Will Starling

by Ian Weir

  Bow Street Runners.

  I didn’t recognize this particular pair, but I was familiar with the species — Special Constables hired by Bow Street Magistrates’ Court, to run down malefactors. Someone at the nethersken had recognized me, and sold me.

  I shrank back into the night before being spotted, but it had been a near-run thing, and now the hounds were clearly closing in. I slunk all night through an oily rain, arriving in Covent Garden as the market was stirring to life. That’s where I picked up the newspaper, and read the Epistle. Afterwards I slunk some more, and then I went to Milford Lane.

  The rain had stopped an hour or two before, the cobbles still slippery as the morning sun rose above the houses. A shopkeeper was outside taking down his shutters, and a boy threw a knotted rag for a flop-eared puppy while the city rumbled to life beyond.

  Janet came out the door of her shop, stopping dead as she saw me and then looking round in dread, as if half-expecting Constables to loom along the rooftops. “You can’t be here,” she hissed, seizing my arm and dragging me to a more sheltered spot in the mouth of an alley. “They come again last evening — Bow Street Runners. Asking after you, up and down the lane. Will, they’re watching this place.”

  The man at his shutters was looking our way — the way you do, idly wondering if something is the matter, when voices are urgent and phizogs tight. The little boy had glanced over too, partway through retrieving the knotted rag.

  “Is she here?” I asked.

  “La Smollet, you mean? No. I ent seen her, nor heard from her neither, since the night I met you at St Sepulchre’s.”

  Here was news that brought fresh desolation — and an ever-deepening unease.

  “D’you know where she might go?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “Would you tell me if you did?”

  “Yes! Will, I swear to you — she left three nights ago, and she ent come back. I can’t abide the giddy twat, but I wouldn’t lie to a friend.”

  “D’you think she’s all right?”

  “The fuck should I know how she is?”

  But she saw the expression in my face. Softening, she touched my arm.

  “Will, I’d lay good odds that she’s fine — I’d wager the shop on it. And cos why? Cos coming out all right is what La Smollet does. Whatever happens, her sort will end on their feet. At the end of the world, it’ll be the rats left standing — and Annie Smollet. And I say this in tolerance, if not exactly love.”

  A cart had lurched into the lane, here to collect night-soil. Another door or two had opened; more glims were sidelonging our way. The little boy and his puppy stared with the slack-jawed idiot interest that runs in both species.

  “If she comes — if you hear from her — tell her I’m leaving.”

  I meant it this time.

  “Say goodbye for me. Can you do that?”

  “Yes, I can do that, you fucking eejit.”

  It came upon me, then: this was really the last time I’d ever see Janet Friendly. That long scowling face and those red hands balled into fists. I discovered the thought made me remarkably sad.

  The puppy had commenced barking at us, dancing back and forth.

  “Will, go.”

  And I went. I turned and hurried from Milford Lane, after a last shoulder-snotting clutch against Janet, and a last despairing gaze towards Annie’s window.

  But I couldn’t leave London — not quite yet. Not ’til I had paid one final call.

  18

  They would go out riding in the fields together, my uncle and his sister — so one of the Lichfield neighbours had recollected. My uncle had a spirited chestnut gelding, sixteen hands at the shoulders; she would ride behind on a fat white pony.

  One afternoon she took a fall. She had been six or seven years old at the time, the neighbour recollected; her brother had been nine or ten. She had tried to follow when he jumped his horse over a fallen log, cos she would follow him in anything. But the pony had stumbled and pitched her headlong; she lay horribly, like a discarded doll.

  Dionysus had carried her home in his arms, gasping through the wood in horror that he had killed her. But she came round after a time, and was laid out on a settee when the waddling red physician arrived. She wailed when he touched her twisted ankle, and her brother rose in impetuous rage — Dionysus, nine or ten years old, driving the physician from the house and announcing that he would care for Emily himself. This he did, swaddling the ankle with a blanket she’d had since infancy and sitting up with her the whole first night. She was on her feet three days later, and by the end of a week was hobbling gamely along the lane with her brother’s arm for support. A wisp of a girl in a white muslin dress, and her brother beside her: tall and golden and shining with solicitude.

  On the November night that would follow ten years later, when she was driven weeping from the house, her brother would stand as white as marble, and as hard.

  The rounding of her shoulder as she turned. The spatter of footsteps receding and the tatter of a wind-wrenched cloak, ghosting into insubstantiality.

  She had haunted him ever since.

  *

  By mid-morning the heat was rising. It would be the first truly warm day of the year, a foretaste of August days to come, when the sun would bake through the brown haze and London would ripen with the stench of itself. Offal and livestock and rotting vegetables; on such days the backstreets might just as well be open sewers, and churchyards could gag you at a hundred paces. There’d been hotter days in the Peninsula, of course — any number of them. I can recollect marches through hundred-degree heat and humidity, and sweltering field hospitals where sweat ran in rivers down Mr Comrie’s face and you expected that limbs must commence to rot before the bone had been sawed halfways through. I have no doubt that Hell will be hotter yet, when I get there. Still, for sheer stinking wretchedness, you have to admire a summer’s day in London.

  Bloody Bill Starling might dispute that — Bloody Bill my pirate father, with tales of whose exploits I had regaled the wide-eyed foundlings at Lamb’s Conduit Fields. Bloody Bill had after all sailed round the Horn of Africa, and straight along the Equator, for weeks. Now that was heat, he would surely have said, had he been here present at this moment. Heat was drifting becalmed for two months in the middle of the South China Sea, as Bill had done in the Year ’03, with the barrels bone-dry and tongues swollen black. Heat was the Black Hole of Calcutta, of which Bill might on some subsequent day tell a tale that would congeal the blood. But Bill would not be weighing in just at the moment — nor indeed at any other moment I could think of — cos of course Bloody Bill Starling did not exist.

  Janet Friendly had taxed me with that, in our days at the Foundling Hospital.

  “You pure made the fucker up,” she accused me one afternoon by the railings. “But you just can’t admit it, can you? And you know why?”

  “No, I don’t — but I expect I will in two more seconds,” I flung back, “cos I expect Miss Janet Know-All is about to tell me.”

  “You can’t admit it, you eejit, becos you’ve started to fucking believe it. You’ve told it so often, you’ve forgotten you made it up in the first place.”

  I cursed her roundly for that, earning myself a drubbing in return, after which I went off in the highest of dudgeons, vowing I would never speak to Janet Friendly again — and didn’t, for nearly a month. But the worst of it was, she was right. I’d invented Bloody Bill. I’d cobbled him together from bits and scraps, and then I’d told his tale so eagerly and so often that it came to seem not just plausible, but real.

  Leaving Milford Lane, I made my way east through the winding lanes along the river. Gradually I found myself tending up Ludgate Hill and past St Paul’s Cathedral, where I bought a cake from a coster-stall and forced down three mouthfuls before tossing it aside. The pigeons were upon it instantly, like Death House sparrows upon a choice bit of finger — or like Bow Street Runners upon a fugitive. Then I found that I was moving farther east, slipp
ing into the jostle along Cheapside and then tending southwards again, crossing Gracechurch Street and veering onto Fenchurch Street.

  And just as All Hallows’ clock began to strike ten o’clock, I arrived at my uncle’s door in Crutched Friars. The housekeeper came to answer my knock.

  “Ohhhhhh,” gasped Missus Tolliver. Her eyes flew wide.

  She’d seen me before, of course. She knew who I was. And she’d read the newspapers.

  “I need to see him,” I said.

  “Ooooooh.”

  This latter vowel may have been a question: Who? But I think it was mainly the quavering astonishment of a housekeeper who discovers a ragged murderer on her doorstep, at ten o’clock of a morning in June. I forced past her, into the house.

  The entrance hall seemed smaller when you saw it in the light of day. A paltry thing when compared against the hall that Atherton imagined for himself in Mayfair, once he stood alongside Mr Astley Cooper as the leading surgeon in London. His entrance hall in Mayfair would be airy and wide, with oil paintings upon the walls and a marble staircase sweeping upwards. There would be an entire wing for his Specimens, and a drawing room done in the Egyptian style, which remained very fashionable this season — had been so ever since Napoleon’s campaign upon the Nile — and a vast dining room where Atherton would host Lords and Baronets, men with grouse moors in Yorkshire and five thousand a year, and all the foremost men of Science and the Arts. Lord Byron himself would no doubt attend, if ever he returned from the Continent. Edmund Kean would yearn to come, but would not be invited.

  Here at Crutched Friars, the stairs lay directly ahead, a narrow corridor leading past them. There were two closed doors; a third at the end was half open.

  “Stop!” cried Missus Tolliver.

  It was a modest library: two bookcases, an armchair and a fire, with a second door — closed — leading through to the rear of the house. Atherton had been sitting at a cluttered desk in the corner, scribbling at some papers. Now he turned at the commotion, and rose.

  Missus Tolliver huffed up behind me. “’Ee barged in, Mr Atherton! I couldn’t stop ’im!”

  “Tell her to leave us,” I said. “Tell her don’t go running to fetch Odenkirk — or the Law.”

  “It’s all right, Missus Tolliver,” he said. “Go upstairs. My nephew is welcome here.”

  Missus Tolliver’s mouth rounded into another O. “Your nephew, Mr Atherton?”

  “That is what I said.”

  The first time he’d ever acknowledged me. Missus Tolliver flabbergasted several more vowels, then withdrew in confusion, leaving us alone.

  The curtains were drawn against the morning sun; my uncle stood in shadow. “There’s a price upon your head,” he said. “Did you know?”

  In fact I’d discovered it just this morning, noted in the newspapers. Fifty guineas, placed upon my nob the night previous by no less a personage than Edmund Kean. Apparently Kean when just a lad had once seen Master Buttons on the stage, and now felt a great sense of grief, arising from his generous spirit. It seemed Kean often felt generous towards his rivals, especially once they’d been reduced to shit-arsed ruination — or better yet, murdered dead in alleyways — so he’d raised a subscription and posted a reward, which would doubtless win him considerable approval. With luck it might also attract larger audiences to his Bertram.

  “So you’re a murderer,” said my uncle.

  “They’re saying worse of you.”

  “We have something in common, it seems.”

  “We have nothing in common.”

  “What do you want?”

  He looked dreadful: haggard and unshaven, his shirt hanging open to the navel. I guessed the rumours had been very close to the truth — he had been searching through the sinks of the Metropolis ever since Meg’s disappearance, ranging down dark passageways and wrenching through doors. He had the look of a man who has not slept in many nights, and begins to think he may never sleep again.

  “I want to hear it from your mouth,” I said. “What you did.”

  “I told them that night at Guy’s Hospital. You were present.”

  “I want the truth.”

  “The Truth.” There was wormwood in his voice. “As little a thing as that.”

  There was a decanter of brandy on a table in the corner, and a tumbler. His hands were unsteady as he reached and poured, and swallowed half at a gulp. “The truth is, I saw an opportunity.”

  “To be rid of a woman who could put your head in a noose?”

  “No,” he said. “To confound them.”

  “And that is all?”

  He actually barked a laugh.

  “All? To resurrect a woman, hanged before half of London — and you say, ‘that is all?’ We have differing perspectives, you and I.”

  The drink seemed to settle him, a little. He drained the rest of the tumbler.

  “I saw a chance to make my name,” he said. “And to save an innocent woman.”

  “You knew her to be innocent?”

  “So I believed. So I decided, at any rate.”

  “So you bribed the Sheriff and brought her here, and left her lying for five hours. To make very sure she was dead.”

  “Did I?”

  “That’s what you told them at Guy’s.”

  “Well,” he said. “Perhaps I exaggerated.”

  A haggard half-smile, sly and sheepish at once. The smirk of a boy caught out in some clever transgression.

  “I am just a bit of a showman, nephew. You’ve noted that? Perhaps I can never quite resist. So perhaps it was a little less time that passed.”

  What had he been like, as a boy? The queer thought came suddenly, catching me off my guard. The tall golden youth who could smile like this — just exactly like this, rueful but winning — and disarm each one of them at every turn. The cleverest boy in all of Lichfield.

  “And what did you expect they’d do,” I demanded, “when you trotted Meg out? That night at Guy’s — if she hadn’t escaped. What did you actually expect?”

  “I expected them to see. All those narrow eyes, and narrow minds . . .”

  “And what about the Law? They’d have took her and hung her all over again.”

  He dismissed this impatiently. “They’d have done no such thing.”

  “Why the Devil not?”

  “Because I would not have stood for it.”

  “She was — is — a convicted murderess. She signed a confession.”

  “And I had sworn to protect her. I had given her my Word.”

  “Listen to yourself,” I cried, incredulous. “Can you actually believe — ?”

  “Christ! Can no one understand what I’ve done? Five hours — two hours — what does it matter? The woman was dead — I gave her life. I did that, Will. I did it. I called to a woman on the farthest shore, and she came back to me!”

  It burst out in genuine passion: grievance and rage and — above all else — confusion. All his hopes and golden prospects, dashed to flinders. Here he stood in the rubble, bewildered and desperately injured, and it came creeping upon me then, the vertiginous realization: I could learn to pity him. Worse than that — oh, ten times worse — I could begin to understand him.

  The boy who was always first, from the day he was born. The first to propose some daring exploit, and the first to prove he could carry it off. The foremost boy in every room, with a charm that burgeoned before him like the bow-surge of a frigate. You’d forgive him almost anything, a boy like that — his small transgressions winked at, and the large ones overwhelmed by the swell of his passage. Capsized like skiffs that blunder across a tall ship’s course; left broken and scattered and bobbing in its wake. A father whose buttons burst with pride, and a dark little sister who worshipped him. It must shape a man, to begin his life that way. It must free him, in ways he can hardly guess. And limit him.

  His back was to me again. He poured another drink and threw it back.

  “I need to find her, Will,” he said. Using
my Christian name, for the second time. “I only wanted to help her, and now I must find her again. I have posted a reward.”

  “I know that. A hundred guineas.”

  “Is that why you’re here — for the money?”

  “I don’t know where she is. But I’ve seen Flitty Deakins.”

  He looked round quickly, not quite comprehending.

  “She claims she’s seen Meg,” I told him. “That letter, in the newspaper . . .”

  And he realized.

  “Those ravings? That’s Phyllida Deakins?”

  Cos of course he’d read the Epistle, the same as half of London had by now. This morning’s newspaper was amongst the pages strewn across the desk top.

  “The deranged, drug-addled bitch.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Poor Miss Deakins.”

  That gaze — impossibly blue — held mine. There was an uncanny depth in those eyes, a fathomless quality like the sky itself, or the sea, as if you could search forever without finding the bottom. I had the unsettling sense of being searched in return, as if my phizog was a code that could be deciphered, and after a moment Atherton’s own face altered.

  “You’re right, of course,” he said. “Poor Miss Deakins. We must keep that in mind.”

  There was something that Keats had said about him once, a curious observation. “It’s as if he doesn’t know,” Keats had said. “Watch him, sometimes — the way he watches others. As if he isn’t sure how he should respond, until he sees the proper sentiment in someone else’s face. Then he can mirror it back to you. As if he’s — I hardly know how to frame it — a child in all his feelings, just learning to toddle his first steps. Such remarkable development of the intellect, and yet so stunted in the heart.”