Death and Mr. Pickwick (88 page)

‘What are you doing, Robert?'

‘Do not attempt to stop me!'

He threw the material into the unlit fireplace. Before long, a lucifer was applied to the papers. Seymour lay back upon a rug in front of the fire, covering his eyes with his hands.

*   *   *

He was calmer the next day, but the agitation had been replaced by lassitude and a cheerlessness which would not lift. He attempted a sketch showing two anglers on a jetty, one sitting, one standing. He uncorked a bottle of oxgall so as to dilute his watercolours, but it had gone putrid, and the smell took away all remnants of motivation, and he sat doing nothing for a while. He did not return the cork to the bottle and whether through indifference, or deliberate intention, he allowed the smell to permeate the house, until his wife complained, and then he took the oxgall outside and poured it on the garden.

Soon afterwards she found him, in very low spirits, in the alcove of the parlour window, grasping the shutters.

‘I am what à Beckett said I am, Jane. A hired pencil, with not a single idea of my own. And that is how I shall always be.'

‘That is not true.'

‘Even if
Pickwick
started out as mine, it is not mine any more. And I no longer care.'

‘But you must care.'

‘I am to blame for not bringing you riches. I do not have the ability. And I never shall. I am a caricaturist – and what is that but a failed artist? An artist who tries to hide his lack of talent by making people laugh.'

‘It is a fine thing to do, to make people happier.'

‘I don't think I can do it any more.'

‘No, no, this is nonsense!'

‘And how could I etch again? My hand shakes. See. How could I apply the needle to the wax?'

‘Then do something else. Please. Another picture. Anything. Just to get you working again. Please. Promise me you will try.'

‘I promise, Jane,' he said weakly.

So in the summer house he drew a picture Ackermann had requested, a pleasant fishing scene called
Noon
, with a tree overhanging a riverbank, anglers sitting around its trunk, another angler in a punt beyond, and sunlight breaking through the clouds. After that, he took a walk around the garden. All the signs of early spring, colours of life and refreshment, were on display. His face was a drained and miserable counterpart. He returned to the summer house, and without pause etched the picture of the clown, exactly as he had drawn it in the version he had taken to Furnival's, fixing for ever his refusal to abide by the will of Boz. His hand did not shake.

When it was done, there was still the other half of the etching plate to fill, as each plate printed two pictures which were then separated by cutting the paper in half. He stared for some time at the blank side. Here, he could either etch the runaway vehicle, or Mr Pickwick and his friends in the farmer's kitchen. He must choose. But one of his pictures must go.

He looked at the sketch of
The Runaway Chaise
: the horse had bolted, the would-be Lothario had already jumped out, and the would-be poet, his cloak fanned out above his head in the wind, was poised to do the same. The picture was full of action, and would make a fine dramatic addition to the illustrations for the second number.

Then there was the scene of the Pickwickians in the farmhouse. In the centre of the picture was Mr Pickwick on a stool, as one of the farmer's men brushed away at his boot. This picture was less dramatic than the other, but it brought the events of the second number to a satisfying conclusion. Above the fireplace in the drawing was a blunderbuss, with a sign below saying ‘Loaded'. He remembered, with bitterness, he had drawn a gun above a fireplace in
The Book of Christmas
as well.

He should not have to lose either picture. He cursed himself that he was so easily persuaded by Hicks to draw the clown. He should have had the strength and the will to stand up for all his pictures.

He made no decision on which to discard.

19 April

It was not at all easy to concentrate in the summer house, that afternoon, as he sat down to read a tale Charles Whitehead had asked him to illustrate. Called
The Landlord of Royston
, the tale concerned an ageing innkeeper in the time of Charles II who wooed a beautiful young woman with displays of wealth. Though the innkeeper won the woman's hand in marriage, she was afterwards courted by a younger man, a visitor to the inn, who in the throes of desire declared to her: ‘I can no longer bear to be as I am.' The woman was won, and eloped.

Seymour lifted his pencil. He drew the innkeeper tempting the woman, holding out a string of pearls as she sat in the inn. He added significant details: a long-necked bottle pointed stiffly upwards on a table, next to two goblets and a cat that rubbed itself against the innkeeper's leg.

It was six o'clock in the evening when the drawing was finished, and he took it to the parlour to show to his wife.

‘Is there something you're unhappy with?' she asked.

‘I thought I would let you see it before I take it to the woodcutter tonight.'

‘Do you have to go out now? Can it not wait until tomorrow?'

‘It must be tonight. John Jackson is cutting it. He will do it justice.'

She looked at him hard. ‘Would you like me to come with you?'

‘Too cold, Janey.'

*   *   *

He rose before dawn the next morning, having been awake all night. For several minutes he stood at the bedside, looking at Jane lying peacefully upon the pillow. He listened to her breath and his fingertips approached her mouth, so as to feel the warm air, but drew back before a touch of the lips. He dressed quietly and went into the corridor, pausing at his children's bedroom, and even leaning against the door, but he did not enter. The floorboards creaked. He went downstairs before putting on his boots, and opened the kitchen door to the garden and stood at the threshold. The day was cold, and so he fetched a cloak. He went out to the summer house. He looked at the items on the desk. There was enough daylight now to see a small, unfinished drawing for
Figaro
. He added a couple of strokes. He added one more. He looked at the pencil. He put it decisively down.

He examined, once again, the drawings
The Runaway Chaise
and
The Pickwickians in the Kitchen
, before he deposited them at the back of a desk drawer under other documents and odds and ends, where they would not immediately be found.

He picked up the two steel plates bearing completed etchings for the second number of
Pickwick
. One plate showed a pair of images: Mr Pickwick chasing his hat and then, by its side, the refractory horse on the back roads of Cobham. The other plate showed the dying clown, beside which was the blank rectangle, awaiting a last picture. Revulsion appeared around his mouth and nose. He turned the plates and stood them so they faced the wall.

He re-entered the house. It was still too early for anyone to rise. In the parlour, he poured himself a brandy and added laudanum. He wrote a few lines in pencil on a scrap of paper. He put the paper in his pocket. He took his fowling piece from the cupboard.

He stood in the kitchen, looking at the items around the room. The table and chairs. Vegetable peelings. The teapot. The bowl of sugar. The mincer. The butter dish. He waited some moments. He opened the door to the garden again. He strode out, carrying the fowling piece. There were few people on the street at this time of day, so there would be little possibility of interruption.

He looked towards the door of the kitchen. He had left it ajar. He waited another moment. Then he turned resolutely away from the door and approached the summer house, but did not enter. Rather, he stood at the rear, where he could not be seen. He took the note out, placed it upon the grass, and stood with one foot upon the paper. He had given the boot leather a good shine the night before.

He rammed down with the ramrod – long-engrained habits of safety made him hold the muzzle away from his face. A wry, resigned curve came to his lips. He rammed down swiftly, with confidence, as he always did, as a competent sportsman would.

The shaking came to him now as he gripped the firearm. He held the muzzle to his chest, pointed at his heart. With his other hand, he directed the ramrod towards the trigger, for it was too far away to reach unaided – the shaking was now so strong, that it took three attempts to find the required niche. Another pause. His breath came fiercely now, the fear shaking it out of his windpipe. His entire frame trembled.

He stabbed down upon the rod.

The flash from the pan flashed sideways. He fell.

He could hear less, as though his ears were filled with jewellers' cotton, yet the sound of two chattering dairymaids on their rounds streets away was clear and loud. Pebbles in the garden were smooth – he had never noticed how round and smooth before. He was on the ground, yet somehow standing above himself, a yard from where he lay. He could smell his own blood, he could almost taste it, like the time he licked a shilling as a child.

He had halted his action, suspended his time, become as frozen as every character in every illustration he had ever drawn. He was in a garden. He was gone.

*   *   *

Elizabeth Kingsbury, servant to the Seymour family, stirred in her sleep. It must have been the master she heard moving along the passage, getting up to do some drawing probably. She stayed a little longer in bed, until a cramp in her calf forced her to rise, and she dressed. It was about half-past six. She went downstairs, tidied up here and there. In the parlour, she placed a magazine on the bookshelf. She went to the kitchen. There was a plate of vegetable peelings and a pot of tea leaves which she should have taken out the night before, and throwing these on the compost heap was her next task. She gathered the peelings and leaves together, smiling as she recalled the impudence of the butcher's boy; it made her blush. Then she noticed the door to the garden was unlocked. She pushed it open. There was an odd smell. Suggestive of charcoal, but not quite that, burning rags perhaps, but also suggestive of roasted belly of pork, yet not quite that either.

She looked out. She couldn't see Mr Seymour. But what was that smell? She stepped out, on to the grass. She saw the sight.

The master lay on the ground behind the summer house. He lay in a pool of blood. He lay covered with blood himself. His cloak lay open and his clothing had caught fire. His gun lay beside him.

Frantic, Elizabeth Kingsbury ran through the house. She opened the street door. She cried for help.

A butcher called John Mason happened to be passing down Park Place West that morning, with the intention of checking up on his delivery boy. Older customers had complained about the slowness of deliveries, and that was probably because the boy spent too much time chatting to the pretty ones. Suddenly a young woman in a state of utmost agitation, indeed panic, emerged from a house. ‘For God's sake help me!' she cried out. ‘Someone please!' He vaguely recognised the woman, as a customer's servant, but her features were too distorted to know her for sure. A long-legged man was already on his way to her side, as fast as his thighs could lift, and Mason ran too.

‘For God's sake, come!' she implored as they reached the house.

‘Is it robbery?' said Mason as he felt in his pocket for a small knife.

‘
It's a dreadful sight.
'

They went inside, passing through the house and out into the back garden. Even for a man like Mason, who had seen animals twitching on a hook in Smithfield, the sight of a gunshot victim was a horror. Worse, as the clothing had caught fire, Mason could smell the burning of the flesh. Covering his nose, and looking around, he saw a watering can beside the summer house, which was half full. This extinguished the flames.

Mason lifted the fowling piece, which was still warm. On the ground beside the man's boot was half a sheet of paper, bearing a few lines of pencilled writing. Mason handed it to Elizabeth Kingsbury. He told the long-legged man to fetch a doctor immediately. Elizabeth pointed towards the entrance of Park Place, and stuttered out that a doctor, Mr Burroughs, lived at number one.

Within a short time, Burroughs arrived and examined the wound on the left side of the chest – it was large enough to insert a finger. With the help of the other men, he lifted Seymour's body, and it was then revealed that the shot had passed through the heart, and exited at the back, straight through every layer of clothing, making three holes in the folds of the cloak. ‘He must have been dead for about an hour,' said Burroughs. ‘His heart must have been literally torn to pieces.'

It was then that Jane Seymour came down from the bedroom, shouting, ‘Good God, what is the matter?' She tried to enter the garden, but Mason stood in front of the back door.

 

*

‘HAVE YOU EVER BEEN INFORMED
of a suicide, Scripty?'

‘Yes,' I said. ‘But not a person I really knew. I met him just once.'

‘And who was that?'

‘An optician. I was working for a newspaper when I met him. This was about eighteen months before his death. He had a hobby of collecting items from the history of his profession – antique spectacles, glass eyes, monocles, test charts. I interviewed him and wrote an article about his collection.'

‘What was your reaction to his death?'

‘It was unexpected, but that was about it. After all, I did not know him. For me, he was just a man with an unusual historical interest. Though not unusual for him.'

‘But what if he had died a few days after your article appeared? He might have seen himself as held up to public ridicule by your piece. The local oddball.'

‘I did not ridicule him.'

‘Suppose you had made some little remark he dwelled upon.'

‘I did not.'

‘But if you had. Some off-the-cuff comment which meant little to you, but perhaps meant a lot to him.'