Death and Mr. Pickwick (24 page)

‘What is that?' she said.

‘A cat?'

‘I don't think so.'

‘Best ignore it.'

‘Please go and investigate. Do.'

The driver returned with the bundled child. By the time the gentleman returned from the tree, his wife held the child to her bosom – the shock on the gentleman's face was almost old-spinsterish.

‘We can't just leave the poor thing here,' she said.

‘Why? It has survived so far.'

His wife gave him a look.

*   *   *

They took the boy to their opulent home, where he was handed to a young servant girl for washing. She rubbed the babe's face until it shone all over, wrapped him in fresh linen, and followed her master's order to take the foundling to Corsham Parish.

Here, in a dark, sporadically volumed office in which last autumn's cobwebs were built upon the scaffolding of a previous summer's, and the threads wafted by draughts, an official crouched over his ledger. His eyes were a combination of procedures, suspicion and complete lack of forgiveness as he looked at the girl.

‘So your master found the child?'

‘Beside the road.'

‘And your master happened to be passing?'

‘With my lady, sir.'

‘Neither you nor your master have any idea as to parentage?'

‘None, sir.'

‘No idea at all?'

‘No.'

He rubbed his nostrils, as if to remove any accumulated particles of self-restraint. He uncurled and leant back against his chair, which creaked as though it was the sound of his vertebrae, and he pressed his fingertips together and pulsed them, as if testing whether one hand reflected the other, as procedurally it should.

‘You are not the first to have
found
your child, and then expected the parish to bring it up.'

‘It's not mine, sir. I swear it isn't. Nor my master's.'

‘The child will be
considered
a foundling. But nothing official can be done without a name.'

‘You had better name him then, sir.'

‘Do you not have any suggestions?' He curled forward over his ledger and smiled unpleasantly. ‘Why not after your master? Or your neighbour? Or even, possibly, after your father or brother?'

‘I'll leave the naming to you, sir.'

He ran his thumbnail through the filaments of his goose quill, ‘There is precedent for the name Moses – foundlings, you know.' As the girl merely played with her pinafore and would offer no help, he stood to consider the surname, and once again there was a creak, but this time it was a sound from his actual joints. ‘I have heard of a foundling who was given the name Outcast. Moses Outcast. What about that?' She gave no response. ‘Had he been found at one end of a town, he could be a Townsend. Had he been thrown in a ditch, he could be a Ditchling.' In a low, uninterested voice he said: ‘Under the circumstances, precedent leads us to one solution.'

Thus it was that the Parish Register for 29 January 1694 recorded the presence in this world of the first Moses Pickwick, ‘so called because found at Pickwick'.

*   *   *

The rubicund wet nurse of Moses Pickwick had the largest mouth and the loudest voice in the West of England, and her fondness for carousing in the taprooms of Bath was universally known. Still, she was a decent enough soul, and she shared her gin with the child if he was crying, either neat or through the medium of her milk.

When the boy grew he still accompanied her to taprooms, for she had become fond of little Moses, for no other reason, she said, than that he came from nowhere with nothing and such a babby needed looking after, and she was the one to do it. Thus, she dragged him around the public houses of Bath as her little companion.

Once, a man decided to compete with the wet nurse in loudness, and he stood up and read to assembled drinkers an amusing new work he had encountered in the capital: ‘A fig for St Augustine and his doctrines, a fart for Virgil and his elegance, and a turd for Descartes and his philosophy!' he proclaimed. This was followed by an enormous draught of beer. ‘And a belch for you, madam!' he said – and demonstrated – to the wet nurse. There was much laughter, not least from the wet nurse herself, and little Moses Pickwick joined in. The man's belch was an early memory.

It came as no surprise that by the age of ten, Moses found employment at the Angel Inn in Westgate Street. However, by the time of his twelfth year, he had become embarrassed by his past and he began to tell the story to the customers that, contrary to rumours, he had been found at the village of Wick near that fine old house, Wick Court. He was named Pickwick because he had been picked up at Wick.

‘More likely you're called Pickwick, because your father made
these
,' said a man looking up from the section of the
Atlas Geographus
he happened to be examining: he pointed towards the wick of a candle which illuminated the map.

‘One day soon,' said the boy, ‘I shall be head hostler.'

‘One day soon I shall travel the world, and see everything curious it has! Get away with you, Moses Pickwick!'

*   *   *

When he was a little older, Moses often associated with Ann, a pretty barmaid, whom he teased about her dimples and bosom, and in the evenings they drank ale by the stables under the light of a lantern. ‘Not many people can say they are the first in a family,' he said.

‘Adam in the Bible could,' she said.

‘Well, he could, obviously.'

‘You were found by a road, Moses Pickwick, not in the Garden of Eden.'

‘The gentleman who found me had a coach with ivory and silver trimmings.'

‘I'm surprised it wasn't gold.'

‘Next year I shall be head hostler.'

‘Get away with you, Moses Pickwick!'

‘Who spends as much time with the horses as I do?'

‘That's true, I'll give you that.'

‘And one day – a Pickwick will own this inn.'

‘Get away with you, Moses Pickwick!'

‘And that won't be the end of it, either. You wait, Ann. Next year – head hostler.'

And next year, he
was
head hostler. Not long afterwards, Ann became a Pickwick herself, and in due course, eleven fresh Pickwicks entered the world, all with Old Testament names, who in turn produced forty more. One grandson of the foundling, Eleazer – a large lad with something of the gentleman farmer in his manner, and a ruddiness which by coincidence he shared with the wet nurse – was the grandfather's favourite. Eleazer worked hard – and became landlord of the Angel Inn. And that was not the end of it, either.

Eleazer Pickwick began a coach service to London, and when the vehicles came in at night, he would be waiting under the inn's sign – showing the Angel of the Annunciation surrounded by light – and he smiled, ruddy-cheeked, at the world. And that was not the end of it, either.

Within eight years, Eleazer Pickwick's company ran thirty-nine coaches a week. Like the large London coaching proprietors, all the Pickwick coaches bore a livery: chocolate-brown body and custard-yellow wheels, with ‘ELEAZER PICKWICK' proudly on the doors.

Eleazer's motto was: ‘We are a respectable business.' After a moonlit night, he kept a close watch on the porters at his booking office, and an even closer watch on the night guards of the coaches. Without warning, he would open up the boot of a coach and sniff for poached game. ‘We are a respectable business,' he said, usually in a tone of dry satisfaction, but on occasions, spitting disgust, prior to the dismissal of a wayward employee. Such respectability meant that by 1800, Eleazer Pickwick was a Bath turnpike trustee – no longer a mere ‘gentleman' but an ‘esquire'.

With the rise of Eleazer Pickwick's status and wealth came the improvement of the Great Bath Road. Rocks were cleared, hills flattened, trees uprooted – all to make a road smooth for coaches between Bath and London. Stonemasons were employed to incise milestones with plainly readable letters, with no mystery about their meaning, including the one at Pickwick village, where the Hare and Hounds became the first horse-changing stop for the Pickwick coaches out of Bath. With justification, the road became known as the finest in all England, with the traffic to prove it; and, with every coach that Eleazer Pickwick sent down the Great Bath Road, his prosperity grew – so that he could acquire a new headquarters for his business, the one his ascent in the world demanded: nothing less than the White Hart Inn itself, the best and most famous inn in Bath, the largest and most popular coaching inn in the West of England.

The White Hart! Jealous and disappointed rivals of Eleazer Pickwick called it a barracks, for it was of a flat stone construction, and massive, with repeated tiers of plain windows, taking up a good deal of Stall Street. Yet this building's very plainness served to focus eyes on its one potent decoration: the portico, where fifteen feet from the ground, a statue of a white stag, the White Hart itself, planted its hooves. Everyone knew the White Hart Inn by the White Hart statue. Eleazer made sure the statue was kept scrupulously clean, by means of a wiry boy who climbed a ladder every Friday and who applied a chamois in every nook, including every tine of the antlers.

The White Hart Inn showed to the world what a determined family could achieve, even if the family started from nothing, with nothing, not even with a name. At peak times, twenty-four coaches stood in front of the inn simultaneously, for destinations all across the country. With good reason, there was a grand painted sign stating ‘Universal Coach Office', and as a clerk entered a customer's name in the large ledger within that office, it was a common question for the customer to ask Eleazer: ‘Exactly how many horses do you own, Mr Pickwick?'

To which he replied, with his thumbs in his waistcoat pockets, ‘I own three times as many horses as miles between Bath and London. Well over three hundred horses in all. A third of those I replace every year,' he said. ‘I am not one to boast, but I
know
the horses, the way my good grandfather did, God rest his soul.'

‘You know three hundred names?' the customer would say.

‘I even know their personalities. And horses can be as varied as human beings. I've had horses that can hate like a man seeking vengeance, or love like a mother loves her wayward lad.'

Considerable were the sums that Eleazer Pickwick lent to the Corporation and high office followed his money. In January 1826, he became Mayor of Bath, and as mayor, he dealt out justice. Three months' hard labour to a man who wilfully extinguished a gas lamp. Jail for two juveniles who stole one pair of shoes and six odd ones. A hefty fine for a man who cruelly beat a pig in the marketplace.

So Eleazer proudly stood under the ‘Universal Coach Office' sign wearing his chains and seals of office. The same jealous and disappointed rivals who called the White Hart a barracks also called the symbols of mayorship a bunch of onions.

But all the jealousy in Bath could not stop Eleazer Pickwick from shaking hands with the Rt Hon. George Canning, His Majesty's Principal Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. Rising with mayoral dignity in the Common Hall, in the presence of the Earl of Liverpool and many distinguished ladies and gentlemen, Eleazer Pickwick announced: ‘I feel, sir, peculiar gratification at being the organ of communication with you on the present occasion and wish that you may long continue to exert your talents in our country's cause.'

He presented the Rt Hon. George Canning with the Freedom of Bath and a gold box. And that wasn't the end of it, either.

At the conclusion of Eleazer Pickwick's term of office as mayor, a great banquet in his honour took place at the Guildhall. One hundred Bath citizens of eminence attended, along with fourteen tureens of soup, seven dishes of fish, six turkeys, two hams, four pigeon pies, twelve dishes of entrées, five haunches of venison and twenty-nine brace of birds, as well as lobster salads, jellies, macaroni, plum puddings, pastries and other delicacies too numerous to mention. It was the pinnacle of Eleazer Pickwick's achievement. Now, perhaps, it was time to retire, time for another Pickwick to take over.

This was the one shadow upon Eleazer's life.

Thirty years before, Eleazer's only child, a promising young man, had gone up to St John's College, Oxford. Eleazer was sure his son would scale even higher heights than himself – the spires of Oxford were but signposts to an illustrious and golden future. ‘If the grandson of a foundling can rise high,' thought Eleazer, ‘how high might the great-grandson rise?' It was as though, to Eleazer Pickwick, foundling stock was no disadvantage at all but proof of good breeding, with every succeeding generation distilling in purer form the finest traits of man.

But at Oxford, young Pickwick wandered around the library, looking up and down the shelves, contemplating the vastness of knowledge. If he opened a book in enthusiasm, he felt an enfeebling languor soon afterwards, and returned the volume to the shelf. He always left the library downhearted. How could he
ever
know more than the tiniest part of the whole? He found escape from these troubling considerations in lighter reading, particularly in the humorous pictures published in old copies of the
Oxford Magazine
, which could sometimes be seen on handcarts. He set himself the goal of completing a set of all the published issues; but before he could reach far in this endeavour, Eleazer Pickwick received the dreadful news: his son had died of a ruptured blood vessel.

Eleazer said afterwards: ‘My son did not finish his studies.' That was his only comment on the matter, when asked.

With no heir, Eleazer's eye fell upon another grandson of the foundling, his half-brother Moses – but, as Eleazer was the older by more than thirty years, he felt awkward in calling Moses a ‘brother', half or otherwise. Accordingly, Eleazer called Moses his cousin. Moses, for his part, felt similarly awkward and always called Eleazer his uncle. For some years these two ran the coaching business in partnership: the custard-and-chocolate vehicles had their doors repainted, so they merely said ‘PICKWICK' – although, when Eleazer retired, the doors were repainted a week later, to place ‘MOSES' in front.