Will Starling

by Ian Weir

  More Wolves had drifted in after Atherton’s arrival, though they still numbered fewer than a score. But more would be waiting at the theatre, and the whole pack would descend upon Fountain Court afterwards, for tonight was to be one of those nights, on which wine would flow like the rivers of Babylon and maidens would bolt their doors in holy dread — or not, depending upon the maiden. In the meantime, those assembled throats howled so lustily that you could imagine the sound reaching the ears of Edmund Kean himself, who was currently in his dressing room, girding his loins for the evening’s performance. This would involve quantities of wine and a second set of loins, belonging to a Cyprian. A third and even a fourth set of loins might be later called into play, at the intervals between the acts. Edmund Kean was the very Avatar of the Age.

  He would certainly be at Fountain Court afterwards, along with Tom Sheldrake and Bob Eldritch and Dionysus Atherton. As fate would have it, Your Wery Umble would be there too.

  *

  I’d been to the Giltspur Street Compter that afternoon. It had been three days since the operation, and Jemmy was still alive. He was even awake, or partly so, lying in some twilight Limbo with his eyes half open. But he was ominously warm to the touch, and his breath came in shallow rasps.

  “Fever’s coming on,” said Meg.

  “I’ll tell Mr Comrie.”

  “Fuck all he can do.”

  She was right, of course.

  She had pinned her hair up and wore a different dress, a drab wool skirt of penitential grey, so presumably she had gone home at some point. But she was sitting where I had left her, at Jemmy’s side. She had dipped a bit of rag in cool water and was dabbing at his face and neck, crooning as she did something soft and tuneless and unutterably sad. She seemed to me in that moment not a lover at all, but a haggard young mother, tending to a monstrous child.

  I had come to change the dressing on Jemmy’s wound. Meg stood to let me do so, and after a moment I felt the touch of a hand on my shoulder.

  “You have a good heart,” she said awkwardly. “I didn’t like the looks of you one bit. But you been kind to us.”

  Hardly older than I was — and younger than my own mother had been, the last time she’d laid eyes on me. That was the notion that occurred to me, looking up at her, and what a curious one it was. I’d never seen my mother beyond my infancy, nor seen a likeness of her neither, though a Warder at the Founding Hospital told me once that she’d been slim and dark. “Like you,” he confided, “except normal. Small and quite pretty, as I recollect, instead of pointy and stunted.” I wondered now what expression had been on my Ma’s face as she looked down one last time on her Changeling — a frail unlovely thing, staring back — and whether she’d looked as Meg Nancarrow did at this moment, a curtain of dark hair falling across pure desolation.

  “I’ll be back tomorrow morning,” I said, and found that my voice was husky.

  *

  I returned to Cripplegate to find Mr Comrie sitting alone in his surgery, climbing down into a bottle of pale. He received the news about Jemmy as I’d expected. “The Devil am I expected to do?” he demanded. “If he’s going to live, he’ll do it. But he won’t.” Then he stood and reached scowling for his jacket.

  “Will you want me to come with you?” I asked.

  “Gah,” he said, swatting one hand as if dispersing flies.

  So while Mr Comrie stumped towards Giltspur Street, I hurried west to Drury Lane. I had it in mind to attend the play, but mainly I was hoping to see Miss Annie Smollet.

  Miss Smollet was the most bewitching actress in London. This was my personal view, and in truth it was a minority opinion, which helped explain why she currently sold flowers on the street outside the theatre. But I had been intensely in love with her for several weeks, since seeing her upon the stage at the Thespis, a ramshackle gaff in Whitechapel.

  I did this, from time to time: fell in love with an actress. But this was different.

  She aspired to act at one of the patent theatres — that is to say, at Drury Lane or Covent Garden. This led to her current station outside the great playhouse; she was hoping to meet someone — a leading actor, or a theatre manager — who might be stopped in his tracks by the loveliness of the flower girl and exclaim: “There stands my Desdemona!” No luck yet, but she remained hopeful. This, I was coming to understand, was her particular gift. Some actors have a gift for tragedy, others for comedy; Annie Smollet’s great talent was for hopefulness. Often she would pay three pennies to go in and watch the play, since much may be learned by studying. Once or twice she may also have accompanied a gentleman into a private box for twenty minutes, as young women of a certain sort were notorious for doing at the theatre, cos I fear Annie Smollet was no better than she should be. But then, how many of us are?

  She was on the corner of Russell Street as I arrived: a slender figure amidst the milling crowd, with roses in a wicker basket. A bright green dress — it set off her eyes — and red-blonde ringlets tumbling from a straw bonnet. I don’t know that you’d call her beautiful, exactly. Perhaps more pretty than beautiful; the girl who lived just down the road. But she had a way of carrying herself — as she would, wouldn’t she? An actress. And that spirit of hopefulness, shining.

  “H’lo, Miss Smollet,” I said.

  She looked over my head at first, as people did. Finding me, she was blank for just a moment, before warming into a smile of recognition.

  “You again,” she said, most amiable.

  I’d seen her here last night. On eight of the ten nights previous, in fact. I’d bought a flower each time.

  “A rose, sir?”

  “By any other name.”

  “’Scuze me?”

  “Would smell as sweet.”

  I’d been rehearsing that in my head, assuming she’d recognize the reference. She looked at me oddly.

  “Yes,” I said hastily. “A rose.”

  It had been wilted at eight o’clock this morning when she bought a bucket-full from a stall at Covent Garden, and the intervening hours had not improved its prospects. But it was a rose nonetheless, from Miss Annie Smollet. She shook it free from the basket, and was already scanning the crowd as I handed her a penny — looking for the next customer, or better yet for a theatre manager heaving into view with arms flung wide. She smelled of oranges.

  “Did I tell you that I saw you act, at the Thespis Theatre?”

  I’d told her so on eight of the past ten evenings. But I had at least half of her attention back.

  “I’m grateful you’d remember me, sir.”

  “Remember you? Miss Smollet, you are seared.”

  The odd look. “’Scuze me?”

  “Into my recollection. When I close my eyes, Miss Smollet, you are there.”

  She had to weigh this for a moment, deciding. Then she dimpled in a smile.

  “I don’t s’pose I was that good, was I?”

  “Miss Smollet, you were a radiance, glowing like the dawn.”

  Let’s be honest: it was laughable. The likes of Your Wery Umble, aspiring to Miss Smollet? She wasn’t much taller than I — this wasn’t the problem. But look at her, and then look at me: a counterfeit Rainbow with a wilted rose, and a dark phizog that was all sharp points and triangles. Still. It wasn’t completely unhandsome, that phiz. There were girls who had thought so, and a few who had even said it. And I had my smile, and I always had words, and — look at this — I’d made Miss Smollet beam.

  Her play had been a burletta of Antony and Cleopatra, which is to say Mr Shakespeare’s drama with songs and rhymes instead of spoken lines. Like the rest of the minor theatres, the Thespis was not licensed for dialogue. This was reserved by law for the two patent theatres, the fear being that spoken dialogue would incite sedition and inflame the weak-minded, and send the Pit rampaging into the night to burn down the Houses of Parliament. Annie Smollet had appeared as an Egyptian handmaiden, and had done so thrillingly, in a black wig and a dizzying gossamer gown. She wore a look of
such plaintive distress when the asp clamped onto Cleopatra that the queen was entirely redundant to the drama.

  I believed that Miss Smollet should be on the stage at Drury Lane tonight, and said so. Or at Covent Garden, playing Juliet and Rosalind.

  “Both of ’em at once?” she exclaimed, feigning to misunderstand.

  “And Cleopatra as well, all in the same play. I believe you are the one actress in London who could pull it off.”

  “Pull ’im off, more like, is wot ’ee’s angling for,” sniggered a voice beside us. “Dirty little devil.”

  Two of Miss Smollet’s friends had joined us, in paint and plumage. They were actresses as well, more or less, but in the meantime they were more reconciled than she to Cyprian endeavour. The one who’d just spoke so wittily — an arch individual with eyes like a badger’s — was actually an acquaintance of Mr Edmund Kean. So I later discovered. She had in fact known him very well for almost ten minutes during the second interval of Richard III the previous November. Right now she stood snorting with drollery.

  Miss Smollet blushed most fetchingly, and raised one hand to hide it. I expect her aim was to cover her mouth, cos I fear Miss Smollet’s teeth were not quite everything you’d hope, seen up close. But I only loved her more for her imperfections.

  The Badger and her chum were already moving away. Miss Smollet went with them, and never looked back.

  Tucking the rose into my buttonhole, I wormed my way into the crowd outside the entrance to the Pit, where they’d been lining up to see Mr Edmund Kean — by the hundreds, and then the thousands — since four o’clock.

  The theatre was an enchanted palace, blazing with light, with room for three thousand, all crammed together in the smoke from the oil lights and the candelabras. The din was prodigious and remained so right through the pantomime and the musical interlude, cos it was always that way at the theatre. A cracking good play — or a dunghill play, for that matter, or even a play that was middling putrid — provided much to talk about. Besides, half the audience never came for the play at all. They were much more interested in seeing friends, or being seen, or securing a bottle of claret and transacting a brisk encounter at the back of a box with one of the scores of Cyprians who attended each night, drawn from the dozens of brothels in the district.

  For my threepenny admission, I managed to struggle my way to the back of the passage that surrounds the Pit, where I was wedged in so tight that I could lift my stampers right off the floor. For an extra three-and-sixpence I could have gone up to the boxes — providing I had such blunt in my pocket, which I didn’t, and assuming I could have extricated myself from the crush, which was impossible. So I tried my best to breathe, and glimpsed from time to time through the wall of reeking humanity a flicker of movement upon the stage.

  To watch Kean act was like reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning. That’s what someone had said — Coleridge, I think — and I wish I could tell you whether I agreed. I’d seen Kean twice before, and it was always the same: I had an impression of a diminutive dark figure, much smaller than you’d expect, flinging himself herk-a-jerk about the stage. Over the din I heard a voice unexpectedly hoarse, not at all like the sonorous instrument that Philip Kemble possessed, and all tragedians were expected to emulate. But that is all I can relate. No fits amongst the audience. No poets clutching at their throats like poleaxed oxen, or otherwise. I suppose you can’t have everything in a play.

  I stayed for the comic afterpiece, after which I should by rights have gone home to Cripplegate. But I’d overheard something the Badger said earlier, as she’d swept Annie Smollet away.

  “We’re invited,” she had said. “All of us, after the play.”

  “Invited where?” asked Annie.

  “The Coal Hole, my dove. Where else would they go?”

  “You mean, the Wolves?”

  “Of course!”

  The Coal Hole was a song-and-supper room, the likes of which had begun to sprout like mushrooms about London. This one lay below the Strand in Fountain Court, at the foot of a narrow passage that reeked equally of yeast and urine. A cellar, low-ceilinged and heavy-beamed, with a horseshoe bar looming yonder through a haze of smoke and a raised platform where several nights a week entertainments were offered up. There was also a private room upstairs, where a number of the Wolves had assembled already, for this was where their feast was to be held. Lupine voices rose in raucous laughter.

  I found myself a perch against the wall downstairs, not far from the door, where I sat with a jar of the Genuine Stunning. A trio of rough flash-talking men in a nook nearby spoke in dark mutters of a mate who’d done the out-and-out upon a lagger by the docks, and who now awaited crapping in the Start. They broke off briefly as the entertainment resumed, in the form of a florid tenor in a battered hat who warbled most piteously of a Ratcatcher’s Daughter who yearned to wed her sweetheart and — as these things go — drowned in the Thames on the morning of the nuptials. There was no sign of Miss Smollet or the Badger — and now that I was here, what precisely had I been thinking? They’d go upstairs to the private room, if they came at all. And imagine the likes of Your Wery Umble, with sinking heart and wilted rose in buttonhole, being asked to join them.

  As the Ratcatcher’s Daughter was being fished out of the river, I toyed with proposing a game of chance to my flash-talking neighbours — the ones whose friend had murdered a sailor, and now waited in Newgate Prison to be hanged. But on the whole, I thought not. I had all but decided to give it up and leave, when a commotion began outside. Shouts in the passageway, and a squawk of protest, then billowing shrieks of laughter. The door burst open and a knot of revellers spilled in — rudely interrupting the heartbroken beau of the poor drowned Ratcatcher’s Daughter, who was just about to cut his throat for grief.

  In their midst was a dark puny man, dishevelled by drink, with a cawing Cyprian on either arm. He gave a lurch and steadied. Heads swivelled, and as they did he gained a foot in height. I do not make this up. He grew before our very eyes. His own were black and — I swear to God — they flashed. The molecules about him began to dance.

  “Humani nihil a me alienum puto,” he exclaimed, quoting Terence — yes, I looked it up. “Nothing human is alien to me!”

  He lurched again, and grew pale. Turned regally towards me. Bent over, with an acrobat’s grace. And shot the cat upon my boots.

  Mr Edmund Kean, in the flesh.

  Upon the great man’s either arm were the Badger and her friend; Tom Sheldrake and Bob Eldritch trailed. Tom was in conniptions of laughter, as Bob clung to the rictus of a smile and contemplated one urine-soggy leg.

  It seemed they had stopped at several public houses en route from Drury Lane, and Kean had just finished pissing in the passageway outside. In this he’d been assisted by the Badger, who held the pizzle. She had in fact been practising penmanship by writing her name on the wall, when her hand had inexplicably slipped, directing the stream at Bob Eldritch instead. Now here stood Bob on his good leg, shaking the other like a cat that has stepped in something. And now the final member of this merry band came through the door.

  Mr Dionysus Atherton. And on his arm was Annie Smollet, laughing most prettily at something he’d said, and remembering an instant too late to cover her mouth. She didn’t even see me as they swept past — stooped down as I was, even shorter than usual, wiping the vomit from my boots with straw from the floor. Hessian boots, they were, quite stylish. I was singularly proud of those boots.

  Atherton saw me, though, and recognized me at once. A swift spasming of visceral disgust, the look that crossed his face whenever he saw Your Wery Umble. Ever since the first shock of seeing me on his doorstep, one autumn evening more than half a year previous. Then he continued on his way, mounting the stairs with Miss Annie Smollet clinging to his arm.

  The room above the Coal Hole was long and rectangular, with tapestries upon the walls. On nights when the Wolves Club gathered, it blazed with light from smoking lamps like Aladdi
n’s Cave. There might be sixty men, or even more, all packed round a table that groaned with serving plates and glittered with bottles and decanters. There were women too, of course, sitting upon laps to be finger-fed sweetmeats, or coaxed beneath the groaning board, or in fact taken right there on top of it, to do some groaning of their own amidst loud huzzahs and joyful cries of manly exhortation. The Wolves were in addition to their theatre-going a philanthropical organization; they took up subscriptions for the deserving poor, and distributed geese at Christmas. But God’s great swinging bollocks — as Mr Comrie would say — they did know how to howl.

  An hour had passed, and I remained below in the tavern. Entertainment was now provided by a man who juggled while singing bawdy songs. I had meanwhile in the corner produced my three little cups — done so in a spirit of reckless dejection, and never mind the dictates of sense and logic, cos Your Wery Umble was exactly that sort of fool. “That’s it, sir; try again, and sure you’ll smoke it this time; oh, bad luck!” But above, a clamour of revelry had been building, hoots and chanting. And before I quite had time to get myself killed, I heard Miss Annie Smollet scream.

  I was on my feet and running up the stairs. As I burst into the room, there were Wolves and women milling and exclaiming. Through the rout of bodies I glimpsed the tabletop, strewn with food and shards of pottery, and there in the midst of it — slender and sobbing and clutching her torn green dress — was the object of my adoration.