Will Starling

by Ian Weir

  It was halfway down a row of houses, hunching dour and sullen between better-favoured structures like a middle child totting up grievances. A Keeper answered my knock, heard my errand, and bid me wait outside the door while he fetched the mad doctor.

  “I’ve come to see Jemmy Cheese,” I told Dr Paxton when at length he arrived.

  A brisk man in early middle age, with a cool appraising stare. His eyes had widened despite himself at his first glimpse of Your Wery Umble — which I took as an achievement, in its way, considering the lunatick sights a mad doctor must ogle daily. My jaw had unswole back towards its normal size, but still I was all lumps and scrapes and blooms of purple souring into yellow.

  “On what business?” he asked.

  “My own.”

  “Then I’d advise you to tend to it,” he said, beginning to close the door upon me. “And I shall tend to my business, and my patients.’”

  “My uncle is Mr Dionysus Atherton.”

  I expected that might stop him, and it did.

  “I am his sister’s child. She died.”

  He wasn’t sure whether to believe me — and who could blame him, after all? The golden glory that was Dionysus Atherton, and the battered scrap of Rainbow on his doorstep. But clearly enough he owed Atherton some favour, or was being paid good coin by him, or both; and besides, a man such as Atherton might very well have several bits of flotsam bobbing in his wake — encounters with actresses and dolly-mops, and servant girls from student days — one or two of whom he might drolly acknowledge as a “nephew.” I watched this possibility cross Dr Paxton’s phizog, bringing with it a small dry chuckle.

  He glanced over his shoulder to the Keeper. “Show Mr . . . What is the name?”

  “Starling.” I did my best to shine the sunrise smile.

  “Show Mr Starling downstairs,” he said. “And my compliments to his ‘uncle.’”

  It was dim inside the house, with bars on the windows and bolts on the doors, and a general waft of decrepitude and faeces. But it could have been worse. There were fifteen or twenty kept here — so the Keeper said when I asked — most of them elderly. They were kept two and three to a room, like derelict linnets. An old woman somewhere squawked out monotonously, every ten seconds; another shuffled with infinitesimal steps, looking in her ragged nightdress so thin that she might have been two great eyes on a broomstick.

  A door at the end with a heavy bar opened onto a stairway descending, and the Keeper gestured that I should precede him. “Mr Atherton’s nephew will watch his step,” he added. He was a twitchy man with the air of a stoat standing upright to take the temperature of the day. Just now he had taken on a smirking solicitude, having decided — so I gathered — to amuse himself by pretending Your Wery Umble was a gentleman.

  The stairs led down into deepening gloom, and a heavy ursine musk. They were keeping Jemmy in the cellar.

  He was alone, sitting cross-legged on a pile of straw, rocking slowly forwards and back again. I made him out by the soiled light filtering through one small window. It was barred, like all the others in this house, though it was scarcely big enough to admit a cat, let alone a man as large as Jemmy Cheese. Forwards and then back again, with a faint rattling at each commencement. They had him in a strait-waistcoat, the villains; he was chained as well, by an iron band round his neck to an iron ring bolted to the floor. There was a harsh metallic chink each time he leaned back, the chain pulling taut to stop him. I thought of a sad old lunatick bear, awaiting one final baiting.

  “Alas,” agreed the Keeper with his solicitous smirk, reading my own expression. “But it is for his own protection, sir, entirely, our guest being prone to Agitation.”

  Wallis was the name of this particular Keeper. So I would learn some days later, when it was cited in the newspaper accounts of what took place.

  “H’lo, Jemmy,” I said, and tried to smile. “It’s Will. Remember me? I’m afraid I’ve come with very doleful news.”

  The dolefullest news I’d ever delivered — so it felt to me, standing in that cellar. This is quite a statement from a surgeon’s assistant who’d told men every day for five long years that a leg was coming off, or that an arm was coming with it, or — dolefuller yet — that all remaining limbs were staying attached cos there was just no point in trying.

  “It’s your Meg,” I told him. “It’s worse than terrible, Jemmy — it’s the worst thing there is — cos they’ve gone and hung her. They said she murdered your brother — did you know?” It came to me then, with an awful lurch, that he might not even realize that Brother Ned had been killed. “That’s what they’re claiming — but it’s a lie, cos she never done it, Jemmy. She was innocent, but they hung her anyways.”

  He just kept rocking. Forwards and back again, forwards and back, rattle and chink. Christ, had he understood a single word I’d said? His face gaunt and slack and his eyes so dull that you’d swear there was no one behind them at all. I began to think it was better that way, lamentable as it was — better that Jemmy was gone far away, gone wherever men go when their heads are smashed in like eggshells, and would never need to live in this world again. But as he rocked backwards once again, there were tears streaming down his cheeks.

  I could have wept then with him. I would have done, I think, in one more second. But that’s when a small commotion broke out, above us. A bellow of protest, loud enough to filter down to the cellar. More bellowing, and a thin gibbering chorus rising up about it — one of the inmates was creating a to-do, and setting the others off. The thumple of hurried footsteps over our heads, and a shaft of light as the door opened up at the top of the stairs, and a voice — Dr Paxton’s — calling impatiently for Mr Wallis to come up and assist.

  Wallis hesitated, dithering between the need to dash and reluctance to leave a visitor alone.

  “Mr Wallis! Directly!”

  He shot a hasty look to me — “Just keep back from him,” he commanded — and then a darker look to Jemmy. An instant’s flash of unmistakable malice, like the glint of a serpent’s tooth. “And you — remember the blistering, eh? Remember how much you enjoyed that experience.”

  Then he was gone. His boots thumped up the stairs, and Jemmy and I were alone.

  I moved closer, as close as I could, and knelt down in the straw.

  “Jemmy, listen to me. Just — please, listen.”

  He stopped rocking at last. The chain hung slack.

  “I don’t know how much you understand — or how much you could tell me, even if you did. But I need to find out, Jemmy. Did Atherton have a reason to want your brother dead? Was it something Ned knew — some secret?”

  He didn’t make a sound. But he didn’t move, either. Poised between forwards and back again, head hanging low.

  “What was it, Jemmy? What did your brother know, that was such a threat? And did Meg know it too?”

  Cos that would explain everything, wouldn’t it? Atherton’s desire to see her dangling and dead. And the promise he made — to get Jemmy out of the Prison Ship — in return for Meg’s confession. Yes, that would tie it up with a bow for Dionysus Atherton. Uncle Cheese in the grave and his secret with him, whatever that secret was. Meg Nancarrow now silenced forever as well — having confessed to the murder that Atherton committed, or leastways had Odenkirk commit on his behalf.

  That must have been what happened. Kneeling on the cellar straw, in the ursine reek of poor Jemmy Cheese, I felt all but certain-sure. Right then Jemmy lifted his head and I swear I saw a flash — a flicker of something — someone — present behind those eyes. It was gone again in half a second and Jemmy began once more to rock: forwards and back again, forwards and back.

  “I’m going to find them out,” I said. “That’s my promise to you, Jemmy. I’m going to prove what Atherton did, and I’m going to see him hang.”

  Jemmy understood, though he gave no sign. I knew, cos that flicker had been there.

  And I’d seen something else as well. Each time that Jemmy rocked backwar
ds — the chink of the chain pulling taut — he was wrenching at the iron ring bolted to the floor. And gaunt as he was, Jemmy Cheese was still strong. He was stronger than you could believe — and the bolt was coming loose. In due course it would surely give way, unless someone informed the Keeper.

  I left Dr Paxton’s house without saying a word.

  Horrifying Assault Near Southwark Bridge

  From a Broadsheet Account

  21st May, 1816

  A new and shocking depredation is reported in the matter of Boggle-Eyed Bob, concerning a Sailor who was attacked two nights ago walking eastwards along Bankside Street, near the Docks. Passing through a narrowing of the road, he was suddenly struck a Fearsome Blow from above, as by an Assailant dropping bodily upon him, from a ledge or rooftop. Precipitated to the ground, the Sailor was sensible of the stench of putrefaction before experiencing a Great Agony, as the Assailant sank its teeth into the flesh of his right shoulder. His cries brought men running from a nearby public house, to be confronted by an Appalling Tableau: an egg-eyed Creature crouched above the fallen Sailor, hair standing on end and mouth smeared with gore. The Creature snarled most horribly but fled at once, shambling hunched and herk-a-jerk into the night, at a swift and uncanny velocity.

  6

  The Wreck of Tom Sheldrake had chambers at the Inns of Court, just north of Fleet Street. There was an outer room where a Spavined Clerk worked at a table piled high with papers, the dust of ages rising and settling as he stirred. Beyond was Sheldrake’s sanctum, an inner room with a desk and shelves of leather-bound books, and a Turkey rug and a window facing west, through which in happier days the afternoon sun would respectfully decline, irradiating the barrister with an amber light, as if he glowed from within with his own superiority. Today he sat shrunken, his eyes too large for his face. His wig lay strewn and lifeless in the corner, as if it had scuttled into the street at the unluckiest of moments and been run over by a carriage wheel.

  “The fault was not mine,” he said. Clutching it like a sailor to a life-rope. “I require you to understand this, Starling. I bear no blame for the death.”

  The Spavined Clerk had straightened as I’d come creaking through the door five minutes earlier. Eyebrows arched at the sight of me, like chalk-dusted caterpillars. But despite visible misgivings, he’d escorted me through to the Wreck.

  “I ent here to accuse you,” I said to Sheldrake now. “I ent here to talk about Bob Eldritch at all.”

  But the name itself was enough to set him off. His face folded in on itself.

  “It was a jest,” he said.

  “I need to ask you about Meg Nancarrow.”

  “I was larking — that’s all it was — everyone in the room knew that. Everyone except for Bob Eldritch, who got it all wrong, like the cork-brain he was, and died!”

  Behind me, through the open doorway, dust rose slightly. The Spavined Clerk had lifted his head, gazing sorrowfully in at the Wreck of Tom, who lurched to his feet and began to pace distractedly, back and forth across the inner room. Oh, yes, said the Clerk’s mournful eyes, as they briefly met mine. Oh, indeed; it is thus, and has been so, and each day it is worse. Behold the Wreck as it Splinters.

  “What did he say, when he came to you?” I asked the Wreck of Tom.

  He froze in mid-lurch. “What?”

  “The surgeon,” I said. “Mr Atherton. Why did he want you to defend Meg Nancarrow?”

  He stared at me for another moment, as if certain I had asked him something else. At length he looked away. “That woman? God knows. Someone had to.”

  “But why you, Mr Sheldrake?”

  Cos there was the question, wasn’t it? Of all the barristers in London — clever and capable men, any number of them — why the Wreck of Sheldrake, drunk and bungling?

  “What were his instructions?”

  “His instructions?”

  “When he hired you. What did he say?”

  Sheldrake blinked, still half distracted by whatever it was that had clutched his thoughts a moment earlier.

  “He believed the woman was guilty,” he muttered.

  “He told you that?”

  “Guilty as Fallen Eve, poor bitch. But the forms must be observed. A fair trial, and then the hanging.”

  “And Meg — you met with her, to prepare the case. You must have done — yes? Before the trial, at Newgate.”

  “Of course.”

  “Did she say anything to you, Mr Sheldrake? About Atherton? Did she seem to possess any knowledge about him?”

  “What are you talking about? What sort of knowledge?”

  “That’s what I’m asking. Anything at all — a hint — some secret she might have known . . .”

  “Some secret?”

  He blinked again, brow furrowing. “I seem to recollect . . .” And then broke off, visage darkening. “The Devil business is it of yours? What’s this to you, or you to me?” He swelled into his old imperious self, or leastwise managed a wretched approximation. “The likes of you, coming here — presuming upon my time. Presuming upon privileged information.”

  “Meg was my friend.”

  “Some draggle-tail he’d had, and felt a fondness for. I have no idea what it was between them, and I wouldn’t tell you even if I did.”

  And then he burst out again, abruptly. He gave a cry, as if in physical pain. “A human limb? Bob Eldritch, gnawing on someone’s arm?”

  There was a copy of the broadsheet amidst the clutter on his desk. He snatched it up and crumpled it, and flung it across the room.

  “God’s teeth!”

  Christ knows I’d been unsettled myself, when I’d seen the broadsheet report first thing that morning — despite knowing what I did about the actual whereabouts of Bob Eldritch’s corpse, bloated and rotting in his grave. Or leastways so I thought I knew, although a report like that can set certain doubts to squirming in the deep rat-haunted caverns of the brain. But Bob Eldritch was not my priority just now.

  Sheldrake had lurched to retrieve the crumpled broadsheet. When he spoke again, it was hoarse and low. “Four nights ago. That’s when he came to me.”

  “Atherton, you mean?”

  He stood by the window, shoulders hunched. Uncrumpling and smoothing. A small despairing laugh.

  “Fingers at the window. I thought it was dead leaves, blown by the wind. But oh, no —scritch-scratch — that hand.”

  And I realized. “You mean Bob Eldritch?”

  “That face of his, staring in. Those eyes — and the hair, straight up. Oh, God help me. And every night since.”

  Despite myself, I felt a pricking at the back of my neck, as if my own hair were rising. And I found myself asking the question, dumbfounded: “What does he want?”

  Sheldrake began to moan.

  “He wants me to open the casement. He wants vengeance.”

  *

  And of course I wanted vengeance of my own.

  I could deny that, and present myself to Your Honour as naught but a selfless seeker after Truth. What would stop me, after all, since I’m the one who’s telling you this tale? But let’s have truth-telling between us, even if larger Truths are too much to hope for, in the roiling murk of this world’s equivocations.

  I wanted revenge on Dionysus Atherton. I desired it more bitterly by the moment, as I left Tom Sheldrake’s chambers that afternoon and found my steps tending towards Crutched Friars, where I stood for more than an hour in the shadow of a tree across the street from my uncle’s house, just watching. The curtains were drawn; no sign of life. No sign of life at all — though life there was indeed, as I know now. More life than I could have imagined, standing there on that Tuesday afternoon, eight days after Meg Nancarrow was hanged. When I look back now my blood runs cold, just to think of it: the life that was in that house.

  But nothing moved within, or leastways nothing I could see. The street outside just trundled about its business as I watched from my place of shadow, a silent Changeling seething with dark imaginings
. Trying to conjure the pictures in my mind: what he was doing this moment, and the next. What he had been doing all along.

  And of course I wanted vengeance. A Revenger in a Tragedy of my own devising — I wanted it as dearly as ever did Vindice in the grand old gore-drenched play, carrying the skull of his beloved about with him, lest he should otherwise for an instant forget what villainy had been done to her, and to himself. I’d wanted it since the first moment I’d stood outside this house, just after my return from the Midlands half a year earlier, carrying my own discovery with me — about my Ma, and who she was, and what had happened. Lugging it like an old brown skull in a sack.

  *

  Miss Smollet was at Cripplegate when I returned. Sitting on the steps outside like my own better angel, in a summer dress and a straw bonnet with flowers, nibbling at a jam puff that she’d bought from a man with a basket, and feigning superb unawareness of several young men who’d stopped across the street to smugger in admiration. All of her attention was fixed upon a dollop of jam — red as a naked heart — that balanced precariously at the corner of her mouth and must be retrieved just in time by a delicate darting of the tongue.

  She’d come to Cripplegate several times since my mill with the Under-Sheriffs, just to see how I fared. I was still creaking and limping, but at least my phiz was no longer such a bloom of jaundice and vermilion — I knew this from checking my reflection in a bit of glass, each time I heard her voice asking after me. I expect these visits were partly just an excuse to get out of her lodgings and avoid Janet Friendly. Still, she could have gone anywhere in London, and she chose to come here to see me.

  And she came smiling, even though today she’d seen that broadsheet report about Boggle-Eyed Bob.

  “He is Dead,” she said, with fine conviction — so fine that I wondered how much rehearsal had been required. “We have seen him, Dead and Mouldering. So let them print what they want, Will Starling — becos We know the Truth.”