by D. J. Taylor
‘You will find that such things cost a great deal of money.’
Mrs Rebecca did not say anything, but the look on her face suggested that she regarded money as the least of her worries.
‘You have discussed – well – some of this with George – with your husband.’
‘He knows nothing of it,’ Mrs Rebecca said.
And Mr Gresham felt again the twinge of guilt that seemed to afflict all his dealings with his daughter. He did not approve of her, or what she did, but he fancied that the flaws in her character were the result of his neglect.
‘If there is money needed,’ he said, ‘then I suppose it shall be forthcoming.’
‘Thank you, Papa.’
Mr Gresham looked hard at her, but he could see no glint of calculation. He picked up his newspaper once more and went on with Irish disestablishment.
*
In Lincolnshire the weather has changed. The spring gales have been and gone, leaving half a chimney smashed and two trees down in the orchard, and now the rain has set in. The fields are awash in lapping pools of water, grown bigger by the day, and the butts are overflowing and would be emptied if there were anyone to empty them. The sky is mostly gunmetal-grey, salmon-coloured around the edges at dawn, then shading into slate. There is a word for all this, Mr Davenant thinks, though he cannot for the life of him imagine where he found it, a word for all these inundations and damp, mournful air: deliquescent. The road beyond Scroop Hall is all but impassable; the sheep are huddled up in the dips at the fields’ ends; even the rooks are hunkered down under the tree-tops. Somehow the horizon seems further away than usual: a grey wall of cloud, out beyond the wolds and the coastland, from which inexplicable protrusions of light occasionally bounce and glimmer, as if there were a battle being fought far out to sea. Like much going on here, it is all faintly mysterious, ineluctable, out of reach.
Mr Davenant watches the rain from his study window. Pinned down by this torrent of water, his estate takes on fantastic shapes, becomes unrecognisable and haphazard. There is a sense that everything is inert, tethered to its foundations. Over the stable doors, where the drainpipe has come away, the water falls in a cataract: he can hear it at night, roaring through his dreams. The trees flap in the wind; the evergreens in the shrubbery have turned livid and arsenical. It has been very quiet at Scroop, although Dora the housemaid has gone, on the excellent grounds that Mr Davenant cannot afford to pay her quarter’s wages, and Evie has been restless. She has a habit of plucking at his sleeve when they meet in the hall before dinner, a way of fussing with the strings of her pinafore dress. Mr Davenant is uncertain about Evie. There are times when he wonders whether he has done his duty by her, whether it might have been better to have sent her elsewhere. But what is ‘elsewhere’? Besides, he has a feeling that Evie’s moon face and her pink eyes – though he is her father he knows that they remind him of the white rats he had as a boy – are a judgement sent by God. It is difficult to tell.
Just now Mr Davenant is making notes on one of the scraps of paper that litter his desk. Like the estate, battened down beneath the rain, the desk has turned haphazard. There are newspapers on it a fortnight old, plates and glasses, trays of old pipe-ash that no one has taken away. It is hard to know exactly of what these notes consist. Sometimes they are little columns of figures, always petering out before they reach their end; sometimes they are memoranda; sometimes drawings of bridles, stirrups, foxes’ heads. Perhaps Mr Davenant scarcely knows himself. Also on the desk, amongst the plates and the drawings of foxes’ heads – wonderfully sharp and lifelike, with pointed ears and serious, vulpine eyes – are several letters, for if Scroop has been very quiet of late it has not gone unvisited. Mr Silas has come again, to the ruination of his patent-leather boots, and Mr Jorkins and his mail-cart. Some of the letters have London franks; some are unopened. Not all the people who have written to Mr Davenant are known to him. It is a new thing, he supposes, this urge to communicate with someone you have not met, this torrent of respectful salutations, esteemed compliments and lurking menace, pouring down upon his head. Like the rain, it seems to have settled in, to be here for the duration.
Something has gone wrong in his life, Mr Davenant thinks, and he cannot work it out. Other men have owned horses that destroyed themselves, and properties that are embarrassed, but somehow they have not turned out as he has. He has always been fascinated by his ancestors – the yellow faces in their gilt frames, the grey tablets in Scroop churchyard – but now they haunt him. There was a moment the previous week when he found himself in the drawing room just before dawn with a candle in his hand, staring at the Caroline clergymen and the Georgian squires, as the rain cascaded over the gloomy garden and a pale, jerky shadow went bounding off across the lawn. Even now he cannot quite say how he came there, what impulse he was attempting to subdue. Like the lights, glinting through the horizon, it is all slightly out of reach. No doubt the Caroline clergymen, preaching their Assize Day sermons, and the Georgian squires, riding into Lincoln for news of the Jacobite rising (which stopped only seventy miles away at Derby), believed in fate. Perhaps, Mr Davenant thinks, it is simply fate that is marshalled against him.
Mr Happerton’s latest letter is face-down on the desk, somewhere beneath the memoranda and the foxes’ heads. In some ways Mr Happerton in the flesh is preferable to Mr Happerton on paper. The man himself is somehow less insinuating, less poised to do harm. It is curious that Mr Happerton’s demands – they are never called demands, everything is offered up in a spirit of absolute amity – should always be brought up in Jorkins’s mail-cart rather than spoken to his face. He wonders how his ancestors would have judged Mr Happerton, and suspects that they would think him simply an adventurer from London, vulgar and ungentlemanlike, as out of place – and as negligible – amid the Lincolnshire fields as a duke’s brougham. None of this, he concedes, is bringing him any closer to the matter of Mr Happerton’s letter, which proposes that the Scroop estate should be made over to him in settlement of his debt, and what should be done with it, such a shocking and terrible thing that Mr Davenant cannot bear to examine it whole but prefers to dwell on its incidentals, or on the wider currents of the world that flow behind it. Mr Happerton, he thinks – and he has grasped this from his conversation, his dress and his slang – is a modern man, and it is this modernity that has brought about his triumph.
There is a brass paper-knife in the shape of a scimitar on the desk, and Mr Davenant picks it up in his left hand while balancing Mr Happerton’s letter on the thumb and forefinger of his right. Even now, though, his mind is not really on Mr Happerton, and the dreadful blow he has struck him, but on the forebear – Mr Davenant cannot precisely locate him in the confraternity of the drawing room – who is supposed to have looted the knife after the battle of Plassey. For all its century spent in a Lincolnshire study, the blade is still keen. There is a little red streak on it that might be blood, or rust, or some other substance. For a moment Mr Davenant forgets Mr Happerton and the other persons who follow in his wake, takes a sulphur match from his pocket, places it on the desk and watches, entranced, as the scimitar cuts it in two. It is a remarkable thing, he thinks, and shall stay with him, whatever else at Scroop may have to be given up.
Outside there is a gap in the rain. Mr Davenant is sensitive to these interludes, and can trace the sounds of dripping water that dominate them back, as it were, to source, to particular trees and defective gutters. He thinks – and the thought rather surprises him – that he will not trouble himself with Mr Happerton’s letter, that he will roust Evie from the schoolroom and take her for a walk in the woods. Then he recalls the last walk he took with Evie – she has an odd way of flitting from tree to tree like a white ghost that is somehow disagreeable – and thinks that perhaps he will leave her to Miss Ellington. Miss Ellington is an excellent young woman and is making great strides with Evie, if only she were not so restless and did not fuss so with the strings of her pinafore dress. He wonders where th
is vexation with Evie has come from, and thinks that it must have something to do with his present troubles, that if Mr Happerton were not oppressing him he would be able to take his daughter for walks in the woods and not think her a hopping white ghost. In the distance there are clouds coming in from across the wolds, and Mr Davenant knows that if he wants his walk he will have to be quick about it. In his haste he drops the point of the scimitar onto his thumb and watches as a little bead of red blood falls onto the edge of Mr Happerton’s letter.
Mr Davenant is used to the sight of blood: pigs screaming in terror as their throats are cut; the scarlet sheen of a stable floor beneath two fighting cocks. All the same, the sight disturbs him. As a young man, subduing a hedge, his right forefinger was nearly severed by a springing saw-blade, and a surgeon had to be called from Lincoln to staunch the wound. We are none of us safe, he thinks. A defective saw-blade, a horse’s wrecked foreleg, a ton of sand dug out of a field: each has the capacity to tear our legs from under us and leave us sprawling. There are more grey clouds moving in above the garden. The wind is getting up. A flock of rooks, becalmed for a moment on the sodden grass, takes unexpected flight and goes soaring off over the wold. Mr Davenant stands uncertainly behind his desk, which has become a thing of terror to him, craving diversion but not knowing where it can be found. The little scimitar knife gleams up at him and he slides it into the pocket of his coat. It will be a useful thing to have with him, he thinks, at night, in a dark house.
*
At Glenister Court, Mr Glenister is restless. He has begun the day in his study with a newspaper, continued it in the morning room with Mr Gosse’s Omphalos, and extended it with a walk in his fields, where there is nothing to see but waterlogged wheat, but none of these things has brought him comfort. The newspaper is two days old and has lost its novelty. Mr Gosse’s book, which suggests that when God created the world he also created the fossils that appear to pre-date that world’s existence, he finds implausible. The wheat will very likely be ruined. Mr Glenister knows that this uneasiness of spirit has to do with Scroop Hall, dimly visible from his bedroom window, half a mile off through thickets and trees. He is rarely invited now and has to find pretexts to visit his friend. A copy of The Times that Mr Davenant may want to consult; a brace of partridges that Mr Davenant may want to put on his table; a book that Evie may care to read, or stare at: each of these errands in the past fortnight has taken Mr Glenister over to Scroop, and none of them has been sufficient to prolong his stay beyond twenty minutes. Mr Davenant is polite – he is always polite – but also distant, or rather more distant than before. There is something wrong between them, and Mr Glenister cannot see what it is. Or rather he can see, but chooses not to. A man’s wounded pride is for its victim to deal with, Mr Glenister thinks. The second reason, more tangible but no less troubling, is the mass of paper that lies on his desk. Mr Glenister is a resourceful man, and he has been putting these resources to work on his friend’s behalf. If Mr Davenant knew of these endeavours he would doubtless be deeply disapproving, and Mr Glenister does not intend that he should. Or rather, not yet. There are advantages in proceeding with stealth, Mr Glenister thinks, of which Mr Davenant, brought up on plain speaking and plain dealing, may possibly not be aware.
Mr Glenister sits at his desk and riffles the papers, which are already thoroughly well ordered, into a new and yet more fascinating arrangement: like a mosaic in which each successive piece is incremental to the design. Mr Glenister is a tallish, fair-haired man of thirty-five, rough-complexioned but with surprisingly dainty hands. At various times over the past dozen years attempts have been made to marry him off. A brewer’s widow from Grantham, a young lady recently discharged from Miss Smollett’s establishment at Stamford, and even a daughter of the Earl of Gainsborough have been proposed for this endeavour, but none of it has come to anything, and Mr Glenister sits in Glenister Court unmolested, plays patience of an evening and takes solitary walks in his wheatfields. He is a crackit, people say, a useful Lincolnshire word meaning a bachelor fond of his comforts, resistant to change, or even fearful of the married state.
The papers, for all their fascination, are still not quite arranged to Mr Glenister’s liking, and for a moment or two he shuffles them, holding them close to his chest before dealing them out again onto his desk like a pack of cards. People who do not know Mr Glenister well – most people, that is – sometimes declare that he is an idle young man who would be better off in a government office or an Inn of Court. The brewer’s widow is supposed to have said as much. Mr Glenister is amused by these reports which stem, he imagines, less from moral dissatisfaction as simple pique. Unlike Scroop Hall, Glenister Court has a kitchenful of Dresden china, a studyful of books and not a tile out of place on its roofs. Mr Glenister knows that had he been a more forceful man, he would have pressed his friend Davenant not to start that lawsuit and not to buy those horses, but he is not forceful, and Davenant is headstrong. There is nothing you can do with such people, Mr Glenister supposes, save to let their folly work itself out and to manoeuvre stealthily behind their backs for its redress, to help them without conveying to them that they are being helped. Hence the pile of papers, which, dealt out a second time onto the desk, are – unlike himself and the brewer’s widow – fulfilling the roles allotted to them.
There are nearly two dozen letters. Some from Mr Silas, the Sleaford attorney. Three from tradesmen in Lincoln. Several from gentlemen – and one or two people who are not gentlemen – in London. The subject of all this correspondence is Mr Happerton, and taken together they make quite a dossier. It is remarkable, in fact, what Mr Glenister has managed to discover. He knows, for example, how Mr Happerton came to marry Miss Gresham, and what Mr Gresham thought about it. He knows about his business dealings with Mr Solomons in the office near Hatton Garden. He knows that he has – no, that he is associated with, a woman who is not his wife. And he knows something, if not everything, about the series of interventions that led him to Tiberius. If it comes to it, Mr Glenister even has one of Mr Davenant’s bills on his desk, bought from a broker in Great Turnstile: although the signature says ‘Saml Davenant’, Mr Glenister is not certain his friend wrote it. That is the trouble with bills, he thinks, together with lame horses and advice in lawsuits: you cannot be sure that what you pay for is sound.
Mr Glenister’s restlessness has begun to leave him. It is afternoon now, a time he prefers, when no one calls, the house is silent and he can please himself. For a moment he wonders whether to find some excuse for walking over to Scroop, and then thinks better of it. He will be happier here, he thinks. Besides, it is all very well accumulating information. The problem is how to put it to use. Mr Glenister is aware that what he knows about Mr Happerton is not conclusive. It might interest a lawyer – it might conceivably interest a police inspector – but it will not convict him. He wonders what Miss Ellington would make of it, who has lately become rather a confidante of his. Mr Glenister thinks Miss Ellington is a nice, well-spoken girl, rather nervous and given to talking about the family she worked for in Warwickshire, who sound dreadfully dull, but not for that reason to be disregarded in any estimate of Mr Davenant’s affairs. She wears curious clothes – little ancient shawls and pelisses, a dress made of stiff, shiny fabric that he thinks may be that legendary substance, black bombazine – but then, as he reflects, it is highly probable that she is not being paid anything.
For a bachelor, living on an estate in Lincolnshire, Mr Glenister has had quite extensive dealings with women. He has danced with them, sat next to them at country-house dinners, bowed to them in the Lincoln shop doorways and once or twice sought them out in other places, but he has never met anyone like Miss Ellington, who is always shooting nervous glances into empty rooms, makes odd gestures with her fingers as she talks, and tells Evie queer stories about will-o’-the-wisps and boggarts, who live far underground and go flapping through their tunnels in search of children who have strayed there by mistake. Mr Glenister thinks that M
iss Ellington has a fervid imagination, a thing not altogether to be despised. He is not sure if he pities Miss Ellington, whose past life is clearly something of a burden, or thinks that only the withholding of pity will help her to prosper. It is difficult to tell.
Outside the rain has begun to fall in torrents, dancing up from the lawn and almost obliterating the line of currant bushes twenty yards away. Mr Glenister wishes the rain would stop. His wheat can stand or fall. It is of no consequence to him. There are other, immemorial livelihoods at stake. This is an ancient part of the world. There are people here, in this corner of England, next to whom the Davenants are brazen interlopers, people who have farmed land for six hundred years. ‘Scroop’ itself is Old Norse, but there were settlers here before that. A year since, one of Mr Glenister’s men found a coin in an upturned furrow, which a Lincoln antiquary dated to the reign of the Emperor Constantine. It sits on the study mantelpiece, along with a tobacco jar sporting the arms of Mr Glenister’s Cambridge college and the portrait of his mother. Mr Davenant must not lose his estate, Mr Glenister thinks. As to why he must not lose it, he cannot exactly say. Because he is a good man and Mr Happerton a bad one? Who can tell? Not even the paper on Mr Glenister’s desk can answer that. Because something long-standing, infinitesimal in itself but part of that wider pattern of solidity and substance, should not be lightly broken up? Here Mr Glenister thinks he is on firmer ground.
*
The schoolroom is at the top of the house, under the eaves. As well as being used for educative purposes, it is also a repository. At some point a variety of oddments – two cabin trunks, an harmonium, a saddle – have been dragged up here and pushed into corners where, when there are more than two persons present, they occasionally do service as chairs. There is, additionally, a blackboard, a set of globes, some ends of chalk and a curious instrument, like an inverted dome, which Miss Ellington supposes is an antique sundial. Even if one’s pupil were not Evie, it would be difficult to teach in such a room, she thinks. There is a strong smell of damp, and the rain rattles the windows with an extraordinary violence. The rooks cry in the sodden garden and the wind, coming in through the cracks in the frames, sounds uncannily like a human voice – or a voice that is perhaps not human. Just at this moment the chalk is back in its box and the blackboard dusted over, and Miss Ellington is telling Evie a story of her own devising. It is about a creature who lives on an island in the middle of the Wash and fishes for sprats with a rod made from a parasol. The creature may be human, or may not be: this information Miss Ellington keeps purposely withheld. It is difficult to know what effect this invention is having on Evie, who is unresponsive at the best of times. Just now, she is sitting on a tall, stiff-backed chair with her head on one side and her eyes lowered, making little restless movements with her hands.
