Will Starling

by Ian Weir

“Be careful, Dionysus.”

  “I am always careful.”

  “There are limits to Science. This experimentation with the dead — it does not do. Nor does the utterance of threats.” He had turned to Odenkirk, glowering up at him with a look so black that it made the much bigger man blink. “This boy is under my pairsonal protection. D’you understand? Touch him and you answer to me.”

  Odenkirk seemed about to sneer a reply, and then found himself shuffling his feet instead, and scowling abashed into the middle-distance. And Wm Starling? He felt his heart rising in proud fierce happiness, and proceeded to spoil it by opening his gob.

  “He sat up on the table,” I blurted, “and turned his head.”

  All three of them swivelled.

  “The dead man — Bob Eldritch. He turned his face and looked out of the window.”

  Atherton stared down from out of the sun. He had seen me amongst the confusion at the Coal Hole two nights earlier, enfolding a sobbing Miss Smollet in my arms as he disputed with Old Bones for possession of Bob Eldritch. Now he took my measure.

  “Miss Deakins said that, did she?”

  “Leave Miss Deakins out of it.”

  But of course I had dragged her in by this point, hadn’t I? Dragged her quaking and weeping into the very midst of it.

  “Poor Miss Deakins,” said Atherton. “To see such sights — and at twenty paces on a moonless night.”

  “Then he screamed.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Bob Eldritch. He opened his mouth and shrieked.”

  There was stillness for a moment then. Atherton had shifted half a step to one side, enough to place himself directly in front of the sun. Half blinded by it, I seemed to see him as dazzling as Phoebus, and as terrible. I raised one arm to shield against the glare, and he smiled at me.

  “Never form the habit of laudanum, boy. God knows what phantasms will haunt your nights.” His smile was thin and gleaming as a bonesaw. “And if you come to visit us at Crutched Friars, you will almost certainly hear the peacock. It shrieks like a soul in torment.”

  *

  That night the horse came to me again, on a twilit battlefield. Always the same horse, lurching out of the darkness and the mist, where I am lost on a vast plain of dead and dying men. It is a fine grey horse, and as it turns towards me I see that the bottom half of its head is gone, carried away by a cannonball. The eyes remain, huge and wild and beseeching, and as they fix upon me I understand that the poor creature is seeing in me its last hope of salvation. I cry out at this in pure despair.

  “William?”

  A shadow bulked above me. Mr Comrie stood in the doorway, holding a candle.

  “A dream, lad. You’ve had a dream. That’s all.”

  I was on the pallet in my attic room at Cripplegate. Clutching the blanket, sitting drenched and rigid and fighting to claw a breath into my lungs. I discovered to my shame that I was weeping.

  “Oh, now,” Mr Comrie muttered. “No, no. No call for it.”

  A wooden scrape as he reached for the chair. Drawing it towards him, he sat himself awkwardly beside me, knobbly and lumpen in his nightshirt. After a moment, there was the weight of a hand upon my shoulder.

  “Not your fault,” he said. “You’ve been to the wars.”

  As had half the men in London, or so it sometimes seemed. You’d see them every day: old sodgers, sitting hollow-eyed in public houses, staring ten miles off and starting at shadows.

  Mr Comrie shifted uncomfortably. Emotion never failed to make him squirm — he had no notion what to do with it, being the sort who expressed himself best in rigorous action. If I’d required to have a limb sawed off instead, he’d have been the very man. And now he had commenced blaming himself, as he did every time the horse came upon me and my cries in the night brought him trudging up the stairs.

  “Five years. A lad your age? God’s bollocks, I should never have taken you along.”

  “It wasn’t your choice.”

  “I should have sent you home.”

  “Home?”

  “England. Kent. That house with the great flopping titty. Wherever the Devil home is.” He shifted again. A mist of brandy and old sweat. “It is here, I suppose,” he added, looking round. “Ah, well. We do all right, William, between us.”

  I forced myself to breathe more steady.

  “There,” he said. “Better?”

  The blackness outside the one small window was beginning to leaven with the dawn.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Gah.”

  “I woke you up.”

  “Sleep, now. Brandy helps.”

  “I had some.”

  “Have more.”

  He chuckled a little and stood, reaching down with his hand to ruffle my hair. In the doorway, he paused.

  “It is not our affair, William. This business at Crutched Friars — whatever it was. Not my affair, and not yours. What Dionysus Atherton does, or does not do. And it makes no difference what he is to you, or isn’t. Eh? No matter what exists between you, or ought to. A threat to you — now, that’s my affair. But not the rest of it.”

  And he was gone. I heard his footsteps stumping down the stairs. His door creaked open and closed, below, and the house subsided back into unquiet stillness.

  The horse had been real enough, as it happens. An artillery horse, wounded in a skirmish on the road, not far from Waterloo. They’d cut it free from the harness and tried to drive it away, but it kept wandering back to join the other horses. The gunners couldn’t bring themselves to deal with it and someone seized at a notion to send for a surgeon instead; somehow — God knows — the errand fell to me. When I arrived the poor beast was trying to press itself up against its fellows, as though fearful of being left behind. And of course I knew what I must do, cos the creature was mortally hurt and suffering. But I couldn’t do it. It was — I don’t know — it was five years of death, I suppose. Five years of men maimed and shrieking, and horses as well — the horses suffered as horribly as anyone, and they’d never even had the chance to choose. And there was something that had happened to a particular mate of mine, Danny Littlejohn — something that had happened two nights earlier, which was preying most cruelly on my mind.

  However it was, there was the poor ruined horse, eyes white and wild and no jaw beneath, and I just stood. There was a thin keening sound, going on and on, and it turned out that this was William Starling, weeping uncontrollable.

  Mr Comrie showed up that time too. Someone sent for him, or else he’d followed me on his own — I never did know for a certainty — and of course he knew what to do. Taking a sabre from a cavalry captain he thrust it swift and kind into the poor horse’s heart. Then he put a heavy arm around my shoulders and led me away.

  The horse came for the first time that very night, and continued to come every two or three nights thereafter. Sometimes Danny Littlejohn was on its back. His own face pinched and white, gazing at me with such reproach that I thought I could scarce survive it.

  8

  Bob Eldritch was buried on a Monday afternoon, in a cold April rain in St Mary-le-Bow churchyard. There was a hearse drawn by four black horses with black feathers trembling on their heads, and six mutes in tall black hats to follow after, all supplied by Mr Bowell and paid for by Dionysus Atherton. The turnout was quite good — as many as three dozen — which was something to be glad of, I suppose. You don’t like to see a man slip from this earth without leaving so much as a stain, no matter what he’s done. The Wolves were out in force, looking grave and guilty. Edmund Kean turned up, arriving late and leaving early, but in the meantime standing in such sable gloom that you’d swear the Melancholy Dane himself had come to St Mary-le-Bow.

  Atherton held up a black umbrella under which the widow sheltered, clutching his arm for support. A poor half-risen dumpling of a woman, stunned into doughy stupefaction by the tragedy: exactly the sort of woman who would marry Bob Eldritch, and bear him little dumple-bairns. She gave a sa
d cry as the coffin was lowered, but held on to a pathetic dignity. No howls and swoonings from poor Mrs Eldritch, nor hysterical precipitations.

  Tom Sheldrake supplied those.

  I had been keeping half an eye on Sheldrake, from my vantage by the gate. He had been pacing on the periphery, just outside the cluster of mourners round the grave, clenching his hands and working the muscles of his face, and with the muffled thud of the first sod falling he burst out in anguish: “Bob Eldritch, you will cease this charade! Rise up this instant, sir, or you and I are no longer friends!” Then with a desolate wail he leapt headlong into the grave, like Hamlet flinging himself after drowned Ophelia.

  They fished him out, Atherton and several of the others, pinioning his flailing limbs and urging him to manliness. At length he was carried off sobbing, while Atherton helped the widow to a carriage. I waited in the churchyard until the grave had been filled, then left to bear my report to Annie Smollet.

  She lived with the Badger in a room they rented in Holborn. It had mildewed walls and a low sloping ceiling and a soot-streaked window with a prospect onto the privy behind the house. There was one bed for the two of them to share, with a wooden box for an escritoire and a shelf with knick-knacks of chipped chinoiserie, and clothes strewn with such abandon that you’d have thought a trunk had exploded.

  “They’ve buried him,” I said.

  Miss Smollet was still considerably shaken by events; she sat pale and frayed on the side of the bed. The Badger sat protectively beside her, one arm about her waist. A scent of lavender and sour linen.

  “You were there?” the Badger demanded.

  “I watched them shovel the dirt on top.”

  I had thought Miss Smollet would want to hear this — to know that it was over and done. But her eyes, red with lack of sleep, began to brim.

  “I did not wish him dead,” she said.

  The Badger did, and said so, fiercely. She hoped Bob Eldritch was howling this very minute, with all the coals of Hell banked high about him.

  Miss Smollet’s bottom lip had begun to quiver. “I did not ask for any of this,” she said. “They have no right to blame me for it.”

  “No one blames you, my dove!” exclaimed the Badger.

  But Miss Smollet believed they did, even though we both assured her otherwise. She was convinced that the mourners had gathered for an hour at the graveside, doleful in countenance but vengeful in thought, specifically to condemn her in their hearts. I began to have the curious sense that she saw Bob Eldritch’s funeral as an event that had primarily happened to Miss Annie Smollet — though I could hardly blame her, considering what she’d been through at Fountain Court. Standing there in the open door, I could hardly imagine blaming Miss Smollet for anything, ever.

  She had me describe the event in detail, beginning to end. She grew paler than ever, and consequently more lovely, as I told how the coffin was lowered by ropes. Her colour flared just once, when I described how Atherton had held the umbrella for the widow.

  “I hate him!” she exclaimed. “Mr Dionysus Atherton is hateful.”

  I did not contradict her.

  “But I never hated Bob Eldritch,” she said. “Not even considering what he done to me.”

  She was standing now. She moved to the window, and turning back she seemed wan but somehow ennobled, as people do who have been purified by long suffering. “I hate no man in this world,” she said, “and no woman in it, neither, nor no child. I pray for all their souls, each one of them, and I ask them in their turn to pray for me.”

  Her chin was lifted in a way that seemed both humble and defiant. It was as if she had been trying on roles like hats in a milliner’s shop, and had suddenly settled on one that fitted. An odd hat for the occasion: you’d almost think she was a woman wronged and doomed, going bravely to her own execution. But oh dear God in heaven, she was lovely.

  “Come back and see us, Mr Starling,” she said. Her smile was Tragic but Enduring. “Come back another time, and bring your cheerful heart with you.”

  The Badger rolled her eyes.

  *

  They sentenced Jemmy Cheese the selfsame day.

  I had counted him lost that night when the fever took hold — cos hadn’t I seen it a thousand times? That’s how it was, with Old Bones. Drive him out the door with steel and shrieking, and he’d slip back through the window under cover of darkness, achieving through guile and gangrene what he couldn’t carry off by main force. And there was next to nothing a surgeon could do to stop him. How could you cure a corrupting wound, after all, or halt the creeping black rot, except by sawing off more chunks? It would set Mr Comrie to grinding his teeth; it would send him climbing down into another bottle.

  But Alec Comrie was never one to give up a fight, even one that was lost. So he went twice each day to Giltspur Street, morning and evening. He bled and blistered the patient, and bid Meg Nancarrow wrap his head in water-soaked rags to cool the brain. She didn’t leave Jemmy’s side — not once, through all of this. When the chaplain came on the second night she drove him away with a curse, and on the morning of the third day — mirabile dictu — the fever broke. Jemmy lay limp and pallid, but by mid-afternoon he took a few spoonsful of beef broth with rice. By next morning he was able to sit on a chair beneath the single barred window of the cell, slump-shouldered and wrapped in a shawl, half his hair shaved away and the rest sticking up in clumps, like some mute lump of a grandmother troll.

  Mr Comrie blinked at the sight, and came remarkably close to a smile.

  “You done it,” I said, standing at his shoulder. “Saved his life.”

  “I plugged a hole in his head. Soon enough we’ll see how much leaked out.”

  Jemmy stared into nothing.

  Meg stood. “I’ll pay you,” she said.

  Mr Comrie made a Scotch noise. “Gah.” Brushing aside invisible flies, he stooped to inspect how the incision was healing.

  “I don’t take charity,” said Meg. “When I have the money, I’ll pay what I owe.”

  He eyed her with a scowling respect, being proud beyond all sense himself. It still galled him that he had asked Atherton to help him find a demonstrator’s position — which Atherton, by the by, had still not done. When he was finished, he muttered something that may have been satisfaction, and turned to leave.

  “Mr Comrie.”

  He looked back.

  “God bless you,” said Meg. “Assuming there’s a God, which there ent — and if there is, then fuck him for the bastard world he created. But you know what I’m saying.”

  Mr Comrie smiled at that. A wintry, unmistakable smile.

  “Take care of him, now,” he said.

  “Oh, don’t you fear.”

  The next day Meg ventured back out into the world, blinking in the dirty London sunlight. She went first to the room by Fleet Ditch that she and Jemmy shared, and after she had changed her frock and wrenched the tangles from her hair, she went down Ludgate Hill to the Three Jolly Cocks, the ale-house where she sometimes worked, to ask them to take her back. The Ale-Draper dismissed her irritably at first, but in the end she brought him round in the inevitable way, on her knees in a cellar store room. Alf, his name was. A red waddling man with a belly like a sack, and she thought how the guts would come coiling out, with a slither and then a whoosh, if you slipped your knife in at the pelvis and drew it smartly lickety-snick up to the breastbone. But by the time he’d helped her to her feet with a hand considerately extended — Alf was a pig of a man, with a heavy fist and a fondness for raising it, but he believed in the chivalric gesture — she had her position back. So she resumed working nights at the ale-house, and after two or three hours’ sleep would arrive at Giltspur Street by late morning. Thus she was absent when the Bailiffs came on Monday at nine o’clock sharp, and bore Jemmy Cheese to Bow Street Magistrates’ Court to answer the charge against him.

  He sat in the dock as in some mountain fastness, his eyes dead and drifting; it was increasingly clear that they
’d broken something inside his brainpan, the mainspring of something undefined but crucial, when they’d cudgelled him down in the graveyard. But this was ruled no obstacle by the court. After all, what would Jemmy have said in his own defence, even if he could have spoken? He’d been taken in flagrante with a cadaver in a sack. Not a criminal offence in itself, since a corpse was not a possession and as such could not be stolen. But it had been wrapped in the burial shroud, and there they had him. Theft: one shroud, near new. Six months’ incarceration. The Beak brought down his gavel and adjusted his attention to the next item on the docket, a counterfeiter who wanted hanging.

  Finally Meg arrived. Learning too late what had happened, she had run all the way from Giltspur Street, pelting through Whitechapel and along the Mile End Road, and arriving in Bow Street just as the Bailiffs were hauling the prisoner to his feet. “Jemmy!” she cried.

  A dim spark flickered in his eyes, like a candle in the depths of a cave. He swayed from side to side and made a low plangent sound in his throat. Meg cried out to the Magistrate, begging him to let her speak.

  “Please,” she said. “For the love of God, show some pity — no, stop it! Let me go!”

  Under-Sheriffs held her back, while Bailiffs dragged Jemmy out the side door. He struggled against them, but he was shackled and still very weak.

  “You bastards!” cried Meg.

  They lodged Jemmy in Clerkenwell first, that being the usual gaol for grave-robbers. Subsequently they would take him out again and put him in a boat upon the Thames. Slowly down the river, to serve out the rest of his sentence in the bowels of HMS Edgar, a 74-gun third-rate converted to a prison hulk in the year ’13 and renamed Retribution, lying at anchor in Woolwich Harbour.

  On the evening of the trial, Atherton went back to St Mary-le-Bow churchyard. So I was told some days subsequent, by the Sexton. He arrived at twilight, and stood by Bob Eldritch’s grave for a long while in silent contemplation, as a man might do who possessed a heart and had been touched in a place near the bottom of it. At last he would walk away into the deepening darkness; it would wrap itself around him like a cloak.