Death and Mr. Pickwick (23 page)

 

*

WHEN ST MARTIN'S STRUCK TWELVE
on the first Monday in May, the gates of Somerset House opened and Seymour and his mother joined the assembled hundreds who upped the stairs and entered the exhibition. There were over a thousand new works on show, of all kinds – mythological, historical, topographical, anatomical. Pictures from floor to ceiling.

‘You see, I am neither decked nor skyed,' Seymour told his mother as they stood in front of his painting, which was displayed at a very acceptable level.

There was undeniable pride on his mother's face as she looked at the large canvas showing the demons and dark shapes of the forest, and men throwing down axes and saws as they fled.

‘What do you intend to do next, Robert?'

‘There is a gallery I shall visit, not far from Bath,' he said. ‘I shall spend several weeks studying the pictures. As soon as I have saved the money, I shall go.'

‘
Must
you go?'

‘I must, if I am to learn from the masters. The collection of paintings is reputed the second finest in the country – by any standard, whether by number of works, by excellence, or by value. And they are exactly the sort of paintings I should be studying.'

‘Where is it?'

‘It's in a very small village – at least that's where the coaches stop, and the gallery is just a short walk away. You won't have heard of it, I'm afraid. But it's known in artistic circles.'

‘You never know – I might have heard of it. What is the village called?'

‘The village,' he said, ‘is called Pickwick.'

‘I
have
heard of it,' she said. ‘I've heard the name somewhere.'

‘The surname “Pickwick” might be known to you, because you could have seen it on the door of a passing stagecoach. It's a coach-proprietor's name.'

‘Perhaps I am just thinking of the wicks of candles. Is the coaching proprietor connected to the village, do you think?'

‘I have no idea.'

*   *   *

When Seymour went to the booking office at the White Horse Cellar, on a cold morning in the autumn, to reserve an inside place to the village of Pickwick, he discovered the coaching company was indeed operated by one Moses Pickwick. Stranger still, two days before, he had received a reply to his letter requesting accommodation in the village inn, the Hare and Hounds, and this too was signed Moses Pickwick. That he would be travelling
to
Pickwick,
by
Pickwick, to stay
with
Pickwick was a most felicitous coincidence, the like of which he had never encountered in his life – it was as though all the Pickwicks formed an omen of good fortune. So, in a pleasant mood, he boarded the coach with its distinctive livery of chocolate-brown body, custard-yellow wheels, and with the name ‘PICKWICK' painted in large letters on the doors. The coach set off.

There were four other passengers, but from the driver's reading of the waybill aloud as each passenger entered his coach, Seymour was the only one stopping at Pickwick; the others would continue to Bath.

Three passengers sat opposite Seymour, and each looked in poor health. On the left was a woman in a green bonnet, who would sometimes try to catch Seymour's eyes with a ‘pity me' expression, her mouth falling open as if she were too weak to press her lower lip against the upper – but if she did so, Seymour always looked away, refusing to play her game. Then came a gaunt man dressed in black, including black gloves: a glimpse of exposed wrist showed an unpleasant scarlet rash. The third was a man whose eyes carried so many bags of loose skin that when his knuckles rubbed there, it suggested the kneading of dough. When this man was asked in a friendly voice by the coachman, ‘How are you today, sir?' the man had answered, ‘Oh – not so bad,' but with a falling intonation, so as to suggest he
suffered
, how he suffered. It hardly needs to be stated that all sought the help of the famous healing waters of Bath.

Next to Seymour was a schoolmasterly man with thinning white hair and silver brightly polished spectacles. Though not young, he seemed healthy.

‘You are not off to Bath then,' he said to Seymour, shortly after they started.

‘No. Pickwick.'

‘I shall be going there myself, on the way back. Bath first.'

‘Do you have business in Pickwick?'

‘No, just conducting investigations. Family things. What my ancestors got up to. I shall be looking at scrolls about them in Bath. Wouldn't interest anyone else, but it interests me. Have you ever been on this journey before?'

‘Never. Have you?'

‘I have, and I can tell you it is a most curious route in places. The things along it may not interest everyone, but they do interest me. There is one spot – one bleak spot – and there is no place colder and no place more lonely.'

‘You make it sound like the grave.'

‘It fills the mind with strange and unpleasant thoughts, that is true. It is called Shepherd's Shore. It is a stretch of five miles and when the wind howls and the rain strikes the coach – well, you will experience it yourself, sir, on this very journey, if you are unlucky. Though
I
would say lucky, for the experience should not be missed.'

*   *   *

The wind duly howled and the rain duly struck, creating an unsettling atmosphere of an isolated box lit by a swinging lamp within, the only respite from a hostile world beyond. The drumming of the rain against the roof made Seymour shiver, and putting up his lapels, he looked out of the window. Though the rain was driven hard against the glass, he could make out mysterious mounds beside the road, earthworks of ancient peoples, whose purpose could only be guessed at, but they suggested unnatural powers at work, for the grass growing on the bulges was darker than the grass elsewhere.

It was a joy when the coach stopped to change horses at Beckhampton, at the Waggon and Horses Inn, a limestone building with a thatched roof. The hospitable firelight could be seen glowing through the windows as the passengers emerged from the coach, and a sign at the entrance requested that they leave their boots at the door and put on slippers provided by the inn, which Seymour's half-frozen toes certainly appreciated. There was time for a hot rum, and an opportunity to warm oneself in front of one of the three fires – though the ‘pity me' woman made the comment that
four
fires were needed in a spot as cold as this. Seymour noticed too that the inn was half full of bagmen talking about their travels, and one garrulous ageing man of this sort, whose fox's head ring flashed in the firelight, was laughing about the ladies whose needs he had supplied over the years, and all over the country. But soon, too soon, the passengers were on the road, and immediately beyond the Waggon and Horses the stretch became bleak again and the ghostly howl of the wind commanded legions of otherworldly rain in a new and strengthened assault upon the box on wheels with the swinging lamp within.

*   *   *

Some miles further, after the wind and rain had ceased, the coach negotiated a hill, and a steep, grassy bank appeared – and there was a most peculiar sight, which the schoolmasterly man took great pleasure in mentioning to Seymour before it could be seen: the figure of an enormous white horse, carved into the chalk beneath the bank. It was at least 150 feet from hoof to head, and the huge equine eye stared down upon the road, into the coach.

‘Is it ancient?' asked Seymour.

‘No, not at all,' said the schoolmasterly man. ‘An eccentric doctor carved it, not too many years ago. The idea of the horse jumped into his head and it wouldn't jump out again. I am not related to the doctor, I hope!'

They passed through a long street of stone houses; then ascended higher ground, to Chippenham, then descended an exceedingly bumpy stretch, followed by an unremarkable hamlet shaded by trees. At a turning in the road, the guard blew a lusty blast on his bugle, and the coachman called out ‘Pickwick'.

The schoolmasterly man leant across Seymour, and pulled down the sash. ‘The milestone says it, sir – the village is ninety-nine miles from London.'

The coach drew up at the Hare and Hounds Inn. It was now nearly six in the evening, so they had made good time. Seymour's bones ached and he emerged stiffly from the coach, rubbing his back. There was the clanging of steel, presumably from a smithy, beyond the inn.

Seymour entered a lounge of smoke, wooden benches, oak beams, and exceeding neatness, with yellow ribbons tied around brown curtains, and scrupulously clean tables. A barmaid, who was adjusting a lamp, smiled as he entered. He heard an old man talking to a younger one at the bar, and they both nodded to Seymour, but their conversation continued unabated.

‘Now when I was a boy,' said the old man, ‘merchants used to join in with the squires and nothing was thought of it, because the merchants had been hunting foxes on the outskirts of the towns. But now!'

‘I always have a good laugh at the city men who want to join the hunt,' said the young man.

Above the bar Seymour noticed two signs, apparently made with a hot poker in wood. The first said: ‘My name is Moses. That name is law.' The second said: ‘Movement makes a man rich.'

Then, from the back of the inn, there emerged a stout man of about forty, wearing a ridiculous wig that purported to be natural hair in abundance. With a broad smile and an extended hand he said: ‘Moses Pickwick at your service, sir.'

After that single sentence uttered, it was hard for Seymour to control a laugh – for the utterer had an
extraordinary
voice, which started deep on ‘Moses' and finished in a squeak on ‘sir'.

‘So you,' said Seymour, ‘are Mr Pickwick, of the village of Pickwick, who runs the Pickwick coaches?'

‘I am, sir. Proud of all three.' The bass and the squeak combined again, only this time the high register came first, until the ‘sir', and the low register followed.

‘Well, I am very pleased to meet you, Mr Pickwick.'

 

*

THE THRICE-CHIMING OF PICKWICK, PICKWICK
and Pickwick, and how they came to be, was of great interest to Mr Inbelicate. Among his considerable collection of manuscripts was one entitled
On the History of the Pickwick Family of Pickwick with an Appendix on Matters Arising from Agricultural Concerns at Swainswick.

In this old document there was little attempt to engage the reader, and no effort spared to frighten him off. Commas were largely absent, and sentences subject to innumerable qualifications and subsidiary clauses. It seems to have been written by an amateur genealogist who had conducted research into the Pickwick family and the Pickwick village.

One learns at the start that ‘pic' was an old word for a point, and ‘wic' an old word for a dairy farm. Hence, Pickwick was the dairy farm on a point – that is to say, a farm on a hill.

One learns next that the folk of Pickwick lived by the larger town of Corsham, but they were not
of
Corsham. Some distinguished their background by whether they were of Upper Pickwick, Middle Pickwick or Lower Pickwick. Amongst the village's population in the early nineteenth century, when the document was seemingly written, were quarrymen and labourers. There was also a Jacobean manor, as well as two public houses, a few feet apart. From estimated figures of alcohol consumed, the Pickwickians – whether Upper, Middle or Lower – drank the produce of the local Pickwick Brewery as though St Boniface himself had blessed it.

There were passing references at the start of the document to a thirteenth-century Wiltshire man with the surname de Pikewike, who may or may not have had some connection to a Pykewyke in a Devon Assizes roll of roughly the same period. There was some speculation, too, as to whether the surname Pickwick was derived from the French
piquez-vite
, or ‘spur fast', which led to the hypothesis that the Pickwick family's connection with horses and coaching was congenital. There was also an account of a visit to the nearby village of Swainswick, and then – amazingly – one of the few statements which could engage the casual reader, for its human interest: ‘The name of Pickwick seems inherently absurd. There is something absurd in its very sound. There are other Pick and Pyke names – Pickhurst, Pickthorne, Pickworth, Pykemore, Pickford – and yet none have the same effect upon the ear. If one did not know the surname Pickwick, one would think it invented.'

I do not apologise for rewriting the contents of the document in the form below, using additional material gleaned from the investigations of Mr Inbelicate himself.

 

*

THE JANUARY OF 1694 WAS
the coldest that anyone in the village of Pickwick could remember, and snow was expected by all. This did not deter a mother from placing her newborn son, wrapped in thin and dirty linen and a piece of sack, on the grass beside the road, under the grey and threatening morning sky. To her credit, she did not deposit the babe in a pail and lower it down a well; nor did she press a pillow upon its mouth. Placed beside the road, it might possibly be seen and saved, before the wind administered the death blow itself, or carried the babe's scent to the earth of its agent, the starving fox.

How many walkers pulled down their hats and passed by? How many riders administered the spur when they saw the bundle and rode on? There were heavy coaches, and lumbering wagons, and other vehicles which plied the road, and yet none took the slightest cognisance of the child. This was until a coach belonging to a highly respected man, allegedly with investments in the importing of tobacco and the manufacturing of soap, approached from the east. The coach's owner and his young wife had spent several days with a friend in London.

The gentleman, heeding the call which is the natural consequence of cold weather and ale, tapped the roof with his ring finger as the signal for the driver to stop, and went to a tree. His wife stepped delicately out, and conversed with the driver, until she heard a noise.