Will Starling

by Ian Weir

  “It’s good she has you,” I said to him.

  “Yes,” said Meg. “I’d be lost.”

  I think he smiled at that. He made a movement with his mouth. I’d seen this in field hospitals — men who’d suffered traumatick injury to the brain. Some of them would recover, more or less, over time. Some would erupt into sudden rages, out of nothing. I’d never seen one the size of Jemmy Cheese, standing by his Meg.

  “What did you see?” I asked her then.

  How could I not ask it, after all? A woman who had crossed the River, and come back again — if that’s what had truly happened. Except she hadn’t come all the way. The current had taken hold before she could reach the shore, and was trying to draw her down.

  “When I was dead, you mean?”

  A sound like pebbles sliding. Meg had laughed, bleak and brief.

  “I saw Atherton’s face,” she said, “staring.”

  “Nothing else?”

  “I don’t claim there’s nothing. How would I know that, after all? Just, I never seen it.”

  A warm wind continued to rise. Meg shivered again.

  “You should go to someone for help,” I said.

  “A doctor, you mean? Or a surgeon?” That sound again, of pebbles.

  I heard myself blurting: “What did he do to you?”

  “I couldn’t rightly say. It was dark, and then it wasn’t. You prob’ly know better yourself — consorting as you do with surgeons. But you’re right to ask. What did he do to me, and why? I have a right to know.”

  The liquid of her breathing, and the night wind prowling in the trees. The mournful hound, wherever it was, had fallen silent. She gazed fixedly across at his house.

  “Are you going to kill him?” I asked.

  “First I need to be certain.”

  A face in a tangle of wild dark hair, and two eyes as red as blood.

  “Miss Deakins would have done it long since. Just judge him, and kill. But that’s what they done to me, Will Starling — and I’m better than they are. Whatever else I am, I’m better than them. And I will have the truth before I decide.”

  *

  Odenkirk emerged from the house just at dawn. The time in all the day when the air is soft and London itself smells almost fresh, and a man may yawn and scratch his danglers and feel that there is Hope still stirring in the world, and Promise stretching out before him. The darkness was half-leavened into grey, and he saw me standing in it. Standing alone across the road, staring back at him.

  I watched him subside into stillness: glims narrowing to slits, danglers abandoned half-scratched.

  “Friend Starling,” he said, and sidled closer. “Is there something brings you here?”

  “I been waiting for you,” I said.

  Birds had begun to sing in the eaves along the street. At the end of it a solitary cart rattled through the gloom. Odenkirk sidled two long steps, and then two more. He stood now in the middle of the road, six swift strides and a murderous clutch away. And here we were, just we two: Little Red-Cap and the Wolf.

  Little Red-Cap gets eaten. That’s the true original ending of the tale — leastways the tale as I heard it at my blue-veined breast in Kent. There’d been another version since, written by two German brothers. I’d heard this from a Prussian cavalry officer in a field hospital, who discoursed upon children’s fables while he lay rotting slowly upwards from the left stump. In the telling of the German brothers, he’d said, the wolf ends up dead instead — which was preposterous, it seemed to me. Cos who’d give odds on Little Red-Cap, up against a wolf?

  “I am a Gypsy,” I said, “come to tell your fortune.”

  “My fortune?”

  “You are a dead man.”

  I saw then the look that ten thousand pigs had seen, in their final instant upon this earth. Ten thousand pigs and Uncle Cheese, and Little Hollis last of all. I turned and ran for my life.

  Odenkirk lunged in pursuit. Down the road, his long strides devouring the distance between us. Oh, he was horribly swift, and in half a moment more he would have me in those hands. Then we were round a corner and into the alley that lay beyond, and Odenkirk slid to a stop as he saw them waiting in ambush: a dozen dark shapes with cudgels, and stone walls rising up on either side.

  “You see?” I said. “A dead man.”

  Odenkirk swore a mighty oath, as villains do upon the stage — or in secluded alleys, near Crutched Friars. He snatched out a cosh he kept concealed, preparing to lay about him, right and left; breaking the heads of every man present, and saving the brainpan of Wm Starling for the last. I expect he might have done it too. Odenkirk was a terrible man.

  But not half so terrible as Jemmy Cheese, who rose now in the gloom behind him, like the spectre of Reckoning itself.

  20

  There was another boy I especially recollect, the night I went out to look for Danny Littlejohn. A raw recruit, this other lad had been, one of the wave who took the shilling after Corporal Bonaparte returned from exile in March of ’15, and the whole bloody lunacy started up again. A stone-cutter’s son from somewhere in the North, with a red coat two sizes too small and great raw stone-cutter’s hands. A spent ball had come trundling along the ground towards him, moving scarcely faster than a man might jog. Without thinking — without knowing — he stuck out one large foot to stop it, the way you’d stop a child’s ball bouncing away from a game. It did for him, of course. Spun him sideways and left him to sit in blinking stupefaction, with the leg so bent it was practically torn off. The femoral artery was shredded in the process, and so naturally he bled to death sitting there. He was still half-sitting when I came across him long hours later, with shoulders slumped and head hung low and the whitest phizog on all that chalk-faced field.

  Danny Littlejohn was no raw recruit, having fought for more than a year all along the Peninsula. But he’d left in the spring of ’14, and that’s what somehow made it ten times worse. Set sail on a troop-ship and gone home, with a “Ta-ra, Will — look for me in London when you’re done.” But then he’d turned around and signed back up. I never understood completely why, and Danny never quite exactly said. I think it hadn’t gone as he’d hoped, back home; I’ve a notion there was not much work, and bad company instead — some matter of thieving, and the long arm of British Justice reaching out. However it was, he came back, and Quatre Bras was the very first action he saw, this second time.

  A line had been buckled by French lancers, and was pulling back — so I was told by an old Infantryman who saw Danny fall. “He was just there, beside me,” the Infantryman gasped, “and then he weren’t.” He knew the two of us were particular friends; he’d watched us singing a comical song just the day before, and chuckled gruffly along. It was in a field hospital just at nightfall when he told me this, the old Infantryman having subsequently fallen himself, a ball shattering his shoulder.

  As darkness closed I went out to find Danny — just up and left, with men still on tables with legs half hewn and Mr Comrie behind me bellowing for light. I searched all that long dark night, picking through the legions of the dying and the dead, who lay strewn across the battlefield like leaves. But I was going to find my friend, even if I had to sift every fallen leaf in all Creation, and at last — at the end of a thousand others — there he was, still alive, sitting on a hillock against an overturned cart.

  “Long Will,” he said. “Bugger me, you took your time.”

  Against all odds he wore that crooked grin, the grin that was purest Danny. His head lolled a little as he sat and his two hands were folded across his belly, just exactly as if I’d found him at his post-prandial ease, belching somnolent satisfaction at his supper.

  “Long Will, I b’lieve I may require a surgeon. P’raps you should fetch your friend Mr Comrie. D’you think?

  I knelt. “Let me see, Dan.”

  “I’m afraid I been a bit of a fool,” he said, “to end up in this manner.”

  He tried to laugh a little, but the pain rose up to choke it.
His hands clenched upon his belly, as if by dint of careful effort he could hold his guts inside. But they kept slithering out, shiny and coiled, to spite him.

  “Oh, Christ, Long Will. Go fetch a surgeon.”

  But no surgeon on earth could help Danny now, cos you couldn’t cut into the abdominal cavity. Corruption was certain if you tried, a worse death than if you’d done nothing at all. And Danny’s death would be bad enough as it was — I’d seen that at once, with a certainty that hollowed me inside. Danny’s death would be worse than bad, and such deaths could take days.

  I held his head and gave him a mouthful of water. He sputtered it down.

  “Go now, Long Will — hurry. But first give me something for the pain. You’re so clever with the potions, and I don’t believe I can stand this anymore.”

  “I’ve nothing, Danny.”

  “Yes you do. I know it.”

  He wept then and cursed me for keeping it all for myself.

  “Judas himself would share a potion with his friend,” he said. “Judas who’s burning in Hell this second. I wouldn’t let you suffer so, you bastard. I couldn’t bear it.”

  “Nor can I, Danny,” I said. “I can’t bear it neither.”

  I took his nose between my thumb and forefinger, and covered his mouth with my palm.

  “I’m so sorry, Dan,” I said.

  He struggled, of course, though every movement brought fresh agony. He jerked and juddered like a man on a rope at Newgate. His eyes huge and horrified found mine, and I have wondered ever since what he saw in those final moments, as his lungs screamed out and the blood vessels burst: the leer of Old Bones himself, or just his poor friend Will?

  Or perhaps did he see — and this was the worst thought of all, and one that only intruded long afterwards — did he see at the last a hard cold glint such as others in their dying had glimpsed in my uncle’s eyes? Those who had drowned in the bottomless blue gaze of Dionysus Atherton.

  *

  They carried Odenkirk back into the Holy Land between them: feet dragging, head lolling, like a man fished out of the Thames. And who would look twice at that, in the glimmering of dawn? Just another merry London buck who’d outdone himself on the ran-tan, and was being taken home by his friends. They slapped him back to consciousness in the cellar, and then commenced to beat him all over again. It was Flitty Deakins who did this, Flitty and some of the others. When Meg came down the stairs, she was very angry. “We ent animals,” she said to them. “We are not wolves.” They stopped then, Flitty and the others, falling silent and shame-faced and then shuffling back as Meg came amongst them, followed by Jemmy. I was watching from the shadows as she knelt by Odenkirk, like a mother comforting her great bleeding boy, and asked him for the truth.

  He had no fight left in him, and babbled it out through broken yellow teeth. Yes, he said, he’d killed Edward Cheshire, murdered him on my uncle’s instructions. He’d helped in the killing of others as well, orphans and strays and derelicts used in medical experiments, just as Flitty had been claiming all along.

  Meg was cradling his head now, in her lap. Odenkirk gazed up into her face, imploring her to understand.

  “Ned Cheshire knew,” he said. “That’s why he had to die.”

  “He’d heard rumours, that’s all,” said Meg, looking bitter and very tired. “There was rumours about, of Doomsday Men being asked for corpses not quite dead. Rumours is not the same as knowing.”

  “But Atherton feared that you knew,” said Odenkirk. “And then someone called in the Law, when the money-lender’s body was recognized. Uncle Cheese, on the Death House table. So a murderer was needed, somebody to take the blame. Someone else had to hang, Miss Meg — and he decided that would be you.”

  Their voices were low. A great intimacy had begun, between them. She brushed a matted clump of hair from his forehead, and her fingers came away blood-red.

  “Then why didn’t he leave me dead?” she asked. “I was dead, if that’s what he wanted. But then he brought me back again.”

  “Becos he could.”

  “That’s all?”

  “A woman hung before all of London? He could never resist a chance like that, to show what he could do. And so he went ahead and done it.”

  “And afterwards. At the end of all of that, he thought I’d — what — thank him?

  “He thought you’d love him.”

  Another voice had said this, from the shadows. My own voice, constricted by a coiling certainty.

  They stared towards me, Meg and all the others.

  “There was a young woman who died,” I said to her. “Choosing you out — then deciding to raise you up — it was all tangled up with making amends, somehow. With making amends to his sister. That’s where it all begins.”

  Meg blinked once, very slowly.

  “Beginnings is all very fine,” she said. “But what matters is making an end.”

  Odenkirk had commenced to blubber softly.

  “Oh, Miss Meg, he’s a dreadful man. A most terrible man, is Dionysus Atherton. He drug me down, but I swear I’m not like him.”

  “I believe you. Hush.”

  “And I can help you now. I know where bodies is dug, at Crutched Friars — I know every one, cos I dug them myself. I can show you.”

  “I believe you’ve done enough,” she said.

  “Oh, Miss Meg, I done such deeds. Such horrid deeds I done. Can you forgive me?”

  Her left hand supporting his shaggy head, lifting it closer. Those eyes as red as blood, and a soft smile on her haggard face; it hardened.

  “No,” she said.

  His own eyes grew very wide, at that, and his feet began to judder. Meg with her right hand had slipped a knife beneath his ribs and pushed it quick and clean into his heart. Odenkirk gave a last soft exhalation, as of an infant drifting off towards slumber, and was gone.

  Letter from Mr Dionysus Atherton

  6th June, 1816

  Comrie —

  You will forgive the scrawl. I fear we are past the point of penmanship.

  By the time this reaches you, I will be gone. The street arab who delivers it may solicit a reply, but don’t bother. His name is Barnaby, and he will be trying to extort payment for a note he knows damned well he can’t deliver, as I am leaving London directly. I may go abroad, at least until the present to-do passes. Fleeing in the night, with my reputation in tatters and the Fleet Ditch Fury — so I am reliably informed — shrieking for my blood. Such a turn of events, old friend. Such a shock to your quondam school chum — discovering himself less than universally loved. You must imagine him scribbling in heartsick disillusion. Picture a teardrop sparkling in his eye.

  But hear this, Comrie. You must understand: the tales they are spreading are lies. I am a healer and a man of Science. I have done nothing that you have not done, or attempted, or leastways wished you dared — you, old friend, and every other surgeon in London. If I am guilty, then so are you. So are all the others. Not one of you has the right to judge.

  You must hear something else, as well: I would have done my duty to the boy. I could have — would have — opened my house to him, and my arms, but he would never allow it. He hated me from the very start, old friend — hated me long before he first laid eyes. He looked at me and saw Belial leering back. And what chance did your old school chum ever have, against the Devil?

  The War destroyed him, I think; and I think you know that too. War destroyed Will Starling, and you took him there. Perhaps you can make your peace with that knowledge. I hope so, for your sake.

  Be well, old friend.

  Yours,

  Atherton

  21

  The assault upon Crutched Friars commenced just after nightfall, as was reported in the newspapers. Much of their information came from the one misfortunate servant who was inside when it happened, and who still had the swooning vapours twelve hours later: Missus Tolliver, the housekeeper. She’d gone to bed early with a headache, and was awakened by the sound of a
hob-nailed boot kicking down the front door. When asked how she could tell the boot was hob-nailed, Missus Tolliver replied that you should have your door kicked in at all hours of the night, and then talk to her about footwear. Hurrying out onto the landing, she discovered that the house had been overrun by shrieking banshees. No, she had not previously seen a banshee, but she knew very well what they shrieked like.

  Here Missus Tolliver’s account grows patchy, owing to the fact that she flung herself headfirst into a closet with her arms up over her head, on the reliable principle that horrors are best confronted back to front, arse upwards. But accounts from neighbours suggest that some dozen persons entered the house, of rough attire and desperate demeanour, carrying lanterns and cudgels. Leading them was a lumbering slack-faced giant.

  They rampaged through the premises, overturning beds and wrenching hangings from the walls, shouting for the surgeon to reveal himself. Others began ripping up floorboards, in search of the Evidence that Odenkirk had sworn was here. When Atherton did not offer himself up, nor mouldering corpses neither, they commenced to smash whatever they might reach, starting with the ghastly room stacked with Specimen jars, the contents of which could be seen the following morning, strewn like blown-up bits on a battlefield. Howling from the house, they kicked open the door of the stable in the back, setting free the creatures within. These turned out not to be Bengal tigers and two-headed apes, as popular rumour had always supposed, but just the usual candidates for anatomical study: rodents and rabbits and moggies and mangy dogs. They were a wretched lot for the most part, skin and bones, but overjoyed to be at liberty, and some of them had considerable spirit left. One elderly German boar-hound took it upon himself to guard the property, as a Prussian gentleman would do, and rising to the occasion bit the first Constable who arrived to investigate.

  Storming back into the house, the attackers laid hands on Missus Tolliver and dragged her caterwauling down the stairs, where she was hauled to her knees and found herself facing a female creature all in black, so thin and gaunt that she might have been made of sticks bound together.