Death and Mr. Pickwick (116 page)

Red-faced Nixon looked straight into the king's eyes. His quivering had stopped. In the firmest of voices, he said: ‘He who hideth can find.'

A gasp came from royal lips.

From that moment forth, every saying of Nixon's was noted down, and scrutinised for its portents for the kingdom. Even the Spanish ambassador left his home in Hampstead to hear what the prophet had to say.

Yet, when the scribes noted down Nixon's statements, they saw that many simply concerned lack of nourishment: ‘I am starving'; ‘I have no food'; ‘My sides go in at the ribs'; ‘My bones have no fat'; ‘My table is bare'; and so on.

When the king was informed, he made a pronouncement: ‘The Cheshire Prophet can eat anything he likes from the kitchen, and if he requires food, he is never to be denied.' He appointed an officer to the task of ensuring that all the prophet's needs were met.

Every day Nixon sat in the kitchen – rarely was he seen without grease upon his lips. Nonetheless, still he said: ‘I am starving!' He said it even as he brought a chunk of steaming meat to his mouth.

By the day, if not by the hour, he grew larger and larger.

Then one morning, news reached the kitchen that the king was going hunting and would be away for some time. Nixon dropped a piece of beef upon the floor. Terror came to his face. He ran to the king, threw himself on his knees in the throne room, and said: ‘I beg you, do not leave me behind, for if you do, I must die. I beg you – take me with you.'

The king listened, but feared the stag would run if Nixon made a sudden prophecy in the field; so His Majesty pronounced that he would not take Nixon on the hunt.

The king rode away – but not before instructing his officer to take special care of the wonder of Cheshire.

Suddenly, the jealousy of the scribes and the kitchen staff towards the so-called prophet erupted. They hurled their own predictions at Robert Nixon – ‘I prophesy that you will fall!' said a scribe, before pushing over Nixon's kitchen stool, sending him crashing on to the flagstones. ‘I prophesy that your sweetest pleasure will turn sour!' said a waiter as he poured salt into Nixon's cider, and forced it down his throat.

Word of the ill treatment reached the king's officer; and though he had never been happy about his assignment to the halfwit, he had his orders. So, he took Nixon to a closet in a far region of the palace. He issued the order that no one was to attend to the ploughboy but himself. He would personally ensure that Nixon was well fed – and, for the prophet's own safety, he locked Nixon inside the closet.

All went well, until the king sent for the officer to attend him in the field. The reason was unknown, but as all messages to attend a sovereign are urgent, the officer left, without a further thought of Nixon.

Nixon sat in his closet eating the bread and meat left for him, licking the bones clean, and drinking from a barrel of cider. He consumed all his food quickly, as if he feared its theft.

No one heard Nixon when he called out: ‘I shall starve! I shall starve!'

Some time later, the officer returned. It was only then, apparently, that he remembered Nixon. He made his way to the closet, opened it, and there was Nixon lying dead upon the floor. He was shrivelled, collapsed into himself, the clothes lying loosely around his wasted frame. His face had developed a peculiar grin, where the starvation had stretched his lips.

*   *   *

In the examination room, Besant wrote that Nixon was a renowned prophet, and exhausted his knowledge with that simple statement; while Skeat wrote a third of a page, noting that some claimed Nixon had even predicted the Cato Street conspiracy of 1820, for Nixon had announced:

When the Monument shall be brought to the Tower

Then shall fall rebellion's power.

After a satisfied look across the aisle towards Besant, Skeat noted that one of the conspirators was called Monument and he
was
taken to the Tower.

Before the allotted two hours expired, Besant had answered all the questions he was able to answer. He put down his pen. Ten other pens had fallen already. Besant cast an anxious glance towards Skeat, who wrote on, gripping the nape of his own neck, his face full of ill humour.

Skeat continued writing until the very last moment allowed. When Calverley collected the papers, Skeat's bundle was the thickest by far.

There followed a supper of oysters, beer, and milk punch, when all talk of
Pickwick
was banned.

*   *   *

It was four o'clock the following afternoon, and the college butler rang the dinner bell. The undergraduates, including Besant, Skeat and all the others who had sat the
Pickwick
examination, assembled in the hall, under the eyes of the portraits of the college heads. The paintings suggested the high hopes with which the college had welcomed young men to study, hopes which perhaps were not entirely in accordance with all the contents of
Pickwick.

Everyone stood as the fellows came in, followed at the end by the junior fellow, Calverley. Just before entering, he had pinned a paper to the board used for college announcements of scholarships, sporting victories and examination results. Calverley assumed an air of greater gravity than normal. He took his place at the high table. The Latin grace was read. All sat down. Trout was served by waiters, and the fishes' boiled eyes, somewhat smaller than alabaster marbles, stared blankly from the plates at the expectant examinees.

As soon as the meal was over, there was a rush to the noticeboard. One candidate seized the paper, and read aloud: ‘
Pickwick
examination. First prize, Besant; second prize, Skeat. C. S. Calverley, examiner.'

For the first time in his life at college, Besant was looked upon with respect. Even Skeat was good-humoured about the outcome – he shook his conqueror's hand, and announced that in Besant he had met his match. He promised that he would buy Besant not one, not two, but
three
pints of Audit Ale, or Strong Ale if his new friend's preferences went in that direction. For no one had ever bought Besant a drink before, and his tastes were unknown.

 

*

‘SO,' I SAID, ‘SEYMOUR'S SON.'

‘If you pester me, I shall make you wait a month, Scripty. We have to catch up on other matters. Thomas Clarke being one. Now
there
was a man who knew about waiting.'

 

*

IN THE PLACE OF KEYS,
cabinets, cleanliness and commands that was the keeper's office in the Queen's Prison, Southwark, the case of Clarke, Thomas, was under review. It was December 1851.

‘So he has no knowledge at all of his period in prison?' said a balding man with a long neck, behind the authority of his desk. A framed watercolour of this man and his wife, both standing stiffly beside a lake, hung on the wall behind his chair. The watercolour showed that the wife was the taller of the two, by several inches, and the length of the man's neck suggested aspirations to height. Beside the picture were a calendar and a ferruled club.

‘He took it bad, sir, when the Lord Chancellor turned down his last appeal,' said the subordinate addressed. ‘He speaks to himself – and he's got a voice like an old coalheaver, where gravel and dust have got in.'

‘Listening to that would grate on the nerves after a while.'

‘It does a bit, sir. He chatters away all night and says he shall never go to the Fleet.'

‘To the
Fleet
?'

‘He doesn't know that the Fleet was demolished five years ago, and he's been here nearly ten years. Mind you, he recovers a bit at times, and brightens up.'

‘How do the other prisoners treat him?'

‘Sometimes they tease him a bit, for something to do. I've heard 'em make chuffing noises at him, like a train, and they tell him there's a railway now where the Fleet was. Oh, and sometimes he gets to thinking that someone wants to sell him a house. He starts saying things to the empty air. Things like: “No, I am not going to buy. No matter how many rooms, no matter how large.”'

‘His mind has gone. I shall draw up papers for his transfer to Bethlem.'

*   *   *

On Christmas Day 1851, as inmates in the Queen's Prison celebrated with a carol and a glass of porter, two officers collected Thomas Clarke.

‘What's today?' he said to one in his gravel voice, as they left the gates and led him to a wagon.

‘Today!' replied the younger officer. ‘Why, Christmas Day.'

‘It's Christmas Day!' He rubbed his hands, and his eyes twinkled. ‘Mr Pickwick at the Christmas party! That was a
marvellous
scene!'

Whenever the wagon passed a Christmas wreath on a door, or men raising a glass in a public house, Thomas Clarke called out: ‘Merry Christmas!'

‘Fine day to send a man to the madhouse,' said the older officer.

‘Doesn't bother him. He's enjoyin' himself,' said his younger colleague. ‘I s'pose that proves he's mad, and
should
go there.'

*   *   *

Clarke lay in bed fidgeting, in a dim Bethlem ward. An attendant, pushing a trolley, brought in plates of bread and butter and a jug of water. The bread had been sliced beforehand, for none in the ward would be trusted with a knife, and some had difficulty in performing minor tasks.

The attendant moved down the ward and buttered the bread for each person, taking a little at a time from a butter dish. Clarke watched this procedure very carefully. When the attendant reached his bedside he said: ‘Why did you use a different pat of butter for me?'

‘What difference does it make?'

‘It is rancid, that's why, isn't it?'

‘Not at all.'

‘No – I know what it is. It is
poison
. You've taken some of the mixture you use to keep the rats down, and you've mixed it into the butter you want to give to me.'

‘Come, it is fine, eat it.'

‘No – now I know what it is. It is
not
poison. You are testing medicines on me. That's it! It is some antidote, which will kill me if it doesn't have any effect. And when you have killed me, you will steal my inheritance. I know your schemes!'

‘Let me show you how safe it is.' The attendant nibbled a corner of the bread and butter.

‘It is a trick. A magician's trick. You think it is easy to play a hoax upon an old man whose sight is not the best. I am wise to you!'

For four restless days, Clarke refused all food. His talk became incoherent. Then he changed his mind, and concluded the attendant was bent on starving selected patients to death.

‘You'll not defeat me!' he said. ‘Give me the bread and spread the butter thick!'

*   *   *

There were periods when Clarke recovered his faculties. He became less suspicious. He enjoyed walks in the garden and talked lucidly to the attendants of happy moments in his life. This was often after examining a flower in the morning dew.

He would sit on a bench holding the flower, and tell the attendants of the brief time when he was the heir to a fortune, and said that, even to the present day, he often imagined himself walking in sunny countryside, a wealthy man – the way he once did, the way he once was. He might have bought a cottage, he said, in pleasant fields, watching the seasons of sowing and harvest, he might have gone to the village inn, and met with men of good cheer. Instead, he had come to the confines of the debtor's cell and the prison tap, whose only purpose was to dull men's senses, and make them laugh amid their own degradation.

And when his bitterness rose, he displayed a vast knowledge of the law, especially as it related to wills and testaments. It seemed preposterous that a man of such learning should be restrained in Bethlem. So, on 27 December 1856, he was returned to the Queen's Prison.

There, once again, the hopelessness of his case preyed upon Clarke's mind. He was often heard to mutter in the corridors: ‘If only I had offered the daughter something.' Then he would say: ‘She would never have got me if I had been generous.' And often: ‘Someone had to pay for what her father did to her. If it was someone from the family – so much the better.'

On 23 October 1858, Clarke was committed to Bethlem again.

The alternation of sanity and sense might have continued, with Clarke being shuttled between madhouse and debtors' prison, but death intervened on 25 January 1859.

By then, nearly thirty-two unbroken years had passed since Thomas Clarke was first imprisoned for debt.

*   *   *

‘There is something on your mind, Buss,' said Harrison, as the old friends shared a drink in the Mother Red Cap public house in Camden, on a summer evening in 1859.

‘You will think it is nothing.'

‘If I think it is nothing, I shall tell you, and perhaps stop you thinking it is something.'

After a few moments, Buss said: ‘Yesterday, I was in a second-hand bookshop. Just idling among the shelves. A smart little man entered, too smart to be a customer in that shop, really. He went straight up to the counter, unfolded a piece of paper, and presented it the bookseller. It was obviously a list of books. The bookseller said “Yes” or “No” a number of times as he looked at the paper – obviously he meant whether or not he had a book in his shop. Then he said something like: “Oh, the first issue, without the border added to the Cruikshank picture. You'll be lucky to find a copy of that, sir.” The smart little man said: “I know it is rare. Why do you think I want it?”'

‘You have lost me,' said Harrison. ‘Why on earth should that bother you?'

‘Harrison, there is a rare work associated with
me
.'

‘Which work?'

‘Do you not know? The one that was
made
rare. The one where my pictures were withdrawn and replaced with pictures by another artist.'