Will Starling

by Ian Weir

  “Poor Miss Deakins,” Atherton repeated now, shaking his head. “Some buck ruined her — that was the story, when Odenkirk sought it out. Down in Devonshire, where she’d been hired as a governess. It was another servant, I suppose — or one of the sons of the house. A child was conceived, and of course Miss Deakins was turned out. God knows what happened to the child, though I think we can guess. Born in a ditch by the side of the road, and left there. Her own family disowned her.”

  “Just like my mother’s family.”

  He flinched, and stood quite still.

  “Who was my father?” I asked him then.

  “She would never say.”

  “Not even to you?”

  “I turned my back on her, along with the rest.”

  And it cost him something to say that — to admit the truth, and to me of all people. I watched his face harrow at the memory, and I knew it had cost him dearly.

  “Have you ever seen an image?” he asked.

  “Of my mother? No. How could I?”

  He gestured.

  “On the desk.”

  Amidst the shamble of papers, there were other objects. A round polished stone and a cat’s skull for a paperweight; an old scalpel used for sharpening quills, and an overturned inkpot, bleeding its last onto green blotting-paper. Nooks with correspondence tucked in, and in one of them an oval cameo. The portrait of a dark-haired girl of sixteen or seventeen years — younger than I was myself, as I stood gazing down at her. Dark hair and dark eyes, and an elfin loveliness. My own face smiling back at me, but transformed into something beautiful.

  “You see it, of course,” said my uncle. “The resemblance.”

  The room was beginning to swelter now, with the rising heat of the day outside. The heavy green curtains were open just a crack; a yellow line of sunlight stole through them, bisecting the Turkey rug upon the floor. The cameo was cool as ivory in my palm.

  “She’d have come for you, Will. If she’d lived, she’d have fetched you out of the Foundling Hospital, as soon as she was able. She’d have cherished you, and giving you up would have riven her heart. I knew my sister, better than anyone in this world, and that is what she would have done.”

  More silence, then. The sound of two men breathing.

  “I could have helped her,” he said. “If only I’d found her in time. Even a day or two, before the fever had taken such hold. I had no training then, not in those days. But even so I would not have let the fever take her. I am convinced of that.”

  He spoke with such dogged conviction that I swear I could see the great Truth taking form. A citadel that he had built up in the telling, stone by stone, mortar and pestle, each day since my mother had slipped away from him forever.

  “I’d have saved her — as I saved Meg Nancarrow. I gave back Meg Nancarrow’s life, however much she hates me for it now.”

  “You need to get out of London,” I said then. “They’re planning to kill you.”

  And I found myself telling him all of it — what little I knew.

  “There’s a band of them, in the Holy Land. Flitty Deakins is one. The others are just — I don’t truly know what they are.” A handful of outcasts, paupers and ragged outlaws, some of them surely as mad as Flitty herself. But they were dangerous. And if Flitty Deakins could be believed, there were more of them every day. “They say they’re following Meg Nancarrow, though they won’t say where she is. And Christ only knows how far they might go.”

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  “So you can save yourself.”

  My uncle remained in shadow. It cut him past bearing, to hear how bitterly he was hated. But I believe — I am almost certain — there was wonderment on his face.

  “You have done me a kindness,” he said. “More than I have ever done for you.”

  And there we stood, just two men: an uncle and a nephew, separated by a chasm, but bound together by so much else. Bound by all the ties of blood, and aching.

  I see myself in this face as well.

  There was the thought that came on the moment, unnerving me with its intensity.

  I have always seen myself.

  “I won’t say let bygones be bygones,” my uncle said. “I won’t insult you like that. But I wish we were not enemies, Will. I wish that of all things.”

  He extended his hand. God help me, I reached out to take it.

  And the side door creaked wide. It opened onto a vestibule, which led in turn to a hallway beyond. Someone was standing, slender and tousled with slumber. A tumble of strawberry hair upon the shoulders of a thin white nightdress. She blinked through the dissipating mists, and then stopped short as she saw Your Wery Umble. Stopped dead in the act of stretching, like a kitten in a patch of sunlight.

  “Will,” exclaimed Annie Smollet.

  19

  Garrick had a trick he would perform in parlours. David Garrick, Sam Johnson’s great friend, and the foremost actor of his age. This was many years ago, of course — I never saw Garrick myself, nor Sam Johnson neither.

  I first came into possession of Sam’s dictionary shortly after the Battle of Salamanca in July of the year ’12 — a dog-eared copy, much thumbed and stained, given to me by a sweet-faced Geordie sapper with a scholarly inclination, who lay dying by horrid half-inches from a stomach wound. I have it with me at this moment, lying open at my elbow as I sit here at my lucubration — from the Latin lucubratio, “study by candlelight; nocturnal study; anything composed by night” — my thanks to you, Sam. I would thumb through the pages in spare moments, scavenging bright bits to try out in speech, and thus gaining a regiment-wide reputation as a curious hybrid, half waif and half parrot. I gained as well the whimsical feeling that Sam and I were old chums and travelling companions, and imagine my wide eyes when I learned that I was — just like Sam himself — from Lichfield, or leastways my forebears were, on one side. When I was there I asked after the house where he had been born, but they looked at me oddly and shrugged.

  And listen to me now — rambling like a sad old pantaloon, with time so short and so much still unsaid. You could almost imagine me ravaged with woe, subsiding into tearful reminiscence. You could picture me shackled and despairing, rocking myself forwards and back again, forwards and back.

  Garrick. That trick of his.

  He would hold himself just out of view behind a doorway. Stepping quickly into the opening he would project some attitude or emotion — joy, love, fear. Then he would disappear from view on the other side of the door, and in an instant reappear, this time projecting another emotion entirely. And not just projecting, but becoming it. Back and forth he would go, in and out of the open doorway, all human emotion embodied in quicksilver sequence. Love, jealousy, rage. Back and forth — twenty-five times, thirty, in less than a minute — despair, elation, torpor, resolution. A master of his technique, was old Garrick.

  But acting is more than technique. It is feelings too — and Garrick had something intriguing to say about that. A player in the white heat of the moment may be amazed, he said, by the intensity of his own emotion, how the surge of it could come on all of a sudden — and no mere make-believe of feeling, either, but the genuine article. True emotion, kindled by the joy of playing, lifting him like a kite.

  Looking back, I’ve come to think that this is what happened with Annie Smollet. She’d cast herself in a role, that evening she followed Janet Friendly to St Sepulchre’s churchyard and found Your Wery Umble standing there. And as she played her part, a great gust of Feelings began to blow. This bore her aloft and swept her down Holborn Street to the room above the bird-fancier’s shop, and it never subsided ’til dawn came peeping through the window, bringing the light of Reality with it. Then finally she did what all kites must, and came fluttering softly down. And who can blame a kite for being a kite?

  As I say, I came round to this way of thinking long afterwards. I wasn’t so philosophical on that morning at my uncle’s house, when Annie came through the vestibule door and
stammered to see Your Wery Umble. I would like to relate that I drew myself to the uttermost extension of my height, delivering a cool observation that buckled Miss Smollet with shame, and left my uncle riven with the icy knowledge that he had earned a Dreadful Enmity. But I’m afraid this would stretch the truth.

  I stood stuttering in distress. I babbled something incoherent to Annie, and shouted something else at my uncle. Then I turned and fled the house.

  I went to an ale-house after that, then to another, and a third, where I maundered for a time and then erupted into bitter denunciations of Mr Dionysus Atherton — calling him traitor and hound — until the other patrons wearied of this and one young fellow loudly invited me to take my mewling elsewhere. He was a butcher’s boy, I think — I’d been stumbling in the general direction of Smithfield. I challenged him, as any young man of spirit would do, provided that he were sufficiently drunk and broken-hearted, and an imbecile into the bargain; and I have no doubt that I would have fibbed him senseless, except that a fist came thundering like a coach and four and the world went suddenly sideways in a clatter of tables and stools. I sat in the lane outside for a time after that, staunching the claret that dripped from my nose, and drooped like an expiring tulip.

  In due course I was no longer alone. A pair of battered boots stood before me, above which two shins disappeared into breeches too short. These were tied at the waist with a length of twine, and my gaze travelled up a filthy weskit to a familiar hatchet face.

  “Bugger me,” said young Barnaby, looking elsewhere, “if it ent the fugitive.”

  It didn’t occur to me to be surprised to see him. It had a certain logic, after all, this district being Barnaby’s customary haunt. On another afternoon, when Your Wery Umble was more sober and less despairing, it might indeed have seemed just that tiniest bit unlikely — that Barnaby would be the one to come across me, of all the street arabs in Smithfield. It might have crossed my mind to wonder whether Barnaby had in fact been keeping an eye open for Wm Starling, for reasons best known to himself. But not today.

  “I need you to deliver a message,” I said.

  There was a house in Crutched Friars, I told him — a surgeon lived there, named Atherton. A young woman was with him, Miss Smollet.

  “Tell her I need to see her. Tonight.” Eight o’clock, I said, and named a church, St Alban’s in the City Road. “Can you do that?”

  Barnaby held out his palm.

  “Tell her she must come alone,” I said.

  I arrived at St Alban’s as the bell was striking eight. The church was empty, except for a pair of old women in black, bowed in prayer like penitential rooks, and a Sexton pottering at the back. It smelled of must and piety, as churches do, with a sick-sweet residue from the churchyard beyond. The last rays of twilight slanted through stained glass, and in the dimness dust-motes danced in rainbows.

  I hadn’t been inside a church for more than a year; not since Danny Littlejohn died. Not that Your Wery Umble had been a great habitué of churches to begin with. I’d been to my share of them on the Peninsula, but they had been converted to field hospitals by the time I got there, with mutilated men for a congregation, and surgeons red with gore standing in for priests. You could say I served five years at that altar, if you were inclined to see it that way, handing up the scalpel and bonesaw in place of the wafer and wine. But I couldn’t say it breeds in a boy a spirit of True Religiosity, that sort of a church. The conviction that a Merciful God is gazing down with all His Saints assembled, and that there will one day very soon be archangelic singing in place of shrieks and moans, and that the stench of blood and shit and rot will be lost in the hyacinth waft of the Fields of Heaven. And what happened to Danny left me less convinced than ever that there was any place for Wm Starling in any House of Redemption in all this great wide weeping world.

  Still, I’d asked Miss Smollet to meet me in a church tonight. So who knows? Perhaps I had inchoate notions that meeting in a church might yet invoke some crucial Blessing; that Miss Smollet stepping through the door might see the configuration — Wm Starling standing in the nave in an attitude of Patient Suffering, lit by candles and dimly irradiated by the last glow of the dying sun through stained glass — and begin to discern the depth of her folly. And I would say that I did not blame her, not for anything at all; that I had no claim upon her, nor the slightest justification for believing that she had ever been mine in the first place, not even for the span of a single night. I was going to tell her all of this, but in such a way that she would perceive what a Noble Heart stood here Crack’d, and understand in a sudden dazzle of remorse that she had Erred most calamitously, cos she did love Wm Starling, and had loved him to distraction all along.

  Eight-thirty, and Miss Smollet had not come.

  A dying bluebottle beat its head against the stained-glass window beside me. In the glass was an image of St Peter, robed and haloed. You could tell it was Peter by the golden key he held — the key with which he opens Heaven’s Gate, as I’ve no doubt he will on the morning Your Honours arrive.

  Eight-forty-five. The penitential rooks had left, as had the Sexton, after lighting candles here and there about the church. I’d done my best to clean myself up before coming, brushing my coat and washing my face at a stand-pipe in the road. I was fragrant as a courting beau, allowing for the residual waft of gin. The drunkenness was ebbing now, and the sick nob-splitter that follows was taking hold.

  The clock struck nine, and what had I been thinking? I looked towards the window, and I swear that St Peter himself in stained glass avoided my eye, as a plain gruff fisherman must do when the truth is too awkward to acknowledge.

  I am Fond of you, Will. That was the word she would use, if ever she came. We’ve been Friends to one another, and I’m so very sorry if you somehow misunderstood . . .

  But she wasn’t coming. I knew that now, though I waited for another hour and more, as the last light died behind St Peter and the church was dark in the gutter of candlelight. I left just after ten-thirty.

  And now here I stood again, across the street from the house at Crutched Friars.

  The night had gone quiet, or at least as quiet as a London night can be. Traffic on the streets beyond, and the mournful baying of a hound, rising and falling nearby. From the stable, perhaps, behind my uncle’s house. Dim light glowed behind two or three of the windows; through one of them, a window on the second floor, I suddenly saw — or imagined — a shadow behind the curtains, as of someone passing.

  Was she still there?

  The window had been left open, against the heat of the day. The curtain stirred with the whisper of a breeze, and in that tiny movement I could almost believe myself certain. Fingers reaching to twitch back the edge of the fabric; a slim form in a white nightdress, and a tumble of strawberry ringlets.

  But was she there? And was she alone? Or was she in his arms?

  It is the worst rack that ever was devised, and we twist ourselves upon it most exquisitely. You’ll know this only too well if you’ve ever stood outside a lover’s house in the blackness, gazing up at a lighted window. And of course you have — admit it. We’ve all been that dark and malignant imp, if only in our thoughts; banished from the wedding feast and peering from the ring of outer darkness, with suffocating heart and gangrenous imaginings. You’d climb to the window — you truly would, if only in your thoughts. You’d find a trellis, or lizard your way right up the wall, if only to confirm the Very Worst and force yourself to watch it.

  And if she was still there, was she somehow in danger?

  The most gangrenous imagining of all, and I kept circling back to it. I had all but resolved to pound at the door — to burst through and confront whatever awaited inside, be it Hell itself, or Odenkirk. But in that agony of indecision, I realized something else: I was no longer standing alone. There were shadows behind me — two dark substantialities in the greater darkness of the night. Two silent shapes, one hulking and grim, and the second a wisp beside him.
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br />   The red-haired Bow Street Runner and his smaller, darker colleague — that was my first conviction, and it stopped my heart. But it wasn’t the Law at all.

  “So it is you. The surgeon’s boy — haunting the darkness,” said Meg Nancarrow.

  Her dark hair loose and tangled; a shawl clutched round her shoulders. She shivered as the breeze came up, despite the warmth of the night. Jemmy’s arm was around her; he drew her close.

  “You done what you could for me, Will Starling,” she said. “You have my gratitude for that.”

  Her voice a ragged whisper, and her eyes were pools of blood — exactly as they’d said. The blood vessels had burst, with strangulation. I’d seen the phenomenon before, though never so shockingly. Her neck was cricked to one side, and one corner of her mouth quirked down, the way you see sometimes in those who have suffered convulsive seizures.

  “It’s true, then,” I said, finding my voice. “You’re alive.”

  Cos it’s something to stop up the syllables in your throat, believe me. Standing in filtering starlight, with a woman they’d hanged ’til she was dead three weeks ago last Monday.

  The shadow of a thin, ironic smile. She reached out her hand.

  “Go ahead and touch me. I’m not a ghost.”

  Bones as frail as a sparrow’s.Her face was pinched and grey, as in someone whose pain is constant.

  “Is it very bad?” I said to her.

  “Don’t matter.”

  Liquid rattled in her breathing, which I liked least of all. It made me suppose that the heart had been overtaxed. Some permanent damage sustained, during the ordeal.

  “If I could suggest — a compound of succotrine aloes. Any pothecary will have it. A wine glass full, taken every other morning . . .”

  I trailed away. A remedy against Decline of Life; I had sometimes seen it work to some effect. But my magpied knowledge of potions seemed suddenly laughable.

  Jemmy held her closer. It was the first time I had seen him since that day in Dr Paxton’s cellar. His eyes were remote, but there was someone behind them, gazing as if from some distant mountaintop.