Will Starling (11 page)

The absence of respiration? Surely not, else many had returned from the dead. Not six weeks earlier, I'd watched Alec Comrie resurrect a child who had drowned in a rain-swollen ditch. She'd been dead fifteen minutes at least — a little girl, lying cold and blue on a tavern table as Comrie, fetched from his dinner, came bandy-legging in. He chafed her limbs and wrapped her in blankets, for the first thing was to warm her. Then he lifted her from behind and squeezed his fist hard into her stomach, just below the breastbone, at which she dribbled brown sludge and then spewed out ditchwater, retching and opening her eyes. Amidst wonderment and jubilation she wept and called for her sister, who was subsequently discovered at a gin-shop two streets over, batting her glims at a sodger.

Or was death the stoppage of the heart? But hearts had been restarted. Hanged men's hearts had done so on their own — men pronounced dead by the attending surgeon and cut down, only to splutter back to life at the foot of the gallows. I could tell you of another man, two days deceased, who sat up on the dissecting table in the Death House at Guy's Hospital, croaking in consternation at the anatomist who was just about to cut.

All of which led to a third, and darker question. Once a man is truly dead and carried pale and cold across the Styx — once Old Bones has put an arm about his shoulders and walked him through the Gate into Darkness — might Science yet summon him back?

Attempts had been made. An Italian named Aldini had tried just a few years previous, right here in London. His uncle Luigi Galvani had experimented upon dead frogs, hooking them with wires to voltaic piles and running electrical current through them, and Aldini went one better. He tried to galvanize a human corpse, a wretch named George Forster who had drowned his wife and baby in a canal and was crapped for it at Newgate. Aldini took possession of the body — one of the four hanged felons granted by Law each year to the Royal College of Surgeons for scientific examination — and conveyed it to a nearby house, where preparations had been laid.

Three troughs, each containing forty copper discs and forty more of zinc. Incisions were made in the cadaver, and metal rods connected. With members of the Royal College looking on and a crowd thronging round the house, swelling by the minute as word spread, Signor Aldini applied the electricity. The first surge caused Forster's jaw to quiver, as if he should groan aloud and blurt some dreadful message from the Undiscovered Bourne; he opened up one ghastly eye and stared. A second application caused him to raise his hand and clench it, while moving his legs and thighs, like a man who would be on his way directly if he could just get his stampers beneath him. Nothing more dramatic could be achieved, though many in the room had turned quite pale as the subject's phizog gurned. Aldini could still provoke movement three hours later by applying current to the ear and rectum.

*

“But of course,” said Dionysus Atherton equably, “it was nothing but scientific enquiry.”

“Or so Aldini maintained.”

“You read his paper, Alec, just as I did. It was an exercise in stimulating the muscles. Aldini never dreamed of bringing back the dead.”

“Did he not?” Mr Comrie cocked his head. The declining sun was directly behind Atherton, irradiating him in its golden glow, and his friend was forced to squint looking up at him. “I know what he said, Dionysus. But I can't say for a sairtainty what any man dreams. Can you?”

Atherton laughed a little. “Perhaps not. No, not for a ‘sairtainty,' as you say. And it is true enough that men have dreams.”

“Some of which would frighten the Devil in Hell.”

“The Devil in Hell? Poor Alec — there's your Northern boyhood, rising up to clutch you by the ankles. All those Sundays in Kirk, hemmed in by Calvinist aunts.”

“And yet.”

“And yet what? Why are we standing here, debating Signor Aldini's dreams?”

“You made the attempt yourself. Two nights ago.”

Atherton had been about to start away, towards a carriage that had just been hailed by Odenkirk. Now he stopped, and for just an instant stood quite still — almost as still as Your Wery Umble, whose jaw had commenced dropping with Mr Comrie's first words, and who now stood clutched by the queerest commingling of glee and foreboding. I had assumed the subject was definitively closed after my attempt to broach it two nights earlier. Evidently not.

“Who's been telling you such tales?” asked Atherton after a moment. Addressing his friend, but staring out of the sun at Wm Starling.

“Do you deny it, then?” said Mr Comrie.

We were in the quadrangle in front of Guy's Hospital, in the dying sunlight of an April afternoon. It was — is — a wide pleasant space, with the hospital on three sides and the clatter of St Thomas's Street outside the gate, and a statue of Thomas Guy the founder standing in the middle, wearing an expression of furrowed benevolence. Students streamed past, some of them bound for Guy's sister hospital St Thomas's down the road, or else — more likely — for one of the many taverns hereabouts. Above us all, in one or two of the windows on the wards, a wan face might be glimpsed gazing out upon light and life.

Atherton had been lecturing that afternoon. The lecture concluded, students had flocked to him like sparrows to a feeder. I worked my way through and managed to slip him a note scrawled in my employer's hand: Mr Comrie's compliments, and could Mr Atherton spare a moment? He never acknowledged my presence as he took it, but after a minute or two I saw him glance at the contents, and in due course he excused himself from the sparrows.

Mr Comrie was waiting by the statue in the courtyard. “No word yet, I'm afraid,” Atherton had announced without preamble. “But I expect to hear directly.” He was assuming the Scotchman had come regarding a possible position for him here at Guy's, as a demonstrator in anatomy, one afternoon a week. Comrie had asked Atherton to speak a word on his behalf — a favour it had wrung his pride to beg.

“Never fear,” Atherton continued, cheerfully. “We'll have this resolved soon. And the very next morning, we will take you to a tailor — a real one, Alec, with two good eyes and opposing thumbs and four fingers on either hand, instead of the blind amputee you would appear to patronize. By God, that coat of yours would humiliate a dustman.”

Mr Comrie had muttered a stiff appreciation. Then, as Atherton prepared to depart, he had bluntly and without warning changed the topic. Now he stood awaiting Atherton's reply, squinting into the sunlight, and looking scarcely less stony than Thomas Guy himself.

“Eldritch. That was the man's name?”

“It was.”

“And did you do it?”

“Of course,” said Atherton, almost carelessly.

“Attempted to resurrect a corpse?”

“If that's what you want to call it.”

“What would
you
call it?”

“My duty.”

“And you believed him to be dead?”

“I knew that he was in a desperate strait.”

And it occurred to me: what else had I been expecting him to say? Here in the quadrangle at Guy's Hospital in the last light of an April afternoon, with laughter and voices all around us, and London churning about its business, and Odenkirk sloping up behind us gaunt and grey — what had Your Wery Umble Narrator been thinking? That a surgeon should deny having tried to save a life?

“But did you think him dead?” Mr Comrie demanded again. Clearly this had disturbed him considerably more than he'd let me glimpse, and he was not a dog to let go if once he set his grip. “Fountain Court — that's where it happened? All the way to Crutched Friars. Must have taken half an hour. More? I've brought back souls who were all but drowned, but that was a matter of minutes. Half an hour — an hour? — that's something else. That's trying to resurrect the dead.”

“And what exactly
have
you heard?”

Again, looking straight at me. As was Odenkirk, from a little distance away. His eye had pig-sticking in it.

So I answered.

“I heard an experiment took place,” I said. “In the stable, behind your house. I heard electrical current was employed.”

Mr Comrie looked back to Atherton. “Is this so?”

“I tried to stimulate a choking victim's heart and respiration,” he replied.

“After he'd been dead for — what — an hour?”

“Fifty-three minutes, by my chronometer.”

“And of course you failed.”

“I have made arrangements for the funeral,” said Atherton. “Is that sufficient reply?”

“D'you intend to try again?”

“On Bob Eldritch, do you mean? No, I think not. He's lying in Bowell's back room, Alec, with his jaw swaddled shut and pennies on his eyes. I suspect poor Bob is beyond the reach of Science. I suspect the time has come to let him rest.”

“You know what I'm asking.”

“He leaves a widow and two young children. We're taking up a subscription for their support. Perhaps you'll want to contribute.”

“D'you intend to try again on someone else?”

“Of course. At the very next opportunity.”

Mr Comrie's mouth had tightened to a thin white line. Atherton laughed out loud.

“Look at you,” he said. “As dour as one of your Calvinist aunts.”

“Be careful, Dionysus.”

“I am always careful.”

“There are limits to Science. This experimentation with the dead — it does not do. Nor does the utterance of threats.” He had turned to Odenkirk, glowering up at him with a look so black that it made the much bigger man blink. “This boy is under my pairsonal protection. D'you understand? Touch him and you answer to me.”

Odenkirk seemed about to sneer a reply, and then found himself shuffling his feet instead, and scowling abashed into the middle-distance. And Wm Starling? He felt his heart rising in proud fierce happiness, and proceeded to spoil it by opening his gob.

“He sat up on the table,” I blurted, “and turned his head.”

All three of them swivelled.

“The dead man — Bob Eldritch. He turned his face and looked out of the window.”

Atherton stared down from out of the sun. He had seen me amongst the confusion at the Coal Hole two nights earlier, enfolding a sobbing Miss Smollet in my arms as he disputed with Old Bones for possession of Bob Eldritch. Now he took my measure.

“Miss Deakins said that, did she?”

“Leave Miss Deakins out of it.”

But of course I had dragged her in by this point, hadn't I? Dragged her quaking and weeping into the very midst of it.

“Poor Miss Deakins,” said Atherton. “To see such sights — and at twenty paces on a moonless night.”

“Then he screamed.”

“Excuse me?”

“Bob Eldritch. He opened his mouth and shrieked.”

There was stillness for a moment then. Atherton had shifted half a step to one side, enough to place himself directly in front of the sun. Half blinded by it, I seemed to see him as dazzling as Phoebus, and as terrible. I raised one arm to shield against the glare, and he smiled at me.

“Never form the habit of laudanum, boy. God knows what phantasms will haunt your nights.” His smile was thin and gleaming as a bonesaw. “And if you come to visit us at Crutched Friars, you will almost certainly hear the peacock. It shrieks like a soul in torment.”

*

That night the horse came to me again, on a twilit battlefield. Always the same horse, lurching out of the darkness and the mist, where I am lost on a vast plain of dead and dying men. It is a fine grey horse, and as it turns towards me I see that the bottom half of its head is gone, carried away by a cannonball. The eyes remain, huge and wild and beseeching, and as they fix upon me I understand that the poor creature is seeing in me its last hope of salvation. I cry out at this in pure despair.

“William?”

A shadow bulked above me. Mr Comrie stood in the doorway, holding a candle.

“A dream, lad. You've had a dream. That's all.”

I was on the pallet in my attic room at Cripplegate. Clutching the blanket, sitting drenched and rigid and fighting to claw a breath into my lungs. I discovered to my shame that I was weeping.

“Oh, now,” Mr Comrie muttered. “No, no. No call for it.”

A wooden scrape as he reached for the chair. Drawing it towards him, he sat himself awkwardly beside me, knobbly and lumpen in his nightshirt. After a moment, there was the weight of a hand upon my shoulder.

“Not your fault,” he said. “You've been to the wars.”

As had half the men in London, or so it sometimes seemed. You'd see them every day: old sodgers, sitting hollow-eyed in public houses, staring ten miles off and starting at shadows.

Mr Comrie shifted uncomfortably. Emotion never failed to make him squirm — he had no notion what to do with it, being the sort who expressed himself best in rigorous action. If I'd required to have a limb sawed off instead, he'd have been the very man. And now he had commenced blaming himself, as he did every time the horse came upon me and my cries in the night brought him trudging up the stairs.

“Five years. A lad your age? God's bollocks, I should never have taken you along.”

“It wasn't your choice.”

“I should have sent you home.”

“Home?”

“England. Kent. That house with the great flopping titty. Wherever the Devil home is.” He shifted again. A mist of brandy and old sweat. “It is here, I suppose,” he added, looking round. “Ah, well. We do all right, William, between us.”

I forced myself to breathe more steady.

“There,” he said. “Better?”

The blackness outside the one small window was beginning to leaven with the dawn.

“I'm sorry,” I said.

“Gah.”

“I woke you up.”

“Sleep, now. Brandy helps.”