Will Starling

by Ian Weir

Afterwards, I was able to piece it all together.

  It had begun with the arrival of two serving men, bearing a suckling pig upon a vast pewter serving-platter. The pig was received indifferently, but the platter brought inspiration forking down upon Tom Sheldrake, who saw at once that they had the raw materials to re-create the Birth of Venus as a tableau. The platter would serve as the clam-shell, a wall-hanging as the billowing main. They required only the goddess herself, to share her charms and set loose tumbling auburn locks.

  And there was Annie Smollet, with her strawberry ringlets.

  Oh no, she said quickly. No, really. She was happy right where she was: upon the knee of Dionysus Atherton, eating sweetmeats.

  Hoots of raucous encouragement. Venus shrank back. Atherton laughed, and heaved her to her feet.

  Huzzahs. Tom Sheldrake reached to take her hand.

  “Please, no. No, really, sir — I couldn’t.”

  There was panic on her pretty face. Her tresses had tumbled, but she would not remove her clothes, no not on any account, not even with Tom Sheldrake’s cheerful assistance. Indeed, sir, no; she would not stand naked upon that platter, with countenance demure. When Sheldrake persisted, she struck at him, to the merriment of all.

  “Stop it!”

  Venus had started to cry. In another moment, Tom Sheldrake might have paused to reconsider. One of the other women might have risen to her assistance, wrapping a protective arm about her and glaring remonstrance round the room. Possibly even the Badger, who was after all Miss Smollet’s best friend.

  But in that instant, Bob Eldritch rose up.

  Over the course of the past few hours, he had been jeered at, interrupted, shouted down and pissed upon. It had been that sort of evening for Bob Eldritch; it had been that sort of life. Bob had had a bellyful, of ignominy and of claret. Now, with his keen legal mind, he had pierced to the heart of the matter and understood that Miss Smollet was being coy. Thus he lunged drunkenly at décolletage, and clutched.

  Miss Smollet gasped. Breasts spilled out in a rending of cloth — milk-white orbs, b’God, exactly as described in plain-bound tomes that Bob Eldritch had furtively purchased from certain booksellers in backstreets near Paternoster Square. She cried out — “Oh, sir, fie!” — exactly as over-dramatic virgins were wont to do within such pages, thus confirming Bob in his conviction: play-acting.

  Tom Sheldrake could scarce believe his twinklers. “Have at her, Bob, you shrivelled stallion!”

  Miss Smollet screamed as she crashed down upon the tabletop with Bob Eldritch upon her. Amidst a great bray from his fellows, he wrenched at his breeches to free that Terrible Engine with which Lord Rutalot in plain-bound pages laid siege to the Temple of Hymen.

  There was a problem, however. The breeches had bound up maliciously, to thwart the Amorous Knight. He hunched — he reared up on his knees — he uttered strangled oaths. But the treacherous breeches held fast, in such a manner as never afflicted Lord Rutalot, while the Ravishing Instrument raged within, bent in slantingdicular distress. Bob’s face turned crimson — not at all unlike the suckling pig’s. His eyes bulged, big as onions. He flapped feebly with one arm, like a gosling attempting flight, and clutched with his other hand at his throat. As the Wolves fell about themselves in mirth, Bob Eldritch uttered a soundless howl and toppled sideways.

  This was the very moment I burst in. And the tableau before me was not at all what Tom Sheldrake had intended, when he had set all of this in motion. The milling revellers; the ruins of the meal; the suckling pig on its back upon the floor, trotters to the moon, like a battlefield casualty. And Miss Smollet crouching wretchedly on the table, clutching the tatters of her dress. Squirming through the press, I wrenched my coat off and wrapped it as best I could around her shoulders.

  “What did they do?” I cried, ready to kill them all.

  The laughter was beginning to turn. Not that I even noticed, at first, with my heart so full of rage and Annie Smollet. But the hoots were giving way to consternation.

  “Christ, look at him,” the Badger was saying.

  Bob Eldritch lay on his back. His face was now a deep rich purple, and his legs were juddering.

  “Come now, Bob!” exclaimed Tom Sheldrake. “A joke is a joke, sir, but you begin to go too far.”

  But Bob had gone too far already. He had gone a considerable journey down a long dark road, and if not hallooed in desperate haste he was not coming back. I saw this clearly, despite the tumult, and the distraction of Annie Smollet weeping against me.

  Atherton saw it too. Shouting for the Wolves to stand aside, he shoved forward and knelt.

  “Bestir yourself, Bob Eldritch,” ordered Sheldrake, growing stern. “In a moment we shall lose all patience.”

  Bob Eldritch no longer moved at all. Atherton plunged his fingers down the gullet, but they would not reach. He called for a knife.

  A candied plum: this was discovered subsequently. Some wag had thrown it in a moment of inspiration, as Bob had reared with mouth agape, wrenching at his breeches.

  Atherton had the knife in his hand and cut down with the sharp point, notching a cross at the base of Bob Eldritch’s windpipe. Blood brimmed, but did not bubble. If air were passing through, there would be froth.

  “Christ A’mighty,” said the Badger. “Is he dead?”

  “No one is dead!” cried Tom Sheldrake, colour draining from his phiz. Tom was the one — of course it was — who’d thrown the candied plum. “Bob Eldritch, stir your stumps!”

  Atherton was wrapping Bob in his own coat, and shouting for more. He needed blankets. And a bellows — yes, a fireplace bellows — quickly.

  “Is he dead?” the Badger asked again.

  Atherton seized the bellows. Thrusting the tip into the notch he had cut in the windpipe, he commenced to pump, as if Bob Eldritch could be inflated like a balloon and thus lifted clear of his dreadful predicament. As if he might burgeon and swell, and then — most remarkably, and with the deft insertion of a cork — rise like Lazarus. His chest rose and fell, and rose again with Atherton’s exertions, causing the onlookers to exclaim in hopefulness. But when the bellows was removed, the wind whistled feebly from Bob Eldritch’s lungs, like a toothless man attempting a tune. He deflated very slowly, and did not move again.

  Tom Sheldrake was now as pale as a corpse himself. He shook like a linden leaf. “You are a wretch, Bob Eldritch,” he cried, “if you suppose that you can die like this! Be manful, sir, and stand up!”

  “Summon a carriage,” Atherton commanded. “Quickly!”

  A grimness had come upon the surgeon, and a gleam.

  “A carriage?” cried Tom Sheldrake. “Where are you taking him?”

  “To my house.”

  Tom Sheldrake howled. “No, sir — it is monstrous — you will not! I say you will not have Bob Eldritch upon your shelf!”

  But such was not Dionysus Atherton’s intent. Oh, no indeed. Such was not his intention at all.

  7

  Atherton had a house in Crutched Friars, near Trinity Square. Not a fashionable district — most certainly not Mayfair — but in the heart of the City, and not far from Guy’s Hospital across the river. The house itself was a good one, large and detached, with stables in the back, as befitted a Rising Man.

  Miss Phyllida Deakins lived in mortal trembling in that house.

  Phyllida Deakins was a clergyman’s daughter, and her father’s own dear darling girl. She had been a governess in her last position, a decent Christian governess in a decent Christian house, with a window that opened upon the Devonshire sunrise, and two bright angels in her care. Now she was condemned to Crutched Friars.

  To live under a surgeon’s roof was distressing enough at the best of times. Patients creeping in for consultations, and sudden shrieks from behind closed doors. Besides, dissections took place in all such houses; everyone in London knew it. And Flitty Deakins had a mortal horror of dissection. To be stretched in your nakedness upon a table for anatomists to leer at; to be
splayed and carved and severed, until you could never be Resurrected whole, and must face Eternity with missing limbs and your ribcage gaping wide. Since coming to this terrible house she had been haunted by unspeakable dreams, in which she awakened on Christmas Day to find herself laid out in place of the goose, with carollers gathered about the table and Mr Atherton standing golden and gleaming with a great silver fork in one hand and a carving knife in the other, exclaiming in ghastly bonhomie: “Now, who is for white meat, and who is for dark? And which of the children will have the Pope’s Nose!”

  Did she deserve this? Perhaps she did. Flitty Deakins admitted the possibility, as a Christian; perhaps she deserved such torment, and much more besides. Which one of us after all could claim to merit any reward, beyond God’s Judgement upon our iniquities? And Miss Deakins had sinned in such a manner as must make the seraphim cry out in despair for her poor tatter of a soul — but still she could not think that she deserved to suffer so much.

  The horror began as you stepped through the front door, where awaiting you in the entrance foyer was the articulated skeleton of a tiger. Upon the stair-post coiled the snarling skeleton of a stoat, and there was infinitely worse to come, for down the hall was Mr Atherton’s Collection Room. A human skeleton stood beside the bookcase in this room, and organs and limbs and unholy deformities floated in sealed glass jars on shelves along the wall. Amongst these were jars containing foeti: three of them, human foeti, in ascending size. These gazed with empty hopeless eyes upon Miss Deakins as she scrubbed the floor, for this was one of her duties, to get down upon her knees in this unholy place and scrub, as if any water in the world could wash it clean.

  Often in her toils she was watched by Odenkirk, Mr Atherton’s man. A creature of angles and corners, was Odenkirk; he sloped suddenly around them, coming upon you all unexpected and demanding what you’d been up to. He’d be smiling, as often as not, but it wasn’t the smile of a Christian at all, just a crooked slash across his face. He’d sprawl down onto a stool for an hour at a time, smoking his short clay pipe and staring at you while you laboured. His legs outthrust, for they were very long and thin, as was all the rest of Odenkirk, excepting his feet and his hands. They were huge, those hands; they were pig-sticking hands, for such was how Odenkirk had started off in life. He had begun by killing pigs, and he had done much worse than that since. Oh yes he had, for Flitty Deakins had made enquiries. Flitty Deakins had acquired certain Facts that would curl your hair.

  Odenkirk would like to grip you with those pig-sticking hands. Imagining this, his smile through a haze of smoke was lupine. His hair was entirely grey, which was not natural, for Odenkirk was still a young man. Abruptly he would suck on his teeth and say, out of nothing at all: “You don’t fool me, Miss Phyllida Deakins.” He would chuckle down low in his throat. “I know you. I guessed what you was the instant I laid eyes. Maybe the Man Himself don’t know, and most prob’ly he wouldn’t care if he did. But I make it my business to establish what I’m dealing with, and I’d smoked you out within a week.”

  At the end of each harrowing day, Flitty Deakins would creep by candlelight up the stairs to the bed she shared with Cook. Past the tiger and the stoat, all the way to the second landing, where a turbaned Hindoo with emerald eyes awaited. Some nights he would let her pass, but other times he would leap and sink his fangs into her shoulder. Miss Deakins was much addicted to laudanum, which encouraged hallucinations.

  But the Collection Room was real enough. So were the tiger and the stoat, and Odenkirk. And so was Flitty Deakins’s distress.

  “Two nights ago, Mr Starling. I have not slept one second since; I swear I may never sleep again. For every time I close my eyes, I see that chalk-white face rise up, and hear that dreadful shriek.”

  It was late morning as she described this to me. The two of us were huddled together at a table in the Duck and Dolphin in Leadenhall Street, in a shadowy corner furthest from the door. Miss Deakins did not set foot in such low places; she had never tasted gin. But on this one occasion she found she must accept a dram of pale — “a very small dram, Mr Starling; the very smallest they will serve, and not more than one; or two, at the uttermost limit” — on account of her nerves being shattered.

  We’d met by chance a few minutes earlier, on the street. We knew one another already, more or less; I’d seen her several times at Atherton’s house as I’d arrived on some errand or other from Mr Comrie. I had been on my way there that morning, when Miss Deakins had emerged suddenly from a pothecary’s shop: tall and spare and dressed in black, her dress hanging slack and shapeless as a cassock. Miss Deakins always dressed in black, as if in permanent mourning for her own lost happiness. She gasped as I came round the corner at her, then calmed a little in recognition.

  “Mr Starling, is it? Yes, of course — it is only my friend Mr Starling, Mr Comrie’s man. You gave me such a start.”

  Something was clearly amiss, even by Miss Deakins’s customarily agitated standards, so I lingered. Besides, a question had been gnawing ever since that terrible night above the Coal Hole, and after a moment of fragmented this-and-that, I asked it.

  “A man was taken to Crutched Friars the other night. I don’t suppose you heard what happened?”

  She went rigid. “Man?”

  “Two nights ago, a man called Eldritch. Atherton brought him in a coach, sometime after midnight. He died — leastways he must have done, cos his funeral’s set for Saturday. But I couldn’t help wondering . . . Miss Deakins? Are you quite well?”

  She had begun to quiver uncontrollably. “Oh, Mr Starling,” she said in a whisper. “Oh, that dreadful night!”

  She had heard the coach arrive outside, she said, in a clattering of hooves. Odenkirk had hurried to meet it. Miss Deakins recognized his voice, and moments later she glimpsed him through the window, holding up a lantern and gesturing as he led the way across the stableyard behind the house. In the shaft of light there were three men, lugging something limp and heavy. Mr Atherton was with them; Miss Deakins heard his voice, exhorting them to be quick. It had been close to forty minutes, she heard him saying.

  “Forty minutes?” Odenkirk’s voice, uncertain what Atherton meant.

  “Since the man has been dead. So there may yet be time.”

  “Time for . . . ?”

  “Hurry!”

  The stable bulked in the darkness beyond.

  Flitty Deakins lived in mortal trembling of that stable. No doubt it had once been used as Nature intended, for the keeping of horses. But Mr Atherton kept other creatures instead, outlandish beasts: peacocks and sloths and cassowaries, and some whose identities she could not even guess at. She could hear them, at all hours. They haunted her nightmares, and once in the creeping light of dawn she had awakened in her bed to see the face of Belial staring at her through the window. Her screams had petrified Cook, and brought Mr Atherton himself at a half-run. He had barked at her until she was able to stammer a description, at which he left again in a choler, calling to Odenkirk that the baboon had escaped. It was a serious matter, Odenkirk had later told her with a chuckle; the creature was dangerous.

  “Dangerous? I told him, Mr Starling, I said to him: ‘The creature is not dangerous. The creature is one of the four princes of Hell itself, Mr Odenkirk, drawn here by the wickedness of this house!’ Oh, Mr Starling — dear young Mr Starling — you can have no idea what that house is like.”

  In fact I knew very well what went on in surgeons’ houses, living as I did in one myself. Mr Comrie had no stable to fill with creatures for anatomical study, and he was never as active as was Atherton in transactions with the Resurrectionists. But from time to time there were the same night-time doings in Cripplegate as haunted Miss Deakins. Thumps and muffled curses on the stair; rough men in moleskins arriving in darkness, with burdens tied up in sacks, to be hidden ’til the donkey-cart should arrive to transport them to the Death House for dissection. Miss Deakins must surely have known this, but perhaps her need for a friend was so very
great — any friend at all, even if it be a surgeon’s boy she’d seen no more than five times in her life — that she invented in her head quite a different Will Starling, and poured out to him her poor heart.

  She wasn’t old. Not yet thirty, was my guess, though her hair was streaked with silver and her face was already gaunt with the habit of laudanum. But there at the Duck and Dolphin, in the writhing shadows cast by firelight, she might have been a beldame in a cave.

  “The stable,” she whispered. “I saw them take him — it — the corpse, for that’s what it was. I knew this at once, Mr Starling, as surely as I’m sitting here before you. They carried the mortal remains of a human creature.”

  There was a loft in the stable, at the top of a wooden ladder, accessible by a trapdoor that was kept padlocked and bolted. Flitty Deakins had not seen this with her eyes, as she would not set foot in that stable. But others had; there were whispers. And there was a small cracked window in the loft, behind which Miss Deakins had from time to time glimpsed movement. Now she saw dark figures moving in the light of Odenkirk’s lantern; they were laying something out upon a table.

  “I stood as one astonished, Mr Starling. A-stonied — turned to stone — in the true original meaning of that word.” She knew such things, for she had been a governess, with two bright angels in her care.

  “And where were you, Miss Deakins?”

  The question took her off balance. “In Devonshire, Mr Starling, as I have said before.”

  “I meant, where were you standing? Two nights ago, as you watched?”

  Cos I wanted to be clear in my head. Even there at the Duck and Dolphin, so near the start of it all, I had the sense that I must be clear in my head.

  “I was standing in my bedchamber, of course. I’d been wakened by the voices, and went to the window.”

  But I had a notion that the servants’ quarters at Crutched Friars faced south and east — such was my quick calculation, based on the very few times I’d been inside — and not north, towards the stable. Atherton’s surgery was at the back of the house, however, on the second floor. His surgery, where laudanum would be kept.