Will Starling

by Ian Weir

  “What do you mean, never arrived?”

  “I heard that from one of the Porters.”

  I stared at him. “Then where did it go?”

  “The Porter didn’t know. But I heard someone say they thought it ended at Bowell’s.”

  Mr Bowell’s eyebrows operated upon the same mechanical principle as his smile, according to an ingenious arrangement of levers and pulleys. Just now they were being jerked upwards to express bemusement. The Nancarrow party? Here? No, indeed; no such party had been brought here on Monday last, nor upon any other occasion that Mr Bowell could recollect.

  “They’re saying otherwise, at Guy’s.”

  The mechanism creaked again. Mr Bowell could not imagine why. “Nor why Mr Comrie’s boy might suppose it to be any of his concern.”

  We were in the front parlour of his establishment, where Mr Bowell was wont to meet with his customers — the ones as still drew breath. It was a room where Old Bones might sit at his ease, with his skeletal trotters upon an ottoman and a nightcap on his head: a small, dim, narrow room, as if in token of the more permanent lodgings Mr Bowell had on offer, with oil lamps flickering and a rug upon the floor muting footsteps to a whisper. You felt you ought to whisper yourself, in such a room, lest those lying stiff and still just down the stairs be startled into wakefulness. I had hurried here straight from my meeting with Keats, arriving just as Mr Bowell was closing his shutters for the night.

  “I should like to oblige you,” he said, meaning the opposite. “But I never laid eyes upon the Nancarrow party — not in life, nor afterwards. You must consult the Surgeons, I think, or the Porters at the Schools of Anatomy. Or perhaps the Keepers at Newgate Prison — they might assist you — for many are buried right there, as you may know, under the stones of Dead Man’s Walk; many of them as pass on within those walls, and thus go to their rest with no marker at all, and a seasoning of lime. But I cannot assist you; I have no knowledge. Good night.”

  But he was lying. I saw the uneasy flicker of it in his face, even as I saw the flicker of something else behind him. Thos Bowell the Younger was framed in shadow beyond the archway, watching. And if the undertaker had been touched by the cold hand of unease, then his son had manifestly been taken by it, and hoisted by the scruff by it, and shaken.

  Young Thos was about to grow more uneasy still. Some small while later, he stepped out the back door to trundle his way to the jakes, only to be confronted by a dark youth with a triangle face who had been waiting for him there. “Christ Jesus!” squawked Young Thos, cos it is a mighty discombobulation to be thus waylaid in the darkness of the night, with your breeches already unbuttoned and nothing more upon your mind than a solitary sitting-down and a contemplative stink. But he answered what I asked, with the encouragement of an earnest offer to slice his danglers off him if he didn’t. I had an impression he was eager to tell the tale — and he told it with a genuine relish.

  Oh, yes, he said. Oh, yes indeed. The Nancarrow bitch were brought here in a cart, directly after the scragging at Newgate. The surgeon arrived with her, Atherton. A great flurry he was in, with orders snarled and directions shouted — “Do such-and-such, Young Thos,” and “Look sharp, you young hound!” — and at first it seemed to Young Thos’s rising consternation that the surgeon was bent upon trying to revive the corpse.

  “But then he stopped. And such a look come over his phizog that it causes me to shake all over again, just recollecting.”

  Cos the surgeon had changed his mind, it seemed. He had decided to wait. To take Meg to another place, and revive her in another manner, now that it seemed certain she was dead.

  My own consternation was now rising by the second. “You’re saying there was doubt?” I exclaimed. “Meg may still have been alive?”

  No, said Young Thos, with a look so unsettled it could not have been play-acting. That was what made it all more peculiar still. Cos Meg Nancarrow had been stone dead from the start.

  “She were Dead from the second she come into the shop — take my word. I seen Dead every day of my life, bare nekkid on a table with its peck-box hanging open. I know what Dead looks like, and Meg Nancarrow were it.”

  I left with very much on my mind.

  And never thought once to ask after Isaac Bliss.

  The Sensational End of Boggle-Eyed Bob

  From a Broadsheet Account

  23rd May, 1816

  All of London has raptly followed the career of Boggle-Eyed Bob, the night-stalking revenant that was first reported some weeks ago near St Mary-le-Bow Churchyard, importuning passers-by, before proceeding to horrid emanations and cannibalistic assaults upon the living. It now appears that this dreadful saga reached its terminus in the small hours of this past morning, when a trio of young gentlemen, late returning from a “spree” upon the town, were arrested by syllables of feminine distress, issuing from an alley near Haymarket. Investigating, they discovered a member of the Cyprian Tribe, being set upon by an assailant whose intent seemed at first to be violent conquest. But at that very moment a shaft of moonlight broke through the covering of cloud — as if it were no moon at all, but the Unblinking Eye of Providence — and in its silvery stare they perceived that the assailant was no mere mortal ruffian, but none other than Boggle-Eyed Bob, crouched over the struggling Drab like some monstrous toad.

  The Creature fled at once, but the young gentlemen gave chase, emboldened by their superior number, and by the spirit of intrepidity which in such moments fills the heart of every true-born son of John Bull’s Island, as it lately did upon the field of Waterloo. Others took up the hue and cry, drawn by their urgent calls for assistance, and soon a swelling throng pursued the Creature, bearing lanterns and makeshift weapons. The Creature ran with hideous speed, tending towards St Giles Rookery, in whose notorious labyrinths it seemed certain to escape pursuit. But Providence again reached out its Avenging Hand, directing the Creature into a close, where it turned with a shriek of unholy rage as the pursuers closed, and bore it down.

  Reports remain confused and varied as to what next transpired. But it appears that, as the crowd belaboured the Creature with cudgels, a measure of some incendiary element, such as coal-oil, was dashed upon it, and was then ignited by means of a bull’s-eye lantern, fiercely flung. As the Creature lay insensate, combustible material was cast on top, in the form of timber from a nearby tenement that had collapsed upon itself, as the wretched dwellings in that Foul Sink of London are known to do; and in the matter of a minute a great blaze had arisen, like unto the Fires of Smithfield that were kindled in bygone days for heretics and female felons.

  What desperate thoughts passed through the mind of the Creature, if any thought remained, cannot be known. Perchance its final glimpse was of the Much Greater Fire that assuredly awaits. But certain it is that the earthly career of Boggle-Eyed Bob had ceased, and at the end of half an hour naught remained but ash and cinder, which now was dispersed into foul black rivulets as a torrential rain burst forth, as if Heaven itself would cleanse the Metropolis of all lingering pollution of Bob.

  10

  Miss Smollet received this news as you might expect: dramatickally. I’d gone to Milford Lane mid-morning, as soon as I’d read the broadsheet, to find that the tale had arrived before me.

  “I did not wish for this,” Miss Smollet said. She said it over and over, tugging distractedly with one hand at the other. But not as an actress would do upon the stage — much more as a very young woman might do, pacing backwards and forth in the lane outside the shop, with the sun on her hair and a clutching sense that she had somehow been the cause of something dreadful.

  “I wanted to be left alone — that’s all. I wanted him to Go Away. And we seen him in his coffin, didn’t we? The two of us — you and me — with our Very Eyes. And d’you suppose — ? Oh, Will — oh, dear Christ — could it really of been him they killed last night? Or have they gone and murdered someone else?”

  Janet Friendly had no doubts. We stood together by the counte
r as Mrs Sibthorpe coaxed Miss Smollet up the stairs to lie down.

  “Three bucks on a ran-tan?” Janet snorted. “It could have been anyone they killed. They stumble on someone in an alley, and suddenly there’s a frenzy. God knows your eyes would bulge like eggs, Will, with half of London howling after you, and your hair would stand straight up too. I don’t say I have sympathy for the bastard — he was attacking that girl, after all. But he was never Boggle-Eyed Fucking Bob.”

  And if Janet was cynical, Mr Comrie was purely disgusted.

  “Was it Boggle-Eyed Bob? No, it wasnae Boggle-Eyed Bob. For thaire never was a bollocking Boggle-Eyed Bob to begin with.”

  He had grown particularly Scotch, always a sign of inner turbulence. I had returned to Cripplegate to find him in the surgery, hammering nails into the wall. Evidently he had decided to hang some new pictures.

  “He was seen,” I ventured. Cos by this point, I was no longer sure what I believed — about Boggle-Eyed Bob or about much else. Especially after the report of the Fleeing Woman, and the tale Young Thos had squawked out by the jakes last night, a combination that had kept me awake until the blessed light of dawn had begun to creep through the window of my attic room.

  “Aye,” muttered Mr Comrie. “Boggle-Eyed Bob was seen.”

  “By various parties.”

  “Outside churchyards, importuning little girls. In chimneys, making faces at sweeps.”

  “I thought I seen him once myself. Right here at Cripplegate — the night Miss Smollet slept in my room.”

  I had never told him this, and I hesitated before telling him now. He paused in his hammering, but did not turn round.

  “Saw him whaire, precisely, William?”

  “At the bottom of the stairs.”

  I pointed — a useless gesture, since Mr Comrie continued to look fixedly at the nail he’d been hammering, as if he could drive it the rest of the way through sheer intensity of Caledonian disgust. His voice was level and ominously calm.

  “And saw what, precisely? If I might enquire.”

  “A figure,” I said, beginning to flounder. “A shape.”

  “Describe it.”

  “Well — a sort of hunching.”

  “A ‘hunching’?”

  “A sort of a man’s shape, hunching over.”

  “Such as children see in the nursery, William? When they’ve gone to bed with bogles on the brain?”

  “Yes, I admit. I could have imagined . . .”

  “Such as fools and old women see on dark nights, when witches ride about on broom-sticks?”

  “But it’s not just me. Half of London thinks — ”

  “And half of London is an ass! I expect much more of you.”

  He punctuated this with one last hammer blow, and picked up the first of the pictures: Sir Charles Bell’s appalling scrotum, which apparently he had decided to hang here after all.

  “There is Science, William — and there is Superstition. Reason, or Lunacy. One side, or the other — and if it’s the other, then God help us all. This skulking about in the night — this digging up of graves — it will not sairve. Can you not see that? You’re as much to me as any son could have been — and William, this is madness.”

  There was mottled anger in his face, and a genuine distress. I hadn’t seen that distress since the road near Waterloo, when he’d arrived to find a horse with half a head and Your Wery Umble sobbing uncontrollably. I was about to see it again too — the very next night, at Guy’s Hospital.

  Cos in the morning, a note would arrive at the door. Mr Dionysus Atherton was to deliver a Lecture and Demonstration of Historic Moment. His old school friend’s attendance was most strenuously urged, along with that of all the leading surgeons in London and luminaries of the Royal Society. A revelation was to fall amongst them like a thunderbolt; it was to scatter their assumptions like leaves.

  This evening, old friend. Eight o’clock. Do not under any circumstance be late.

  *

  The operating theatre at Guy’s is a cockpit, as you’ll know if you’ve been in it — and God pity you if you have — with a raised gallery ringing the operating floor, on three sides. It was thronged with students and colleagues when Mr Comrie and I arrived, but also present were more of the Gods of Science than I’d expected. My uncle had invited them all, and they had come — though whether through scientific excitement, or a secret desire to see him fall, I don’t presume to say. They’d never been sure what to make of him, all the titled grandees of the Royal Society. A brilliant man — oh, indubitably — and rising; but somehow Not Quite One Of Them. I saw Banks himself amidst the press — Sir Joseph Banks, the president of the Royal Society, who had begun his brilliant career as official botanist on Cook’s voyages round the globe, and was now a weak-eyed man of sixty-odd, oppressed by gout and kidney stones. The surgeon John Abernethy was here, and his quondam student William Lawrence, standing upon opposite sides — as of course they must, in their mutual detestation. The Scientific Community was still very much a-twitter about the recent public lecture in which Lawrence had eviscerated his old mentor’s views on a Life-Force in the blood.

  Atherton entered from the back, through the passage by which Sufferers are brought into surgery on Wednesdays and Fridays at one o’clock. He wore a new frock coat for the occasion, and strode with a nervous exaltation. He hadn’t slept last night, perhaps not in several days; that much seemed clear at once. But he swept in like Kemble playing Coriolanus, commanding the gaze of every man in the room — even those who had come rehearsing their sneers. The very molecules of the air were dancing about him.

  “Gentlemen!” he cried. “I thank you for attending — and more than that, I congratulate you, because it is a momentous evening for every man here present. It is a momentous evening for every man who draws breath — and every woman too, and child. For what I am about to tell you will shake the Citadel of Mortality.”

  There were exclamations at that, and muted guffaws from the enemy camp, cos of course every Brilliant and Rising Man must have Enemies. Mr Comrie beside me gave a groan. “Listen to the man,” he exclaimed. “What the Devil does he think he’s about?” I stayed silent, watching in breathless fascination. I had a notion already where this night was tending.

  “Gentlemen!” cried Atherton again. His eyes swept across the crowd once more, defying each one of us. The man could be splendid; I confess it. “We have heard much, of late, concerning the Spark of Life. What it may consist in — how it is extinguished. How it might even, in our fondest dreams, be rekindled. We have heard the matter debated, with deep learning and conviction, by two who are amongst us at this moment.”

  He meant Lawrence and Abernethy, of course. Lawrence, tall and supercilious, allowed himself a thin smile; Abernethy’s pugnacious face darkened.

  “I believe,” my uncle continued, “that there is within us a Life-Force, as Mr Abernethy and others have asserted. I believe it is the principle of our existence, and may even be said in some sense to equate with what common men think of as a soul. But I do not propose to reopen the debate, tonight.”

  “Be thankful,” said a dry voice, “for small mercies.”

  This was Lawrence. Some laughter, which my uncle affected not to hear.

  “There was a woman hanged at Newgate, on Monday morning last,” he said. “Her name was Meg Nancarrow.”

  The laughter died. An instant’s silence, then the stirring of execration.

  “God’s bollocks,” muttered Mr Comrie. “Oh, Atherton — you didn’t.”

  But he had. That’s exactly what he’d done. The conviction came upon me with a scrotum-tightening certainty.

  “I have attended numerous hangings, gentlemen. Some of you have done so as well. It is Scientific interest that prompts us, a passion for studying the mechanism of Death. And I have often had cause to observe — as many of you have done also — that life may continue for some good while after all empirically discernible signs are extinguished.”

  He
had begun to stride, back and forth, as he invariably did when he lectured.

  “Meg Nancarrow dropped at three minutes past eight o’clock. At 8.27 all struggle ceased, and at 8.33 she was pronounced dead by the attending surgeons. I took possession of the body immediately upon its being cut down, having made prior arrangement to do so.”

  “What, bribed the Sheriff, you mean?” someone demanded, indignant. Banks.

  “If you will. I had arranged as well for the body to be delivered to an undertaker’s establishment nearby, where it arrived at six minutes past nine o’clock.”

  So Young Thos had told the truth, I realized — or leastways part of it. The body had gone first to Bowell’s.

  “And then, you — what?” Banks demanded. “You’re not telling us you tried to revive the corpse?”

  “No,” said my uncle. “I did not. I decided to wait.”

  Uncertainty now. Mutterings of confusion.

  My uncle’s voice rose above them.

  “As you will know, an attempt at revival was once made by John Hunter himself.”

  Hunter’s famous bid to revive the Revd Dodd, hanged at Tyburn for forgery in the year ’87. He’d had the corpse conveyed in secret, straight from Tyburn Tree to an undertaker’s establishment.

  “He failed, gentlemen. But he made the attempt — Hunter, the fons et origo of modern anatomical science. The father of scientific surgery, and Mentor to such luminaries as Mr Abernethy, whom I rejoice to see amongst us this evening. Hunter himself believed that a corpse might be resurrected, and he made the attempt.”

  “He did no such thing!” cried Abernethy. He had been standing in silence ’til now, his florid face growing redder by the moment. “John Hunter, sir, did not seek to resurrect a corpse. Our Lord did that. John Hunter sought to revive a man who might merely be unconscious.”