Derby Day by D.J. Taylor Page B

and his hair all askew, and the mud on his hands from bearing the coffin, looked as if he had but lately risen from the grave himself.
    But there were other matters in which it seemed that the fates had conspired against Mr Davenant. Tiberius had certainly made his owner’s reputation – the Marquis of Loudon had sent a letter in his own hand positively entreating that he be allowed to cover his mare Miranda – but he had very nearly ruined him too. Thinking that where one animal had gone others might follow he had bought more horses, and they had not served him so well. One had broken its foreleg and had to be destroyed. Another had disgraced itself so thoroughly in its debut that it had never been shown again. And then Mr Davenant had done a very rash thing. He had begun a lawsuit with a neighbouring squire who, he alleged, had dug up part of his land for a quarry, and the neighbouring squire had defended himself and won. And people said that although Tiberius remained in his stable, and was already being spoken of in connection with the Derby, Mr Davenant scarcely had the hay with which to feed him.
    Mr Davenant lived at Scroop Hall, near the village of Carlton Scroop, about sixteen miles from Lincoln, and somehow this increased the air of melancholy that hung over him. It was a big, old, rambling house, stoutly built and with comfortable rooms, but one of the wings was shut up, with the furniture hidden under blankets and brown paper. One or two of the guidebook compilers had passed that way, and said civil things, but somehow the public had never followed them: the place was too grim and too remote, too Gothick people said, who had read Mrs Radcliffe’s romances. There was a pretty garden leading onto a picturesque wood, but the wind off the wolds blew the trees and the shrubberies into fantastic shapes and the entrance to the wood was guarded by a gamekeeper’s gibbet, and the ladies did not like it. It had once or twice been suggested to Mr Davenant that the guests who walked about his grounds would have benefited from a bank of fir trees as cover, and the absence of half a dozen stoats’ hindquarters and a badger’s brush staring at them from the gamekeeper’s rail and a pool of blood beneath it, but Mr Davenant had shaken his head. He liked the great wild garden with the wind careening over the grass, and the stinking gibbet, just as he liked sitting in the family pew, and the wolds where he coursed his dogs, on the grounds that they had always been there, an immovable rock to set against the shifting sands on which so much of his life seemed to founder. This was the history of Mr Davenant, Scroop Hall and Tiberius.
     
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    If Mr Davenant was rated odd and melancholy, he was not without allies. He had a particular friend called Glenister – owner of some of the fields that backed onto his wood – who had stuck with him during the business of the lawsuit. Mr Glenister was a bachelor and wealthy enough to employ a bailiff, so his time was his own and much of it was spent at Scroop. Just now he and Mr Davenant were standing on a little point of raised land – the only point of raised land for several miles around – set to the north of the house and commanding the road into the village. It was a dull, wet day in the later part of February, with no sound except the noise of the hedgerows dripping water and the scrape of boots on the turf, and yet full of movement. A flock of black birds was in sharp flight eastward, sheering away over the ploughed fields and the ancestral turf. Beneath them, a small carriage moved rapidly into view along the road.
    ‘Do you know who is in that gig?’ Mr Davenant suddenly demanded.
    ‘I can’t say that I do.’
    ‘Two attorneys from Sleaford. I had word of their coming. It is very possible there will be an execution in the house.’
    ‘Gracious!’ Mr Glenister whistled through his teeth and manoeuvred his boot at a clod of earth with sufficient force to send it