Will Starling

by Ian Weir

  “I would have you do as you will,” said Sheldrake. He leaned in closer as he said it, as if imparting words of great significance. “Do you understand what I’m saying to you? I am saying, do as you will.”

  His breath was as foul as a three-day corpse; his eyes glittered with desperate animation.

  Thus he appeared as he returned to his home that night. He had rooms near King’s Cross, where he lived alone, with a cat called Roger for company. I almost liked that in him, when I found it out. It is more difficult to despise a man with a cat called Roger.

  This was on a Tuesday, 4th June. I had remained inside the room at Holborn for two whole days after awakening to find Annie Smollet gone. The first I spent in anxious expectation, thinking at each minute to hear her footsteps tripping up the stairs. But she didn’t come, not that day nor the next, which I spent curled alone upon the bed with the Black Dog pacing on the landing and birdsong and birdstink rising from below. Finally I roused myself, and leaving a woebegone note slipped lorn and lightheaded down the stairs — two days it had been, with nothing to eat — into the mutter and snarl of Holborn. With the darkness, I was waiting outside Sheldrake’s lodgings.

  He came along the Gray’s Inn Road, his bull’s-eye bobbing him into view. As he passed, I stepped swiftly in behind him.

  “You sent word you wanted to see me, Mr Sheldrake?”

  He turned with a gasp, and I let him see my knife.

  “Just so’s you know, Mr Sheldrake — if this is a trick or a trap, I’ll kill you. Nothing personal — not a threat — just a solemn promise. Play me false and you are a dead man.”

  He gave a laugh at that, a high queer sound of strangled mirth. “Dead, sir? Whatever can you mean by dead? I think you must be more specific, sir, for death” — a finger to the side of his nose, and a ghastly wink — “death is not entirely what it was. Indeed, I think you may be behind the times.”

  His eyes had grown to unnerving size as his phiz had hollowed around them, just as Barnaby had reported. Cadaver-gusts of breath. But a fine new weskit as well, and a sprig of flowers — I thought of descriptions I had read, of condemned men in the olden days being trundled to Tyburn Tree on a cart, bung-eyed with drinking but determined to exit game, making desperate merriment with the crowds along the way.

  “Is she alive?” I demanded.

  “She, sir?”

  “Meg Nancarrow.”

  “Ah. Then that depends, sir. That very much depends.”

  “On?”

  “On what you mean, sir, by alive.”

  I raised my knife, touching the tip to his throat. His apple bobbed.

  “You went looking for me, Mr Sheldrake. You said I’d been summoned. If you know where she is, then tell me now.”

  He offered the rictus of a rakish smile, essaying the gay sad dog of old.

  “Indeed, sir. Come, sir. Sheldrake’s just the fellow. Follow Tom.”

  We crossed the Gray’s Inn Road and continued, heading west. I was still half thinking this must be a trap, and that round each corner a clutch of Constables would be waiting, cudgels in hand. But there was no one, except the usual night-walkers of London.

  “It wasn’t murder,” I said, matching his shambling pace. “The actor — Buttons. They’re saying I murdered him, but it wasn’t that.”

  I don’t know why it seemed so important that he understand this. But I might have saved my breath.

  “No murder done.” A ghastly wink. “Quite right. No blood upon my good friend Starling’s hands — no stain upon those soft white daddles.”

  “I said it was never deliberate.”

  “And why those hands should be unstained — of all the hands in London, sir, drenched in gore up to the elbows — why these alone should be so pure, remains a mystery. But there you have it. There it is. Starling’s hands are white.”

  He touched his finger once more to the side of his nose, raising the bull’s-eye with the other hand as he did so. His face was a jack-o-lantern in the glare.

  Sheldrake quickened his pace now, angling west and south, until we crossed Kingsway and reached Great Russell Street.

  “Where are we going?” I demanded.

  But I’d guessed the answer already.

  The Holy Land — St Giles Rookery. A vast squalid labyrinth, stretching out from Great Russell Street in the north, to the church of St Giles to the south. St Giles-in-the-Fields — cos there had been green fields here once, and trees, instead of bricks and filth. Tonight fires flickered here and there in the tangle of courts and narrow stinking streets, with human creatures crouching round them. Derelict buildings jumbling together, leaning drunkenly shoulder to shoulder like old reprobates conspiring. Streams of filth down the middle of the lanes, in place of the brooks that trickled in that long ago unfallen time, with lumps of excrement instead of smooth wet stones. And now I had no further fear of Constables. No Officer of the Law would set foot here, not by night — nor even by daylight, without a dozen more to back him, armed with muskets. And even if they did, what could they hope to accomplish? Anyone familiar with these narrow streets could disappear in half a minute; and if you truly knew the Holy Land, you didn’t need to use the streets at all. You’d know of doorways connecting one building to the next, and passageways leading from cellar to cellar. You could disappear into darkness and never come back out into the light of day — by your own choice, or by someone else’s. You could rot in one of those cellars until you were nothing but bones and fungus, and no one who knew you would ever be the wiser.

  The Wreck of Sheldrake tacked onward, hurrying down one alleyway and turning into another, forging through the murk and stench while unseen eyes peered from the darkness and shadows in the night retracted into holes upon our passing. We stopped at last in a slanting doorway, somewhere in the dark heart of the maze. A sliver of yellow moon peered down askance, then slid behind the clouds again. I had tried as best I could to keep track of all our twists and doublings back, bracing myself against the prospect that I might have to extricate myself at speed from this dreadful labyrinth. And Christ only knows what Minotaur awaited.

  Sheldrake’s mood had changed. “Lily-white hands,” he said, looking bitterly down at me. “Of all the daddles in London.”

  “Is this where she stays?”

  “I did not ask to see these things,” he burst out suddenly, “or know them!” On his face was the same look of anguish as on that afternoon in St Mary-le-Bow churchyard, when he’d flung himself into Bob Eldritch’s open grave. “Did I ask Meg Nancarrow to hang? No. Did I ask Bob Eldritch to choke himself to death? No, sir — never in life! I say again, sir; I did not. I did not wish it — I was not consulted!”

  Then he lurched through the doorway and into the blackness within. I followed.

  Stench, and uncanny stillness, and the certainty that eyes were watching: this was my first impression, and it was overwhelming. There might be three floors and two dozen separate rooms in such a dwelling, each room housing six — or ten — or twenty. From time to time a teetering building would give a terminal lurch and then collapse right there on top of itself, with Ragged Souls scrambling like ants to escape out the windows. There must be dozens in the house with us now, but in that moment you didn’t hear a single one of them. In the glancing light of Sheldrake’s lantern, I glimpsed for an instant a twisted boy peering down from a half-landing above us, with a parent — or some larger Imp — behind him. Then they were gone, and I followed Sheldrake onto some rickety stairs leading down into deeper darkness.

  There was no railing, and often enough there was no step either, the boards having long since rotted through, or else been ripped up for firewood. Houses in the Holy Land were all consumed by fire in the end, but this mainly happened piece by piece. The winters here were the worst in London, with January knifing through broken windows patched with paper and rags. Twice I missed my step and nearly fell headlong, until we reached a level passageway. It was dank and strait, with puddles of water — I pref
er to think it was water — gathering underfoot. Rats scuttled in the blackness behind us, and the Wreck of Sheldrake sloped on. There was a branching passageway, and another doorway.

  Sheldrake stopped.

  “Through there,” he said, pointing. “Down.”

  I waited for him to lead the way. But Sheldrake was shying back now, like a horse that has balked with white rolling eyes at a gate and will not be driven one foot farther, not if you were to beat him ’til he bled.

  “No,” he said. “Not Tom.” His voice had broken, with his nerve. “I’ve done what was demanded of me. No more. She wants to see you.”

  He bolted, taking his light.

  More steps led down, at my feet — but the blackness below was not quite complete. A faint garish glow seeped upwards from the depths. I took one very deep breath indeed, and started down into the void. Six impossible steps descending to a half-landing, and the seep of light grew more discernible with each one, as if it would rise like Stygian waters to my ankles, and then my knees. A turn to the left at the landing, and then six more steps, down into a space that surely squatted just atop Signor Dante’s First Circle. Or beneath it.

  A cellar room, stinking of smoke and human creatures, with a ceiling so low that even Your Wery Umble could scarce stand upright. A table with candles burning, and three or four ragged forms crouched round it, at a meal. White faces stared up at me, and then a tatter of black shifted out of the shadows in the furthest corner of the room. An ancient woman, as angular and sharp as Atropos the Third Sister snipping thread.

  Except she wasn’t old at all. I saw that now, as my eyes began to adjust to the stinging gloom. Her face was pinched but scarcely lined, and her own eyes were bright with laudanum and zeal.

  “Mr Starling is here. A friend is come. We rejoice,” said Flitty Deakins.

  She had been staying until very recently at a Servants’ Lurk — a low lodging-house inhabited by domestic servants who had lost their place. There were such dosses throughout London, full of wretches who had been dismissed for thievery and bad character, and who now devoted their waking hours to plotting robberies — and worse — in retribution. This particular Lurk was near Charing Cross; Miss Deakins had returned there after I had left her on the morning of the hanging.

  This much I would piece together afterwards. But in that first moment, as you’ll understand, Miss Phyllida Deakins’s domestic arrangements were not foremost in my mind.

  “Where is she?” I cried. “Is she alive? Can I see her?”

  Miss Deakins cocked her head. “I don’t know, Mr Starling. Can you?”

  I looked round urgenttly. But it was just Miss Deakins and I in this reeking cellar, and the ragged shapes round the table, and not one of them was Meg Nancarrow.

  “I fear I am being mischievous with our friend,” said Flitty, addressing herself to the others. “Poor Mr Starling.” Her face had crinkled itself into amusement. “I fear I have always been mischievous. My father would say this, Mr Starling. ‘Phyllida is my own dear darling girl,’ he would say, ‘but I fear there is mischief in her.’ My father was a man of the cloth, a clergyman in Devon. Did you know that?”

  “I want to see Meg.”

  “I was the youngest, Mr Starling, and the apple of his eye. I would walk with him across the fields to visit his parishioners, and I was a good girl, good as gold. They would all tell you so; they were unanimous in this opinion. ‘But I fear my Phyllida is mischievous,’ my father would say, ‘and I pray this will not bring her to a Reckoning.’ This was a great preoccupation of my father’s, Mr Starling — the Reckoning that awaits each one of us, at the appointed hour.”

  “I want to see Meg!”

  It came out of me as a shout, shatteringly loud in the cellar room. Miss Deakins flinched back a little, her mad eyes squinting like a cat’s recoiling in distaste.

  I turned at the sound of creaking on the stairs. More ragged shapes had come down behind me — two or three of them, blocking the way. It occurred to me then that I couldn’t get out, unless they should allow it. I expect the same thought occurred to Flitty Deakins; she smiled just a little.

  “Who are these people?” I asked her.

  “Friends,” she said.

  “Of yours?”

  “Of hers. We’re all friends of hers. That’s why we’re here.”

  “Is Meg alive?” I asked again.

  “Unlike the children who went into the surgeon’s stable at Crutched Friars.”

  “You know this for a fact?”

  “I saw them go in. I have no doubt what was done.”

  And here she stood: the eye-witness I had been seeking. Black tatters and poppy-bright glims.

  “Experimentation, Mr Starling. Taking them to the brink of death, and beyond. Seeing how far they could go, and still come back. Animals first, and then children. Beggars and waifs, whom no one would miss. An old man went in once, and a girl — some dolly-mop who’d been fished from the Thames. She’d flung herself in, I believe, for some such reason as dolly-mops have when they do these things. Odenkirk had her over his shoulder — she’d drowned herself, but she wasn’t quite dead. I saw that, because she opened her eyes — right at the very end, before the stable door closed behind them.”

  She had grown so thin that I wondered if she was eating still at all, or whether all her sustenance now was opium and milk. And in dwindling she had somehow hardened, as if some alchemical process had begun, distilling her down to the purest essence of herself. She was more Flitty Deakins than she had ever been before — and more purely, profoundly mad.

  That’s when the first true doubt began to lodge.

  “I was to be next, Mr Starling. They’d have done for me next, if I hadn’t escaped. My father’s own dear darling girl, on that table of theirs . . .”

  “I need to see her, Miss Deakins. I need to see Meg Nancarrow.”

  The ravings trailed into silence. The hooding of mad eyes.

  “You need proof that she’s alive. Is that what you’re saying?”

  “I’m saying I want to see her.”

  “And she wants to see you too, Mr Starling — that’s why we brought you here. She’s grateful for what you tried to do, and she hopes you might do more. But first we need proof from you.”

  “Proof of what?”

  “Proof that you are with us, Mr Starling. To the uttermost extremity.”

  An Epistle to the Londoners

  As printed in The London Record

  5th June, 1816

  There was a terrible surging in her head, she said to me, as if her vital essence were being forced upwards by the weight of her body against the rope. Her skull was swollen to grotesque size and must surely burst, like the belly of a lamb with bloat. This went on, she said, unbearably. At last there was an explosion of light, and in that awful radiance she saw the angel.

  “But this was no Nursery-Angel,” she said to me, “for children. Nor like unto the two bright angels, Phyllida, that once were in your care.”

  No, this was a great and terrible Being, taller than trees. In its hand was a flaming sword, and in its visage she glimpsed an overwhelming Truth.

  “What Truth was revealed to you?” I asked.

  The Great Question that was never put to Lazarus. He rose up and walked — so the Gospels say — but Lazarus never spoke a word of where he had been, or what he had seen. Nothing to cause his sisters hope, or horror; no word to oppress his friends with mortal trembling, or to gladden their poor hearts with joy.

  She replied: “I saw that we are free.”

  We were standing on the rooftop as she spoke. There is a rooftop where she will stand with her Jemmy in the grey of twilight, the setting sun behind them and their shadows stretching out across London.

  “We are free,” said Meg Nancarrow, “and may do as we will. And O! — there will come such a Reckoning.”

  17

  I had picked up a copy of the newspaper at a street stall near Covent Garden, not long after dawn. T
he Epistle was printed at the bottom of a page, where it had already been discovered by a group of dishevelled Corinthians lurching home from a spree. One of them declaimed aloud while his friends clustered about him in hooting incredulity.

  There are moments in life when you blunder in front of a window, or a glass. And you stop to see the most risible creature peering back at you, in some hideous weskit that he has mistaken for the very pineapple of fashion, a kingsman slung round his neck like the banner of his pretentions, with an expression of adolescent constipation that is clearly intended as Deep Sagacity. You blink — you may even for an instant begin to laugh — until the realization dawns: this is a reflection, and it is mine. You’ve draped yourself in Rainbow togs and swaddled yourself in fervent convictions, but in that reflection there you stand: exposed in the knobbly white nakedness of your own absurdity.

  The Epistle of Flitty Deakins was my looking-glass that morning. The anxious chitter of voices started up again, somewhere deep in the rat-holes of the mind. The rats had begun to skitter as I stood in that cellar the night before, listening to her raving about dead children and poor doomed dolly-mops. Even in that ghastly cellar, I knew what I was hearing: a tale told by a madwoman. And here in the light of a London dawn, could a sane man continue to believe it?

  Far better men than Your Wery Umble have lost their faith in God, and been left quite shattered. I think, looking back, that I had plunged into my own crisis of faith that morning in Covent Garden. A different manner of crisis, but no less devastating.

  I’d begun to question my certainties about the Devil. And without the Devil, then how are we to proceed? Where are we to point, and blame? There is no one and nothing left to loathe, except the reflection staring back.

  Last night had not gone well, even after I’d climbed back out of that cellar and stumbled my way free of the Holy Land, back to the nethersken by the Docks where I’d stayed before going to Holborn with my Annie. Arriving at the head of the street, I stopped myself just in time as I glimpsed two forms in the darkness on the corner nearest the house, revealed in hints and flashes by the light of their lanterns. A red-haired man in a scarlet weskit, and a smaller and darker companion, impersonating as best they could two fellows merely out to take the air on a rain-drizzling night down by the London Docks, and finding this stinking corner to their liking.