by Ian Weir
“’Ere, you can’t just barge . . .”
“Let go of me!”
A hammering of footsteps, and the woman came round the corner of the stair. Wiry and slight, her hair hanging wild. Great dark eyes in a narrow face. Too sharp-featured to be pretty, but almost beautiful nonetheless, in the way that a small fierce thing can have beauty. She was ragged from running, and her breath came in tearing gulps.
“They’ve done for him — they’ve stove in his head! God rot them in Hell — God rot you too — it’s all your doing!”
“My doing?” Mr Comrie stepped out of the surgery, perplexed.
“Your fault — his — the other one — Atherton! The bastard lot of you!”
“If you won’t make sense, I can’t help you. Who are you, woman, and what has happened?”
“Foul filthy murder has happened! They’ve killed my Jemmy!”
Meg Nancarrow cursed wildly, and burst into tears.
4
They’d lugged Jemmy Cheese to the Giltspur Street Compter. It had taken Meg all morning to find that out, after learning from Little Hollis what had happened at the graveyard. Rushing to Giltspur Street she had found him alive but very bad indeed, so bad it could hardly be worse. She’d dashed to St Bart’s to fetch a surgeon, but none seemed inclined to come running, just to save the life of a Resurrection Man. Somebody gave her Mr Comrie’s name, and his address at Cripplegate.
“Aye,” he grunted. “I’ll come.”
“Then hurry, damn you!”
He reached for his jacket — the one he wore for going out, with fewer stains. I followed with the pocket set of instruments, wrapped in leather, that we took with us on calls.
Giltspur Street Compter is at the east end of St Sepulchre’s, just north of Newgate and no more than a stone’s throw from the Fortune of War, where Jemmy’s tribulations had begun. The Compter mainly held wretches arrested for Debt, but night charges were often brought in as well, since the Watch-houses were not permitted to retain prisoners. It was the Watch as had brought Jemmy here.
They’d been drawn by the hullabaloo in the graveyard — so Meg Nancarrow had pieced together. The coachman’s friends had been set to hang him, as was done to that Resurrectionist in Dublin, except they thought they’d beaten him to death already. “Hang him anyway!” someone cried. But others weren’t so certain, and two or three began to ask themselves whether killing a man was precisely what they’d had in mind, and whether the Law might not have something to say on the subject. Such was the state of affairs when two elderly Charleys creaked up with their bull’s-eyes and their long staves, exclaiming “here-now-here-now” and “God’s teeth!” As the pack began to scatter, the Watchmen commandeered the donkey-cart of an early-rising costermonger, and trundled Jemmy Cheese to Giltspur Street.
“They reckoned he’d be dead, the bastards.” Meg spoke in ragged bursts as we hastened. “Dead and cold by the time they arrived, and they could take him to St Bart’s and sell him to the surgeons.” A look of incandescent accusation. “Sell him to the likes of you.”
Mr Comrie took this sort of thing in stride, having been cursed by shrieking Lobsters halfway across Southern Europe. By 187 of them in a single day, after Salamanca. But I tended to take things more personal, on his behalf.
“The likes of him,” I said, “is haring across the Metropolis to help you.”
“I know that!”
She was so full of distress that she had to put it somewhere, so she’d grown furious instead. Here was my golden opportunity to leave well enough alone, and naturally I passed it up.
“Haring across the Metropolis,” I repeated, deciding I liked the sound. I have a weakness for the mellifluous syllable, and a magpie’s eye for shiny words such as mellifluous, which I’d found just the other night in Sam Johnson’s dictionary. “And what’s he likely to be paid for all his trouble?”
“Payment!” cried Meg. “Now we come to it, do we?”
“No one’s consairned with payment,” said Mr Comrie.
But he was beginning to fluster, cos she’d stopped right there in front of him. In the middle of Long Lane, with cows bawling in Smithfield Market beyond, and passers-by slowing to snicker and stare at the picture we made. A soiled dove shouting at a discomfited Scotch surgeon, and young Wm Starling, Esq., standing by, wishing he’d put a stocking in it.
“Here and now? On my knees in a pile of horse-shit? Then let’s be getting on with it!”
Another man would have reacted differently. Dionysus Atherton would have pointed out which pile. But Mr Comrie just turned beetroot-red.
“Here, now,” he said. “Your fellow needs me.”
He hurried on, and I fell in behind him. Meg Nancarrow followed after, with a last look round at the faces snickering back at her. Defying them to find her filthy and ridiculous. As if she’d commit them to memory, every one, and come back at her leisure to slit each throat.
“God’s swinging bollocks,” Mr Comrie said to me, under his breath. He had the expression that soldiers in battle will wear, when they see a leg cartwheeling past six foot above the ground. “This one’s a going consairn.”
*
They were holding Jemmy Cheese in a small stone cell, with a cot and a wooden bucket. It was the anteroom to a larger chamber, where half a dozen others were lodged. Jemmy lay on his back, bloated with bruising and caked in blood; one side of his head was swollen grotesquely and his eyes were sightless slits. Some tragic troll, I thought, fallen headlong from a mountaintop.
“Is there hope?” asked Meg Nancarrow.
She hovered in the doorway, clutching her shawl. Her voice was low and husky, when she wasn’t using it to hit you with.
Mr Comrie did not reply. Having scanned the long bones for obvious breaks, he probed the skull beneath the matted hair. His fingers were long and dextrous — remarkable fingers to serve at the extremity of such stubby arms, for the surgeon was otherwise a man of bulges and bandy legs. A man for the wrestling competition at a country fair, or just for digging stones out of fields.
“No broken limbs,” he said at length. “But. Depressed fracture of the skull.”
“What will you do?” Meg asked.
“Come back tomorrow. See if he survives the night.”
“And then?”
“See what may be done.”
“What can I do for him?”
“Wash him.”
“Like a corpse?”
“He’s breathing. Keep him warm.”
“Is there hope?” she asked again.
He looked at her squarely. “A little. How much do you need?”
She looked back at him for the longest moment. Then she nodded.
In the morning, Jemmy Cheese lay pale as death. But he was breathing.
“He’s strong,” said Meg. She’d sat at his side all night; so the Turnkey told us as we arrived. “He’s stronger than you could believe.”
Someone else was here as well. A spindly man of one- or two-and-thirty, bespectacled and balding, with pursed little lips and womanly hands, scarce taller than Your Wery Umble himself. Filthy and fastidious in an old brown coat and a bright red weskit.
“Ecce homo,” said Edward Cheshire, also known as Uncle Cheese. “Behold my brother, Mr Comrie. Brought low, and sinking steadily. Oh dear, oh dear, and vhat am I to do?”
He shook his head and looked away, like a sorrowful species of robin. The perfect round lenses of his spectacles caught the light from the one small window, and flashed.
“Go dig your own cadavers, Ned,” said Meg. “Collect your own outstanding debts, from them you bleeds white.”
He pretended he hadn’t heard. “Media vita in mortus sumus,” he said. “In the midst of our lives we die.”
So it meant indeed, as I was later to discover when I looked it up. Or so at least it almost meant, allowing for certain imperfections in the syntax. And who would twist a man upon the rack of his declensions, at such a time?
I knew of Uncle Ch
eese, of course, as did Mr Comrie. Every surgeon in London knew of Edward Cheshire. He kept a pawn-shop in a lane behind Old Street, where he had been at work at the counter an hour previous when Little Hollis arrived with the dire news about his brother. He had come directly, locking the shop and cursing in Latin at a brandy-soaked man who was arriving with his children’s warm jackets to pawn, now that spring had come. Most of Cheese’s customers were of this ilk, although his most lucrative traffic was in goods as never graced a window: Things. Large, Small, and Foetus. He did a brisk sideline in teeth, as did others in the Resurrection trade, harvesting them for sale to dentists. Many of the dentures in London owed their provenance to Edward Cheshire, who was an unfailing source of fine fresh teeth at a reasonable price, often with bits of gum still sticking. He had another line of business as well, lending money to those as found themselves caught short. Medical students at the Borough Hospitals would turn to him in times of need, as did any number of others — gamblers and indigents, widows and wastrels, honest mechanics down on their luck — including one or two imprisoned here at Giltspur Street, for debt. Uncle Cheese would meet their needs, at interest compounded weekly. If they failed in their payments, he would send his brother to speak to them.
His brother, who lay stretched out before him. You could see the thought writ clear in Edward Cheshire’s face: a Metropolis full of chisellers, and here lay Jemmy Cheese in ruins.
“Oh, dear,” he said. “Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.”
Mr Comrie had decided. “I will operate to relieve pressure on the brain.”
He was already rolling up his sleeves. I had lugged the full kit of instruments this morning, against such an eventuality. Mr Comrie kept these in a metal box from Army days.
“A half-crown,” he said to Edward Cheshire. “Before I begin. Without it I can’t help your brother.”
Words will not describe Ned Cheshire’s grievance: that a surgeon would extort so brazenly.
“A man’s life — ” he began.
“Give the man,” said Meg, “his coin.”
Uncle Cheese drew himself to his full height, such as it was.
“Can you guarantee the operation will succeed?”
“Of course not,” Mr Comrie said.
“And if he lives, that he will ever be the same?”
“No.”
“Vell, then.”
Uncle Cheese was a man of business, and grew brisk as he laid out his terms. A sixpence in advance, and a further sixpence should Jemmy survive the procedure. A third sixpence on such a day as Jemmy should sit up and point both eyes in the same direction, without drooling. And the final six pennies should Jemmy recover completely, able to perform all the functions necessary to a full and happy life. “Such as speaking in full sentences,” said Uncle Cheese, “and controlling his bowels, and collecting outstanding sums from — ”
“Give the man,” said Meg, “his fucking coin.”
Her voice was choked, but not with distress. Anger, so intense that it needed all her strength to hold it in. It was remarkable to see, that anger. Smouldering right down in the marrow, like a fire banked low. If she breathed too deeply, it would kindle. If she gave it oxygen it would surge, lighting her great dark eyes from within. She would rage into conflagration, blistering the stone walls and igniting the beams. She would burst from the Giltspur Street Compter and shriek across the rooftops of London, dancing them into flame.
Ned Cheshire fished out a half-crown. He gave it to Mr Comrie, who handed it to me.
“Find a blacksmith. Run.”
When I returned the one side of Jemmy’s head had been shaved, and his cot had been moved to the larger cell, where the light was better. Mr Comrie reached for his trephine, which was of sturdy Belgian make. Jemmy remained mercifully unconscious, and partway through the proceedings the Turnkey joined him, turning pale and dropping with a thud. Guards and prisoners had gathered like geese in the doorway to watch, for a chirurgical procedure was a rare treat, almost as good as a hanging — even better, in a way, considering as the conclusion wasn’t so foregone.
The drilling took several minutes. A T-shaped handle was turned clockwise, once the drill-blade was placed against the skull. The blade was conical, the width of a shilling at the top, with depth-guards to stop it from delving too deep and damaging the brain. It was tricky, though — skulls come in varying thicknesses, and it’s ever so easy to drill just that fraction too far. Once the hole had been drilled, relieving the pressure, Mr Comrie raised the depressed edges of the fracture, fishing out with his forceps stray slivers of bone, shockingly white against a brain as pink as blossoms. Then he screwed into place the coin — hammered wafer-flat by a blacksmith I’d found in Paternoster Lane — and sewed the flaps of scalp back over. A wonder with needle and thread, was Mr Comrie; he sewed like a seamstress.
Finally the wound was dressed and wrapped. Jemmy Cheese lay in waxen pallor.
“If he awakens, he’ll want water,” Mr Comrie said, straightening. “Don’t give him too much.”
“A half-a-crown,” said Edward Cheshire. “In his head.”
I swear he was mentally marking the spot, with an eye to retrieving it should his brother hop the twig. But of course the coin had been ruined. With a muttered execration, he left the room.
Mr Comrie left as well, and the spectators dispersed, leaving me alone with Meg and Jemmy Cheese. She sat still and silent by the cot, in slanting light from the window. Shadows haggarded her face, and I realized that she was younger than I had been supposing. She was not much older than I was myself: nineteen years. I can tell you that with certainty, since they kept records at the Foundling Hospital — though I couldn’t tell you who my father might have been, or where my mother went after she bundled me up and left, or what name I had been born with.
“I’ll come back this evening,” I said, gathering up the instruments. “I’ll bring a healing essence — you can use it when you change his dressing.”
My organ of compassion had been stirred. I am also a shameless little show pony, as you have surely begun to guess, and I proceeded to trot out my knowledge of physick.
“It is rectified spirits of wine, with tincture of lavender and oil of origanum. Very efficacious” — another word magpied from Sam Johnson — “and stimulatorious of the healing processes. I will mix it for you beforehand, missus, having a modest expertise in the pothecary line, picked up along the way.”
Meg Nancarrow had forgotten I ever existed. Her dark hair had fallen forward, curtaining her face.
I tried again. “He’ll awaken. You’ll see. I’ve seen men brought back who were ten times further gone — seen it often and again, on the Peninsula with Wellington. We saved men with musket balls in their brainpan. ‘We’ meaning Mr Comrie,” I added, “myself being strictly speaking only his assistant. However valuable I may have proved, as he kindly said on several occasions. Being kind, Mr Comrie. Very kind indeed, despite appearances.”
I once saw a hot-air balloon rising up from Vauxhall Gardens, as a breathless crowd looked on. It began with great promise, but sprang a leak as it cleared the trees and commenced losing altitude almost immediately. After sagging onward for a bit, it gave up and subsided into a gorse thicket, where it ended up sideways and tangled, with aeronauts limping and plucking out thistles. I had that feeling now.
Meg was speaking. “I won’t let the surgeons have you, Jemmy.” She spoke very low, dabbing his forehead with a bit of rag she’d moistened in rainwater. “They won’t have you, if you die. I’ll carry you on my back to the sea, if that’s what it takes. I’ll build a fire on the shore, and burn you. That’s my promise to you, my love. And dogs can piss on the ashes, if you won’t come back to me. I’ll piss on them myself, I swear to Christ. I’ll hike my skirts and straddle what’s left, if you go and die on me, you bastard. Please Jemmy, God damn you, don’t you go away.”
5
The London Foundling Hospital was built by a philanthropical sea-captain named Thomas Cor
am, on the site of an old cricket ground at Lamb’s Conduit Fields. It squatted — and still squats today — at the end of a sweeping drive on the north side of Guilford Street, where the jumble of the Metropolis begins to peter into fields and open spaces. Behind a sweeping semicircular wall with iron gates are kept the little wages of sin, for such is the governing notion of the place. The foundlings gathered into Thomas Coram’s arms are the offspring of virtuous women who have Fallen. There are two plain brick buildings and a chapel, fronting onto an open courtyard; the west wing houses the little male wages, and the east is for wages of the female persuasion.
Before accepting an infant, the Governors required evidence that the mother had previously been of good character, to which she might — God willing — be expected to return, once her little burden had been lifted. They also required evidence of the father’s desertion. If there was satisfaction on both counts, then the fortunate mother could trudge away, leaving her infant to the permanent guardianship of the institution, in token of which the Governors would choose a new name to bestow. Inspiration had long since failed by the time Your Wery Umble arrived at the iron gates — or else it flared up in spurts of perverse whimsicality — the upshot being that the companions of Will Starling’s childhood included Admirall Bembow and Richard Shovel, not to mention Edward Plantagenet and a gamine named Female Child, whom I loved to distraction for several years without the slightest glimmer of hope or acknowledgement.
Foundlings did not actually spend their earliest years at the hospital. Once accepted, they were farmed out to wet-nurses in Kent, where I lived ’til I was four. I have snippets of recollection from those days, but nothing adding up to a whole: a white cloud in a blue sky, the chill of a hard-packed dirt floor against my naked arse, the baleful ogle of a monstrous chicken. Most of all I recollect — or think I do — a red hand hoisting a vast white blue-veined breast. I couldn’t tell you much about its owner, except that she must have been kind enough to the nippers in her care. After all, here I am today.
