The Snake-Oil Dickens Man. Ross Gilfillan
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were last to leave the lobby and I followed them down the steps to their buggy. I walked over to the fly and opened the door and let down the step, intending to hand in first Dame Bullock and then Cissy herself. I longed for the soft touch of her hand in mine. But first I offered Mrs Bullock my hand and she astounded me by brushing it away with her parasol, snapping, ‘Unhand me, you ruffian,’ before boarding under her own steam. I looked to Cissy but she only glowered and avoided my gaze. When I asked what was up, she said, ‘You leave us be. Poppa was right. I was blind. You’re nothing but a low-down swamp-rat and I don’t want nothing to do with you, ever again!’
‘But, Cissy,’ I said, quite thunderstruck. ‘I just told the inquiry, I had nothing to do with the swindle. I’ll pay you back your money myself.’
‘I ain’t talking about the swindle,’ Cissy said. ‘I was referring to the shame your family brings to this town. I heard,’ she said, with a look of sour repugnance, ‘all about your mother, Billy.’
She cracked her whip and the buggy moved off, leaving me such a sorry individual that had I been a horse, or a dog, I would most likely have been shot.
II
Merriweather was looking for me but I couldn’t face his certain wrath. He had been made to look a bigger fool than he was and would be seeking to vent his ire upon me. In other circumstances, I might have gone to my mother but now that was out of the question: because of her, my Cissy had spurned me. I climbed the old tree I had spent whole days in as a kid and mused upon my relation, whom I occasionally glimpsed through a veil of yellow leaves as she took linen to and from the wash-house.
The memory of the night she had wafted past me in a fantasy of taffeta and scent made me nauseous. But it also set me thinking. I had seen my mother dressed up before but never so perfectly as that night. I had an imperfect memory that Merriweather had once bought her dresses and that at some time in the distant past there had been something between them and only now understood that he must have used her and discarded her. At the time, I only saw the dresses and noticed that for a while she didn’t live in the lean-to behind the wash-house. Then I brought to mind other occasions when she had dressed fine but I didn’t recall them well as these were nights on which I had generally been sent early to bed.
I was sickened by an abrupt realisation. Parts of a puzzle I should have completed years ago fell into place. Bullock’s estimation of the Particular and of its inmates suddenly made sense. I had taken the bad name of the hotel to have some reference to its boorish and drunken owner and perhaps to the edifice itself, which had once been quite grand but was now broken-roofed and in need of a multitude of repairs. In truth, the establishment was a sham: a worn-out suit with brand-new pockets and everyone knew it.
Now I perceived that we took in any ragtag and bobtail at cut rates; that Irving was whispered to be wanted in Wyoming; that mystery surrounded the blind schoolteacher Putnam. Our poor name might have been born out of any of these facts. But that the reason some folk drove out of Hayes to stay in the Particular at the failed hamlet of Rodericksburg was because of the particular services that Merriweather could arrange, at a price, might never have occurred to me had not a snub from Cissy Bullock awoken my slumbering senses. I thought at first that I must have been blind, or he too discreet, for me not to have seen what was going on. But I searched my mind, and later the diaries I had kept as a child, connecting dates, impressions and memories and arrived at a conclusion that was as inevitable as it was terrifying. Unless there was something I had overlooked, it was awfully clear that my mother had been not only the gewgaw of Merriweather but had most likely been pimped by him to a succession of our honoured guests.
I thought of Cissy and how she now appeared as impossibly remote. Did she know what I knew now? That seemed impossible. Her father would slander my name yet never tell her that. But recent events were being talked up all over town and the customers who had been in the saloon that night had not omitted to include in their accounts of the evening, that Mrs Talbot had finished the night with the Wilkes man. If Cissy didn’t know the extent of what was going on now, it couldn’t be long before some gossip poured it into her ear like so much mercury.
III
In the afternoon, I knocked upon Elijah’s door. I had nowhere else to go and longed for the blanket of routine.
‘You’re early,’ he remarked.
He said that Mr Merriweather had lately been with him and had acquainted him with the fact that my name was presently not good currency. ‘He said it smelt to high heaven, in fact,’ said Elijah. ‘Well, never mind that now; we shall work on my memoir and when it is dark we will take a walk. It will be safer to talk without these walls. I have that to relate to you that will make you think differently of yourself and perhaps you will then not give a hang about the opinion of these small-town prattlers.’
Though electrified with curiosity, I knew it was no good pushing him and resigned myself to the ledger and pen. Elijah settled himself in a rocking-chair and took up his story.
‘I had embarked upon the ocean crossing, had I not?’ he asked.
‘Not so far as that,’ I said, for I had dozed through the last part of the narrative and this had gone unrecorded in the ledger.
‘We won’t mind the details. It’s sufficient to say that I got myself to Liverpool in time to join the steamer Britannia, bound for Halifax and Boston.’
His pale blue eyes fixed me with their sightless gaze.
‘I was barely aboard before I had been told that among the eighty-six passengers I would be attending were Mr and Mrs Charles Dickens. What do you think of that, then?’
‘Dickens? You met him?’ I asked, astounded that the man whose life and works had formed such a disproportionately large part of our studies, might be personally known to my tutor himself.
‘Not so fast,’ said Elijah. ‘All in good time.’
‘I’m listening,’ I said.
‘Don’t just listen, boy, take it down. Now, I would hardly have taken my fellow stewards for bookish men but both they and the crew were much exercised by this news. Such was, and remains, the celebrity of Charles Dickens. I was surprised that not a few knew him from his works themselves but many more knew him as the popular figure. They had seen his name time and again in newspapers and the likenesses of him and his creations decorating all kinds of products and advertising. Why, if you had asked them whom they considered the most famous man on earth, I guess that some might have answered President Tyler and others Queen Victoria but I would place a hefty wager that many more would have promptly replied, “Charles Dickens.”
‘So you may imagine there was not a little competition among we stewards for the honour of attending on the great man and we were sorely disappointed when he elected to ensconce himself in the ladies’ saloon where he would be served by a Scottish stewardess.
‘I caught sight of him the first night out. He was taking the air on deck before turning in. Against the weather, he was wearing a great pea-coat and a pair of cork-soled boots. At about thirty years of age, he was not much older than myself but what a gulf separated us! There was Boz, sipping his brandy, long hair blowing in the sea breeze, apparently without a care in the world, cutting through black waters towards a country that already loved him as its own fortunate son. And there was I, risking the fury of the chief steward by standing out upon the companionway, the better to catch a glimpse of the man who had come from nothing and made himself what he was, with no better weapon than the tip of his nib.
‘I longed to drop down the ladder and strike up a conversation with the immortal who had given life to Pickwick and Sam Weller, Fagin and Sykes, Squeers and Quilp. For unlike my colleagues and, I suspected, most of the passengers, I had read these books and his sketches of London life attentively and had long been fascinated by their author. But he finished his drink and ducked back inside before I had summoned the resolution to ask if he would like a second and that was the last I saw of him for perhaps five days.
‘When my labours were over, I lay upon my bunk, my mind churning with possibilities. This