Free Derby Day by D.J. Taylor Page A

probably not be entered by Mr Davenant.
    ‘Naturally in our line of worship we can’t countenance such things, but it’s well to know of them, I think. They do say that Septuagint – that’s a blasphemous name for a horse – is coming on strong. You’ll remember me to her ladyship I hope, sir?’
    ‘Certainly I shall,’ Mr Glenister said, handing him into the waiting gig and thinking that he would be damned if he did. The wheels rolled a little in the dirt, the clerk gave a sort of hiccup, and Mr Silas, sitting seraphically beside him, with quite as much dignity as if he had a mitre on his head, was borne away back to Sleaford with Mr Glenister’s note for four hundred and seventy-five pounds in his pocket.
    When he had gone Mr Glenister did not, as he had first intended, go back into the stable yard. Instead he roamed about the lower parts of the house with the air of a man who is searching for something he cannot quite put his finger on. He peered into the drawing room, where half a dozen old Davenants looked down at him from a wall whose paper had been quite the fashion in Mr Davenant’s grandfather’s day, put his head into the kitchen where the day’s milking lay on the great oak table waiting to be scalded, stared at the maps and prints of old Lincolnshire that hung in the vestibule next to Mr Davenant’s ulster and his collection of walking sticks, and by degrees walked back to the room he had left five minutes before. A maidservant came along the corridor carrying the half-empty bottle of sherry and the four glasses and he stood to one side to let her pass. Far away in the upper regions of the house there came a little rustling noise and the merest gust of what might have been laughter. Mr Glenister thought the house was very run down: two of the panes in the hall were cracked, the door swollen with damp and the fire that burned in the drawing room insufficient for the season. ‘I suppose Davenant knows what he is about,’ he said to himself. A copy of Mr Silas’s schedule lay on the desk, underscored with marks from Mr Silas’s pen, and he picked it up and put it in the pocket of his coat. The little rustling noise came again from somewhere high in the rafters of the house and he cocked his head to one side to listen to it.
    ‘How many servants do you keep indoors now?’ he asked, when he returned to his friend in the stable yard.
    ‘There is Mrs Castell, the housekeeper, and a couple of maids. Why do you ask?’
    ‘No particular reason. What became of Kennedy?’ Kennedy was the Scroop Hall butler.
    ‘Ah, Kennedy and I don’t see eye to eye these days, I’m afraid … But what did that man have to say?’
    Mr Glenister gave the version of his dealings with Mr Silas that he thought might be least objectionable to his friend’s ears. Mr Davenant shook his head.
    ‘I am very much obliged to you – but you shouldn’t have paid the money.’
    ‘It was nothing – nothing at all.’
    ‘It was very much more than nothing. I am ashamed to be beholden to you, Glenister.’ But something in Mr Davenant’s eye said he was grateful too.
    ‘Who is this Happerton fellow who is set on ruining you?’
    ‘Ruin me?’ Mr Davenant gave a savage laugh. ‘He is a scoundrel, no doubt, but he does not want to ruin me. If he wished to do that he could have done it ages ago. No, he is after – Tiberius.’
    ‘And you never heard of him before?’
    ‘I think I did – just. One of those men who speculate in horses as you would in guano or shellac. Heaven knows what he may do. But come, Glenister, let us take a walk. I feel that if I went inside the walls would press in on me and seem set to crush me.’
    Mr Glenister wondered at this turn of phrase, but consented to follow his friend along a path that led from the rear of the stable yard past the eastern side of the house and down towards the garden and the wood beyond it. As they neared the point at which the lawn began its slow decline into the trees