Will Starling

by Ian Weir

  Table of Contents

  Half-title Page

  Also by

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Part One

  Part Two

  Acknowledgements

  Author Bio

  Will Starling

  a novel

  Also by Ian Weir

  Daniel O’Thunder

  Copyright © 2014 by Ian Weir.

  All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). To contact Access Copyright, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call 1-800-893-5777.

  Edited by Bethany Gibson.

  Cover and page design by Julie Scriver.

  Skyline illustration by Chris Tompkins.

  Paper texture by www.bashcorpo.dk.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Weir, Ian, author

  Will Starling: a novel / Ian Weir.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-0-86492-647-0 (bound) ISBN 978-0-86492-571-8 (epub)

  I. Title.

  PS8595.E47D65 2014 C813’.54 C2013-908079-1

  C2013-908080-5

  Goose Lane Editions acknowledges the generous support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (CBF), and the Government of New Brunswick through the Department of Tourism, Heritage, and Culture.

  Goose Lane Editions

  500 Beaverbrook Court, Suite 330

  Fredericton, New Brunswick

  CANADA E3B 5X4

  www.gooselane.com

  To Jude and Amy, always;

  and

  In memory of my father

  Prologue

  LONDON

  1st May, 1816

  A man standing straddle-legged, pelvis outthrust and one-eyed lad in hand, braced on the lip of merd-urinous Fleet Ditch in the blackness of a cool spring night with an aaaahhhh. That’s where it all began to turn — assuming that anything can really be said to begin anywhere, and isn’t one great tangle of consequence snarling all the way back to Adam’s first rumpety-bump with Eve. But that was the moment — right there — when an irrevocable step was took, which led to the next and then to the one that followed after, faster and faster, slip-sliding down a mountainside of feverish intentions ’til all at once the bottom had fallen away and there we were, plunging headlong and confounded to Perdition.

  And there at the turning stands Dick Whycher.

  Dick was a clerk at a ship chandler’s. He’d been out on a spree with a mate of his, a carpenter’s apprentice called Toby Fegen. They’d visited various boozing-kens in the winding streets by the river, and now they were stumbling homewards. Toby led the way, the light from his bull’s-eye lantern lurching in the murk like the beacon on a ship at sea. The streets were slippery with rain from an earlier storm and Toby splashed through puddles.

  “Half a second,” Dick had announced, drawn up short by nature’s call.

  “I wouldn’t, Dick,” Toby warned, as he saw what his friend was about. “I would not do this. I’ve told you before.”

  Dick belched in reply, and rootled in his breeches.

  That had been nearly a minute ago, for Dick Whycher was a prodigious pisser. It was a source of considerable pride to him, along with his teeth, which were largely unrotted. His hair was thinning, alas; but no man was ever perfect, and in any case Dick Whycher wore a hat, a low sloping affair that perched at a rakish angle as he gazed up into the night, listening to the splashing from below. The night was surprisingly clear, for London. The storm had blown itself out an hour ago and now there were stars, by God, twinkling down upon Dick Whycher pissing. It filled him with a sudden wonderment, as if something immense was being hinted to him about the universe and his especial place within it, which he might if just slightly more sober have grasped in an instant of blinding transformation.

  “I know you don’t believe me, Dick,” Toby Fegen was saying darkly. “I’m just saying it’s a Fact.”

  Toby had come up beside him, breeches firmly buttoned. A sailor had told him once of a creature like a tiny eel, with teeth, that lived in the rivers of somewhere treacherous such as Africa or possibly Peru, which would swim up the stream of them as pissed in the water and straight through the solitary eye of the breeches-adder, with consequences too shocking for any man to contemplate. The sailor knew a man this happened to, who died after three days of shrieking. Besides, it was Science.

  Toby Fegen was not a learned man, but he knew about Science. This was a bold new age of discovery and Science was everywhere on the march, overturning new rocks each day and exclaiming at what wriggled underneath. There were men with telescopes looking at the stars, and men in balloons rising up towards heaven. And if there were microscopic eels in Africa or Peru, then Toby was not about to piss in Fleet Ditch. It was foetid and reeking and clogged with refuse, dead dogs and cats and rodents and worse, and God only knew what teeth might exist on any microscopic eel as could live in that.

  “Jesus,” Toby said abruptly.

  “Eh?” said Dick, still gazing skyward.

  Toby raised the bull’s-eye for a better look. “Down there.”

  “What?”

  “There.”

  Dick peered.

  A bundle of rags, or so he first assumed. Dimly illuminated beneath the dwindling arc of his waters, which sparkled in the lantern light. But it wasn’t rags.

  “Jesus Aloysius Christ,” said Toby. “On a stick.”

  The man lay on his back, half sunk in ooze. A little man in a weskit that had once been red, with spindly legs akimbo, eyes wide and staring blindly up at whoever was pissing down. One arm was outflung, as if to grope for his spectacles, which poked up from the mire just out of reach. A cracked round lens caught the light and glinted.

  Dick Whycher saw at once what must be done.

  “Guy’s Hospital,” he said. “Across the bridge. We’ll dredge him out and take him there. We’ll take him to the surgeons.”

  “The man is dead! And not just dead, but murdered. Look — someone’s gone and slit ’is throat!” In the lantern light it gaped in a dreadful grin. “We’ll clear off, Dick, is what we’ll do. Before someone comes by and supposes we ’ad somethink to do with it.”

  But Dick was clambering down into the ditch and calling for Toby to do likewise.

  “Dick!” wailed Toby. “’Ee’s long past needing of a Nospital — there’s no surgeon in the world could be of use to ’im!”

  “But he’s of use to the surgeons, Tobe — and they’ll pay. Four quid is the value on this one. Which is four quid more than you’re worth, squeaking and flapping your arms. We’ll take him to the Porter at Guy’s Hospital. There’s a door for it round the back.”

  “’Ow do you — ?”

  “Because I know it, Tobe. I once met a man, all right? Now give us a hand!”

  Dick Whycher always seemed to know. He knew a man, or one who knew another man, or lived just round the corner from his cousin, and was according-wise stuffed full of the most remarkable bits of information from London’s underbelly, sifted like coins from the sludge of the sewers. Now he was knee-deep in the ooze, squelching down to hoist the little man and snapping for Toby Fegen to make himself less useless.

  For another moment, Toby stood rooted. It was horribly wrong, in every conceivable way. The man had been murdered and surgeons were ghouls and one instant of wretched misfortune was all it would take — a bleary-eyed Charley sloping round a corner, with a bull’s-e
ye and a snort of surprise — for this to end with two necks in a noose and the Newgate Hornpipe for Toby and Dick. And that wasn’t even taking account of the eels.

  Four pound, on the other hand, was four pound.

  With a gargle of desperate misgiving, Toby set down his lantern and slid.

  Thus the turning began.

  The monstrous re-enactment of a birth — so it must have seemed, if you’d been there in the darkness watching. Peering from the mouth of an alley, perhaps, with the rotting hulks of the buildings hemming you in like creaking old ruffians of evil intent, though what you’d be doing in such a wretched neighbourhood at such a time of night I couldn’t say, a decent soul such as yourself. Two midwives cursing in the moonlight, knee-deep in slime. The twisted infant hauled upwards, pale and dripping. Then out of the ditch and away down the cobbles, the newly-born braced between the two of them, head lolling and toes dragging. Bound for the Death House and the slab and the surgeons, and one of them in particular. A man named Mr Dionysus Atherton, whose deeds — both prodigious and unutterable — are at the heart of all that follows.

  And here I am at the end of it, scribbling these words by the stub of a candle in a small stone room, with St Paul’s bell nearby counting out the days and hours that remain to me. A man might be moved to take stock, at such a moment. Reckon up the tally of a lifetime: the good deeds entered in one paltry desperate column — Christ, can there really be so few? — offset against all the sprawling ledgers of the small and mean and ill, with sheets to come, whole folios, of Opportunities Frittered/Squandered/Lost. A man might turn to prayer at such a moment. Just in case — cos you never know, do you? Perhaps there really is something beyond, though Meg Nancarrow said no — nothing but the darkness, she said, Old Night plummeting with vast black falcon’s wings — and Meg was someone who should know the truth, better than any soul now living on this earth. A man at such a moment could begin to wail aloud in pure panic rising up, and desolation.

  I will write as swiftly as I can. There is so very much to say, and such little time left in which to say it. I need you to know what Dionysus Atherton did. You must have the facts, and judge for yourself. What he did to Your Wery Umble Narrator, but most of all to others. To Bob Eldritch, rising from that table with a peacock scream, and Meg Nancarrow, and my poor friend Isaac Bliss. The awful deeds committed and the worse deeds done in consequence. The breaking of the very bonds that make us human, in the quest for being something more.

  But once you’ve finished, you’ll know the truth. I’ll have achieved that much, at least. And I made my choices and did what I did, and have no right to be blubbering now.

  If they ask you, tell them I smiled.

  1

  8th April, 1816

  (Twenty-three days earlier)

  The day had begun splendidly for Dionysus Atherton, though not so well for Ronald Peake.

  Peake had a go at dying game. He tottered unassisted up the steps, and reaching the scaffold he raised his head and cried in quavering defiance to the multitude: “Soon I shall know the Great Secret!” But his nerve broke on the last syllable, and after that it was dunghill all the way, which was as much as anyone expected. Peake was a weedy little man, a poisoner. He took to caterwauling as Mr Langley the hangman tied up the halter and put on the white hood, and with his last uninterrupted breath was heard to cry out for his mother — which was dunghill as it gets, considering as his Ma was the one he poisoned. Then all words were gone with a hempen thud, and a great roar went up from the twenty thousand who had gathered outside Newgate Prison on this clear bright April morning.

  Dionysus Atherton consulted his timepiece, and made a note: the subject dropped at one minute past eight.

  The subject was now jerking like a fish on a line, since Mr Langley had not dropped him far, just the customary six inches. The rate of strangulation would depend upon several factors, none of which favoured Ronald Peake, whose weight — so Atherton had estimated with his practised eye — was no more than eight stone. Worse, Peake had no friends to offer financial encouragement, without which Mr Langley would not have waxed the rope. In the death cell Peake had broken down and admitted poisoning his mother, an elderly widow with whom he had lived throughout his adult life, on the grounds that she fed him slop. This revelation was detailed in his Last Dying Confession. Such a document was a time-honoured tradition at hangings, hastily printed on broadsheet and hawked about for a penny. The Revd Dr Cotton, spiritual adviser to the inmates of Newgate, was widely believed to be the source of the information, for which printers would pay handsomely.

  At 8.04 the jerking ceased momentarily, before resuming with greater vigour.

  Atherton stood in the very thickest of the crush. Here in the shadow of the gallows he was wedged in on all sides, which made it awkward to negotiate pencil and notebook. He might have bought a place in a shop window opposite, or upon a nearby balcony, amongst the young swells and the well-fed family groupings. There he might have observed unmolested, with keen scientific detachment. But that wouldn’t prime the vital juices like standing with the throng. And nothing stirred the blood quite like a hanging.

  “There is such life in it.”

  He had spoken aloud.

  “Well, not f’much longer, ducks. But ent ’ee ’avin’ a go! Dancing all the way to the churchyard, that one — ’ats off, there, you in front!”

  A slattern, wedged by his elbow. Arched on tiptoes for a better glimpse, and eyeing him slantways.

  “One of them scribblers, are you? Penny-a-line feller?”

  Atherton chuckled by way of reply.

  “No, then? No, you don’t look the sort. Grubby little buggers, most of ’em. Wotcher doing then, ’andsome?”

  “I am extending the range of human possibility.”

  She would have been quite fetching in her prime, with all her teeth and the dew of her youth upon her. Even now — two-and-twenty, at the least — she retained a cheerful fuckability. Her name, Atherton decided, should be Blossom.

  “I got a room,” said Blossom. “Not far. Extend something else f’yez, if you like.”

  Peake gave a twitch after some moments of dangling like an empty sack, and resumed thrashing. He was given up for dead at 8.12, and again at 8.17 and 8.33. All movement finally ceased at 8.48, and death was pronounced at two minutes past nine. But when the moment had actually come — or whether indeed it had come yet at all, as they cut him down and loaded him onto the cart — could not be said with certainty. Death’s mechanism remained a mystery, despite all the advancements of Science. Dionysus Atherton knew that as well as any man in London. It was almost as great as the Mystery of what might come after.

  *

  Blossom’s room was in Seacoal Lane, but they stopped in an alley nearby. It stank of piss and worse, but it was relatively private, and Blossom was duly encouraged onto her knees. Morning sun beamed in a warm shaft through the buildings as she tugged Atherton’s breeches down about his thighs. There was nothing like it, he thought: sunlight upon his face, and an April breeze playing gently about the nethers, as Blossom bobbed briskly. Spreading his arms, he imagined himself upon a balcony in Rome, blessing multitudes.

  Afterwards he gave her half a guinea. Whatever else he may have been, he was never mean with his purse. It wanted four minutes of ten when he arrived at Bowell and Son, in the warren of streets behind St Bart’s Hospital. The sign above the door showed a painted coffin.

  Peake was in the cellar, he was informed, the cart from Newgate having arrived some minutes earlier.

  “How many minutes?”

  The undertaker consulted his own timepiece. “Seven.”

  At 9.49 the clatter of hooves had been heard in the yard without, and at 9.51 the Subject had been unloaded. Yes, Mr Bowell assured the surgeon, these times were exact, Mr Bowell’s timepiece being an instrument of great precision. It had been passed down from his grandfather to his father, both highly punctilious men, as was the present Mr Bowell.

&nb
sp; Atherton frowned. The corpse cut down at 9.02, and in the cart by 9.04. Then another forty-five minutes before its arrival here, not half a mile away?

  “Teeming humanity, Mr Atherton. The welter of the living. The cart must negotiate the crowd as it leaves the Event.”

  The undertaker gave a sigh, expressive of the ultimate futility of all mortal endeavour. His was a gaunt face with a blunt jaw and high cheek-bones, curiously reminiscent of a coffin. One wondered if he was born that way, or whether this was related to the phenomenon — well-known, though not Scientifically authenticated — by which owners came to resemble their dogs.

  “Does Mr Atherton wish to view the Subject?”

  He did, though he misliked those forty-five minutes. The delay would make no difference in the present case, since he intended no procedure upon this particular corpse beyond dissection — the customary carving-up in the reeking, shrieking charnel house at St Thomas’s Hospital. But there were other procedures — there was One, in particular — for which he was gathering data and laying his plans. And forty-five minutes could well pose an obstacle, should he attempt it upon a corpse from the Newgate gallows.

  “I will send my man round this evening to collect it,” he said. “Keep it here for me ’til then.”

  The undertaker inclined his coffin-shaped head. This was no trouble; and even if it were, trouble would be gladly taken on Mr Atherton’s behalf. Mr Atherton had always been kind, very generous indeed. There was a twitching of the cheeks, followed by a painstaking elevation of the corners of the mouth, as though Mr Bowell’s smile were an outcome achieved via levers and pulleys.

  “And how is the boy?” asked Atherton.

  The smile creaked into an expression of regret.