Free Derby Day by D.J. Taylor Page B

there came a sudden blur of movement, and a pale, white figure – a girl in a print dress with her boots flying over the turf – came and buried her face in Mr Davenant’s shirtfront.
    ‘Evie.’ Mr Glenister, watching the tremor of the girl’s white head, was struck by his friend’s solicitude. ‘You should not be here. You should not, indeed. Where is Mrs Castell?’
    Getting no answer, he made a little delicate movement with his hand and raised her face up to meet his own. ‘What if you were to fall, and no one to see you?’
    The girl murmured something that Mr Glenister could not catch. He thought, staring closely at the quivering head – it was not often that he met her on his visits to Scroop – that her skin had no pigmentation in it all. Then he saw that her eyes had perhaps the faintest tinge of grey.
    There was a sound of hard breathing and urgent footsteps a few yards away, and a stout woman in an apron with her hair coming down her back came shambling into view around the side of the house.
    The girl opened her mouth – she performed this act in the manner of a fish that lies stranded on a river bank – and looked as if she might shriek her displeasure, but then lowered her head and walked meekly back to the spot, about ten yards away, where Mrs Castell, very indignant and with her hands on her hips, stood waiting for her.
    ‘She is no better, I suppose?’ Mr Glenister wondered, as they carried on down the path.
    ‘Evie? No, she is no better. She can read, you know, after a fashion. I won’t say what fashion, but – well. She made a drawing of a pheasant the other day, that Raikes’ – Raikes was the keeper – ‘had shot in the wood. But there are times when you would think she did not know me, when she flies into passions and Mrs Castell does not care to have her in the room.’
    ‘Do the doctors say what is wrong?’
    ‘Nothing. They say she should see other children, but there are none that would willingly see her.’
    ‘Perhaps the new governess will be able to do something with her.’
    ‘Ah yes, the new governess,’ said Mr Davenant absently, and Mr Glenister knew that his mind had gone back to his other troubles.
    They had reached the entrance to the wood, where the gibbet barred their way. Here the keeper had nailed up a stoat and a pair of martens, and a black shrike was tearing at the stoat’s head with an odd, repetitive motion of its beak. There was blood on the grass and Mr Glenister, looking at the martens’ sightless eyes and the stoat’s ravaged skull, knew that if it had been left to him he would have taken down the gibbet.
    There was not, in truth, a great deal to Mr Davenant’s woods. Anyone who was not their owner could have walked through them in five minutes and thought that he had not missed anything. But they were Mr Davenant’s pride and joy – more so now that his position as the owner of Scroop Hall was in jeopardy – and he took Mr Glenister through them with a kind of defiance.
    ‘You’ll see that tree there, Glenister? I was advised to have it down, as the man said that the wood was rotted. But I told him it should not be touched and, do you know, it has righted itself?’
    ‘It is certainly a very fine tree,’ Mr Glenister said, who had had this miracle of nature drawn to his attention half a dozen times before.
    And so they pottered about in Mr Davenant’s wood, as the clouds marched off towards the coast, and a very weak sun came out to supplant them, and an occasional pheasant scuttled out across the path, and all the time the shadow of Mr Happerton hung over the skyline together with the retreating rain. In the end Mr Davenant could find no more to say about his trees.
    ‘Did you ever feel,’ he asked, quite out of nowhere, ‘that you had not made the best of your life? I don’t mean in the manner of making yourself comfortable, but in taking the chances that were offered you?’
    ‘I suppose we all of us feel that,’ said Mr Glenister,