Will Starling

by Ian Weir

  *

  The Fortune of War stands at the junction of Giltspur Street and Cock Lane, just across from St Bart’s Hospital. The name had been chosen by an owner from the previous century, who retired from a naval career missing both legs and one arm — or so the story went. Myself, I could never quite see how a man might tend a bar while down to his last limb, but perhaps this is just Your Wery Umble being literal-minded.

  The Fortune of War was much like any other low tavern in London, except for the little room in the back where on any given night there might be as many as a dozen corpses laid out — Things, to use the parlance of the trade; Stiff ’uns, in varying states of decomposition, each with a tag naming the man who brought it in — cos the Fortune of War was the favoured haunt of the Doomsday Men, north of the river. Several of them could at any time be found in the taproom, drinking. They wore rough jackets and slouch caps, and moleskins on digging nights. They had about them the air of wicked Sextons. From time to time one of the surgeons from St Bart’s would hurry over to inspect the Things on display, as if they were so many codfish laid out on a plank, and if a price were agreed upon, a hospital Porter would slope over and lug the purchase to the Death House for dissection. If a Thing were beginning to putrefy, the owner might fail to find a buyer at St Bart’s, in which case he would load it into a hamper and lug it round to another hospital, or to one of the private anatomy schools.

  Just after midnight I pushed through the door, looking round through the fug of smoke ’til I spotted Little Hollis. There he was, as he’d promised to be when we’d reached our agreement earlier that evening: sitting with two or three others, and nodding as I caught his eye. Draining his jar, he made some excuse to his companions — you didn’t discuss such Business as ours with them as were not partners in the enterprise — and then rose and high-arsed past me, out the door. I followed.

  “Have you got the tools?” I asked him, as we stood together in darkness on Cock Lane.

  He squinted upwards at the sliver of moon, a reek about him of old cellars and recent urine.

  “’S been a change of plan,” he said. “’S eighty-twenty, now. The proceeds.”

  “We agreed on fifty-fifty,” I protested. “Equal terms.”

  “’S ’Ollis as supplies the himplements. ’S ’Ollis as contributes the hexpertise. So ’s eighty per cent to ’Ollis — take or leave.”

  He eyed me slantingdicular, and spat. And he was bluffing, of course. Little Hollis had depended on Uncle Cheese to acquire information about corpses and make the arrangements with Sextons — and he had depended as well on poor Jemmy to protect him from rival gangs. The Resurrection trade was highly competitive, and a man in the way of being self-employed could find himself set upon most grievously. I guessed he hadn’t been on a job since that dreadful night in St George-in-the-East churchyard, which explained why he’d been desperate enough to take up my offer in the first place.

  But Your Wery Umble was hardly doing this for the jingle. Fifty-fifty or eighty-twenty, it made little difference to me — especially since I strongly suspected it would end up in nothing at all. But I let him believe I was mightily aggrieved, and made a feint at battling for sixty-forty before giving in and letting him have three quarters.

  He allowed himself a grunt of sly satisfaction, before muttering that Your Wery Umble should be grateful for anything at all. “The likes of you, and the likes of ’Ollis. ’S a perfessional, is ’Ollis, a top perfessional, haccustomed to the likes of Jemmy Cheese, and Nedward Cheshire. ’S a terrible coming-down for the likes of ’Ollis. ’S a terrible loss he’s suffered.” He shook his head lugubriously. “And Meg Nancarrow too, on top of all the rest. ’S lost now too, is Meg. ’S no hope for the bitch.”

  “Do you believe she did it? Murdered Uncle Cheese?”

  There was the barest hint of a pause.

  “’S what they say, innit?”

  “I think she’s innocent.”

  “’S not for us to decide.”

  “Christ, I wish I knew what happened.”

  Cos on that night — as you’ll recollect — I didn’t know. Standing there in the darkness outside the Fortune of War, I had none of the pieces that I would subsequently jigsaw together; had no inkling, not as yet, of the visit that had been paid by Uncle Cheese to Crutched Friars, with Little Hollis waiting for him outside in the night, primed to dash for a Constable if Cheese should fail to emerge. Looking back upon it now — reliving that night outside the Fortune of War, all these months later — I can imagine a furtive look flickering across the sharp phizog of Little Hollis. I can picture the barest hunching of narrow shoulders.

  But in that moment I saw nothing, preoccupied as I was with the ordeal that lay ahead. And then suddenly there was a scraping of boots against cobblestones, and Hollis flinched as a figure stepped out from the darkness behind us.

  A slim form in a man’s baggy jacket, far too large, and a cap such as low rough fellows wear, raising a bull’s-eye lantern in one not-quite-steady hand.

  “Let us Do This Deed,” said Annie Smollet.

  I had told her earlier that she was not coming with us. I had stated it in no uncertain terms, but Miss Smollet had paid no heed — she was coming, she insisted, and that was that. Now here she stood, in togs she had borrowed — or so I could only suppose — from a friend in the Wardrobe Room at one of the theatres, tucking a stray ringlet back under the cap and eyeing me with an air of desperate resolve.

  Little Hollis peered in disbelief. “Aw, bugger me blind,” he said.

  “My Mind is Set,” said Miss Smollet. “And when my Mind is Set, there is no budging it, not with Gunpowder nor Cannonballs.”

  I had the sense that she’d been rehearsing this all the while she’d been standing here, waiting for me to come back out of the tavern. And it was a rousing enough declamation, I suppose, in its way — assuming your notion of what we were about was drawn from the pages of a penny-blood.

  “Lead,” said Miss Smollet, “on.”

  Little Hollis looked back to me. “’S ninety-ten, now,” he said bitterly.

  St Mary-le-Bow lay half a mile to the south and east. We veered a little distance northwards first, stopping at a crib where Hollis had stashed his implements, and then we were on our way, Little Hollis high-arsing ahead of us and Miss Smollet keeping close to my side, talking in a low quick voice all the while.

  “I know What Lies Ahead,” she insisted, repeating it several times, as if saying it often enough would make it so. “And more than that, I know how the Job Is To Be Done.”

  It seems she’d been in a play once, with grave-robbing in it.

  “I was the Girl who got Exhumed. It was a wonderful role, and highly dramatickal, for I’d been stabbed through the heart, and my wound commenced to bleed when the murderer looked upon my poor corpse. Fatal wounds will do this, Will, as everyone knows, to identify the guilty and bring justice from beyond the grave. This is a Medical Fact, documented by Learned Persons. And it was very thrilling. I rose up slowly, eyes wide with woe and holy vengeance, and lifted a trembling arm to point the villain out. It weren’t a proper theatre, really — more like a penny gaff, stuffed with castaway apprentices baked on gin. But O! they gasped and cheered, Will, when I sat up, and I swear they would have done so anyways, even if my burial clothes was covering a bit more of me up top.”

  Of course she was Acting at this very moment, as if the three of us were players on a stage. But now we were skirting around St Paul’s and slipping swiftly along Cheapside, and suddenly the stench was upon us with a shifting in the wind, and we stood at the rusted gate of St Mary-le-Bow churchyard. That’s when it all at once became Very Real to Miss Smollet. She stopped dead with a tiny choking gasp, holding aloft the bull’s-eye and clutching with her free hand at my jacket. And I confess that it was becoming suddenly Real to Your Wery Umble too.

  It is one thing to conceive a Gothick Venture in your mind, or to sidle about a churchyard in the light of day, as I had done t
hat afternoon, to remind myself of the exact location of the grave and to look for any telltale signs that Resurrectionists had already come. It is another thing entirely to creep through a rusty gate in the depths of night, with the shape of a church massing before you in the blackness and the stench of putrefaction rising all around, and to pick your way through jumbled stones and crosses, and slide wooden shovels from a burlap sack, and dig. Not even five long years of battlefield surgery can quite prepare you for that — and especially not when Bob Eldritch was here too, present in each creak of a lonely branch and each ghostly mutter of the wind.

  “It’s all right,” I whispered to Miss Smollet. “The living ent here to spy us, and there’s naught to fear from the dead.”

  But I swear I could feel bulging eyes upon me, with every slinking step I took. As we reached the grave, I took the bull’s-eye from Miss Smollet, and trained the shaft of light.

  “This is the one,” I said.

  A marker with Bob Eldritch’s name, and a mound of earth. Little Hollis looked to me accusingly.

  “’S already settling, the dirt. ’Ow long ago did you say this one was planted?”

  I hadn’t said, not exactly, when I’d enlisted Little Hollis in the plan. I’d let him believe that the burial was recent, since of course a cadaver loses all value once it’s had too many days to putrefy. And I didn’t answer him directly now, cos I just wanted to get this over with.

  You’ve doubtless read scores of desperate penny-blood tales — haven’t we all? — and seen any number of them enacted upon the stage. Corpses rising and ghosts wailing and devils appearing in belches of sulphur smoke. So I’ll leave you to conjure the image for yourself: Miss Annie Smollet standing still as stone in the moonlight — cos there was moonlight now, I know there was; if there wasn’t, there ought to have been — as Wm Starling and Little Hollis hunched and muttered and delved like moles. A shaft angling down, and then suddenly — finally — the jolt and the hollow thud as my shovel struck the coffin. I crouched breathless as Little Hollis slithered headfirst down into the earth. Strange, terrible noises — the creaking as he pried with the crowbar, as if Hell’s rusty gate was opening beneath us. Then he was slithering out again, and handing me the rope.

  But something was wrong. Something was entirely amiss — cos there was weight, dead weight, at the end of it. Hollis hauled, and I did likewise. The dead weight rose with my confusion, and at the end of an endless half-minute a shapeless lump was lying on the ground. The stench of putrefaction billowed as Little Hollis tugged open the shroud, and there lay the week-old remains of Bob Eldritch, blue and bloated in yellow lantern light.

  Miss Smollet dropped the bull’s-eye with a cry, and Little Hollis cursed.

  “’S ruint!” he exclaimed bitterly. “Look at ’im — ’s already rotten!”

  And Your Wery Umble had been so certain that we would find — what, exactly? An empty coffin and proof beyond all doubt of some abomination against Nature, committed by Mr Dionysus Atherton? No, cos it could never have been as clear as that — and surely I must have known it, even in my moments of most purple supposition. Even an empty coffin might well have had a simple explanation: that Atherton had chosen to dissect his friend, and had staged a Christian burial for appearance’s sake alone.

  But something. I had convinced myself of that. Some evidence that Atherton was indeed the villain I had convicted him of being in my heart. And now I had nothing at all, save a newly dug hole and a reeking shroud full of bloated Bob. Little Hollis was beside himself with grievance, and left me to reinter the body by myself — cos what else was I to do with the thing? — with the aid of poor Miss Smollet, who ricocheted in her emotions from giddy relief to reeling confusion to throat-clutching horror at where we were and what business we were about. She was still in a state an hour later, as we found a public house by the docks that opened before the dawn, and I purchased two half-pints of blue ruin — one for each of us — no longer certain whose need for fortification was greatest.

  As Miss Smollet drank hers down, the relief was for just a moment or two ascendant. She swept off her cap and shook loose her strawberry hair, to the startled appreciation of a table of watermen nearby. Eyes shining, she seized my hands in hers.

  “We carried it off, Will Starling — didn’t we? We Done the Desperate Deed. We dug him up, and there he was!”

  She began to laugh, giddy with exhaustion and sudden wonderment.

  “But I don’t understand, Will. I don’t understand it one bit. Cos we seen him lying there, blue on the ground — and yet I seen him scratching at my window too. Oh, it’s the most comical thing you can imagine, becos my head is spinning with it, and I swear I will never sleep again, and — Will, what am I to do?”

  She laughed as if she’d never stop, and abruptly burst into tears.

  My own nob was spinning quite sufficiently on its own, and I wanted nothing more just then than to drag myself back to Cripplegate and sleep. But the new day had its own revelation in store, one that stunned me almost as much as the discovery of Bob Eldritch in his coffin.

  Meg Nancarrow had made a full confession.

  The Last Dying Confession of Meg Nancarrow

  As taken down by Under-Sheriffs

  “I, Margaret Elizabeth Nancarrow, prostitute, of London, being under sentence of death at Newgate Prison and trembling in terror of the Judgement that awaits, do solemnly confess the following. That on the night of 1st May, 1816, I did meet at a low public house in Black Friars Lane with Edward Cheshire, known as Uncle Cheese, also of London. Harsh words was exchanged between us, and threats uttered, as heard by numerous witnesses, concerning a sum of money which I considered to be owing to me. Upon Edward Cheshire’s departure from the public house, I followed after him as far as Holborn, where the dispute continued. After some minutes Edward Cheshire proposed that we put off the question until the following morning, when more sober heads might prevail, upon which he turned his back and started to walk away, in the belief that we two had agreed to part. Instead I flew upon him from out of the darkness, maddened by my greed and wrath; striking from behind I cut his throat with a blade that I had concealed upon my person, and afterwards flang the bleeding corpse into Fleet Ditch, as if its ooze might hide my crime from humankind and Heaven.

  “I understand that there is no more hope for me on earth, and none neither in the Life to Come, unless I tell the Whole Truth, and never mind how Horrible it be. I declare furthermore that I acted entirely alone with no accomplices, and that the blood of this Foul Crime stains no other hand but mine. I pray that my Awful Fate will be an example to other women, who might be tempted onto the selfsame path: O Wretched Sisters, abjure your Wickedness, and Gin.

  “My only comfort is in knowing that my husband, James Cheshire, known as Jemmy Cheese, will be sustained through the benevolent offices of Mr Dionysus Atherton, Surgeon, which support he has pledged through his goodness alone, and not for any merit that my poor husband or his dying Meg may possess.

  “I do swear that every word in this statement is Heaven’s Truth, having been copied down and read back to me aloud. And I pray that Our Lord, by whom one of the crucified thieves was saved, may yet find Mercy in His Heart for even such a sinner as the Murderess who kneels here weeping.”

  Signed: M Nancarrow

  Witness: The Revd Dr H Cotton

  Newgate, 12th May, 1816

  18

  There is a service for the condemned in the Newgate chapel, the day before the deed is done. The Condemned Pew is a black pen in the middle of the chapel, and the coffin is placed there beside the Guest of Honour to aid in disciplining the mind, cos who could say where idle thoughts might wander else, on this penultimate morning in the world. The Revd Dr Cotton the Prison Ordinary would preach a sermon upon the fires of everlasting torment that are ordained for those as die without a full confession of their sins and true repentance in their heart.

  Meg on that Sunday morning was still refusing to confess, no matte
r how forcefully Dr Cotton implored, nor how hot the Fire was that he conjured up or how horrid the eternal suffocation. She sat through the sermon like a small fierce cornered animal and demanded afterwards to be taken back to the Press Rooms, where the condemned were allowed to spend their final days on earth. There were two of these, common wards with long tables and benches and narrow bunks and a fire at one end, separated from the rest of the gaol by the Press Yard: a flag-stoned courtyard, open to the sky, where in bygone times those prisoners who refused to enter a plea — wretches as hardened and obdurate as Meg Nancarrow — were stretched naked upon their backs and pressed to death with stones and iron weights. The Revd Dr Cotton began to despair of Meg’s immortal soul, and perhaps also of the sum he might otherwise raise by selling the details of her Last Dying Confession to the broadsheets, as the Newgate Ordinary was widely suspected of doing.

  Shortly before noon, Meg was informed by a Keeper that the three Judges had met the evening previous to review her sentence, and had issued their decision: no mercy. She turned ashen upon receiving this news, and trembled violently. Some while later she was reported pacing in agitation, and at one o’clock she cried out to see the Prison Ordinary, saying that she wished to make her peace at last. The Revd Dr Cotton arrived with all haste. Rumours of a Confession were soon leaking out, and by three o’clock the first of the broadsheets was on the street.

  I saw her an hour later. At the furthest end of the Press Yard was a double grating with a gap between, where the condemned could receive a visitor — each of them on one side of the grating, with a Turnkey between them in the vacant space. They’d brought her out in shackles.

  “Why would you make such a confession?” I asked her, bewildered.

  “Cos I did it, Will, just like I said. Harsh words was exchanged, and threats uttered.”

  She was quoting the exact words I’d just read in the broadsheet that I’d purchased for two pennies from a hawker in Paternoster Square. The printed account was accompanied by a woodblock illustration of a woman in Olde Tyme Garb kneeling wretched at the headsman’s block. This was possibly Anne Boleyn, broadsheet printers being notorious for reusing whatever illustration they might have to hand. Tomorrow morning those sheets would be fetching sixpence at the hanging — there would be updated accounts and ballad versions as well, with Meg’s lamentations rendered in lurching rhymes.