Death and Mr. Pickwick Read Online Free Page A

leave.’
    The midwife climbed down and drew the curtains, cutting out the natural light. She pinned the edges together. When the room was as dark as required, and no fresh air entered, she lit candles and poured hot gin from a teapot beside the bed.
    â€˜Here, dearie, it’s pure, and nice and sweet, none of your all-nations-drippings that most round here would give you.’ After a little pause she said to Elizabeth Bishop: ‘You did not make a promise to go to London. He might have said things in his fever, and you might have said things back, but you didn’t swear. Though even if you had – would it count ? And even if it did count – men make promises, and forget them. You make certain this child never has a single nostrilful of London air.’
    A dipped candle had failed to light and was smouldering beside the bed. Elizabeth leant across, and blew it alight again. ‘If it is a boy, he will grow up in London.’
    *   *   *
    Mud, all over the streets, caking Elizabeth Bishop’s boots and the hem of her skirt. Carts and coaches and street-cries, men playing fiddles and bawling out songs.
    *   *   *
    On the twenty-fourth day of December 1801, Elizabeth Bishop’s children, now three in number, watched as she hooped a faggot of ashwood with nine bands of the same wood. The family occupied a cramped room in Islington with little in the way of furniture, but there was a fireplace, and coals to go into it.
    â€˜Your father would have done this for you,’ she said. ‘So I shall do it for you. Now, each choose a band.’ They did so. ‘I shall have the one at the bottom.’ She placed the faggot on the fire. ‘The last of our bands to crack wins – this!’ She pulled a small orange from a pocket in her skirt.
    All sat on the floor watching, especially the youngest child, Robert. He clenched his fist in intensity of concentration, completely absorbed by his chosen band. Suddenly there was a crack, and he turned and looked in despair at his mother. His widely spaced and sad eyes penetrated her, and he began to sniffle, and then to cry. She comforted him but his entire frame shook with misery. ‘Goodness, Robert – you’d think I had put you on the fire!’
    She lifted him up into her arms and walked over to the window, in the hope that the streets of Islington would be a distraction from tears. They were on the top floor, and looking down, the better-dressed men, almost without exception, exhibited a huge stomach, protruding far beyond the brim of a hat.
    â€˜Do you know, until I came to London, I had never seen so many fat men, Robert. Though there are thin ones too.’ She then saw that one of these fat men, with a triangular hat and globular front, had crossed the street to enter the building. ‘Oh dear,’ she said. ‘Well, we knew the landlord would come. I don’t know what I will say.’
    They all waited, with identically anxious expressions, for the knock.
    But when it came and she opened the door, Robert wriggled free of her arms and stepped in between his mother and the man demanding rent. Without any warning or prompting, the boy began singing a song in a shrill and unsettling voice, a song which his mother had taught him from a song sheet the day before:
    Pity the sorrows of a poor old man!
    Whose trembling limbs have borne him to your door,
    Whose days are dwindled to the shortest span,
    Oh, give relief, and Heaven will bless your store.
    The landlord looked down in astonishment. The boy continued.
    These tattered clothes my poverty bespeak,
    These hoary locks proclaim my lengthened years,
    And many a furrow in my grief-worn cheek,
    Has been the channel to a stream of tears.
    The landlord’s face showed every possible manner of exasperation. When the three-year-old started to accompany himself with dithering limbs and appealing eyes, the face filled with