrs Castell wound the clock herself, the master poured his own wine, the grass grew a foot high and there was no one to cut it. Nobody came unless it were the baker’s van, or Mr Glenister, or a travelling pedlar unpacking his wares on the kitchen table so that Hester could buy a penn’orth of pins or two farthings’ worth of silk thread. Mrs Castell went to bed at nine, the front door was locked half an hour later and the house was asleep by ten. And yet post there was a-plenty, all brought up by Mr Jorkins, laid out on a silver tray and taken off straightaway to the master’s study for him to ponder.

  But if they were modest and quiet, did not tend their garden, and spent their money on penny pin-packets, they were not, Miss Ellington discovered, without their resources. On the contrary, they had a consuming interest that lay beyond any human association or social prospect, for all that it resided in a stable, slept on straw, lived on hay and had its water from a bucket. What did they talk about there in Lincolnshire? Why Tiberius. Nothing but Tiberius. Dora said when the Derby was confirmed – which everyone supposed it should be – she would wager the money she had in the National Savings Bank upon him. Hester had a little keepsake book full of pictures of him cut out of Bell’s Life and The Sportsman’s Magazine.