“Have you played at all recently?” said Lenox.
“Not for five years. In honor of your return, however, I may let them stick me at the end of the queue to bat. I expect the game will have been called for dark well before then. Hopefully, that is.”
Lenox smiled. “Have you got the same bat?”
“Oh, yes, though she’s a bit yellow now.” Freddie’s bat was made of an old Everley willow tree that had been struck dead by lightning. He had made it himself, many years into the distant past.
“I’d have brought mine,” said Lenox, “though it was only store bought.”
“Fripp will have you sorted.”
Lady Jane was wandering in their general direction now, and waved at them, her soft smile visible even from a few hundred yards.
Lenox felt a flash of love for her. He stood and started toward her, to say they ought to leave soon.
Indeed by half-eight they were at the cricket pitch, an enormous expanse of closely shorn meadow just beyond Musgrave’s house on Church Lane. (Dallington had been spared, there being enough players for both teams, and was left behind at Everley.) It was an absolute carnival already when they arrived, though the match wouldn’t begin for another half an hour; there were men in their whites striding everywhere, calling out hearty taunts in each other’s direction, and women congregated around a white pavilion, cloth-topped and erected the week before. Jane went in that direction, greeting Mrs. Richards, the wife of the local butcher, as an old friend and enquiring as to the state of the tea, which was being brewed in frantically large quantities, by quite what method nobody could entirely agree — tea being a substance that provoked sharp and definite opinions in nearly every person present. Off in the distance four men shifted a sunscreen, white and as tall as a two-story building, so that the batsmen of the morning hours should be able to see.
Nominally the captain of the Royal Oak side was a man named Symes, who owned the public house. He was an ill-natured fat person, generous, and above all desperately and misguidedly in love with new technology. His most recent acquisition — which he rode with quiet dignity around Plumbley, despite near universal derision — was a penny-farthing. This was a kind of bicycle with an enormous front wheel and a small back one, in proportion roughly the same as a penny and a farthing sitting side by side upon a table.
Symes had an ugly cut on his forehead.
“The high-wheeler?” said Frederick sympathetically. “Well, well. You can only improve at it.”
Symes scowled. “It is very difficult to mount, Mr. Ponsonby, but once the position upon the front wheel is ascended, is achieved, it is a marvelous — I assure you a very marvelment of — well, yes. I don’t like to hear a word against the machine, myself. That is my own prejudice I grant you.”
Even Symes, who ran a pretty rigorously decorous public house, could not commandeer Fripp: here the fruit-and-vegetable man was absolutely and entirely in his element. He walked off the boundaries, double-checking them, with the captain of the King’s Arms, Millington Junior, the town’s new blacksmith, whom Lenox had never seen — the dead spit of his father, though perhaps even larger in the arms. Fripp, wiry and brown as a nut, looked miniature next to his opposite number, but he exuded a kind of calm authority that made the mismatch seem, obscurely, to lie in favor of the Royal Oak; even the tea debate subsided when he went round the pavilion to check that all was in order for the midday break.
After that errand was complete he returned to his team and spotted Lenox. “Charles,” he said, with a tight smile.
“Mr. Fripp. Are you—”
Just then the umpires arrived, gentlemen imported at some expense from Taunton, and the cricket ground went silent, somber. Fripp and Millington hurried toward them. The Royal Oak side said good-bye to their wives and their children and assembled at their benches, many of the men nodding deferentially — perhaps uncomfortably — at the two aristocrats in their midst.
“Are we taking anyone’s places?” asked Lenox of his cousin, swinging a bat to loosen his shoulders.
Frederick said, “No, Tolbert took a bad leg, Walcott inherited a piece of land in Devon, and someone else — oh, yes, Crockington is in London, for who-knows-why. I wouldn’t have played myself, if we didn’t need a final batsman. Fripp made me swear up and down or I should be in my gardens, now.” He nodded toward the costermonger, who was arguing vehemently about the state of the wicket. “I hope nothing is riding on my innings, either,” Freddie said. “Fripp looks liable to give someone a hiding.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
The Royal Oak won the coin toss — Lenox wondered in passing whether it was truly one of her Majesty’s ha’pennies that the umpire flung into the air — and Fripp, in consultation with Symes and a beefy farmer named Truelove, elected for his side to take the field first. So much in cricket depended on the patch of grass between the two boxes where the complementary batsman stood, and Fripp claimed it would be more favorable as the day warmed, that the bowls in the afternoon would come in harder but truer, with less spin. Besides, everyone knew the KA was a shabby place and if they didn’t show Millington and Apswell that the Royal Oak was superior they should be ashamed of themselves, properly and heartily ashamed. Oh, and welcome to Mr. Lenox, the member of Parliament.
The squad cheered their assent to this rather lamely concluded motivational speech as if it had been delivered by Leonidas upon the brow of Thermopylae, and Millington Junior in fact Xerxes Junior: Fripp’s passion was so evident that his words were secondary to his purpose.
Lenox took his place rather shy of the boundary on the covering side, shielding his eyes against the sun. He watched their bowler — Fripp’s cousin Thorpe — toss a few lazy practice balls. A new cherry! How long had it been since he had seen that brilliant red, soon to be dulled by bats and dirt!
In cricket, of course, an out is a rare thing — hours may pass between them — and the goal of the batsman is simply to stay alive, often unspectacularly. The batsmen of the King’s Arms were steady and merciless. Lenox came to loathe their opening batsman in particular, who stroked short, sharp balls in every direction, none of them ever coming within five feet of the outstretched arms of a Royal Oak man. At last the KA lad made out on a spectacular curve of the ball from the bowler, Thorpe — Fripp’s shout of glee might have been heard in three counties, and all the men crowded around to congratulate him.
The next batsman was equally consistent, only once hitting the boundary rope on the bounce — for a four — and never hitting it over the rope altogether for a six, but stringing together one run, one run, two runs, one run, until the score began to mount.
So the morning wore on. The Royal Oak changed bowlers from time to time, switching over from Thorpe’s wicked spin to the straight, hard bowling of a groomsman with an enormous mustache called Gibbs.
Though it seemed as if it would take years for their ten to go out, gradually the men of the King’s Arms fell. One, standing stock-still, had his wicket nicked by Gibbs, another was caught out by Fripp, and Lenox, too, made one sharpish catch, one-handed and with his body fully elongated, so that he landed painfully on his ribs. That was for the seventh out, and he felt a flush of joy — perhaps the purest joy he could recall — as it was his turn to be crowded about and receive the plaudits of the team, even Symes, his wound flaring under the sunlight, grinning like a baboon.
Then, just after noon, it ended very rapidly. In ten minutes two King’s Arms batsmen were dismissed — one stumped, one bowled — after many of their compatriots had each batted for well over an hour.