Will Starling (14 page)

“Take the shilling,” he said now, “or else go somewheres else, and take that trinket with you. Put it back on the coster-barrow where you prigged it, you sack of wapours. Your mother? Pah! I'll varrant your mother's alive to this day — down by the dockside, looking for sailors. A gleam in her eye and three rotten teeth in her head.”

Master Buttons had gone quite pale. For an instant, there was a wild look on his phizog: the look of a man you might not wish to cross so cavalierly. But at that moment Meg Nancarrow came through the door, with a suddenness that brought the vast ginger feline arching to his feet.

“They've bunged him up, the bastards.”

“My brother, you mean?”

“They come for him this morning. Six months!”

Uncle Cheese exclaimed, for this was dreadful news. His brother, scarce able to stand, condemned to Durance Vile — six months, with no one to care for him, and Edward Cheshire's half-crown in his head. And what of Nedward C. himself, with money loaned to half the shirkers in London, and no one to collect it? But Meg had come to him, for succour. Dark-eyed Meg, all alone in the world, and of course Uncle Cheese was precisely the man who could help her. He was more than a match for so many of those who held themselves above him. Oh, yes indeed. Edward was much wilier than they realized.

And Edward knew Secrets.

He placed his hands upon Meg's shoulders. She shuddered, putting him in mind of a bird he once found as a child, fallen from its nest. A sparrow, its heart frantic between his palms, quivering with the sheer distress of being a tiny bird in such a world.

“Leave it to Brother Ned,” he said.

And all this while Master Buttons had stood forgotten — exactly as he had stood for the past fifteen years. Watching Ned Cheshire from the cat's-piss-scented shadows, his grievance bansheeing inside him. Keep one glim upon Master Buttons; that is my advice to you. Master Buttons had never in his brief half-hour of glory played Iago or Richard III, had never essayed one of the truly malignant villains.

But he could certainly start now.

*

In St Michael's Chapel at Westminster Abbey there is a monument to Lady Elizabeth Nightingale, who died in childbirth
aetat.
twenty-seven. In the statue, Lady Elizabeth swoons against Joseph, her husband, as Death slithers from his subterranean cell beneath them, aiming his deadly dart and reaching out his bony claw to seize her by the ankle. The Rattling Fellow is serpentine and stark; frozen in marble he moves with a clatter and a terrible swift coiling, and poor Joseph raises one arm in a desperate bid to ward him off.

This image rose to Atherton's mind as the coach bore him back to Crutched Friars. The night was foul. Rain slanted in torrents, lashing the coachman and volleying like musket-fire against the sides, while Atherton sat brooding within. He had been this evening to attend a woman in Mayfair who was afflicted by a painful swelling behind one knee — the
wife of a baronet, no less, with extensive holdings in Buckinghamshire and five thousand a year. It was an aneurysm of the popliteal artery; Atherton had no doubt of this as he probed and smiled and radiated blue-eyed reassurance, keeping his thoughts very much to himself. Without surgery the artery would assuredly burst, with fatal consequences. And the surgery was certainly possible. He could tie the artery off, leaving the circulation to reroute itself. The procedure had been known for upwards of three decades; Atherton had performed it a dozen times himself, his successes including a coachman who had recovered and lived on for nearly six years, before expiring just the other day of unrelated causes, upon which he had been duly buried in St George-in-the-East churchyard — the selfsame coachman whose resurrection had been bungled by Little Hollis and Jemmy Cheese. Atherton had been keeping track of his former patient's whereabouts through a loose network of informers, as surgeons often did. He had intended to cut open the leg and investigate
post mortem
the results of that operation — to identify exactly how the healing had proceeded, and which veins and arteries had grafted themselves into service — a valuable scientific opportunity now squandered, with the coachman lying deep again and putrefying apace.

So yes, Atherton could perform the surgery. The question was: should he? A terrible, bowel-voiding procedure with no way to dull the pain, and the chance of success perhaps one in four — at best. And a baronet's wife was not a coachman. If surgery was a coachman's only hope, then of course any surgeon would perform it. Simple human compassion demanded no less. And if — alas — the procedure failed, then nothing really was lost, and nothing left behind but a coachman's widow and a snivel of coachman's children. But the wife of a man with five thousand a year — there would be blame, however unfair. There would be censure, and pursed aristocratic lips, and Society doors closed firmly in his face. Mr Astley Cooper had not risen to the verge of a peerage by attempting heroic surgery upon baronets' wives.

The coach rattled up Ludgate Hill and past St Paul's Cathedral, whose bell was striking ten. The rain continued in sheets. Atherton huddled deeper into his cloak.

Poor Joseph Nightingale in the statue is a monument to human futility: one arm outflung against Death — he might as well be holding back the sea — and on his face both horror and abjection. In one more instant the Rattling Fellow will have Lady Elizabeth's ankle; he will drag her shrieking down with him, and bolt his iron door against the light, and there is nothing that poor Joseph — or any man living — can do.

And yet.

And yet what if there were? A means to wrench open that door, and usher the dead back to life again. What
is
death, after all? And imagine being the man who could cast light upon the answer — or even the barest portion of it. That would be worth a lifetime of study — any number of mornings outside Newgate, observing and charting the process of strangulation. It would justify any number of experiments on animals, who were after all not capable of experiencing pain as we do. And perhaps — who could say? — it might even justify other forms of experimentation as well.

His sister Emily had believed him capable of extraordinary achievement. “I am in my soul half Gypsy,” she had said to him one day, “and I glimpse you working wonders.” Fourteen years old she'd have been, or thereabouts; three years younger than her golden brother. Her hands in his, eyes sparkling, and O! — his heart had burgeoned. He had been her hero and her protector, right up 'til the moment when she had actually needed him.

As the coach pulled up before his house, Atherton made a decision. He could not in conscience abandon the baronet's wife. He would cast about for some colleague willing to attempt the surgery in his stead.

And now a cloaked figure was hurrying to meet him, hunched against the squall: Odenkirk, extending an umbrella. He was saying something, seeming to think it important, as Atherton pushed past him. Entering the house, he shook off the rain. It occurred to him that he hadn't eaten, and he called for the housekeeper to fetch him bread and cold meats. Finally he heard what Odenkirk was saying.

“I believe it were the Deakins let him in.”

“Who?”

“The upstairs maid, sir — the one as hears peacocks shrieking. The man is waiting for you now.”

“What man?

“Our friend with the broken-headed brother, sir — and could have one himself to make a family pairing, if someone was to wish it. Nosing about the Collection, as we speak, sir. Cheese.”

 

“A marvel, sir, is what it is. A vonder of the modern vorld. The foetuses and such — the
foeti
, I should say, as speaking to a man as has his Latin, like myself — the
foeti
in their jars, and all the rest.”

He stood hat in hand, gazing. The three bottled foetuses gazed blindly back, like wizened miniatures of Ned Cheshire himself.

“What are you doing here?” Atherton demanded, arriving in the doorway.

“I do believe I am vorshipping, sir,” said Uncle Cheese. “At an altar of natural philosophy.”

The room was a library, in its way: lined floor-to-ceiling with shelves, with a ladder to reach the uppermost. Oil lamps cast a muted glow, and footfalls were smothered in a rug of deepest green. You lowered your voice in a room like this, immediately and instinctively. Words had a way of dying in the throat, for the books in this library were confined to a single squat bookcase in one corner, with a skull on top and a skeleton standing alongside. The shelves were for specimens instead. Scores of them — hundreds, even — row upon row. Some dried, and the rest in jars, lined up like the pickled preserves of some demented cook. Human and animal both: Atherton was an avid student of comparative anatomy, with an especial fascination with defects and deformities. Here were human shinbones with osteomyelitis, and the distinctive mal-union of a tibia and fibula; bones with bulging non-gummatous lesions indicative of syphilis, and a hydrocephalic skull as bloated as a bladder. A two-tailed lizard, and the beak of a squid, and a vast array of teeth from every creature you could imagine, as if Noah had awakened one night with a demented dental obsession and a pair of pliers close to hand. The larynx of a child who died with croup, and the penis of an elephant, and a kidney with tapeworm cysts. Stomachs of herons and pelicans and camels, and the femoral artery from a gangrenous leg; human eyeballs bobbing in alcohol, the heart of an ox and the skull of a monkey, and a baby crocodile forever lunging.

Ned Cheshire gazed in reverence at all of it.

“I ask again,” said Atherton. “What the Devil are you doing here?”

He had guessed the answer to that already. The man was after money — though whatever imp of presumption had possessed him to come here, to Atherton's house, was another question.

“The Devil, Mr Atherton? Does he come into the matter? I suppose he does, sir, if it's considered in a certain light.”

Uncle Cheese had turned to face him. He smiled a little, half in apology. “My brother, sir. Poor Jemmy . . .”

“. . . Is none of my concern.”

Not true, and Atherton knew it. Despite his mood, he forced himself to listen.

The news was hopeful, on the one hand. Jemmy Cheese had survived his ordeal, and was recovering at this moment. Unfortunately — “and here is the fly in the ointment, sir, the
musca
, as one might say, in the
unguentum
” — he was recovering in prison, where he would languish for half a year, unless set free by gaol-fever, or the murderous inclinations of his fellows, or just the cracking of a noble heart from grief. And who was left to bear this loss but Jemmy's family? Ned Cheshire himself, deprived of both his brother and his half-crown — a cost that could be precisely rendered as one sibling, two shillings and sixpence — and of course poor Jemmy's woman, Meg. Weeping in her desolation, sir — for herself and all her babbies yet unborn — unless the surgeon upon whose business poor Jemmy had been engaged should be mindful of his responsibilities.

“But I told her wery earnest, sir.
Nil desperandum
, I said, and translated it for her benefit: never despair. For Mr Atherton is a man to recollect his duty, and honour the principle of the
douceur
.”

Uncle Cheese held his hat in his hands. Rainwater dripped from his sodden clothes and puddled humbly at his feet. A little man in a red weskit, cocking his head like an obsequious robin, and gauging Atherton's reaction with slantways calculation.

Lounging by the door, Odenkirk caught Atherton's glance and arched one eyebrow in lupine query:
Shall I?
And God knows how sorely Atherton was tempted — on a night like this, no less, soaked to the skin and irritable with hunger, gnawed by misgivings about his patient the baronet's wife in Mayfair, and haunted by Shadows from the past. But like any anatomist he needed subjects for dissection, which meant he needed Edward Cheshire, who operated one of the most reliable networks of Resurrectionists in London. And the man was within his rights to demand a
douceur
.

This principle governed the relationship between the anatomist and his necessary associate. An anatomist made a private arrangement with a Doomsday Man at the beginning of each season — normally in October, just prior to the teaching term at the hospitals and private schools — at which point a fee was offered. This was a token of goodwill, ten guineas' worth perhaps, designed to foster the spirit of Christian co-operation and stimulate an uninterrupted supply of corpses right through to the end of the term in April. A finishing fee was normally paid at this juncture, to ensure that the milk of goodwill did not curdle over the summer months, during which the graveyard soil lay largely fallow, owing to short moon-bright nights and the rate at which Things ripened in warm weather. Behind it all lay an unspoken agreement: a grave-robber's family would be supported in the event of his being taken up. And Jemmy lay this night in shackles, with despair in his heart and Ned's half-crown in his head.

With a muttered execration, Atherton produced a banknote. Uncle Cheese took it, fastidious as a lady's spaniel accepting a sweetmeat.

“Ten pound,” he said, folding the note into quarters and tucking it into his hat. “Thank you, sir; a good start.”

“A
start
?”

“But of course, Mr Atherton, I should like to go many steps vurther. As perhaps the little fellow in the corner was thinking, as he arrived here at your house.”

He meant the skeleton by the bookcase. A stunted thing with crooked legs and a clubbed foot on one side. The bones were a dull brown colour.

The silence was left to hang for just a moment. If bottled
foeti
could blink in non-comprehension, they might have done so now. When Edward Cheshire spoke again, his voice was silken.