Death and Mr. Pickwick by Stephen Jarvis

you, now.’
    The route upstairs gave further evidence that the Vaughans were well-to-do. The stair carpet showed no signs of wear; there were wall hangings and paintings; there was a porcelain statuette of a horse rearing up on an elegant landing table; there was a fragrance of eau de toilette.
    â€˜You’ll be sharing with Barton – a strange one, he is. You’ll get your meal today at five. You may look round the house – but the best of the valuables are under key, and all the important rooms too, so don’t get ideas. That’s your room along there. Oh and this I am to give you.’ She reached into her pinafore, and pulled out a key. ‘It’s for the street door. Come and go as you want. Make the most of it until the Vaughans come back.’
    *   *   *
    Smithfield market, after dawn.
    Whole sides of pigs hung from the hooks on the long sheds, and there was the smell of boiling meat. Stray dogs, driven wild with temptation, befriended the market workers, sniffing their aprons which were soiled green-brown with hay and grass, an animal’s last meal before slaughter. There was the sound of sawing and steel being sharpened. On the tripe stalls, black beetles fought for territory with the flies. At the rear of a shed, a ragged collection of men and women queued to collect a pint of tripe broth, theirs for the flourish of a jug.
    Robert Seymour sketched the tumbling of a pig’s internal organs as they followed the path of a blade. There was still breath in the animal, and its limbs twitched. He watched the steam rise from the blood around the butcher’s boots. Then he wandered inside a shed, towards a barrel into which a man emptied a bucket of white, bloodied brains. He glanced in other barrels nearby, which contained tongues, lungs and chitterlings. The workers here laughed and chirped. In an annexe, a mixture of blood, water and intestinal matter lay spread out across the floor. Seymour then walked to a shed where skinners separated hide from flesh, and snippers cut off hooves. He saw a man pushing a wheelbarrow-load of bones.
    Having finished with these scenes, Robert Seymour took his sketchbook to the animal pens, where villainous-looking drovers made free use of the goad; for crushed into five acres of Smithfield were thousands of cows, sheep, horses and pigs. He saw a sheep that had reared up, and become wedged in that position by the other sheep in the pen. He watched its drover, a youth not much older than himself, swing a fist at the creature, and laugh as two bloody teeth fell out on to the filth. Dodging the dung and the pools of urine, Seymour then sat upon a bale of hay, to draw a salt-and-pepper mare with a twisted hind leg and a healed cut over one eye, and he made the twist in her leg unsettling to behold, and the eye blindly blank.
    A public house nearby had stayed open throughout the night, and he sketched two ruddy men outside, who clapped hands as a deal was struck. ‘Down the red lane!’ said one, as they lifted their tankards, and became another sketch.
    He drew and walked in the surrounding streets for several hours, before returning to Duke Street at noon, for he had been assured of a lunch by the bushy-headed servant.
    As soon as he inserted the door key, he heard a cry from upstairs which would not have a disgraced a parade-ground drill sergeant – except that the voice was female. ‘Robert Seymour! Come up here, if that is you. Upstairs, second door along.’
    The servant entered the hall in a state of agitation. ‘Just sending him up, Mrs Vaughan!’ She pointed at his shoes. ‘You’ve got the mud off those? All right. Up you go. And don’t stare at her dress.’
    â€˜Is Mr Vaughan back?’
    â€˜No, she wants to get to you first. Up you go.’
    At the top of the staircase, at an angle through the open door, he glimpsed a bird-patterned oriental vase on a piano. Suddenly a woman with a