In the eternity of history, there are some select places, and the lives therein, that are immortalised by their isolation. They seem to exist only for themselves, forever being but never ageing, always standing apart from the passage of time. For them, an unchanging story is written. Such was one overlooked corner of the county of Kent, in England. It was not the unspeakable grime nor the unquenchable stench, neither was it the bone-grinding poverty nor the iniquity of justice that confounded the curiosity of the casual visitor to this unprepossessing provincial town; rather, it was the ever-pervading sense of mundanity. This was, after all, the birthplace of Obadiah Bumble.

While literary history had burdened it with the name of Mudfog, this was not the source of its disrepute. Nor was it gripped by a mysterious ague or pox that was bringing mortality to the populace before their time. The people were afflicted for certain, but it was their immortal spirits that were decaying. Here, in the reign of our noble King George IV, the town’s soul was crumbling as surely as it might slip into the greasy, ravenous mudflats betwixt it and the creeping tides of the river.

’Twas not always so. In years forgotten, when fresh ocean breezes brought the clippers cruising into Mudfog’s harbour, their billowing white sails proudly thrusting their cargo to market, the town was the first stop for the fast trade from the East. Unloading teas and silks from the orient for dispatch throughout the kingdom and beyond, Mudfog’s name found some small fame as the place to secure the very first shipments of fashion’s fleeting necessities. The gentle ladies of Canterbury, Croydon and Slough would take their afternoon repast with a swirl of gossamer veils, dropping with infinite delicacy the name of Mudfog into their discourse.

Mudfog, it had to be said, was now a town of the past. The river’s rising mudflats were reclaiming their namesake, choking the town’s quaint harbour, leaving it as a soggy mire sinking into the foggy marshes. The elegant, if unremarkable, regency town hall displayed a clock in its pediment that was resolutely stuck at six minutes past the hour of twelve. No one was quite sure if it had surrendered at the high point of the day or simply ground to a halt in the dead of night; all they knew was that it no longer had a purpose to measure the hours. It was not that time itself had paused but rather entirely passed the town by, abandoning Mudfog to the doldrums of history as the rest of the world continued with its own narrative. In an era when every place set its own hours by the position of the sun overhead, Mudfog had abandoned any such need. To be sure, the town’s epoch was not over but it was suspended. It was caught in the deadtime between its noble, documented history and an unwritten future. It was as if the story of Mudfog had been pinched off from the nation’s narrative, like a temporal oxbow lake, and it now told its tale only for its own sake. It was marooned from the passage of history, in a time-out-of-time.

This was not to say that its peculiar epoch was totally bereft of charm. Befitting its becalmed state in the oxbow of history, overlooking the town was the hill known as Oxengarth, on account of its likeness to an Ox lying on its side. The townsfolk enjoyed referring to it as Mount Luna due to the stunning views it afforded of moonrise floating high off the sea’s evening starline horizon. Many romantic trysts had been cemented on its summit. The old town was scattered around the lower slopes, as if cast down like boulders. The random collection of buildings were clustered around the stone harbour, its wall extending beyond the tidal flats to dip its extended finger into the brown, brackish sea water of the River Medway’s salty mouth. It was here that the larger vessels used to ride the high tide into the harbour refuge, settling their bottoms into the silt, held fast for the transfer of freight onto The Strand, the main waterfront thoroughfare. Radiating out from The Strand like veins were the network of dark alleyways down which the goods would flow to their various sheds and warehouses. Beyond them the ground rose steeply on the lower reaches of Oxengarth.

On approaching Mudfog from the sea, one would observe that the newer, more civilised part of the town had been constructed in orderly Georgian splendour on the flatter ground to the right, or western, side. Bisecting the two halves of the town was the Chesterfield Road, climbing steeply over the western shoulder of Oxengarth. It levelled out at the edge of town and half a mile later the Stockton Lane came in from the left. If the busy traveller ignored this diversion to the small hamlet of that name, then a few miles later the Chesterfield Road came to a fork, the left being the high road to the Midlands of England and the right being the low road to London. The capital was but thirty five miles further on but it might as well have been a hundred years into the future.

If one were making such haste to escape the town, then one would have missed its true heart, its soul. There was a cottage on Chesterfield Road, hemmed in by a row of modest stone houses but set back from them and seeming to predate its surroundings by a century or two. It had its own front garden, which was essentially a patch of grass with an apple tree in the centre, affording an expansive view of the town below and the Thames Estuary beyond. The cottage was nestled under a heavy thatch roof, the upper storey windows peeping out shyly from under the Norfolk reeds. The lower storey was entered by two or three stone steps to a substantial front door, offset to the left and bordered by three mullioned windows, two to the right, one to the left. The only access to the rear of the house was through that front door, sidling past the single flight of stairs and straight down the hallway to the other side.

The owner of this dignified, if modest, residence was the redoubtable Mrs Mann, a widow of uncertain provenance. It was known that she hailed from Ickwell in Bedfordshire and that she had made her reputation in the campaigns against Napoleon Bonaparte. The foundation of this reputation was much less well-defined but it appeared that she brought comfort to many of the soldiers in the conflict, presumably mostly on the British side, and returned home having been handsomely rewarded. Tragically, Captain Mann, her purported husband, had met his heroic end in some unknown battle in a long-forgotten year. Indeed, such time had passed since he was last seen in Mudfog that nothing remained of anyone who had acquaintance with him. Nevertheless, Mrs Mann was steadfast in honouring his legacy and regularly drank his health.

Her modest fortune allowed her to furnish her home in a surprisingly respectable style. Pride of place went to the longcase clock, the product of master clockmaker Thomas Tompion and a treasured inheritance from the war years. Renowned as a prudent woman of business, she was meticulous in monetising her affections. Amongst other activities, she supplemented her pension by offering occasional boarding facilities to paying family and guests. Many an evening passed in a miasma of bliss, Mrs Mann and a close relative from any visiting sloop singing lustily long into the night. Indeed, such was the surplus love that poured from the ample bosom of the good Mrs Mann that she would also accommodate the unfortunate orphans of the parish for a shilling a week. The parish was grateful for her hospitality but its financial support had to be stretched across the most economical of budgets in order to release a meagre profit.

It was into such a libertarian family background that Obadiah Bumble was born. His father, we know, was a military man of sorts. With the proper encouragement Obadiah’s mother, Miss Magdalene Bumble, might recall the gentleman’s towering height, the slippery sheen of his skin and the muscular power of his torso. From other hazy maternal recollections Obadiah learned that his father wore a dark tunic with silver braid, which he enjoyed to unfasten tantalisingly from top to bottom, popping each silver button with a dashing flick of finger and thumb. On other occasions, his mother might remember a tunic that was crimson and the buttons copper, or no outer garment at all but a shirt of rough Irish linen. For all the fecundity of her memory, though, one detail always escaped her: the gentleman’s name.

Sadly, there was little chance that Obadiah ever would obtain for himself his proper name. Before he was yet four years old his beloved mother was obliged, perforce, to seek employment in the capital. Naught but a hastily scribbled note announced that she had departed for employment in Low Holborn, to ply her trade as she knew best. The young boy fancied that she was regaling the local gentry with her well-honed skills for domestic entertainment, and few amongst his acquaintances entirely disagreed with him. To all intents and purposes, the tender young Obadiah found himself an orphan to fortune.

Luck, though, looked kindly on the young ingrate as it would so many more times in his life. Mrs Mann was a distant relative of his mother’s and it was into this happy bosom that Obadiah had been embraced in the spring season of his third year. As ward to the matriarch, supported by a lucrative familial stipend, he was served with at least one stout meal per diem on an admirably regular basis. He was also permitted his own room, cosily located in the rafters. The thatch was regularly fumigated thanks to the cracks in the chimney breast that passed through the room. The other orphans did not enjoy the same elevated social status and their parochial stipends were not quite so fulsome. Once the hostess and her ward had been provided for there was barely a few farthings to spare for their upkeep. Naturally, Mrs Mann would never allow her charges to starve so out of kindness would default to food over clothing. If the children appeared to be dressed in rags it was only so that they could eat most days.

As was to be expected, under the tender care of his protector Obadiah Bumble grew into a young boy of healthy proportions if, that is, a powerful constitution can be measured by the extension of one’s belt. With his perfectly spherical head, topped off by a flaccid mop of coal-black hair, he made up for a lack of personal charisma with his corporeal presence. By the time of his twelfth year he had far outgrown the other orphans, sideways as well as upwards, a physical superiority that imbued him with moral confidence. This notwithstanding, something irked at his heart. Call it conscience, call it empathy, call it what you will, Master Bumble would on occasion wonder if the other orphans might have fared as well as he had they won better fortune in life.

Events at the cottage on the Chesterfield Road fell into a regular pattern soon enough. Mrs Mann, an active night owl and committed late riser, enjoyed her social activities long into the evening. Master Bumble tended to amuse himself during the day by sauntering around the town admiring the etiquette and fashions of the finer folk of the Mudfog ton. Even as he grew into a young lad, he received little in the way of schooling, beyond reading and writing, but seemed to absorb some knowledge by chatting to an endless stream of passers-by. He rarely concerned himself with the intermittent lodging of parish orphans, a random cast of bit players in the grand drama of his own life. If Mudfog was a stage, then he had every intention of being its costumed leading actor.

The cycle of domestic performances took a different turn one evening in the late spring of Bumble’s early youth. Young Obadiah and Mrs Mann were taking their evening meal at the parlour table in the front room while a visiting orphan sat on a three-legged stool in front of the range. The urchin was aged beyond her stature, on the cusp of her teens but endowed with the fragile physique of a child half her age. She had the parchment complexion of the eternally famished.

The young girl had lately been dispatched from the east end of London for her own safety. Her mother, a Miss Cranehill, was a descendant of the extensive Mudfog clan who were renowned as sturdy yeomanry folk. Escaping the decline in enterprise afflicting her hometown, Miss Cranehill had sought dignified employment as a resident of a workhouse in the nation’s capital. It was then that Misfortune’s tentacles took a deadly grip on her fate and she fell under the wing of the workhouse beadle, the type of gentleman who believed honest work was reserved for those with Christian morals, the kind he clearly eschewed. Neither was this gentleman much for keeping his affections within the marital home, so to speak, and he pursued numerous friendships on the residents’ side of the building. In particular, he cast a keen, protective eye over the young lady, fresh from the Kent provinces.

Appropriately for a workhouse beadle, he seemed especially fond of children. Even while he had an officially acknowledged youthful son and infant daughter by the woman who kept his home, as a consequence of his intimacy with Miss Cranehill he had fathered yet another daughter. Her name was Nancy, a proud Cranehill name bestowed hastily before the beadle could impose his own choice. The bond between mother and daughter grew stronger by the day, which was just as well when dangers lurked around every corner in that part of town. Rumour had it that the beadle’s son, sharing the father’s easy conscience, had taken an unnatural interest in his half-sister as she grew.

Miss Cranehill, in a move only the mortally desperate would understand, fled from the workhouse and sequestered her daughter deep within a gang of prepubescent pickpockets. Miss Cranehill herself, though, was betrayed by mercenary rumours and the beadle’s son ran her to ground in the basement of a crumbling tenement. He made demands to which no mother could acquiesce, not while she still had life to resist. In that part of London, though, this is not a defence that holds much power. It was said that her lifeless body lay deep in the any one of the filthy creeks that irrigated the most depraved parts of the city. The gang of pickpockets, credited with the care of their own, feared for the young Nancy and dispatched her to Mudfog and the protection of her mother’s hometown.

For any other orphan girl, such a removal to another town would simply have condemned them to yet another den of vice. However, Fortune had diverted the fate of that young wretch into the home of Mrs Mann. This evening, as Obadiah and Mrs Mann sat at the table, the ragged girl was at last witnessing something of what a home could be. She was provisioned with a warm pottage and a large crust of bread, a satisfactory meal for one of emaciated proportions. The cuisine was very much to her tastes and she slurped it down with happy abandon, quite without regard to the refined manners of her hostess.

All at once, the scrap of a girl rose and approached Mrs Mann, her bowl cradled in her hands. The hostess was aghast at the interruption to her meal, a morsel of junket quivering on her spoon.

“Well, girl!” she demanded.

“Please Ma,” sweetly intoned the little girl, “I…I want some more.”

“More, girl? More?” exploded Mrs Mann.

For a moment, the words were pulled tight across the air with unbearable tension. For a moment, Bumble glanced up from his dish of custard, noticing for the first time a single face from the endless cast of orphans, waifs and urchins. For a moment, his eyes drank in the soft golden hair, intended by providence to shine with blessings but now cropped back with savage inhumanity. If he had chosen that moment to look away, the future course of his life would have continued uninterrupted. Instead, with a lightning blow, his life was hurled onto a higher path.

For the first time in his life, Bumble shared the pain of another. He might have claimed that he already knew the quality of pain: the pain of an appetite unsated, the pain of cold when his bed has not been properly warmed. He had also witnessed pain in others: the starving beggars on The Strand, the freezing widows huddling by the harbour wall. However, that pain he observed in others had never made inroads to his own sentiments. This time, for the first time, it fell like a lump hammer on his heart. He looked across at the young girl, her empty bowl cradled in her hands. Rising from his chair, he took his own plate still piled high with food, lent towards her and used his knife to scrape half the contents into her bowl. She looked up at him, her big blue eyes filled with emotion.

“My name is Nancy Cranehill” was all she uttered.

Bumble generally kept company with adults, such as Mrs Mann, and he had rarely held conversations with children, even when he was a child himself. Least of all would have been the likelihood of conversing with a mere girl. He had no objection to girls per se, simply that he had never noticed them before.

“Most charmed to make your acquaintance, Miss Cranehill,” he blustered. “Obadiah Bumble at your service. And if I may, I would like to pledge to you that, as long as you are a member of this family, you will not go hungry.”

With that, he glanced over at Mrs Mann, whose eyes immediately dropped their gaze to the tabletop. Bumble glared at her but his point had surely been made: whoever came to this house joined their family and should be treated with the same status as the most favoured guest.

And so it was that the lives of two orphans became intertwined, each having been cast out alone to write their life story as best they could. One would face the world with vanity and bluster, the other with service and self-sacrifice, yet each represented two halves of a conjoined history. Neither story would ever be complete without the other.