Derby Day

by D. J. Taylor

  It was remarkable what interested him. He took no notice of the pictures on the walls of the drawing room, or the half-empty decanter that Miss Nokes had omitted to return to its tray, but he spent several minutes turning over Mr Happerton’s letters in their tray, and a little blue notebook propped up at the end of a bookshelf went into his pocket. All the while Mr Allardice kept his ear cocked for descending footsteps. He had just wandered into the hall to examine a pile of horsey appurtenances that were lying in a heap by the grandfather clock when there came the noise of a cab pulling up at the door, and a sharp-faced but undeniably pretty woman could be seen stepping down from it onto the pavement.

  Mr Allardice turned on his heel and went rapidly back into the drawing room, where he took the precaution of hiding himself behind one of the drawn-back velvet curtains. A bell jangled again, nearer at hand. Realising that his idyll with Nokes had come to an end, along with his chance to inspect Mr Happerton’s letters, a part of Mr Allardice was all for disappearing down the kitchen staircase and up the area steps as soon as was convenient. Another part, however, told him not to be hasty, and instead he kept his place behind the curtain, and his eye trained on the door. For perhaps five minutes silence prevailed. Then came a noise of footsteps in rapid transit; two voices, one high to the point of stridency, the other meekly subdued, in conversation; and another set of footsteps drawing nearer by the second. The door of the drawing room was thrown open and Mrs Happerton strode over the threshold.

  Plainly there was some urgency in Mrs Happerton’s sortie to the drawing room, for she was still wearing her bonnet. Advancing into the centre of the room, she saw the decanter on the table – as redolent of mischief to a vigilant householder as a broken window-catch – and sniffed at it. But it did not seem to Mr Allardice that she was much interested in the thought that her maid had been recruiting herself with spirituous liquor, and that her air of preoccupation had quite another source. There was a little earthenware mug in her hand, steam rising from its lip, which she now set down upon the sideboard. Mrs Happerton now reached into one of the sideboard’s compartments and brought out a jar of brownish powder in which Mr Allardyce thought that he detected cinnamon or possibly arrowroot. ‘Nightcap for the old gentleman, then,’ Mr Allardice thought, watching Mrs Happerton stir the powder into the milk.

  And then Mrs Happerton did what, to Mr Allardice, jammed into his hiding place behind the curtain with the back of his head squashed up against the window pane, seemed a peculiar thing. Going across to a neat little desk by the bookcase, she took a key from the bunch that hung from the wall to one side of it, unlocked one of the desk’s several drawers and, looking very cautiously to right and left of her, produced a little green sack, whose fastening she now opened, and a pinch of whose contents she now sprinkled over the contents of the mug. She then rapidly shut up the desk, put the key back on its ring and, carrying the mug very carefully before her (just as if it was a candlestick, Mr Allardice thought to himself) went back out of the drawing-room door. He heard her feet moving up the staircase, and then they pattered away into nothing.

  Mr Allardice came out of his hiding place and looked around the empty drawing room. In replacing the key that opened the desk drawer, Mrs Happerton had – very unhelpfully, he thought – stood directly in his line of vision, but he was an experienced man with keys and a moment or two’s experiment had the drawer open and the sack in his hand. The grey and faintly sandy powder inside intrigued him. He rolled a speck or two on his finger and sniffed it cautiously. He weighed the sack in his hands and, finally, took an empty matchbox from his pocket and shook a little of the powder into it. A bell was jangling somewhere in the middle distance, but there was no sign of Miss Nokes. ‘No one at home,’ he said out loud. The kitchen, to which he returned a moment or two later, was quite empty. There was still some tea in the pot and he drained off half a cup of it and crammed another slice of Dundee cake into his mouth as he went. ‘Bella Nokes,’ he said to himself, with what might have been a faint rustle of amusement. And then he was gone up the area steps, into the square and out among the people coming back from evening service, nodding at a policeman who stood motionless on the street corner as the crowds swarmed around him and seemed in some quaint and mysterious way to acknowledge him. And Miss Nokes, returning finally to the kitchen, found only the empty tea cups and the last fragment of Dundee cake on its salver and the unfastened door swinging gently in the breeze.

  *

  ‘Well, we have half a dozen samples of that man’s handwriting in a notebook, at any rate,’ Captain McTurk remarked to Mr Masterson. ‘Thank Allardice for that.’ They were sitting in the office high over the ostlers’ yard examining the items brought back from Belgrave Square.

  ‘He has not compromised himself, I hope,’ Mr Masterson wondered. ‘No banns being read, or anything of that sort?’

  There had been an occasion when Mr Allardice’s professional zeal had very nearly resulted in a breach-of-promise suit.

  Captain McTurk smiled. ‘There is no doubt about it,’ he said. ‘Happerton is the man who wrote the fragment of the letter which was found on the cellar floor. Look here – see how he curls his “a”s. It is quite distinctive.’

  ‘I dare say it is,’ said Mr Masterson, who was of all things a realist. ‘And yet it might have got there quite innocently you know.’

  ‘A scrap of a letter found in a basement next to a jeweller’s strong-room the morning after he is discovered to be burgled! How so?’

  ‘It could have got there in a dozen ways, and have nothing to do with whoever committed the burglary – a man whose identity we don’t yet know.’

  ‘I think that I know it.’

  ‘Your opinion is one to which I habitually defer’ – Mr Masterson was courtesy itself on these occasions. ‘But at any rate there is nothing that connects Happerton to the man Pardew. All we know is that Pardew was last seen at Richmond. That is all.’

  ‘I wish we could find that Captain Raff.’

  ‘Vanished off the face of the earth,’ Mr Masterson said, ‘and neither his landlord nor his laundress any the wiser.’

  ‘It may be that he is down at Epsom.’

  ‘It may very well be. But no one has seen him there.’

  Captain McTurk shrugged his shoulders in a way that suggested Captain Raff did him the gravest discourtesy by not keeping him constantly informed of his whereabouts.

  ‘There is something else, though, that Allardice brought back. What do you make of this?’

  Mr Masterson inspected the little box of grey powder while the story of its finding was explained to him.

  ‘I should say,’ Captain McTurk elaborated, ‘that my old friend Mr Gresham has been taking it with his nightcap.’

  ‘It may well be medicinal.’

  ‘Allardice said it came out of a sack locked in a drawer, and that Mrs Happerton herself mixed it into the milk.’

  ‘Why should a woman not prepare her father’s hot milk?’

  ‘Why not indeed? But all the same I should like to conduct a little test. You might tell Hopkins to come in here.’

  Hopkins was the secretary who sat in the closet next to Captain McTurk’s office. While Masterson was fetching him, Captain McTurk picked up the cup that had held his morning coffee, found that the dregs were still warm and, placing a little of the powder on the end of a spoon, sprinkled it over their surface.

  ‘Now Hopkins,’ he began as the secretary came into the room. ‘I take it you have no objection to helping us try a little experiment?’

  ‘None in the least,’ said Mr Hopkins, who was an amiable young man.

  ‘Well, just drink up this coffee will you? It shan’t do you any harm.’

  If Mr Hopkins had imagined that he was to be let in on some great secret he was gravely disappointed, for no sooner had the coffee been drunk up than the cup was taken from his hand and he was sent back along the corridor to resume the work on which he had been engaged.

  ‘Ten to
one it is nothing,’ Mr Masterson said.

  ‘Not such a bad price. Why, you may get that almost on Happerton’s horse, which was such a certainty a fortnight ago.’

  ‘I did hear,’ Mr Masterson said, ‘that a great deal of money has been placed on Baldino and another horse – Septuagint, I think it is.’

  ‘I wonder who placed it?’ Captain McTurk remarked. ‘What else do we know about Happerton? About him personally, I mean?’

  ‘Oh, he is a regular sporting gentleman. Rather a swell, you know. An agreeable man, everybody says.’

  Captain McTurk considered the question of Mr Happerton’s agreeability for a moment and then strode rapidly into the doorway of his office and jerked his head along the corridor. ‘Well,’ he said, coming back into the room and clasping his arms triumphantly over his chest, ‘I should say that ten to one was good odds after all.’

  For Mr Hopkins, although grasping a pen in his right hand, and with his left extended to retrieve a sheet of foolscap, had fallen asleep at his desk.

  *

  Two evenings later Miss Nokes, in her best pinafore and cap, stepped out to the Bag o’ Nails in West Halkin Street in the confident hope of finding Mr Allardice smoking his pipe on the oak settle before the fireplace, but found him absent. Nor, to her great disgust, did he ever come again.

  *

  For a week now Tiberius had been at Mr Mountstuart’s establishment in Cheam. The stables were in some sense semi-public, and gentlemen who came there in the hope of seeing the horses were not very often turned away, and the grooms who permitted these inspections had something of the vanity of the artist’s model. Mr Happerton, who had installed himself at an inn a hundred yards from the stable door, was in two minds about these visitations. He liked people praising his horse because it reflected well on his judgement in buying it, but in these circumstances – with half a dozen men gathered round Tiberius’ stall to discuss his points – the thought that he wanted the horse to lose was a torture to him. At this stage odds of seven or eight to one could still be procured – Baldino and Septuagint were at three and four – and there were times when Mr Happerton’s mind harboured wild schemes of raising another three or four thousand pounds and staking it on his own horse.

  A moment’s thought was enough to convince him that his affairs were too far gone for this to be practicable, but still the idea that his pride and joy, the animal whose picture he had carried with him on his wedding tour and clutched under his arm like a talisman as he burst into Mrs Venables’ drawing room, might not win the great race was simple torment, however great the promised reward. He had totted up his likely earnings, should Baldino or Septuagint take the garland, and they stood between fifteen and twenty thousand pounds. What would happen if neither of the horses succeeded, he did not quite like to think about, but he was confident that they would not fail him. He had watched Tiberius very carefully in the practice runs he had taken and assured himself that his original diagnosis was correct, that the horse lacked stamina, and there was additionally a weakness (Mr Happerton was sure that only he had noticed this) in his left hindquarter. And this was to ignore the further impediment of having Major Hubbins to ride him.

  But there were other phantoms disturbing Mr Happerton’s sweet repose, beyond professional jealousy. First there was Captain Raff, whose disappearance continued to puzzle him. For the Captain’s vanishing had been so mysterious. No letter had been sent, and no meeting called for. Mr Happerton had been to the chambers in Ryder Street – missing Mr Masterson by half an hour, although he did not know it – but found the door shut up and a sheaf of tradesmen’s bills twisted around the knocker. None of Captain Raff’s artist neighbours knew where he was, and he was discovered to owe the old woman who looked after his linen thirty shillings. More annoying, perhaps, than the circumstances of this disappearance was Mr Happerton’s gradual awareness that Captain Raff had really been very useful to him. He had run messages. He had interviewed that class of person with whom, in the general way of things, Mr Happerton was not prepared to deal. He had tolerated, or suffered, Mr Happerton’s slights and aspersions. In Raff’s absence this role had to be filled by Mr Mountstuart, and Mr Happerton found that neither he not Mr Mountstuart liked it, for Mr Mountstuart was not a Captain Raff.

  He was a big, stout man of forty who had once, it was said, knocked a groom senseless for answering back to him, and he would sooner have submitted to some of the indignities forced on Captain Raff than Mr Bradlaugh consent to be appointed chair of an evangelical mission to the South Seas. And so it was Mr Mountstuart who negotiated with stewards, who led deputations to Mr Dorling, the celebrated clerk of the course, and flattered him, and paid bribes to gatekeepers, and the doing of it irked him – not because he was ashamed, but because he thought it constituted a reversal in his life, like a Cinderella married to her prince, who discovers on the very next morning that she is expected to come downstairs and lay the fire. Mr Mountstuart did not, Mr Happerton assured himself, know very much about horses. Still he knew enough, Mr Happerton also assured himself, to be faintly suspicious of Mr Happerton’s motives.

  ‘I think you have made a mistake with that Major Hubbins,’ he said one morning when they were making certain arrangements in respect of Tiberius’ transportation to the Downs on the morning of the race.

  ‘I never knew a better man in the saddle,’ Mr Happerton protested, conscious, as he did so, of the want of civility in his voice.

  ‘Well, that’s as may be, Happerton, but I tell you, if he falls off that animal he’ll not get back onto him again.’

  This seemed to Mr Happerton so indisputably true that he merely frowned, and began instead to talk of some enticing mash that he wished to be prepared for Tiberius on the evening before the race day. There was, he knew, no logic in his annoyance. He wanted his horse to lose, but the realisation that lose he might continually depressed his spirits. He knew that the prospect of his horse losing depended on his being ridden badly, but whenever anyone suggested that he might be ridden badly he grew angrier still.

  And then, to add to the problems caused by Captain Raff’s disappearance, there was the question of Major Hubbins. Like Mr Happerton, and like Tiberius, and like half a hundred people connected with the race, Major Hubbins was now installed at Cheam. He, too, was staying in an inn, a sporting inn, where the landlord, knowing who he was, made much of him. In fact, Major Hubbins was very comfortable. He had hot water for his feet, which were delicate, and embrocation for his knee, and his glass of negus, and Mr Happerton to call upon him – yet none of this was satisfactory to Mr Happerton. On the one hand Major Hubbins, who had ridden horses for the old king, and had once been complimented on his ability by the Duke of Wellington, could not be patronised. Mr Happerton had tried this once, got a little rebuff for his pains, and not liked it. On the other hand there was a lack of worldliness about him that Mr Happerton thought that he could not quite believe in. He could not, it went without saying, tell Major Hubbins that he wanted him to lose the race; but he assumed that Major Hubbins must have some faint inkling of his plans. In fact, the merest conversation with the Major assured him that he did not.

  ‘So, how do you think we stand, Major?’ he had enquired one morning a week before the race as he stood in the Major’s room at the Brood Mare. Major Hubbins was very comfortable. He was looking at a selection of sporting prints, sent to him gratis by a print-seller in High Holborn, and deciding which ones he would like, and a bowl of broth, brought up by the landlady, was steaming at his elbow.

  ‘I think we shall do very well,’ Major Hubbins said. ‘He pulls a little, you know, and is flustered, perhaps, when there is anyone near him, but really I don’t know when I rode a nicer horse. By the by, you might tell Maitland’ – Maitland was Mr Mountstuart’s groom – ‘that his withers need looking at. He was pretty ragged when I took him out yesterday morning.’

  ‘And you are well, I take it?’ Mr Happerton wondered, thinking that Captain Raff would have known
about the withers. Major Hubbins said he was very well and went on drinking his broth.

  But there was another thing about Major Hubbins, set next to which his refusal to be patronised and his apparent lack of worldliness faded into nothing. Watching him put Tiberius though his paces, seeing him approach the horse in the stable yard, Mr Happerton feared that he had made a mistake. There was no denying Major Hubbins’ advanced age, or his troublesome knee, or the various other ailments that vexed him, but there was a thoroughness about him that belied his years. One morning out on the Downs, unprompted, the Major had decided, as he put it, ‘to give Tiberius his head’, and Mr Happerton, as he watched the horse thunder across the bright turf, thought that he would not have cared to do such a thing himself. Dick Tomkins, of whom great things were predicted, was to ride Septuagint, but Mr Happerton suspected that even Dick Tomkins would not have handled the horse a great deal better. Again, wild schemes flitted through his head – he would find some pretext for dismissing Major Hubbins, he would find someone else to ride Tiberius – but he knew that the time for this substitution had passed, and so he stayed silent.

  And then again, and in some sense dwarfing all the anxieties of short odds, horses and their riders, there was the problem of Mr Pardew. Mr Happerton had seen the picture of Mr Pardew in the newspapers and been frightened by it. Again, this was an area in which Captain Raff could have helped him. Captain Raff would have advised, sent emissaries and conducted interviews. But now there was no Captain Raff, only Mr Pardew and his stick, infesting his study and demanding bills at three months. There were times when Mr Happerton looked at the matter of Mr Pardew dispassionately. He told himself that there was nothing to connect him with the burglary at Mr Gallentin’s shop, and that there was nothing Mr Pardew could gain from betraying him, as the betrayal would also involve himself. He told himself, too, that he had believed Mr Pardew when the latter had sworn that he intended to leave the country. But a small part of him worried that Mr Pardew might not leave the country as he had promised, or that he might do so but then come back, and that any material rewards that accrued to Mr Happerton might be compromised by Mr Pardew’s finding out about their existence.