Will Starling (16 page)

If the two of us were together, this performance might become a comic turn, such as you might see between songs at the Coal Hole back home.

“A mermaid has been offered for sale,” Danny might announce, “at Billingsgate fish market.”

“A mermaid?” I would exclaim. “But surely not!”

“Which on closer investigation revealed itself to be a species of seahorse.”

“Oh! How disappointing for the fishmonger, Daniel, whose price was surely knocked down something cruel.”

“But more disappointing still for the seahorse, Long Will.”

“For the seahorse?”

“To have been so very nearly a mermaid.”

Then we'd fall about in helpless hilarity, while old campaigners eyed us sourly and someone ended in chucking a clod of dirt. But we amused ourselves most wonderfully, and often would speculate about the times that lay ahead when we'd return home to London together. “The likes of us, Long Will,” Danny would say, “we don't accept our future as it comes. We pluck it, like an apple from a tree.”

*

On Thursday the world grew lighter again, a little. So I rose and went round to the room in Holborn to look in upon Miss Smollet. I found her quite solitary — the Badger had left town.

“Mr Starling,” she exclaimed, seeming genuinely glad to see me — or leastways to see someone.

She had hardly gone out since the events at Fountain Court, or such was the impression I formed. She smiled gaily, but it was stretched and thin, and I had the notion she had not slept well. “Come in,” she said. “Here, would you like to sit? Sit down, if you like.” She cleared a tangle of clothing from a wooden chair, looked vaguely round for somewhere to put it, and added it to the tangle on the bed.

Birdsong floated from below. The room was above a bird-fancier's shop, which was strung like a Yuletide tree with birds in cages, hanging side-by-side from the rafters and lined up along the shelves. In daylight hours the whole house rang with them — and smelled, of course — and Annie Smollet in her attic perch might have been the topmost item on display.

“Look at me,” she said suddenly, reaching a hand to her hair. “I must look a fright.”

She did not. She was tousled and unpainted in a plain cotton dress, which inspired in me notions of shepherdesses, and sylvan glades. Not that a glade ever looked like the room in its present condition, though this was neither here nor there; clothes strewn with even more abandon than before, and the sour linen waft competing vigorously against the birdstink. Apparently the Badger had been the tidy one.

“She went to Chatham,” Miss Smollet said.

The Badger had met a gentleman of means, and been offered a position. I didn't ask for details, though presumably the position was horizontal, with two or three rooms and an allowance to go with it — generous or otherwise, depending on the gentleman. It would continue 'til the gentleman grew to find her tedious, or else his wife smoked out the arrangement, at which point the Badger would be home again, such being the way these things normally ended.

“So here I been,” Miss Smollet said. “All Alone.”

She had a habit of speaking in Capital Letters, as if stepping from her own life and onto the stage, where Everything was Much More Dramatic. But she meant it too.

I'd brought another sleeping draught: my pretext for coming. “In case you still need it,” I said, offering it up.

But she shook her head tightly, and said something odd. “I don't want to sleep here. Not in this room — not alone.” Then she shuddered away a shadow that had fallen. “Take me out,” she said suddenly. “Take me walking.”

 

The day was soft with the promise of summer yet to come; by afternoon it would be genuinely warm. You could imagine a blue sky beyond the brown haze, and the breeze would surely have been fragrant with blossoms if it hadn't been wafting through London. Miss Smollet took my arm, and we set off amidst the hurly-burly. She wore a pale green dress and a shawl to match, and her cheeks were abloom with rouge.

I couldn't tell you exactly what we said, that morning. Mainly I recollect a sense of happiness. At one point she asked me to tell her about my adventures in the War, and I said this was not something I spoke of very much. When she asked why this should be, I pointed to a man on the corner juggling plates, and grew quite eager to watch. A while after that we came across a Punch and Judy man, a crowd clustering round, so I paid his boy a penny for each one of us, and angled us round to a better vantage.

“Who doesn't like a Punch and Judy show?” I asked Miss Smollet cheerfully.

In fact, I did know someone who didn't care for Punch. Mr Comrie took a jaundiced view, wanting to know what was so frolicsome about a big-nosed homicidal puppet who would cudgel his wife and baby to death, exclaiming: “That's the way to do it!” But Mr Comrie for all his virtues did not have much sense of humour.

Danny Littlejohn had actually worked for a Punch and Judy man — he'd been the boy who worked up the crowd and took the coins — and could talk about it at considerable length. Punch and Judy was actually a very moral play, he would explain, for it demonstrates to wives that they should try to live in peace with their husbands. That claim may be open to debate, but it is undeniable that the play proceeds with Mr Punch tricking Jack Ketch the hangman into hanging himself — which may not be moral exactly, but is Wery Ironical Indeed, and counts as the next closest thing. And of course the play ends with Mr Punch cudgelling the Devil to death, which is the morallest act ever performed by man, or puppet.

I knew I should not be thinking about my friend, here in the bright brawling clamour of spring sunshine, with gales of laughter rising up and Mr Punch laying energetically about him. It was the sort of reminiscence that could bring the Black Dog skulking back round the corner, so I looked to Miss Smollet instead, and that's when I saw the expression on her face, tight with visceral recollection.

I was an oaf. Worse than an oaf, I was a villain — cos this was exactly what she'd enjoy best, wasn't it? Scarcely a week after her experience at Fountain Court: a crowd hooting and braying as Mr Punch walloped his wife.

“Christ,” I muttered, instantly ashamed.

“It's fine,” Miss Smollet said. “It's quite good.”

“Let's go.”

“I think — all right. Yes.”

She gripped my arm tightly as I steered us away, past a clutch of apprentices who whistled appreciatively at her passing and a legless old beggar who sat scowling in a wooden box with wheels. The crowd thinned a little as we angled onto one of the side-streets leading east, and Miss Smollet was almost vivacious again by the time we stopped to buy a bag of ginger nuts from a street-seller.

“Tell me more news,” she said.

As we'd walked I'd been babbling of titbits I'd read about, or earwigged in coffee houses. Now I dredged up an anecdote about something Beau Brummell had said, so memorable that it has since gone out of my head completely. Then I worked up my nerve.

“Oh — and the most wonderful artefack was found near the London docks, by a young man walking.”

I drew it out: a small silver locket on a chain. “It put me in mind of you,” I said, with my best attempt at a casual air.

“The way it's been dented up, you mean?”

“No!” Though it was tarnished and battered worse than I remembered. “Look inside,” I said.

Inside was a miniature portrait of Miss Annie Smollet herself.

It wasn't, of course. And now that I looked again, I saw that the resemblance wasn't as strong as I'd fancied. But she had fair hair too, this girl in the locket, and an openness in her smile: a look of fresh hope dawning that was the very pith and essence of Annie Smollet.

“You found this on the riverbank?”

“I did. Washed in with the tide.”

A lie, though hardly the worst that was ever told since Satan came sidling slantways through the Garden. In fact I had spied it at a coster-stall on the Embankment, kept by a wicked old extortionist who demanded three shillings. Subsequently he turned his back to extort another customer, which was an error on his part.

“You are Very Sweet,” said Miss Smollet, bending for me to slip it round her neck.

We had stopped at a corner of Newgate Street, not far from the foot of Snow Hill, down which a multitude would pour on Monday mornings when there were hangings — not that this was in my thoughts at the moment. There was a movement towards me then, and a scent of oranges. Lips brushed whisper-soft against my cheek, and I swear to the God who waits to damn me: Wm Starling could have dropped down dead right there and then, and in that instant counted his life well-lived. This may help to explain why I didn't hear clearly at first what she was saying to me, her voice gone suddenly quite low.

“He come to see me last night.”

“What's that?”

“Outside my window. Bob Eldritch.”

Of all the names she might have uttered, she'd come up with the very one. The one that could snap my head round and leave me staring, flummoxed.

“Miss Smollet — Bob Eldritch is dead.”

She summoned a small, strained laugh. “'Course he is,” she said. “I know that.”

“So it was just a dream.”

“I suppose.”

The colour had crept up into her cheeks. She didn't meet my gaze.

“What did he do?” I found myself asking. “In the dream.”

“He scratched to be let in,” she said. “Scrabbling with his fingers at the glass, with such a look on his face — as if he'd break your heart, just looking. Then he opened his mouth, and screamed.”

“Screamed? How do you mean?”

Miss Smollet summoned another small laugh.

“Have you ever heard a peacock?”

A Curious Incident in Whitefriars Lane

 

 

The London Record

2nd May, 1816

Reports are circulating of several strange encounters with a Staring Man in the vicinity of St Mary-le-Bow Churchyard, all of them taking place in the hours of darkness. Most recently, a young woman was accosted by the man while returning to her lodgings after midnight. The woman, identifying herself as Summut Sal — “cos I'm known to take a glass of summut, sir, if a gen'lman should be offering” — shared her story with
The Record
at a public house in the district. In her own words:

“I was on my way from Never-You-Mind when 'ee comes up saying, ‘Would I take 'im in?' I sez exackly what you'd imagine, which I won't repeat, but 'ee starts to follow and 'oo can say what would of 'appened except some mates of mine come by and that drove 'im off. What's that? Well, of course they saw 'im too; they ent blind. Eyes big as eggs, starting right out of 'is phizog — that's the first thing you noticed. A mate of mine, she sez, ‘that's 'im, all right, that's the Boggle-Eyed Man.' She said there was another girl as seen him two nights earlier. 'Ee said to this other girl something very queer indeed. 'Ee said 'ee didn't have a nome to go to, though 'ee should of done. ‘A nome as snug and quiet as could be,' 'ee said, ‘with fine strong walls and a roof above that should last 'til the end of the world, except they stole it from 'im.'”

We would not normally have offered up this information for public consumption, being uncertain as to the reliability thereof. But here the tale grows stranger still, for we subsequently encountered a Sexton who had noticed the same man on an earlier occasion. The man was standing outside the gate, the Sexton said, gazing through the railings with great round eyes, as if longing for someone to let him in. Afterwards he recollected something singular about the man's appearance. It was pouring with rain, he said, and yet the man's hair was sticking straight up from his head, like quills upon a porcupine.

12

The item was buried on the back page, at the bottom of a column. I stumbled across it at a coffee house that I'd sometimes visit of a morning, while Mr Comrie waited for patients to manifest. I glanced through it once, not paying full attention. Then I read it again, more slowly.

I'd have read it a third time, had I not been jolted from my uneasy reverie by an animated discussion in the stall behind me. It seemed a Discovery had just this morning been made in the Death House at St Thomas's Hospital.

 

The Death House is where cadavers are kept, and dissected. As sister hospitals, St Thomas's and Guy's had always shared one between them.

Go on, then. Go down a creaking flight of stairs, and then proceed along a narrow corridor, hung with sconces. There is a heavy wooden door at the end. Brace yourself, and step through.

Imagine a room constructed especially for Old Bones, according to his own meticulous specifications, and where — of all the rooms in the world — he should be most completely at his ease. A long low cellar with a square lantern hanging from a central beam, and sunlight cringing in through narrow windows, set high up, at ground level. Sunlight itself is sullied here, and lingers wretched and reeking. There are specimens along one wall, and a fireplace opposite with a pot for boiling the bones — a great copper cauldron, such as trolls might gather round at some unspeakable feast — although these are not the elements you notice first. First you are assailed by the stench, which is staggering, even by London standards. A cock-tail of rot and pickling alcohol and human putrefaction that worms into the very pores of those who labour in this place and never quite leaves them, ever again, though they should spend a lifetime scrubbing with lye soap and steel bristles.

Next through watering twinklers you see the dead: cloven heads and ghastly grinning visages, stretched out on wooden tables. As many as a dozen, some mornings, with students and surgeons crowded round each one. They stand in pools of congealing blood, like crows around a fallen nestling, and as your gorge begins to rise in earnest you will notice limbs and bits strewn about the floor. Arms and legs and fingers, and morsels of skin and fat that will be discovered later on the bottom of boots, or in folds of clothing. There is something about the candles too, that gutter at the heads of the tables. They are squat and misshapen, these glims, and exude a sick-sweet musk that is not like any tallow you've ever nosed. It is not from a cow or a pig, you think, and the thought occurs — ye gods, yes you are, you are absolutely correct — they've gone and used the fat that came most convenient to hand.

And the sparrows. Somehow these seem most horrible of all. Excited little birds, flitting and brawling over human scraps, while rats the size of badgers gnaw at bones in the corners. Here's one bold fellow glaring red-eyed at a surgical student, who laughs and tosses him a bit of vertebra. Across the floor a severed hand seems to scuttle like a crab, until you realize that a small grey rat is dragging it by the thumb, and here you may lose whatever breakfast you had hazarded. I did, my first time in that place. Five years in field hospitals across the Peninsula, and Your Wery Umble seized a bucket and shot the cat.

The cadavers arrived surreptitiously, being for the most part delivered in sacks to the Death House Porter at a private entrance in the dead of night. The majority of these had been freshly exhumed, although Doomsday Men were always sharp-eyed for ways to avoid the intermediate stage in the resurrection process: to wit, the digging. I once knew a Resurrectionist who was strolling along the Borough High Street when a man took a convulsive fit and dropped down dead, twenty paces ahead of him. With wonderful presence of mind he rushed forward, crying aloud that this was his own dear brother. Sobbing and lamenting, he took possession of the body, availed himself of a donkey-cart, trundled the remains to St Thomas's and sold it to the surgeons, who had the poor fellow carved and dissected before his family had missed him for supper.

The cadaver that concerns us now was brought to the back door in the darkness before dawn by two apprentices. The usual Porter had taken sick and gone home; the man who replaced him was new to the hospital, which explains how the corpse went unrecognized. Normally dissections commenced as soon as the sun rose, natural light being required for such close work, but several other cadavers had been delivered earlier. These were laid out already, with the consequence that this late arrival was left for several hours under a sack.

So it was afternoon before it was at last stretched naked upon a table. Students gathered round, as eager as those ghastly sparrows. The gaping wound in the throat caused a stir, though it was far from the first time that a fresh cadaver bearing marks of deadly violence had appeared on a dissecting table. The genuine excitement began a moment later, when one of the students — a lad named Keats — plucked away a rag that had been carelessly tossed over the face.

“God on a gibbet,” he exclaimed. “It's Uncle Cheese!”

 

Keats was a friend of mine. He'd been apprenticed to a pothecary in Edmonton before commencing surgical studies at Guy's, which gave us an interest in common. I encountered him on that particular evening at the King's Head in Tooley Street, a regular haunt of the students, who were still buzzing with the afternoon's events.

“Half of them reckoned we should just proceed,” he said.

This would have been the customary course of action — cut him up and then boil him down, all traces gone before anyone was the wiser. But there was the dilemma, cos half the students at the Borough Hospitals owed money to Uncle Cheese, including Keats himself. “One pound, three shillings and sixpence,” he confessed wryly, “repayable at twenty per cent compounding. And how would that look, if anyone ever
did
catch wind?” So after some debate, the Porter was sent to notify the Magistrate, who arrived an hour later to claim the corpse and take down statements. The two apprentices were in consequence being sought on suspicion of murder.

“Though whether anyone's seeking them very hard, I wouldn't presume to say. This was Edward Cheshire, after all.”

Keats chuckled drily, and coughed. Keats had an habitual cough, which he fretted about. He was an amiable bantam, a year or two my senior and scarcely taller than Your Wery Umble, which endeared him to me on sheer principle. He was a capable student who had shown some surgical skill, but he confided that he didn't like it much. Sure enough he was gone at the end of the term, and subsequent-wise was to scribble poetry of a strange dream-like intensity. I read a bit of it myself, and liked it in its way — though my own taste ran more to tales that galloped through a thunderstorm, with corpses piling up in the ditches on either side.

“Blanched almonds,” I said to him, as I stood to go.

“What's that?”

“Your cough. Mix almonds with syrup of tolu, and a few drops of opium tincture. Two spoonsful, twice a day.”

“Yes,” Keats said. “Good idea.”

His mother had died of consumption. You'd see him coughing in his handkerchief, then anxiously eyeing it for spots of blood.

*

It had made me uneasy, this news of the murder, though I couldn't exactly tell you why. I'd had occasional dealings with Uncle Cheese, on Mr Comrie's behalf — my employer was never eyeball-deep with the Resurrectionists, in the way that Atherton was, though you could hardly be a surgeon in London without crossing paths, and you'd hardly say I held a fondness for Ned Cheshire. But somehow there was a vague sense of connectedness; the sense of a pattern that was not entirely random, if only you could see it from the proper angle.

I was also being followed.

I knew it as soon as I left the King's Head. As I started along Tooley Street, there was someone behind me in the darkness. I looked round quickly. A knot of medical students lurched out of an ale-house across the road; light spilled after them for a suspended moment 'til the door swung shut again. On the next corner a sailor swayed against two nymphs, underneath an oil lamp. But six paces beyond the darkness closed round again, and the next lamp was no more than a candle-point in a void — which was the problem with a London night. A London night was as dark as a night in a forest, but it had more feral creatures in it. A man could get his throat cut for any of a hundred reasons, on any street in the Metropolis, without even being Uncle Cheese.

But the darkness can work in your favour, if you've a bit of the feral in yourself. Shadow-footing forwards, I turned right onto Hayes Street, just short of the Borough High Street, before veering abruptly right again into a narrow passage, where I waited. A moment passed, and then another. Then I heard them clear enough: the
tramp, tramp, tramp
of heavy boots. A thin shaft of light from a bull's-eye lantern slid past the mouth of the passageway, and a long grey form slid with it. I stepped out behind.

“Looking for me, then?”

He turned cat-quick, which I didn't much like at all — a man that size, so nimble on his stampers. Cos of course I was counting on myself to be much quicker, else I'd never have shown myself in the first place.

“You might have hallooed,” I said to him. “Called out my name, if you'd wanted to talk. 'Stead of following after a fellow in the blackness of the night, which could give him wrong notions about your intent.”

In the lantern's light his teeth showed long and yellow. I expect it was intended as a smile. “Friend Starling,” he drawled. “The very man. We need to have a private word, we two.”

“Then go ahead and have one.”

I held my knife in my hand, having slipped it from inside my boot a moment earlier. A six-inch stiletto, scalpel-sharp, won in a game of hazard at a tavern in Spain. Odenkirk saw the glint and just smiled the more, as if to suggest that it might go very ill for Wm Starling if matters between us should come to pig-sticking. I suspected he was right.

Odenkirk had begun his days in a Workhouse: St Saviour's, in Newington Causeway. It was hard to credit — a man that size, suckled on Work'us gruel — but apparently it was true. This hadn't come from Flitty Deakins, neither; I'd made enquiries of my own. He'd managed to get himself apprenticed to an Irish butcher and spent several happy years at a slaughter yard in Smithfield, killing pigs, before moving on to less sanguineous work shifting cargo at the docks. It appeared he gravitated as well to a loose confederation of house-breakers and head-breakers — cracksmen and rampsmen, in the parlance of the trade — amongst whom he continued to find considerable scope for his old pig-sticking skills. He may indeed have found occasion to employ these upon his old master the butcher, who was discovered bleeding his life out in an alley behind a public house not long after young Odenkirk had given in his notice. The butcher was a terrible man for drinking, and prone to improving his apprentices with his fists. He'd been stuck, as fate would have it, like a pig.

By the time Atherton met him, Odenkirk was working as a bully at a night-house in Curzon Street. This was none of your reeking stews, but an establishment catering to gentlemen. It auctioned off twelve-year-old virgins for as much as fifty guineas — some of them being auctioned as virgins seven nights running. Next door was an even more exclusive establishment, where ancient creaking baronets who required correction might for a suitable sum present their shrivelled shanks to Mistress Riding-Crop for striping. At any rate, Odenkirk and Atherton had hit it off, or had at least each seen how the other might be useful.

Now here we were, just we two, alone in a London night. Hayes Street was otherwise dark as a shroud, and beyond us the river slid silent through the blackness. Above us was London Bridge, where hundreds clustered in shanties that choked the traffic, and hundreds more slept rough, clustered round fires in barrels.