by D. J. Taylor
His eyes staring up at nothing.
And now they were all as lost as he …
Part Four
XXII
Mist
The weather is so very bad down in Lincolnshire, that the liveliest imagination can scarcely apprehend its ever being fine again.
Charles Dickens, Bleak House (1853)
AT GLENISTER HALL the mist is rising. For half an hour now Mr Glenister has stood by the window in his study watching it roll up from the fields behind his lawn, and Edgard Dyke, which lies to the back of his birch wood. There is always mist in Lincolnshire. Even on fine summer mornings it lurks in the spinneys and the water meadows’ edge: a dense white halo, ghostly, like fine-spun cotton. The local myths and legends are full of it. The Gesta Daemonorum Lincolnensis, a monkish scribble on the flyleaf of a tenth-century psalter kept in the vault of Lincoln Cathedral, talks of a great fog clouding the sky from Sliofor ad Luthe, which Mr Glenister, who has seen the psalter, thinks is the land between Sleaford and Louth. Out of this fog, according to the author of the Gesta, a winged steed, coal-black and with flaming eyes, periodically emerges to gallop the night sky with a pack of spectral hounds yammering at his hoofs. There are similar myths in Norfolk, forty miles away beyond the Wash; antiquaries – Mr Glenister is a member of the Lincolnshire Society – think them derivative. It is the Pegasus of the Lincoln psalter who rode here first, out across Spurn Head above the grey North Sea. But it is a second black horse, which interests Mr Glenister now: Tiberius, in point of fact, who only a fortnight hence will be taken down to London for the great race. For reasons he cannot quite fathom, Mr Glenister has determined to be present, even if – Derby Day being what it is, and no lodgings to be found within a dozen miles of Epsom – it means staying in a London hotel. It is all to do with Mr Davenant, he thinks, Mr Davenant and, more generally, the tribute that the dead exact from the living, in this case the obligation to travel a hundred miles to watch a horse run in a race that will last two and a half minutes in front of a hundred thousand people.
There is something ominous about the mist, Mr Glenister feels, watching now as another dense cloud or two comes stealing up from the birch wood, if not uncanny. A human figure suddenly engulfed by it – he has seen his keeper so surrounded – does not disappear but is rendered frailer and less substantial. The idea of frailty makes Mr Glenister think of Mr Davenant, on whom, since the body was brought up from the stream on a rail ten days since, he has not ceased to focus his mind. It is known to everyone – everyone, that is, except the Coroner, who charitably diagnosed mischance – that Mr Davenant destroyed himself. And it is thought, from the evidence of a paper found in Mr Davenant’s study, that it was Mr Davenant in his rage and misery who attempted to destroy Tiberius, killing the thing he loved so that no one else could possess him, or perhaps did not mean quite to destroy him, or he would have chosen a better time and a better weapon. To Mr Glenister, who reads books and newspapers, who is a Lincolnshire man but with affiliations beyond the flat fields and the lowering sky, all this is curiously symbolic. The world is changing, he thinks, and it is leaving Mr Davenant and his sort behind. It is not enough, now, to live in a house that your grandfather inhabited, in sight of fields that his grandfather walked, in a periwig, for there is a tide sweeping over the Lincolnshire flats that no amount of ancestry can damn or divert. Tiberius, Mr Glenister thinks, is caught up in this tide, although a part of him knows this to be nonsense, for gentlemen have always run horses and crowds come to watch them, if not at Epsom Downs then elsewhere. And now, by destroying himself, Mr Davenant has made that tide run a little faster, ensuring that a crowd of other things will be swept away on it just as he has been swept himself.
It is only ten days since Mr Davenant slipped into the stream – whose banks, as the Coroner pointed out, were caked in mud and unusually steep – and already he has been buried, and memorialised in the Lincolnshire Chronicle, and if not forgotten then is of no account in the new arrangements that mysteriously prevail. The will was read out at a lawyer’s office in Lincoln to an audience consisting of Mr Glenister, Mr Davenant’s brother, Mr Happerton and his London attorney, and was, everyone very soon agreed, quite otiose, seeing that Mr Happerton had in his pocket a bill of sale of the Scroop property with Mr Davenant’s signature on it. ‘It is all to do with that horse, I suppose,’ Mr Davenant’s brother remarked, with whom Mr Glenister subsequently ate his lunch. ‘There is more to it than that, I think,’ Mr Glenister said, not knowing what he could decently say in such circumstances. ‘And this Mr Happerton,’ the cousin complained. ‘How did he come to get such a hold on him, I wonder?’ ‘He should never have begun that lawsuit, I fear,’ Mr Glenister said, again not liking to say all he knew. ‘Poor Sam,’ Mr Davenant’s brother lamented. ‘Ruined for a horse and a sandpit that someone dug up in one of his fields. It is very hard.’
The rooks do not trust the mist, Mr Glenister notices. At the first hint of it they return to the tree-tops. These, Mr Glenister thinks, look like the masts of fog-bound ships. In winter the Humber would resemble a forest, were it not for the clanking hulls. And yet, for all Mr Davenant’s brother’s complaint – he is resigning his Fellowship to be married and perhaps needs the money – Mr Happerton has, in the matter of the will, been surprisingly gracious. The incidental legacies – £30 to Mrs Castell, a carriage clock to Hester the housemaid – have been handed over. Mr Glenister himself is already the proud possessor of a steel engraving of the Battle of Culloden, at which some Davenant is supposed to have distinguished himself. To the starker questions – what will happen to Evie and Miss Ellington – there is, as yet, no answer. Mr Happerton is at Epsom: the fate of his tenant’s child and her governess is of little moment to him. Doubtless, like the servants’ wages and piles of mouldering timber, it will be dealt with at the proper season. Mr Glenister has discovered, somewhat to his surprise, that he is to be Evie’s guardian. He is not certain how he feels about this, liking Evie but wondering whether this liking may not be stifled by her constant proximity.
Since her father’s death Evie has fallen into a decline, rambling around the place like a pale white ghost and having to be brought back from woods and meadows into which she has strayed. Mr Glenister, whose advice has been sought, has suggested that laudanum should be mixed into her milk. But one cannot always go on administering laudanum to a fourteen-year-old girl, he thinks. He wonders what it would be like if Evie came to live at Glenister Court, and foresees a future of cats persecuted by her ineffable love, white muslin in hasty transit over the wet grass, the red eyes which remind him of a rat’s staring up from the kitchen table. It is all a question, Mr Glenister feels, of determining where responsibility lies.
Just at that moment there is a knock at the study door, and the maid opens it to reveal Mr Silas, the Sleaford attorney, raising his legs, one knee at a time, in a kind of jogging motion, and twisting his hat in his hand. In the past few weeks Mr Glenister and Mr Silas have become remarkably intimate, in so far as intimacy can ever exist between a Lincolnshire squire and the deacon of a Dissenting chapel. Mr Glenister knows that his late father, a Canon of Christchurch, would have refused to enter a room if Mr Silas sat in it. There are people who say that Mr Silas, whose feet are still moving nervously up and down as if he walked some invisible treadmill, is another part of the tide sweeping in across Lincolnshire and the world beyond it, but Mr Glenister thinks not. There have always been Mr Silases, he believes, demure but self-conscious little men skipping about the coat-tails of the great, and not so great, and charity (in Mr Silas’s case expediency) requires that they should be honoured. Mr Silas, he sees, is somewhat changed from his usual appearance, and the difference lies in his dress, specifically in the substitution of his black jacket with a kind of antique frock-coat, frogged and emerald green, but with a hint almost of purple. Mr Glenister thinks his father would have been seriously offended by Mr Silas, with or without his coat, whereas his son is merely amused.
‘
Come in, Silas,’ he says now. ‘It is very good of you to come and see me.’ The coat, he finds, is too big to be ignored. He cannot avoid looking at it, nor can Mr Silas avoid the slant of his gaze. ‘That is a very extraordinary garment you have on.’
‘I don’t know that it’s so very remarkable,’ Mr Silas says nervously. ‘But then, us attorneys are always supposed to go about like rooks, you know.’
‘You have not brought Mr Jones with you, I think,’ Mr Glenister says, looking into the doorway as if Mr Jones might still be lurking in the corridor.
‘Well – no. Jones is a very useful man, you know, but when the business is confidential, I like to come on my own.’
Mr Glenister is suddenly aware of colour, both in the room and without it. The imperial sheen of Mr Silas’s frock-coat; the red wax seal on the sheaf of legal documents he now takes out of his case; a damasked chair-back; the whiteness of the mist, now receding a little on the virid grass. The Gesta, he recalls, has the same variegated palette: black hounds, red eyes, golden stars flung over the horizon. Mr Silas, meanwhile, is stirring in his chair. Without Mr Jones to cajole and bully he is less sure of himself, and somewhat humble. The legal documents are strewn across his lap.
‘A terrible business,’ he says suddenly, out of his nest of papers. ‘I take it there’s no doubt that the poor gentleman … did away with himself?’
‘Every doubt,’ Mr Glenister tells him, who privately has none, but is not prepared to allow this point, ‘with a bank as steep as that. A regiment of dragoons could have tumbled down there in the dark and not climbed back again.’
Mr Silas has his own ideas about the river bank, which not even his respect for Mr Glenister can subdue. ‘And then that Mr Happerton. He’s a low fellow, that one, bringing a London attorney up to settle the affair when any one of us could have done service.’
‘I think it is only that gentlemen prefer to use their own men of business,’ Mr Glenister demurs.
‘In case questions are asked that can’t be answered. I’ve no doubt you’re right, sir,’ Mr Silas says. ‘I suppose there’s no doubt about the bill of sale?’
‘None. It was all laid out in the usual way, I believe. Mr Statham’ – Mr Statham sits in the House for the county – ‘was one of the witnesses.’
‘A nasty Liberal, that never should have been set over us … Well, I have done what you asked, sir, and here is the result, sad as it is. But perhaps you would like to see a schedule?’
Sometimes the ghost horse of the Gesta carries a warrior in black armour. At other times he is riderless. Some antiquaries have identified this figure with the Norse god Tyr. Others think it a fanciful tribute to Offa, the Mercian king.
‘No indeed,’ Mr Glenister says. ‘I should like to hear anything you have to tell me.’ There is a fire bursting up in the grate for all it is May, whose red coals would do for the ghost horse’s eyes. Mr Silas moves his hands out in front of him like a pair of pincers, looks for a moment as if he will seize up the ink-bottle on Mr Glenister’s desk, but in the end merely presses the tips of his fingers together. He is quite in his element again.
‘Well, sir. There was a great deal of debt. But you know that. None of it considerable in itself, perhaps, but a terrible amount when put together. There was money owing to the lawyers. Half a dozen tradesmen in Lincoln and elsewhere too. Now, in the normal course of things a shopkeeper that knows his man and has a bill will keep that bill going – take his interest, have it renewed, that kind of thing. And country gentlemen’s the best kind to have the paper of, sir. There may not be ready money, but there’s property. Two acres with a dozen cows in it’s worth far more to a man with a bill than a grand pianner or a wardrobe of Dresden silk. But that London attorney of Happerton’s, he went around buying up debt. And he did it a-purpose. Times he’d pay pretty near all that was owed on a bill – 80 or 90 per cent – just to get his hands on the paper. There was a bill owing to Edric, the Lincoln corn chandler, which Edric, to give him the credit, didn’t want to give up, out of respect to Mr Davenant whose father helped set up his father in his shop, which he paid face value for, and that’s not natural, for there’s no profit in it.’
‘You are saying that Mr Happerton deliberately set out to ruin my friend Mr Davenant?’
‘I don’t say that, sir. Bill-broking’s a free trade. Any man can set up in it if he wants and pay what he likes for such paper as comes his way. Who’s to say what’s the value of a thing? If we all knew that we’d be as rich as Dives. What I’m saying is that Mr Happerton went to a deal of trouble to get his hands on Mr Davenant’s property, which he did by bringing all the debt together, so there was only one creditor. And then …’
‘And then what?’
Mr Glenister is still thinking of the Gesta, in which the ghost horse with the pack of hounds yammering at its tail has been replaced by Tiberius, with the figure of Major Hubbins clinging to his back. He will go and see Tiberius at the Derby, he decides, in the hope that it was something his friend would have wanted. He wonders what extremity of passion it was that inspired Mr Davenant to attack the horse in its stall. But then there is no knowing what a person may do when afflicted by circumstance. There is a man whom Mr Glenister once knew – he is in the Hanwell asylum now – who, when a young lady wrote to him breaking off their engagement, severed his own finger at the knuckle and sent it back to her in a bloody envelope by way of reply. No, there is no knowing what a person may do.
‘Well, when a man’s in debt and signing his name to paper all the time there comes a day when he don’t know what he’s signing. Or when what’s signed isn’t his, if you take my meaning.’
‘You mean that some of the paper wasn’t Davenant’s, but it had his name on it?’
‘Who’s to say, sir? But if a man’s signed twenty bills, he may not jib at the twenty-first. There’s nothing more lowering than a mound of paper. Now, take a look at this. I got it – well, I’d best not say how I came by it – but you’ll see the promise is to Lovegrove, that saddler, which between ourselves is not an honest man. Did Mr Davenant have dealings with Lovegrove? May very well have done. Who’s to say? But here’s his name on Lovegrove’s bill.’
‘But surely all Mr Davenant’s bills were bought up by Mr Happerton?’
‘Well then this one was overlooked. Put to one side and forgot. You’d be surprised how often that happens. Why, I knew a house once that was about to be sold – new owner had his cows already grazing on the meadow, and measuring up the sash window that he wanted took out – when they found the place was entailed and couldn’t be sold at all.’
‘I should give a great deal,’ Mr Glenister says, ‘to have that bill.’
‘I can’t let you have it, sir. Indeed I can’t. It should be in our safe, that’s where it should be.’
The mist is receding now, and there are rooks out on the grass. Again, a part of Mr Glenister’s mind is wondering what plans Mr Happerton has for Evie and Miss Ellington. He will do what he ought, he thinks, for this is what he has always done.
‘By the way,’ he says, ‘there is sad news of Lady Mary Desmond.’
‘I am sorry to hear that, sir. Truly. What is the matter with her ladyship?’
‘Well – it is all very delicate. I fear she has quarrelled with the Reverend Toms at St Julian’s. A rather high establishment, I should say.’
‘As high as they come, sir,’ Mr Silas agrees. ‘Why they’d lower down a stuffed dove on Whit Sunday if they could get away with it. It’s not a place I ever visit, but they do say that you can scarce see the altar for smoke.’
‘Exactly. And Lady Mary, as you doubtless remember, was raised a Quaker. Of course it is early days, but I have heard that she was speaking very favourably of your congregation.’
‘Was she, sir? Well, we shall be very glad to welcome her. And the old Earl, too, if he’s a mind.’
A moment later and the saddler’s bill is in Mr Glenister’s hand. Again, he thinks of his father. The Canon of Chr
istchurch would have disdained these subterfuges. But then he did not live in such an age as this, Glenister thinks. We must adapt ourselves to the world we inhabit, or we are lost. The signature on the bill is like Mr Davenant’s, but in some way curiously unlike it.
‘Now look at this,’ he says, drawing out of his desk the sheet of paper that Miss Ellington retrieved from Mr Davenant’study. For some reason the memory of Mr Davenant’s face staring up from the rail is very vivid to him: white, sightless and curiously indistinct – as unfathomable, Mr Glenister thinks, as the signature on the bill.
‘What’s that then?’ Mr Silas asks. He looks thoroughly animated, even more so than at the prospect of Lady Mary Desmond visiting his red-brick chapel and sitting next to the pink-cheeked tradesmen’s wives in their Sunday bonnets.
‘An attempt at Mr Davenant’s signature, I should say,’ Mr Glenister tells him. He puts the saddler’s bill face down on the desk. ‘Let us see if any of them tally.’
‘The third, maybe,’ Mr Silas says. He is breathing heavily, like Tiberius, or perhaps the ghost-horse as it gallops the night sky.
‘The fourth, I should say,’ Mr Glenister corrects him. ‘Look how the line drops down under the “D” in “Davenant”.’
And Mr Silas looks at him in admiration.
*
Not more than a hundred miles away Captain Raff wakes up in an attic bedroom looking out over a series of low, grimy rooftops. The dome of St Paul’s looms over the skyline. The sun shines uncomfortably through the open window. There are no sheets on the bed and the mattress is yellow with age – and other things – but Captain Raff is more concerned by the absence of the water jug which has vanished mysteriously during the night. He suspects that the landlord of the premises, to whom he is beholden, has taken it in spite. For a moment he stares around the room in search of it, looks at the bare floorboards and the solitary chair that supports his clothes, but there is no sign. Of all things in the world, aside from Baldino’s victory in the great race, the receipt of his £300 and his revenge on Mr Happerton, Captain Raff thinks that he desires a glass of water the most. A mouse runs over the boards towards the wainscoting and he watches it slide itself, with furious motions of its paws, into an aperture that the naked eye would not have known was there. The thought strikes him that he, too, is a species of mouse and this is his hole.
