by Ian Weir
“Where is he hiding?” the creature demanded. Two great glazed eyes were blazing.
Missus Tolliver near to died, recognizing who it was.
“Flitty!” she exclaimed. “Miss Deakins — don’t you know me? We are friends!”
“We are not,” said Flitty Deakins. “And I ask you again: where is Dionysus Atherton?”
“Gone!” cried poor Missus Tolliver. “Gone, Miss Deakins — fled this house. Left half an hour ago, with a few possessions thrown together.”
“Gone where?”
“He would not say! Oh, Miss Deakins, as you are a Christian, let me be!”
Flitty Deakins would have done no such thing; Missus Tolliver saw this writ like Judgement on that face. Flitty Deakins would have cut her throat and had her liver afterwards, sliced paper-thin like the famous ham they served at Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens — so thin, they swore, you could read a newspaper through it.
It was commotion from the street that saved her life. A crowd had gathered despite the hour, and a shout went up that the Constables were on their way. The attackers milled in a moment’s confusion, then fled out the back door, taking Flitty Deakins with them. She was shrieking for vengeance with each receding step, said Missus Tolliver, who by now had fallen face down again and resumed the proper posture for such moments: arms over the head, haunches to the moon.
I read the accounts in the newspapers myself, days afterwards. Read them at my leisure, having very considerable time on my hands thereafter — nearly six months of it, as events would transpire, in Newgate. But on the evening in question, the evening we stormed Crutched Friars, I was very much preoccupied. While the rest of them had been rampaging after my uncle, I had rushed through the house in desperate search of Miss Smollet instead. Lunging into rooms and shouting out her name, fearing at each turning that I’d find my Annie murdered, or much worse. But she wasn’t in the house, nor in the stable neither, cos I searched there next, by the light of a bull’s-eye snatched from a fellow marauder. I cast round for a shovel — a pickaxe — something to dig with — the wild fear clutching that she might already be buried. Here beneath the floor, or outside in the garden — mouldering with all the others that Odenkirk had sworn he’d concealed, though we hadn’t begun to root them out, not yet.
I found something else instead. In a corner of the stable was a rough wooden door, and a room behind it smelling of mould and rot, with shitten straw strewn across the floor. There was a lantern hanging on a hook, and a work-bench in the corner, on which a skeleton had been most carefully laid out. The bones were brown with boiling, and awaited articulation with wire.
A boy’s skeleton, with little twisted legs, and a spine bowed like a barrel hoop.
I howled.
*
I found Barnaby at an ale-house in Smithfield, in the midst of a rabble clustered round a rat-catching ring.
“Tell me where he went!” I cried.
“Where ’oo went?” said Barnaby, slantways.
But he knew very well, cos the sly little bastard had left Crutched Friars earlier that evening with a message to deliver — I’d learned that from Missus Tolliver, before fleeing Crutched Friars myself. The others had scattered, Jemmy and the rest; I’d no idea where they’d gone.
“Atherton!” I cried. “Where is he? Say it!”
Presumably he saw pure murder in my face, cos he didn’t even ask for money first.
“’Ee’s staying at a coaching inn tonight. Leaving London by mail coach first thing tomorrow.”
“You know the name of the inn?”
“I b’lieve I ’eard it mentioned.”
“Is she with him?”
“The girl?”
“Yes, the girl! Did she go with him, when he left Crutched Friars?”
“She did,” said Barnaby. “Most dramatickal she was,” he added. “Like a hactress on the stage.”
Behind us in the ratting ring, a one-eared terrier named Titus was doing mighty execution upon the vermin, to roars of approval. He’d killed a dozen already, breaking their necks with a lunge and a toss; the corpses lay strewn about him, and the remainder huddled together in a corner. There is doubtless a legend burgeoning this instant, in dark holes where rodents gather: One-Eared Titus Ratsbane, who comes for vermin children who disobey.
“Tell me the name of the coaching inn,” I said.
“The White ’Art,” said Barnaby. “In Islington.”
*
And looking back, I scarcely know that boy — the Wm Starling who left the ale-house and set off alone towards Islington, with all the deadly resolve of Titus Ratsbane himself. I can watch him in my mind; I look down on him in fearful wonderment.
I found the White Hart by pounding on doors. A tidy gabled building in a rutted yard, with stables to one side for the post-horses, and lamplight glowing dimly within. A candle-point winked into existence at my repeated hammering, and the door was opened at last by a squinting Innkeeper.
“Full,” he grunted, peering out. “Got no room.”
“Atherton,” I said.
“Atherton? Got none of them. No Athertons — no room. Good night.”
My foot stopped the door.
“Tall man,” I said. “Yellow hair.” Cos of course he’d be using another name. “A young woman with him.”
This rang a bell for the Innkeeper, and a shilling provoked recollection. A man of that description might possibly be in the taproom.
A low room with benches and heavy wooden tables. A gaping hearth at one end, above which a boar’s head glared glassy loathing. Atherton sat by a mullioned window, writing by candlelight. He sat alone, the other guests having long since retired.
He startled to see me in the doorway, bleak as death.
“I’ve come from Crutched Friars, uncle. I saw Isaac’s bones. My friend Isaac Bliss.”
Just the two of us, in the guttering light of the single candle. Paintings of hounds and hunters on the walls, and portraits of famous highwaymen staring insolently from the shadows, barkers primed. I had a pistol of my own, purchased at a pawn-shop in Temple Bar with one of Mr Comrie’s guineas. Atherton had begun to rise; now he froze.
“Will, what the Devil are you doing? Put it down.”
“Experiments on the living, uncle. Finding the point of death, and trying to bring them back. Yes? And how long did it take my friend Isaac to die?”
“Isaac was dead when he came to my house.”
“You’re a liar. Odenkirk confessed it all, before Meg killed him. A rehearsal for reviving Meg — is that what Isaac was to you? Was he practice, uncle? And how hard did he die?”
“Odenkirk is dead?”
“I don’t care about Odenkirk!”
But evidently Atherton did. He hadn’t known about the killing, and it shook him.
“Christ Jesus,” he said.
He was haunted now, and hunted. And I seemed to glimpse someone else gazing back at me, someone strange and familiar all at once, in the shadows and lineaments of that stricken face.
“No,” he said. “No, Will — you won’t kill me.”
I cocked the hammer.
“You’d murder your own father?”
The world stopped then, and everything in it.
The ghostly lines of my own face, tracing themselves through his, like the shadow of a palimpsest emerging. And I have known this, haven’t I? In some dark instinctual part of me, in some foetid hole where rodents writhe, I have known it from the start.
And it seems to me that I can watch him now — look down from my Newgate eyrie upon Will Starling, the one who went to the White Hart Inn that night. Watch him blink his glims in stunned incomprehension, and take one tottering half-step back, like a prize-fighter who has taken a good old English peg to the liver from Tom Cribb himself. Cos it takes an instant to be felt, a blow that terrible. It freezes a man first, leaves him paralyzed and gasping, before the agony rises on white-capped waves of nausea and the bottom falls out of the universe. I can hear m
yself stammer a furious denial, even as the certainty takes hold.
It is the truth. Yes, of course it is. He is monstrous — and I am his — and I have known this all along. I am tainted with him, and everything that is in him. The world is foul with the both of us.
Candlelight flickered over Atherton’s face, and shadow. A reflex of purest guilt — something furtive and unutterably ashamed. And then the beginnings — oh, God damn him — of a smile. A small defiant creeping smirk, both loathsome and self-loathing. The cleverest boy in Lichfield, and a small dark sister sobbing.
I fired.
Atherton lurched backwards, clutching at his shoulder. Hit, but not killed. I snatched then for my knife, as a woman’s voice cried out in Capital Letters.
“Help — O, Help! — O, Villainy!”
Annie Smollet had come down the stairs. I glimpsed her, framed in an attitude of operatic horror, as through the chaos I was aware of something else: the thunder of footsteps without, and something the size of a bullock bursting through the door. It would reveal itself to be a red-haired Bow Street Runner, with a smaller darker colleague on his heels. They had come in fearful haste, so I would afterwards learn, acting upon intelligence that the fugitive Starling would be here. In the moment I knew only shouts and blows and a fearful weight crushing down upon me, and another glimpse of Annie Smollet as she rushed to support the wounded Atherton.
And outside the door, someone capered all this while. The urchin Barnaby, madcap in his triumph.
“Pay up!” he was crying. “Pay up, you fuckers — fifty guineas on ’is nob, and every one of them is mine!”
A Further Epistle to the Londoners
As Printed in The London Record
11th June, 1816
He thinks to himself: I have outrun the Reckoning. He is deluded. A Reckoning waits like a green-eyed man in a turban, its teeth filed to pencil-points. It will come at him out of the darkness, shrieking like fifty gibbons. And it will come upon others of his kind, for he is worst, but not unique. London is lousy with such men; it wriggles and it crawls.
I say to you: such men are an abomination.
Suffer them not to live.
22
It was Flitty in those last wild days, driving them on to disaster. I can’t say that for a certainty, cos I wasn’t there present in the flesh. I was locked up instead in Newgate Prison, where I’d been dragged straight from Islington by my two friends the Bow Street Runners, and now awaited trial for the murder of Master Buttons. But it only stands to reason.
Flitty had been Bedlam-mad from the start, and in Meg she’d found a pole-star for her delusion. That’s how it was, I think, more or less — cos who can say for a certainty what takes place in any mind, least of all the mind of one as deranged as poor Phyllida Deakins, with grief and laudanum and self-loathing. She’d invented in the Risen Meg someone who could grant her absolution — I’m convinced that was the nub of it. Someone to tell her: “Be free henceforward, and do exactly as you will.” Meg herself never had a plan, beyond settling scores with those as had wronged her worst; it was never more than personal with Meg. But Flitty’s rage was of the more exalted kind, that species of Holy Rage that howls out against sinners and sinning, and kindles great purifying bonfires.
So now Flitty Deakins had taken up the torch — and they were bound to follow someone, the rabble that had gathered round Meg in St Giles Rookery. Half-mad paupers and muttering vagrants — petty criminals with towering grievances — all that tag, rag, and bobtail of the lunatick and lost, drawn by a licence to smash and a mob to do it with. And as Meg began to dwindle and fail, it was Flitty who exhorted them onward.
It began with a surgeon from St Bart’s, set upon and drubbed half to death in Smithfield. Another surgeon was chased down the Borough High Street in broad light of day, and then came attacks upon private schools of anatomy, three in a single night. Two in Southwark, and a third in St James Street: doors kicked in, a Porter maimed, the premises set ablaze. The fire in St James Street spread to houses on either side — good London burghers, fleeing in their nightshirts — and that’s what did it. Attacks on surgeons might be winked at; they might even be enjoyed, if the surgeon were sufficiently soprano as he shrieked himself down the High Street. And one maimed Porter more or less does not signify very much, in the vast clockwork of the universe. But the destruction of property — the burning of homes in a respectable district of London, where values were substantial, and rising — that was different. That was Anarchy.
Two dozen Constables led the way into the Holy Land, backed by Infantry. They marched left-right with bayonets fixed, as the denizens scuttled and stones and bottles rained down. They had with them an informer who knew the Rookery maze, and knew moreover which house Meg’s people were hiding in. When they failed to come out at the first shout, two volleys were fired, tearing through rotted walls and the bits of rag that were stuffed in the windows. Their Captain ordered the charge, and they kicked through the front door, where Jemmy Cheese awaited.
Meg had been hit in the second volley — so it appears, from all reports. She was down, and Jemmy was stooping to lift her as the Lobsters thundered in. With a roar he rose at them. Seizing the first man, he broke him — just like that. Cracked his spine and slung him aside, then turned upon the others, fists like cannonballs. Cos this was not that long-ago night in the churchyard, where Jemmy had gone down meek and guilty. This was Meg lying crumpled in a widening pool of red, and Jemmy was going to kill the whole British Army.
He might have done it too. He would surely have killed another several, since they could only come at him one by one, through the single doorway. Others were blazing through the windows now, musket-fire like muslin fabric ripping, pop-pop-pop. There was a ball in his shoulder, and another in his thigh, which only made him rage more fiercely.
Except now the building was on fire.
It could have been an accident — a candle knocked over in the confusion. A blue tongue licking the edge of a tattered curtain, and then — before anyone had time to think — a surge of flame and a belch of smoke and dry rotted wood going up with a whoosh. But I think Flitty Deakins set the fire deliberately. No one knows this for a fact, and no one ever will, not with poor Flitty as she is now, chained to a wall in Bedlam Hospital and spitting out curses on Dionysus Atherton. But I’m sure of it, based on what she was seen to do as the flames rose up, and what she was heard to moan as they dragged her out of the wreckage afterwards, charred and raving like a witch only half burnt at Smithfield. I’d practically stake my life — assuming that I had a life worth staking.
Flitty had seen Meg fall, looking down from a landing. She’d seen Jemmy rush to her, and heard the shouted orders from outside, so she snatched up a coal-oil lamp and dashed it against a pile of rags in the corner. She snatched up another and set fire to a room on the second floor, splashing the oil like a priestess gone wild as ragged shapes scrambled out the door. They saw her then from below, the Sodgers and Constables in the street — saw her leaning out of the window above them, with smoke billowing about her and the crackle and shimmer of flames rising, shrieking at them like the lunatick she was and calling upon Michael Archangelus to swoop down with his sword. But there was method in it too, cos she’d sown confusion. She’d caused a distraction and bought time for the others — for Meg and Jemmy, most of all.
Jemmy had picked Meg up in his arms — “cradling her like a injured kitten,” one of the Lobsters would say afterwards. Several of them saw this, though the house was already filling with smoke, and two or three of them glimpsed him lunging up the stairs. But they were forced back by the heat and smoke, and stumbled choking into the street, where there was shouting and milling and bellows for buckets of water. That was the fear, all of a sudden — those tinderbox houses all jumbled together. A fire could rip through the Holy Land and rage out right across London. And that’s when Jemmy was seen on the roof, with the smoke rising about him and Meg still cradled in his arms. A shout went
up, and one of the Lobsters fired off a shot, which took Jemmy clean in the throat and killed him.
The Lobster was afterwards certain of that. A man named Davies, a coal miner’s son from Carmarthen. He had bad feelings, he said, about killing a man in such a manner — shooting him down on a rooftop, and not on a battlefield. But he was sure that the ball brought Jemmy down; he saw Jemmy stagger, and topple. There was another man who later claimed something different — that Jemmy had not gone down at all, but had stumbled and then recovered. Through the smoke, he claimed, he had seen Jemmy leaping onto the next rooftop, still clutching Meg in his arms. If this was true, then Jemmy might very well have leapt to a farther rooftop still, so close were all the buildings together, and clambered in through a window to hide somewhere ’til darkness fell.
But of course that’s not what happened. Jemmy was shot down by Infantryman Davies, and died on that rooftop with Meg in his arms, even if their bodies could not be identified the next day when Constables dug through the rubble. There was nothing so surprising in that, considering the intensity of the blaze, though naturally the most fanciful rumours were soon spreading. Someone claimed to have seen two figures rising straight up into the haze of the London sky, which opened to swallow them. There were sightings afterwards in Glasgow and Liverpool, and a curious story about a farmer’s wife in Essex who found two vagrants: a hulking man who never spoke and a strange dark-haired woman with blood-shot eyes, hiding in a shepherd’s hut. They were both considerably injured, though alive, and the farmer’s wife offered to fetch them a bit of food. When she returned, the hut was empty. They were gone.
23
That same night, there is someone else in Tom Sheldrake’s bedchamber. He knows it the instant he gasps himself awake, bolting upright.
“Roger?” he whispers, hoping against hope.
It is not the cat.
