by Ian Weir
At length I was trundled to London on a wagon, and deposited at the Foundling Hospital, where I remained for the next ten years. They dressed us in uniforms and taught us to read from the Bible — taught the boys, at any rate. They taught odds and ends of skills as well, though nothing very ambitious. The girls would aspire to domestic service, it was supposed, while the lads would mainly end in the Infantry or Navy. A foundling might serve for fodder just as well as the next young man.
At fourteen years, the foundlings were apprenticed out to employers. I caught the eye of a chimbley sweep, as you might expect.
“Is he honest and reliable?” the sweep demanded of the warders who flanked me, one on either side.
Oh yes, they assured him, lying through their ivories. Yes, this was the very lad for slithering up his flues.
“I will do my utmost, sir,” I vowed, my smile as earnest as God’s promise of salvation. “I will not let you down.”
I went off with him that same afternoon. The following morning he turned his back for a moment, and looked round again to see a scarecrow receding at speed: small, and growing smaller by the second.
I joined the Army some months later. I’d been making my way towards Kent, with notions of finding my old wet-nurse — I had it in mind that she might know something of my mother, who had never turned up at Lamb’s Conduit Fields to reclaim me, as mothers sometimes did. How exactly I thought I might find my old nurse remains a mystery to me, considering as I had nothing to offer up but a description of one epic breast. That plus the chicken, which was assuredly dead by now. In any event I got myself off course, and ended up in Southampton instead, where I smiled my way into employment as a pot-boy at the Spyglass Tavern.
It was a boozing-ken near the docks, catering to sailors and sailors’ whores. One night a recruiting party from the Ninety-Fifth Rifles came in, and as I cleared tables the Sergeant took to me remarkable: a red-faced man with a roaring laugh and magnificent sidewhiskers. They were sailing to Spain with the morning tide, and he was damned if he could see why Your Wery Umble should not come with them. He stood me drinks, and clapped me on the back, and exclaimed what a dashing figure I should cut in a bright red coat. One of his fellows stripped his off and put it on me to prove the point. The sleeves were half again as long as my arms, and the hem trailed down below my knees, but Recruiting Sergeant Sidewhiskers swore that this was no obstacle; we’d find a tailor and have it taken in, and requisition a half-sized musket. Until it arrived I should serve as a drummer, leading Tom Lobster into battle. Men would cry huzzah, he predicted, and girls would fall right over backwards with their skirts up over their heads.
In fact they were not a recruiting party at all. My new friend was mere Infantryman Sidewhiskers, who found the notion of Your Wery Umble in uniform wondrous comical — and I was such a flat that I did not see it. Still, how much could you expect from a boy who would set off from London to Kent in quest of a gigantic titty, and end up in Southampton instead? So I found myself lurching awake on a troop-ship in the middle of the Channel, with a pounding nob and last night’s libations on my shirt. I spent the rest of the journey spewing into a bucket, and I have never seen a gratefuller sight than the Spanish coast as it loomed through a bank of fog.
The ship dropped anchor and they rowed us ashore, and I was staggering onto the sanctuary of solid ground when behind me I heard the sounds of consternation. A sodger had taken a fall while disembarking — so I discovered in the hubbub that grew as they ferried him ashore. His fellows clustered round and shouts went up for assistance. Finding a stretcher they carried him into a dockside tavern, sweeping pots from a long wooden table, after which the press parted and voices exclaimed that the surgeon had arrived.
He came through them like a man striding into a howling wind. Bent forward, arms pistoning, head outthrust like a snapping turtle’s. Expression like a snapping turtle’s too, and a first glance told him that the leg was badly broken.
“You, there,” he barked. “Take your thumb from out your arse, and be useful.”
I had wormed my way through for a closer look — a bad habit of mine. Cats, and curiosity. But surely he wasn’t barking at me?
“Yes, you! Run and fetch my tools. Tell them Mr Comrie commands it.”
The instruments were still aboard ship, he said. That meant commandeering a boat — “Surgeon’s orders, from Mr Comrie!” — and being rowed back out, to be hoisted aboard like a rat that had unsuccessfully deserted. But I liked saying “Surgeon’s orders.” It’s a phrase, I discovered, as will puff a lad’s chest. So I did as I’d been bid, making my way back to the ship and following a grumbling subaltern down a ladder.
Mr Comrie had shared a small cabin with three field officers. His kit was stowed underneath a berth, along with a flat rectangular metal box, considerably scuffed and dented. I opened it, just to be sure, and there they were — gleaming back at me.
With luck, you’ve never seen a surgeon’s tools. Ranks of them, laid out each in its place, with military precision. Most of them I could scarcely guess at, though I was to find out soon enough what each one did. There were needles and bone-handled amputation knives, two smaller ones and one long wickedly curving blade such as an Arabian pirate might clench in his teeth as he boarded your ship in a penny-blood tale. Forceps and tweezers and surgical hooks, and a long slender probe for musket balls, and a cranial drill and a sleek finger-saw. There were three separate bonesaws besides, the largest like a hacksaw with a detachable blade. You knew they were bonesaws just by looking; wedged amongst them was a sharpening stone. Sharpness of the blade was a constant issue in battlefield surgery — so I was soon to learn. If you’re going to have a limb removed, try to be first up. After an hour or two, blades will start to bind as a saw will do in green wood.
I swear that they really did gleam, in the dim light that filtered through a porthole. I looked up to find the subaltern eyeing me slantways. You could see what he was thinking, of course. A box of precision-made tools, in the clutches of a shifty little chancer like Your Wery Umble.
“Got any idea what them things is worth?” he asked narrowly.
And yes, it had crossed my mind: close the box, flash the smile, and hotfoot straight to the nearest pawn-shop. But curiosity won out that afternoon — I won’t call it virtue — and I did as I’d been commissioned. Clutching the box under my arm, I carried it back like a catamite bearing ritual knives to the priest who waited, bare-armed, at the sacrificial altar. Or no, not a catamite — wrong word — I looked it up just now, in Sam Johnson’s dictionary. I believe I intended acolyte instead.
The crowd at the tavern had grown even larger, and in the midst of it Mr Comrie waited impatiently. “Thaire you are! Put them on the bench — beside me, close to hand.”
The stricken man lay on the table, raising himself on one elbow and clamouring for another dram of pale before they set the bone. I saw with a start that it was Sidewhiskers. Mr Comrie ignored him.
“You, you, you, and you,” he said, jabbing a finger at four strapping sodgers. “Hold him down.”
They exchanged looks of alarm, but did as they were bid.
“Knife,” he said to me.
“Knife?” cried Sidewhiskers, as realization dawned.
“Best to do it now,” the surgeon told him. “Straightaway, while you’re still in mettle. More chance of survival. The agony is diminished.”
“You’re not going to have my leg off — just set the thing!”
“Won’t heal. Fester and rot, gangrene next. Dead inside a week, shrieking.”
“Look here,” someone was saying. “It’s his damned trotter. His decision.”
Apparently it wasn’t. “Knife,” Mr Comrie barked to me, again. “No, the other — with the curving blade.”
The Arabian pirate’s knife. It was used — I was about to discover — to slice through skin and muscle. Many surgeons still employed a technique known as the Master’s Round: one sweeping circular cut. Mr Comrie insisted on
carving a “V” instead, leaving longer skin flaps to suture together afterwards, over the stump. Much less pain, and a better chance of healing without rot.
“Hold him fast,” he said to the four strapping sodgers, who now looked as chalky as Sidewhiskers.
“No!” wailed the stricken man.
“Two minutes, that’s all. Two minutes out of a lifetime.”
So it was. He sliced through to the bone, clean as carving the Sunday joint, and barked for the largest bonesaw. Two minutes later was calling for needle and thread. And Your Wery Umble, who had spewed all the way from Southampton, held his stomach down quite remarkable, handing over each instrument as it was barked for, and watching with fascination and something very close to awe. Truth told, I was a bit appalled with myself. You’d like to think you’d be more distressed by the suffering. But I was mainly exhilarated instead — by Mr Comrie’s dreadful skill, and the notion that I had acquitted myself admirably. Afterwards, I groped for some words of reassurance to offer to poor Sidewhiskers, who groaned horribly as they carried him off.
“Well done,” was the best I could come up with. “You’ll see — right as rain. Back on your feet before you know it.” I winced. “That is, back on your foot . . .”
Mr Comrie was wiping blood from his hands with a rag. It had soaked his shirt as well, though he didn’t seem to notice. I cleared my throat, and waited for him to offer some gruff compliment.
“You can clean the instruments,” he muttered. Forgetting, apparently, that I was not his servant.
“And what if he dies anyway?” I asked after a moment. “Holding him down like that, while he’s screaming for you to stop.”
“Then I’ll have given him a chance. That’s all a man can ask for, up against Old Bones.”
Old Bones?
“The rattling fellow. With the scythe. When they’re clean, you wrap them in cloth,” he added, “before putting them back in the box.”
I hesitated, and couldn’t resist asking the question: “So what are these worth?”
A wintry look. “The skin right off your back.”
“Right you are,” I said, and commenced wiping the blood from the tools.
Mr Comrie continued to eye me. “I saw you on the ship,” he said. “Running away from home? Or just haven’t got one?”
“I expect that would be my business.”
I said it with a careless shrug, the sort that marks out a London lad, tough as nails — and not at all the other sort of lad. The sort who’d find himself sobbing on the road to Southampton, with a sense that the world was much too large, with no one in it who’d care if he expired in the nearest ditch.
“I’m here for a sodger,” I said to him.
He honked one abrupt syllable. Apparently this was a laugh. “Sodger, eh? You’d do better to tag after me.”
“Not likely,” I snorted, deciding to take against him strongly.
“How old are you?”
“Eighteen.”
“And I’m the King of Portugal.”
“Sixteen, then.”
“Fourteen. At the outside.”
He reached for his jacket, which he’d draped over a chair. Two wide-eyed Spanish pot-boys had arrived with sawdust, to sop up the blood on the floor. They were going to need more sawdust.
“I was fourteen when my father died,” he said then, unexpectedly. “My mother died years airlier.”
He said it like that: airlier. I shrugged.
“Bring the leg,” he said.
“The what?”
He pointed. Sidewhiskers’s severed trotter was lying on a bench nearby, attracting flies.
“We bury those.”
“I don’t take orders from you.”
But it seems I did — and it turns out a leg is heavier than you might expect. I picked it up and followed him out the door.
And I followed Alec Comrie for the next five years, through the field hospitals of the Peninsula. Just a dogsbody at first, but by and by I was helping during procedures, even learning to tie off the arteries after an amputation, since it turned out I have a knack for this sort of thing — keen eyes and nimble fingers. Then I followed him back across the Channel, spewing every nautical foot of the way. Followed him to London, where I discovered a city a-swagger with the Spirit of the Age, and did my best to swagger along with it. And so we might have continued for many years, Your Wery Umble prancing in his show-pony way while Alec Comrie lanced boils in Cripplegate. Jemmy Cheese might have died — or lived — and faded from our memories, and Meg Nancarrow with him. Dionysus Atherton might have continued on his long and dark descent, with no further consequence for Wm Starling, and the great globe itself gone on turning, turning, turning through the heavens, just exactly as old Copernicus had predicted.
Then came the night of Bob Eldritch and the Wolves.
6
Bob Eldritch had fallen in with Dionysus Atherton and a dozen other members of the Wolves Club at a chop-house in Russell Street. I have this on the authority of witnesses. A barrister named Tom Sheldrake was with him, along with two or three cronies from the Inns of Court and several theatre men. The names of these others are not important, although I have them in my notes. They were given to me by one of the serving girls when I went to the chop-house some days later, intent on puzzling together the steps that Atherton had taken en route to the catastrophe that awaited at the culmination of the night.
Atherton had arrived at six o’clock. Seeing him, Tom Sheldrake exclaimed in dread.
“No!” he cried. “No, not yet — for Bob Eldritch is still alive!”
Bob summoned a pained smile, and a small obliging chuckle. He was a solicitor, a round mild man of two- or three-and-thirty, with a widow’s peak and a twisted leg that caused him to walk with an awkward hirple.
“Back, thou implacable Nemesis!” cried Tom Sheldrake to Atherton.
He had flung himself dramatically in front of his friend, as a hero might do upon the stage, being convinced — or so he affected to be — that the surgeon stalked Bob relentlessly, covetous of studying his deformity. Tom was a witty fellow. “Back, I say, for Bob Eldritch ain’t for pickling yet!”
Bob supplied another pained chuckle. By and large he accepted the terms of his friendship with Sheldrake, which involved a willingness to roll over at regular intervals with his tail wagging feebly and his legs in the air, and the tacit concession that Tom’s life was writ in dramatic letters whilst his was confined to parentheses. “Hullo, Atherton,” he added, his game smile not quite masking a secret concern that he was indeed being eyed with professional interest.
The surgeon returned the greeting, with a wink that stopped just short of reassurance. “Is there wine in London?” he asked, turning to the others. “Then fetch it forth!”
A cheer went up. Cheers often did when Atherton was present. His smile gleamed through the pall of smoke.
The chop-house was low-ceilinged and dingy, with dark stalls along one wall and greasy tabletops, and the composition of the meat pies was a subject of fierce debate. Tom Sheldrake held that the absence of rats would be an optimistic sign, except that there were no cats either. But Tom was ever the drollest of fellows — a sad dog, as his friends would put it. Besides, the dinginess suited the Wolves, for they were all rough dangerous fellows when gathered together, as wild as a band of highwaymen, however meek most of them might seem in everyday life. And the chop-house was just round the corner from Drury Lane, where Mr Edmund Kean was first tragedian. This evening he was to perform Sir Giles Overreach in Massinger’s play A New Way to Pay Old Debts. It was the role he had been performing two nights earlier, when he had come within a whisker of killing Lord Byron dead.
Just as Atherton arrived, one of the Wolves had been re-enacting the poet’s collapse.
“Lord Byron himself,” exclaimed Bob Eldritch, now. “Two nights ago, Atherton — you’ve heard?”
Atherton had, along with half of London.
“A convulsive fit,” said Bob
, “and it was Kean’s performance did it to him. The final act, as Overreach goes mad and rages . . .”
“Women dissolve into hysterics,” interrupted Tom Sheldrake, to make sure the story was properly told. “They shriek aloud, Atherton, and swoon. The other players upon the stage turn pale; Mrs Glover must support herself upon a chair; and then suddenly down goes Byron. Drops in his private box — down, sir, like a poleaxed ox — clutching his throat and foaming.”
“Perhaps not technically foaming,” ventured Bob Eldritch, stung into a small display of independent spirit, “as a medical man might understand the term . . .”
“Foaming, sir, at the mouth.”
“And whether strictly speaking a poleaxed ox could clutch its throat . . .”
“Go and find an anatomist’s shelf, Bob, and perch yourself upon it.”
“Yes, all right, but — ”
“A peer of the realm, precipitated into convulsions by the player’s art. By the greatest display of passion, sir, ever seen upon an English stage. Upon any stage, to state my personal opinion, in the world — that is what we observed, those of us who were privileged to be at Drury Lane two nights ago.”
“Although in strictest factuality” — a quiver of actual mutiny in Bob’s mutter — “I don’t recall your being there at all.”
“Gentlemen — and I include my friend Bob Eldritch in this category, despite any quibbles that he himself might advance, upon technical grounds . . .”
“Indeed, Tom, I am the one who described to you how — ”
“Gentlemen, and ladies too, for I note a few of the fair sex here present amongst us — and despite whether ‘ladies’ is the term that my friend Bob Eldritch would use, in his customary insistence upon strict speaking — for God’s sake shut your cake-hole, Bob, and raise your glass — ladies and gentlemen, luminaries and Bob, I salute Mr Edmund Kean!”
A howl of approval shook the rafters. Atherton howled along with the others, for this was of course the very raison d’être of the Wolves Club. It had been formed at the instigation of Mr Edmund Kean, and existed to howl approval of him, as the greatest actor of his generation. On nights when Kean was not performing, it went to howl opprobrium at rival tragedians, many of whom as arrogant upstart pretenders deserved to be howled right off the stage. There were thirty or forty Wolves in total — men of the theatre, in one capacity or another, along with professional men — including those such as Atherton whose participation was occasional. When fully assembled, they howled very loudly indeed.
