by Robin Blake
Yet dinner with the Georges was to provide me with some intelligence of real interest. We started in a way I had expected, with Elizabeth reverting to the little girl that the old ones still thought she was. This performance, which was of special delight to my mother-in-law, did not exclude the embarrassment of baby-talk and nicknames, of childhood reminiscences, and arguments about which kitten drowned in the porridge pot on New Year’s Eve. And so on, and on, while I tried to show interest.
I had carved their second and third platefuls, I had fetched more ale, I had amiably endured sly asides from her mother (‘And when are we going to hear from you two of that Fortunate Event that we pray for every day?’; ‘A woman can die truly happy only when she is a Gammer’; etc. etc.) and more direct allusions to the same, shouted jocularly by old Charles (‘I hope tha don’t lack the vigour, young man, that tha’s not got brats! Eh? Eh?’). Finally, having enough of all this I turned the subject to that of my visit to Cadley Place that morning.
‘Poor little Ruth Peel!’ said Mrs George, when I had done. ‘I remember her birth at Peel Hall so well, and the shock of it.’
‘She is a Peel of Peel Hall?’
This came as a surprise to me. I’d thought, as I’d said to Fidelis, that she must be a native of some distant county.
‘Oh yes, she was born there, like I said.’
‘You knew her?’
‘Not knew her, but I saw her as a babby. I used to milk at the Hall. It’s where I met Mr George, you know. He was one of the dairymen – eh, Charley? Before we went to Broughton and took over your dad’s cobbling shop.’
She repeated this at twice the loudness, and Charles chuckled obligingly.
‘Oh aye,’ he said, ‘tha were my little milkmaid.’
I asked for more details about Ruth.
‘She was the daughter they wouldn’t own to, that ashamed they were of her, with her stunted arm. All sorts of daft things were said – that she’d been touched by Beelzebub, that her mother had lain with a fish, that sort of nonsense – so to end the talk they sent her away after a few months to the mother’s brother in Lincolnshire to be brought up and forgotten about. She had good schooling there in time, I’m told.’
‘So she was the daughter of old Benjamin Peel, was she?’
‘The last of them. He had several, but no sons. Ruth must be the only one left of them now, any road, because the rest’s dead as far as I know.’
‘Happen that’s why she’s come back,’ put in Elizabeth. ‘She’s inherited.’
‘It’s precious little if she did! Just the house, which is a ruin since the roof caved in. The land and farms are long since sold off. How fallen the mighty! Time was when the Peels ruled for miles around this town.’
Like many that are deaf when surrounded by conversation, Old Charles spent much of his time removed or abstracted, as if thinking inwardly. But from time to time he would stir and be jolted into speech that showed he was following some of the talk.
‘Forty year afore I were born,’ he announced loudly, ‘Benjamin Peel’s grandad were Mayor, am I right? He were another Benjamin Peel – the Great Benjamin Peel, he were called actually. But then he took on Cromwell, and the family went downhill after. Slowly, mind. But Preston never glorified the Peels again, and they lost all their money – I forget how. Any road, that’s it. That’s what happened.’
‘What happened to Benjamin?’ I asked.
‘Don’t know. But he was never seen here no more.’
He took a large swallow of ale and lapsed back into silence, while the conversation between mother and daughter moved on to the variable prices in the day’s market. I was thinking that I knew now where Ruth Peel had got her patrician manner, and her education; also that I understood her feelings about her poverty, and that she might feel it was unjust. She seemed to have much ill-fortune to complain of, not only in how she had been treated by Pimbo, but by her own family.
After we finished eating, Elizabeth and her mother retired to drink tea in the parlour, and I was left sitting with Charles over a bottle of Madeira wine. After five minutes, with the old man sound asleep in his chair, our girl Matty came in to clear the dishes. I asked her to keep an eye on him, and slipped away into the office, which I reached through a communicating door off the hall.
On Saturdays, Furzey worked only in the morning, so I had the place to myself. I arranged the papers from Pimbo’s escritoire on my desk and began looking through them – each pile representing documents from a single slot in the escritoire.
I looked first through the large stack of bills and correspondence with tradesmen. One or two were receipts for payments made, and these I kept together. The others were almost all requests, and increasingly demands for payment: 7s. 8d. to the currier; a couple of guineas for a horse; £1. 6s. 8d. at the wine merchants; 9s. 10d. for shoes. One letter was asking for sixteen shillings on account, towards payment of a bill of more than three times as much. ‘We conclude that you take advantage in every way of us and we request immediate payment of a sum on account, which we think not unreasonable. R. Pilkington.’ Taking a pen I noted down every sum that still appeared owed by Pimbo and added them together, from which I learned that on this evidence alone he was domestically indebted to the extent of £36. 15s. 9d. None of these debts, I should make clear, were those of the goldsmithing business, whose financial records I would have to look at with the help of Hazelbury at his office. These were the transactions of his home where, so the proverb has it, charity begins.
Having carried out this small audit of Pimbo’s household debts, I turned at the first bundle of correspondence with Zadok Moon and at once the sense of gloom and indebtedness was quite dispelled. On this evidence, Moon was a man with a preternaturally sunny and optimistic view of life – and more particularly of business. The letters continually emphasized ‘zealous backers’, ‘the most willing buyers’, ‘accommodating traders’, ‘highly excellent merchandise’, ‘the best ship and crew money can obtain’ and, several times underlined, ‘tip-top compound profits’.
When I had read this entire packet of papers together, the upshot was clear: Phillip Pimbo had joined with Moon as the principle investor, or so Moon’s letters repeatedly stressed, in a joint enterprise for buying and fitting out a ship – The Fortunate Isle of Liverpool, Edward Doubleday Captain – for a Guinea voyage. The way in which it worked, and most particularly the notion of ‘compound profit’, was explained in an enthusiastic summary by Moon. This was in a letter dated eighteen months previously, when the scheme was just under way:
The hold of the ship being filled with such goods as are monstrously desired by the natives of the Guinea coast, but very cheaply obtained at home viz. simple metal manufactures, coloured cloth, beads, spirituous liquor (they are exceeding drunkards there), gunpowder etc; these goods are exchanged after sailing to Benin for a full cargo of prime slaves, which are in a matter of weeks ferried comfortably across to the West Indies and traded in exchange for sugar, rum, tobacco and cotton. The ship then cruises back to Liverpool on the bosom of the trade winds, to complete a year’s voyage. Her final cargo is then sold, believe me, Sir, at a prodigious return on the sum of money originally placed with the venture. For every guinea they have invested in such enterprises, it is not unknown for gentlemen to receive a hundred back! A more usual return would be of about ten times the principal. You have been bold enough to invest such an amount as to make you the Prime Investor and, at the conclusion of the voyage, give you much profit, Mr. Pimbo, as befits a man of your wealth and station. I will make a more modest profit myself but it will suffice to give me a good stake in a second similar venture in the future.
Another set of letters, seemingly in reply to expressions of anxiety from Pimbo, were devoted to reassuring him of the safety of the enterprise. The Fortunate Isle, said Moon, was a thoroughly new vessel of the ‘snow’ variety. She was captained and crewed by expert seamen, and she would be fully insured, both in herself and in respect of any cargo she
would carry, against all risks whatsoever. So, while there was no expectation at all that anything could go amiss, in that unlikely case his capital was fully covered. Pinned to this letter was another, in which Pimbo was asked to send immediately, as his share of the insurance premium, the sum of one thousand five hundred pounds.
A third, smaller sheaf of correspondence was of an earlier date – a full six months previous to those concerning the Guinea venture. It helped me much in understanding Pimbo’s motives in joining it – his ambition to move into the novel business of private banking in Preston.
‘I have had obliging letters from Lord Oswaldene and Sir Henry Amplesides’, wrote Moon. ‘Both of these gentlemen are intimates of the First Lord of the Treasury and they assure me that the administration smiles upon your idea of establishing a local bank in Preston, as it does on similar projects by gentlemen in other cities and towns of the realm. However both my correspondents emphasize the need for such ventures to be established on a very secure basis, with an initial working capital of at least £20,000. I would add that in my own opinion even more might be required, since these by law must be private businesses whose partners must accept unlimited liability for any losses.’
This letter placed in relation to the other later correspondence revealed the progression of Pimbo’s thoughts. More than twenty thousand pounds? He must have wondered where in all creation he was going to find such an amount, until the notion of a trading venture came into his head, combined with … Of course! Grimshaw’s Corporation money! The Guild savings!
My thoughts were interrupted by a ring on the street door: Luke Fidelis, holding in his hand a shiny silver spoon seven or eight inches long.
‘Here is a spoon transformed,’ he said coming in. ‘The mysterious apostle spoon. I have just bought it from Amity Thorn.’
‘As a medicine spoon?’
‘Don’t be daft. I have no need of a spoon. I did it to help the Thorns. Amity’s found it impossible to raise any money in Preston by it, and the church warden – silly man – says her entitlement to relief is doubtful so he must put the case to the parish council. Here.’
He handed the spoon to me and I looked at it more closely. It was indeed a fine piece of work. The bowl, which was cracked at the edge in two places, was circular and the slender shaft tapered and then at the end enlarged to form a platform on which stood the robed figure of the saint. I could see that he had in his hand a cup, or chalice.
‘It’s a pity she showed this around. People suspect she stole it, which will count against her with the council. Have you changed your mind about that?’
‘No, I think Adam Thorn found it on the Moor, or somewhere out in the open. It was in a filthy state. But just look at it now, will you? She’s cleaned it in a vinegar bath and it’s come up bright. I gave her three shillings and sixpence for it. Did I overpay?’
I swivelled the shaft and inspected the little square dents on the underside. The immersion in vinegar had made these much clearer. They were undoubtedly hallmarks: a crown certainly, a capital letter C, and two with shapes that I could not make out.
I had on my desk a letter knife in silver that had a very clear set of marks, and which I knew to have been made in the reign of King James the First. I fetched it and we made a comparison: one of the marks was the same on both pieces – the crown – but the others were all quite different. What that meant neither of us could say.
‘These marks will authenticate the piece,’ I said. ‘We need a silversmith to tell us more, however – and we haven’t got one!’
‘We will consult the nearest thing to it,’ announced Fidelis. ‘Come on!’
A minute later we had left the office and he was leading me, with a certain difficulty, along the edge of Market Place towards Friar Gate. Trading was now almost at an end, so that we had to thread our way through a disorder of barrels, baskets, sacks and coops as traders, impatient to get home, dismantled their stalls and tossed boards, trestles and unsold produce onto their carts.
Nicholas Oldswick, watchmaker, was established some half way down, and on the right hand side of Preston’s third principal street. Broader at its Market Place end than either Fisher Gate or Church Gate, Friar Gate gradually tapers as it dips down, and then rises again, towards the moorside bar. The buildings that line it, most of them shops and workshops, become less imposing the further they lie beyond the dip and Oldswick’s, being just at the point where the street begins to rise, was of medium size. A sign saying ‘CLOSED’ was displayed in the window glass from which we inferred that Oldswick had not yet reopened after his dinner.
His ancient servant Parsonage came puffing to the door, a sour expression on his face.
‘If it’s a watch that’s stopped, you’ve to come back later,’ he told us. ‘If you’ve got news that he’s won the lottery, you’ve to come in.’
‘It is neither,’ said Fidelis. ‘It’s Coroner’s business.’
He stepped past him and into the shop, where I followed.
‘He’s asleep in his dining chair, doctor. Or was, until that accursed doorbell rang.’
‘Will you be so kind as to fetch him out?’
As the old man shuffled away into the back, I touched Fidelis’s arm.
‘Coroner’s business?’ I whispered. ‘How is that?’
‘I’ll tell you later.’
Nick Oldswick did not keep us long.
‘How do, Titus? Doctor? What can I do for you?’
Fidelis produced the spoon.
‘Would you have a glance at this?’ he asked.
Oldswick took the spoon and beamed at us in turn. He showed no ill effects from having been awoken from his nap and was in jocular mood. He turned the spoon over and over like a curiosity, as if he had never seen such a thing before.
‘Well, as a watchmaker, I am at a loss, doctor. Where is its mechanism? How does it tell the time?’
Fidelis reached across and turned the spoon over in Oldswick’s fingers to show him the hallmarks.
‘As you mention it, Sir, it does tell the time in one way, though without mechanism. It tells its own age – and that is why we are here. We hope you can interpret the hallmarks for us, since you work much in silver.’
Oldswick shrugged and smiled apologetically.
‘I handle silver from time to time, doctor, but I regret I am not an assayer and know nothing of old hallmarks.’
He turned to me.
‘What of it, Titus? Is the spoon evidence in one of your investigations?’
‘It may be,’ I said. ‘If you cannot tell us its age, can you at least estimate its value – the value of the metal, that is, assuming it is indeed silver?’
‘I can, if I weigh it.’
From a shelf he fetched a brass balance set on a wooden base and worked it by placing the silver spoon on one side, then adding small weights incrementally to the other.
‘One ounce and five eighths,’ he said. ‘Let me see: assuming the metal is of sterling standard, I reckon it would be worth something like four shillings at today’s prices.’
‘It seems I did not overpay,’ said Fidelis drily, taking the spoon back.
We thanked Oldswick and leaving him, if he liked, to resume his after-dinner nap, stepped into the street.
‘Why was that Coroner’s business, Luke? This is just an old spoon.’
‘Follow me,’ he said, ‘and you may find out. It’s not far and it’s best to deal with this matter now.’
He strode off ahead of me up the sloping street, in the direction of the bar. Though it was undoubtedly true that I had more important matters to attend to, this business of the spoon was beginning to interest me and I followed eagerly.
* * *
It was a small house on Marsh Lane and very old, its beams twisted and roof uneven, as if they had been squeezed out of shape by the taller premises on either side. A shiny-faced woman of about fifty answered our knock.
‘Hello, Mrs Farrowby,’ said Luke with a slight bow.
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br /> A smile swept the care from her face.
‘Doctor. This is a pleasure. Is it to see grandfather you’ve come?’
‘Yes, though be assured this is not any medical matter. I have brought Mr Cragg along. Is Mr Feather well, by the way?’
‘Never better than middling, but he says that’s all anybody can hope for at ninety years old. And as you know he likes a visitor. Come in both of you, please.’
Wilfrid Feather was known universally by a different name: Methuselah. He was the oldest man in town – and, in all likelihood, the oldest inhabitant Preston had ever known, and his visitors came in expectation of being treated to stories and episodes from life three generations back. Upon superannuation, after serving many years as Town Clerk in the reigns of King William and Queen Anne, he devoted himself to antiquarianism. No one knew the history of Preston better, or remembered more of it by direct experience, than Methuselah did.
In the old style, the house had no kitchen and Susan Farrowby did her cooking on the range in the main parlour. Coming in, they found the old man sitting beside it now, nodding half asleep into his abundant white beard. His granddaughter pinched and shook his ear.
‘It’s Dr Fidelis to see you, Grandad. And he’s brought Mr Titus Cragg.’
‘Who?’
‘You know. The young doctor – the good-looking one that saw to that old boil of yours last year – remember?’
Nodding benignly, Feather held out a palsied hand for his visitors to shake. He looked up and squinted but I knew that he didn’t see much any more, just blurred shapes with voices.
Tea was offered and accepted and, while we waited for the kettle, Mrs Farrowby said, ‘I’m sure the gentlemen would be interested to know the secret of your longevity, Grandad.’ And then, in a whisper to us, ‘He does love to tell, that’s all.’
The old man roused himself. He lifted his inefficient eyes.
‘Oh, aye. It’s simple, is that. The secret of my surpassing longevity is the avoidance of cheese, Sir. All my life – no cheese!’
His voice was thin and sibilant, but clear.