Will Starling (23 page)

Of course she was Acting at this very moment, as if the three of us were players on a stage. But now we were skirting around St Paul's and slipping swiftly along Cheapside, and suddenly the stench was upon us with a shifting in the wind, and we stood at the rusted gate of St Mary-le-Bow churchyard. That's when it all at once became Very Real to Miss Smollet. She stopped dead with a tiny choking gasp, holding aloft the bull's-eye and clutching with her free hand at my jacket. And I confess that it was becoming suddenly Real to Your Wery Umble too.

It is one thing to conceive a Gothick Venture in your mind, or to sidle about a churchyard in the light of day, as I had done that afternoon, to remind myself of the exact location of the grave and to look for any telltale signs that Resurrectionists had already come. It is another thing entirely to creep through a rusty gate in the depths of night, with the shape of a church massing before you in the blackness and the stench of putrefaction rising all around, and to pick your way through jumbled stones and crosses, and slide wooden shovels from a burlap sack, and dig. Not even five long years of battlefield surgery can quite prepare you for that — and especially not when Bob Eldritch was here too, present in each creak of a lonely branch and each ghostly mutter of the wind.

“It's all right,” I whispered to Miss Smollet. “The living ent here to spy us, and there's naught to fear from the dead.”

But I swear I could feel bulging eyes upon me, with every slinking step I took. As we reached the grave, I took the bull's-eye from Miss Smollet, and trained the shaft of light.

“This is the one,” I said.

A marker with Bob Eldritch's name, and a mound of earth. Little Hollis looked to me accusingly.

“'S already settling, the dirt. 'Ow long ago did you say this one was planted?”

I hadn't said, not exactly, when I'd enlisted Little Hollis in the plan. I'd let him believe that the burial was recent, since of course a cadaver loses all value once it's had too many days to putrefy. And I didn't answer him directly now, cos I just wanted to get this over with.

You've doubtless read scores of desperate penny-blood tales — haven't we all? — and seen any number of them enacted upon the stage. Corpses rising and ghosts wailing and devils appearing in belches of sulphur smoke. So I'll leave you to conjure the image for yourself: Miss Annie Smollet standing still as stone in the moonlight — cos there was moonlight now, I know there was; if there wasn't, there ought to have been — as Wm Starling and Little Hollis hunched and muttered and delved like moles. A shaft angling down, and then suddenly — finally — the jolt and the hollow thud as my shovel struck the coffin. I crouched breathless as Little Hollis slithered headfirst down into the earth. Strange, terrible noises — the creaking as he pried with the crowbar, as if Hell's rusty gate was opening beneath us. Then he was slithering out again, and handing me the rope.

But something was wrong. Something was entirely amiss — cos there was weight, dead weight, at the end of it. Hollis hauled, and I did likewise. The dead weight rose with my confusion, and at the end of an endless half-minute a shapeless lump was lying on the ground. The stench of putrefaction billowed as Little Hollis tugged open the shroud, and there lay the week-old remains of Bob Eldritch, blue and bloated in yellow lantern light.

Miss Smollet dropped the bull's-eye with a cry, and Little Hollis cursed.

“'S ruint!” he exclaimed bitterly. “Look at 'im — 's already rotten!”

 

And Your Wery Umble had been so certain that we would find — what, exactly? An empty coffin and proof beyond all doubt of some abomination against Nature, committed by Mr Dionysus Atherton? No, cos it could never have been as clear as that — and surely I must have known it, even in my moments of most purple supposition. Even an empty coffin might well have had a simple explanation: that Atherton had chosen to dissect his friend, and had staged a Christian burial for appearance's sake alone.

But
something
. I had convinced myself of that. Some evidence that Atherton was indeed the villain I had convicted him of being in my heart. And now I had nothing at all, save a newly dug hole and a reeking shroud full of bloated Bob. Little Hollis was beside himself with grievance, and left me to reinter the body by myself — cos what else was I to do with the thing? — with the aid of poor Miss Smollet, who ricocheted in her emotions from giddy relief to reeling confusion to throat-clutching horror at where we were and what business we were about. She was still in a state an hour later, as we found a public house by the docks that opened before the dawn, and I purchased two half-pints of blue ruin — one for each of us — no longer certain whose need for fortification was greatest.

As Miss Smollet drank hers down, the relief was for just a moment or two ascendant. She swept off her cap and shook loose her strawberry hair, to the startled appreciation of a table of watermen nearby. Eyes shining, she seized my hands in hers.

“We carried it off, Will Starling — didn't we? We Done the Desperate Deed. We dug him up, and there he was!”

She began to laugh, giddy with exhaustion and sudden wonderment.

“But I don't understand, Will. I don't understand it one bit. Cos we seen him lying there, blue on the ground — and yet I seen him scratching at my window too. Oh, it's the most comical thing you can imagine, becos my head is spinning with it, and I swear I will never sleep again, and — Will, what am I to do?”

She laughed as if she'd never stop, and abruptly burst into tears.

My own nob was spinning quite sufficiently on its own, and I wanted nothing more just then than to drag myself back to Cripplegate and sleep. But the new day had its own revelation in store, one that stunned me almost as much as the discovery of Bob Eldritch in his coffin.

Meg Nancarrow had made a full confession.

The Last Dying Confession of Meg Nancarrow

 

 

As taken down by Under-Sheriffs

“I, Margaret Elizabeth Nancarrow, prostitute, of London, being under sentence of death at Newgate Prison and trembling in terror of the Judgement that awaits, do solemnly confess the following. That on the night of 1st May, 1816, I did meet at a low public house in Black Friars Lane with Edward Cheshire, known as Uncle Cheese, also of London. Harsh words was exchanged between us, and threats uttered, as heard by numerous witnesses, concerning a sum of money which I considered to be owing to me. Upon Edward Cheshire's departure from the public house, I followed after him as far as Holborn, where the dispute continued. After some minutes Edward Cheshire proposed that we put off the question until the following morning, when more sober heads might prevail, upon which he turned his back and started to walk away, in the belief that we two had agreed to part. Instead I flew upon him from out of the darkness, maddened by my greed and wrath; striking from behind I cut his throat with a blade that I had concealed upon my person, and afterwards flang the bleeding corpse into Fleet Ditch, as if its ooze might hide my crime from humankind and Heaven.

“I understand that there is no more hope for me on earth, and none neither in the Life to Come, unless I tell the Whole Truth, and never mind how Horrible it be. I declare furthermore that I acted entirely alone with no accomplices, and that the blood of this Foul Crime stains no other hand but mine. I pray that my Awful Fate will be an example to other women, who might be tempted onto the selfsame path: O Wretched Sisters, abjure your Wickedness, and Gin.

“My only comfort is in knowing that my husband, James Cheshire, known as Jemmy Cheese, will be sustained through the benevolent offices of Mr Dionysus Atherton, Surgeon, which support he has pledged through his goodness alone, and not for any merit that my poor husband or his dying Meg may possess.

“I do swear that every word in this statement is Heaven's Truth, having been copied down and read back to me aloud. And I pray that Our Lord, by whom one of the crucified thieves was saved, may yet find Mercy in His Heart for even such a sinner as the Murderess who kneels here weeping.”

Signed: M Nancarrow

Witness: The Revd Dr H Cotton

Newgate, 12th May, 1816

18

There is a service for the condemned in the Newgate chapel, the day before the deed is done. The Condemned Pew is a black pen in the middle of the chapel, and the coffin is placed there beside the Guest of Honour to aid in disciplining the mind, cos who could say where idle thoughts might wander else, on this penultimate morning in the world. The Revd Dr Cotton the Prison Ordinary would preach a sermon upon the fires of everlasting torment that are ordained for those as die without a full confession of their sins and true repentance in their heart.

Meg on that Sunday morning was still refusing to confess, no matter how forcefully Dr Cotton implored, nor how hot the Fire was that he conjured up or how horrid the eternal suffocation. She sat through the sermon like a small fierce cornered animal and demanded afterwards to be taken back to the Press Rooms, where the condemned were allowed to spend their final days on earth. There were two of these, common wards with long tables and benches and narrow bunks and a fire at one end, separated from the rest of the gaol by the Press Yard: a flag-stoned courtyard, open to the sky, where in bygone times those prisoners who refused to enter a plea — wretches as hardened and obdurate as Meg Nancarrow — were stretched naked upon their backs and pressed to death with stones and iron weights. The Revd Dr Cotton began to despair of Meg's immortal soul, and perhaps also of the sum he might otherwise raise by selling the details of her Last Dying Confession to the broadsheets, as the Newgate Ordinary was widely suspected of doing.

Shortly before noon, Meg was informed by a Keeper that the three Judges had met the evening previous to review her sentence, and had issued their decision: no mercy. She turned ashen upon receiving this news, and trembled violently. Some while later she was reported pacing in agitation, and at one o'clock she cried out to see the Prison Ordinary, saying that she wished to make her peace at last. The Revd Dr Cotton arrived with all haste. Rumours of a Confession were soon leaking out, and by three o'clock the first of the broadsheets was on the street.

I saw her an hour later. At the furthest end of the Press Yard was a double grating with a gap between, where the condemned could receive a visitor — each of them on one side of the grating, with a Turnkey between them in the vacant space. They'd brought her out in shackles.

“Why would you make such a confession?” I asked her, bewildered.

“Cos I did it, Will, just like I said. Harsh words was exchanged, and threats uttered.”

She was quoting the exact words I'd just read in the broadsheet that I'd purchased for two pennies from a hawker in Paternoster Square. The printed account was accompanied by a woodblock illustration of a woman in Olde Tyme Garb kneeling wretched at the headsman's block. This was possibly Anne Boleyn, broadsheet printers being notorious for reusing whatever illustration they might have to hand. Tomorrow morning those sheets would be fetching sixpence at the hanging — there would be updated accounts and ballad versions as well, with Meg's lamentations rendered in lurching rhymes.

“I flew upon him out of the darkness — that's what I did. I was driven by my greed and wrath.” Her face was grey, but she spoke — she almost chanted — with a strange exalted defiance. “I cut his throat, and the blood stains no other hand . . .”

She broke off and stood trembling, but the look of defiance remained. It made me think of half-mad martyrs, going like bridegrooms to the stake. And was it true, what she was saying? Perhaps it was, after all — except somehow I could not believe it. Something was wrong, wrong, wrong, and had been from the very start.

“What can I do?” I said helplessly.

She seemed to falter just a little, then. A crack beginning to trace along the veneer.

“Go and see him,” she said. “My poor Jemmy. Tell him what they done.”

“I will. I'll go to Woolwich Harbour.”

“No, not there. Not the Hulks. A hospital, here in London — he's being moved. A private hospital, to finish his sentence. I don't know which one. Atherton can tell you.”

“Atherton?”

“It's been arranged.”

“Wait —
Atherton
is doing this?”

“Tell Jemmy it's all right. Proper care — they'll look after him. No matter what becomes of me.”

Her voice caught at that. The crack was spiderwebbing now; in another moment she must surely shatter like porcelain. I hardly heard what she said next, in the stumbling confusion of my own thoughts.

“D'you think they exist?” she was saying. Speaking so low it was almost a whisper. “The fires. The Devil, and Hell — d'you think it's real? Cos I do. Look around you — look at the world, and then tell me there ent the Devil. And maybe there's even God too — only not for the likes of us, Will Starling. For us it's just the other one — the Devil in Hell, and here in London, and the great fire burning right beneath our feet. But he swears to me it will never come to that. He says to me, ‘Don't despair.' And he swears on his life that he'll look after my poor Jemmy.”

Her eyes were locked on mine. Burning and great in her narrow white face, gazing out from shadow through the bars as if she stood shackled in Hell's anteroom already.

“You swear to me too, Will Starling. On your soul.”

“I swear. I'll find where Jemmy is, but — ”

“Swear something else. Swear you'll see that Atherton keeps his promise. And if he don't, then you kill him. Understand? You fucking kill him, Will Starling, if I can't do it myself.”

*

Mr Comrie listened closely as I told him.

“She seems to think he could help her, even now. She seems convinced there's something he can do. ‘And if he don't keep his word, then you kill him,
if I can't do it myself
.' That's what she said to me — exact words.”

“The woman's half wild with terror, William. She might say almost anything.”

“But she didn't say almost anything. She said
that
.”

He was holding the broadsheet report that I'd brought back with me from Newgate. He stared down at it for a moment — the confession, the last despairing dignity of poor Anne Boleyn in the woodblock illustration — then raised his eyes to regard me more keenly than ever.

“What precisely is your accusation?”

I hesitated.

We were in his surgery. He had actually seen two patients today — implements lay disordered on the table, along with a blood-caked length of bandage. Sawdust was strewn to cover the telltale blotches on the floor.

“Go on, then,” he said. “What do you accuse the man of doing?”

And of course Your Wery Umble had no reply. I had nothing at all, nothing tangible, beyond the millstone weight I'd dragged home with me from Newgate — and a conviction hardening by the hour that everything in this dismal matter was amiss, and that Dionysus Atherton's shadow hung somehow over all of it.

Mr Comrie reached for the bottle. He was dishevelled with it already; another few drinks and he'd be oyster-eyed — but he'd lurch to competence if an emergency came pounding at the door. I'd seen him take off a leg when you'd swear he was too stewed to see. Done in two minutes and sewn up after, neat as nanny at her knitting.

“Is he guilty of arrogance?” he was saying. “Aye. Of pride and self-love and ambition, and worshipping at the shrine of his own golden self. Oh, he's guilty of those too — God's mighty swinging bollocks, he's guilty as sin itself. And the way he has treated you — I can never think of him the same way again, William, knowing how he's treated you. But a man can be guilty of all this — he can be guilty of all this and more — and still offer kindness to a poor condemned woman and her broken-headed fellow.”

“I think she's innocent,” I said. “And I think she's hiding something too. She
knows
something, Mr Comrie. But she's willing to take it to the grave.”

He said nothing for a very long moment, and then looked round for a second glass. Seeing none, he reached for the mug used for holding quills. Dumped them out, wiped the mug with a bit of shirt tail, and poured a drink for me — brandy, or thereabouts. We couldn't afford to be particular, here at Cripplegate.

“She's bones already, William,” he said at last. “So am I — so are you. We left bones on every field in Europe. The world is built on bones.”

“So I should just let it go. Is that what you're saying?”

“That's one of the options.”

“And the other?”

He took a swallow, and thumped down the glass.

“Get up off your arse, William. Go and do something about it, if you feel so bollocking sairtain. Instead of sitting here and making speeches.”

 

And still I couldn't have told you — not on that Sunday night in May, twelve hours before the hanging was scheduled to take place — just why I was so convinced that something terrible was amiss. That some monstrous malignity was at work here, if only I could see it clear; some diabolical clockwork that was ticking Meg second by second out onto the Newgate scaffold. And perhaps the sense of clockwork itself came only later — the growing conviction that a hand and mind were both at work, shaping a pattern from events that still seemed random. Perhaps on that night I felt nothing more than a mighty sorrow, and so made it my mission to save poor Meg when no one else would try. Just as there had been no one else in all the world who would help my friend Danny Littlejohn, on the night when he lay weeping at the Gate.

So I went back to the Three Jolly Cocks. Alf the Ale-Draper was there, and a dozen men I'd asked already, along with a few others. But none of them had seen Meg Nancarrow on the night in question, nor Master Buttons. They'd been elsewhere, or left early, or come late; or they'd been too castaway on daffy to say what they'd seen in the first place. They might all have been as blind as Gibraltar Charley, who had come in from his pitch down the road and now sat in his darkness at a table by the door, with Tim the Real Learned French Dog curled dozing on the sawdust at his feet.

“His name is Buttons,” I said, to a trio of rough men near the fire.

They shook their heads. One of them had a ferret, which poked its head now from the neck of his shirt and then disappeared back within, to the great amusement of all.

“Fair hair,” I persisted. “Wears it in ringlets.”

“Oi! Leave off your pestering.”

Alf the Ale-Draper, calling belligerently from behind the bar. Apparently he'd had sufficient of Your Wery Umble.

“I'm only asking — ”

“And you've 'ad your answer, 'aven't you? Now clear off!”

It had gone nine o'clock; eleven hours remained to Meg. She would be in one of the Condemned Cells now. There were fifteen of these in Newgate, three levels of five, in a block built of stone three foot thick. You climbed up a stairway in the light of a charcoal stove. Nine foot by six foot, and nine foot high. A bench at one end; underneath it a rug, a Bible and a Prayer Book. A window, one foot square, and an iron candlestick fixed to the wall. The Condemned was allowed a candle 'til ten o'clock. On the last night, this might be extended.

“Master Buttons — aye, sure enough.”

The voice came from the shadows as I reached the door.

“Henry the Fifth. ‘Cwy God for Hawwy.'”

Gibraltar Charley stared vacantly into space, grinning slightly at the recollection. At his feet Tim opened one ogle, to assess the situation and smoke out if food might be involved.