Will Starling (24 page)

“You
saw
him?” I asked in surprise.

“At Drury Lane. Years ago.”

His hand reached out and fumbled upon the table for the tot of spiced rum. He drank, and smacked his lips.

“And then again t'other night. Just outside that door.”

It took me a moment to credit what he was saying.

“The night the Nancarrow girl were here with Cheese,” he said. “Always liked the girl. Never could abide the money-lender. And you ent hearing this from me.”

“Wait. You're telling me what you saw
on Wednesday night
?”

He fumbled the mug back onto the table — as a blind man must. It is a hard thing to go through this world in darkness, although compensations exist. Blind men tended to do well as beggars, for instance. Some were said to make upwards of a guinea in a single day, which led the suspicious-minded to query just how blind such beggars might be.

“Buttons were speaking with another party,” said Charley. “Intense conversation. Didn't hear much of it, but the other party said: ‘We'll make it worth your while.'”

“And this other man . . . ?”

“Didn't recognize him. Don't know the name.”

“Describe him.”

Charley's milky eyes slid sideways to meet mine.

“Long grey party. Like a wolf.”

*

Master Buttons was known to frequent the Nag and Goose near St Paul's. So Gibraltar Charley had told me, and I arrived at a dead run. He wasn't there, and they hadn't seen him, leastways not tonight. But the Ale-Draper recommended me to a gambling hell by the north end of London Bridge, where they mentioned a gin-shop across the river, near St Saviour's. He was not there either, but someone had a notion that he lodged farther south, by Camberwell.

Finding the street, I commenced pounding upon doors.
Never mind what Odenkirk will do to you
, I would tell him;
concern yourself with the present moment, and this knife I have right here in my hand.
The third door yielded up the keeper of a lodging-house, who hadn't seen Buttons for nearly a month, but had an address for him. It was all the way out in Bethnal Green, where I arrived as the Watch was crying midnight.

Meg would hear the St Paul's bell as it counted out the hour. The Condemned were exhorted to spend their final night in prayer and tearful vigil, beseeching God to bring them to true repentance. Meg would not pray — or perhaps she would, after all. Perhaps as the hours stretched on she would drop to her knees and wring out her heart.

Master Buttons was not at the house in Bethnal Green. He'd decamped two weeks earlier, leaving behind a pair of old boots and a week's unpaid rent. The landlord had information that he might be in Whitechapel, in one of the netherskens around Mitre Square. If I found the villain I should send him word directly, and the landlord would apologize for having flung one of the boots at my nob, as he had done from a first-floor casement upon being awakened by my pounding.

Across the river again, to Whitechapel. But Master Buttons was not at any of the low lodging-houses around Mitre Square, nor along Aldgate High Street or Old Jewry neither, and I went to every pestilential one of them. The last landlord was cursing me as the bell sounded six o'clock. Dawn was a bruise in the eastern sky; London was stirring, and I had failed. Meg Nancarrow was lost.

The crowd would be arriving outside Newgate now. Thirty thousand would come out for a hanging, sometimes even more, streaming along Holborn and down Snow Hill. Meg would begin to hear them through the thick stone walls. A Keeper would arrive at six-thirty to offer her toast and coffee, and at seven-thirty she would be taken from her cell down to the Press Yard. There the Revd Dr Cotton would offer whatever rites she would accept and then turn her over to the Under-Sheriffs of London, who would strike off her shackles and bind her hands before escorting her in procession along Deadman's Walk, the passage that leads to Debtor's Door. It opens onto the scaffold, which would have been erected the day before. Mr Langley would be waiting there, and Dr Cotton would intone the Office of the Dead. Perhaps Meg's anger would see her through the ordeal. Christ, I hoped so.

I dragged myself soul-sick back to Cripplegate at last. As I reached the house, a crow-black tatter detached itself from a shadow. Someone had been waiting for me there.

“They murdered him, you know. The money-lender.”

It was the voice that stopped me dead.

“They'd have murdered me too, and carved me up before the angels in Heaven had time to weep. But I was one step ahead of them.”

A gaunt figure in a ragged cloak, and a pair of mad eyes staring.

“Miss Deakins!” I exclaimed.

“He knew, you see. That's why he had to die. The money-lender knew about the killings.”

“What killings?”

“The
other
killings. I have it all noted down, Mr Starling. I have a Ledger — oh, yes indeed — I can find where the bodies are buried. And I can bring him to a Reckoning.”

In the distance, St Paul's clock was sounding the three-quarter hour.

“Is this true?” I cried. “Or just laudanum and madness?”

“It is the Truth,” said Flitty Deakins, “upon my last hope for my soul.”

I turned then and began to run, as if my own life depended on it.

The Uttermost Extremity of Justice

 

 

From a Broadsheet Account

13th May, 1816

An exclamation arose as St Paul's bell began to strike the hour. The atmosphere had been Festive unto that moment, as if the multitude were gathered for a holiday parade, with entire Families turned out together: lads upon fathers' shoulders, and wives with babes in arms, while vendors did brisk business selling comestibles and beverages. Others had their vantage from the rooftops and upper windows across the square, where space had been sold for upwards of ten guineas. Now thirty thousand necks craned, and sixty thousand eyes searched out Debtor's Door.

It opened and the cry went up: “Hats off!” The entire human mass — already pressed so close together as to seem one single organism — pressed closer still, and surged forward in hopes of glimpsing the Procession.

There they were, ascending the steps to the scaffold. Meg Nancarrow in the midst of it, the Fleet Ditch Fury, so small as to be all but overlooked, as if she were an Afterthought added to someone else's occasion. She wore a black dress, no doubt the finest garment her meagre lot in life had afforded her, as if she were setting forth to attend a funeral. And of course she was; it was her own. A shout of excitement went up, and opprobrium.

She ascended the steps unaided, but reaching the scaffold she faltered, as if her legs would give way at her first sight of the Fatal Noose. It hung there waiting, with Hangman Langley standing gaunt and spare beside it, prepared to carry out his Awful Office. Hands reached to steady her. She continued on, to be positioned upon the drop. As she faced the multitude, those nearest were able to hear the Sheriff ask if she had final words. Her lips moved spasmodically at first, as if none would come. But at length she was heard to cry, in quavering defiance: “Do as you will. Cos that is all the Law there is, in this world or the Next. Remember that, if you should have cause to think of me again.”

The white hood was placed upon her head, at which juncture a disturbance began at the back of the throng. A desperate shouting, which revealed itself as issuing from a Diminutive Youth. Crying that a dreadful Error was being made — that he had New Evidence which bore upon the matter — he plunged into the press of bodies, as if he would by some miracle win his way through to the scaffold and there put a halt to the proceedings. But he was swallowed in the multitude, like Jonah disappearing into the maw of Leviathan. Hangman Langley at a signal from the Sheriff released the drop.

There was a groan from the mob, a deep exhalation that came as if from underneath the earth itself, as if some vast block had shifted in the depths, and then a terrible roar arose from thirty thousand Londoners, here to witness Justice Done unto its Uttermost Extremity. The short drop had not broken the neck; the Fury was seen to contort most desperately. Cries of dismay, for the doleful aspects of the Confession had won considerable sympathy already, and this tide rose steadily as the struggle grew protracted. Many in the multitude exhorted the Hangman to go beneath the platform and speed her passage by pulling upon the ankles; the which he did not do, either through indecision, or else a conviction that such suffering was a Meet Reward for her crime, even though the crowd had quite turned against him by this juncture, and there were grounds to fear that Physical Violence might be offered upon his person.

At the very last, a new commotion broke out suddenly at the foot of the scaffold. It was impossible to see clearly what transpired, but subsequent enquiry would establish that the same Diminutive Youth, who had cried out at the commencement of the Proceedings, had by dint of some superhuman exertion wormed his way all through the press of humanity. He lunged forth now, shouting that a Monstrous Injustice was perpetrated, as if he would smite the Hangman and cut down the Murderess, even in her last shuddering instants. But he was set upon with stern vivacity by the Under-Sheriffs, who bore him down and beat him into sanguineous insensibility, even as all struggles of the Fleet Ditch Fury ceased forever in this Mortal Vale, and she passed on to give answer before the Highest Court of All.

1

The Spanish boy has a name: Miguel. The monkey is Jack. It is not a Spanish name — though this is neither here nor there — because Jack is not a Spanish monkey. He was brought back from some far-flung place by a sailor, who sold him for a shilling to a man in a public house, who soon grew tired of him. So Jack ended with another man who ran a string of beggar children, and rented out animals to help them.

Miguel has returned to Crutched Friars this particular evening, in his cap and bottle-green weskit, with Jack at the end of a leather strap perched shivering on his shoulder. They had attempted to beg at a busier corner near Trinity Square, but were driven off with rocks by a sodger with no legs who claimed that pitch for his own. Beggars are jealous of their pitches, and Miguel has no one to stand up for him.

Both his parents are dead. He came to England some months ago, with a man claiming to be his uncle, whom he had met at the docks in Madrid. Here in London this “uncle” had passed him on to the other man, who ran the string of begging boys. There are any number of such boys in the Metropolis, appearing for a time and then often enough disappearing again, to another part of London, or somewheres else. There is nobody to miss them when they do. Miguel sleeps nights at a doss-house full of runaways and orphans. Girls too. Sometimes there are eight or even ten of them in the same bed, all tangled together; you can't imagine what goes on in a bed like that. Or possibly you can.

It is not a busy place, this pitch of his in Crutched Friars. But people go by, and some of them are generous. The tall man with golden hair — the one who has been pointed out to Miguel as a
cirujano
— passes nearly every day, often in a coach but sometimes walking, especially now that the weather has grown fair, and he always gives a coin. Yesterday it was half a crown — a hand upon Miguel's shoulder with it, and a gentle word. Miguel didn't understand the word, which was in English, but the voice was unmistakably kind.

This particular day is a Friday. It is the day of Meg Nancarrow's sentencing, though of course Miguel knows nothing of that. It is getting on for evening. An hour ago, a young man had come out of the house where the
cirujano
lives — a diminutive youth with a dark triangle face. He spoke a few words of Spanish, urging Miguel to go away. But who is he to tell Miguel where to go? Miguel has had quite enough of this, of being told where he may go, and where he may not. He has the sweetest olive face, but a mule-stubborn look can creep across it.

Still, it is growing dark, and Miguel is deciding that he will go now, of his own choosing. Take Jack the monkey back to his owner, who will keep him for the night, and make his own way to the doss-house. But now someone else comes out of the house of the
cirujano
: the long grey man. He has a hard face, but he is smiling. People very often smile when they come upon Miguel, with his monkey and that sweet olive smile of his own. He says English words, the man, and offers Miguel a bit of bread and cheese, which Miguel accepts gratefully and shares with Jack. The man gestures towards the house, still smiling, by which Miguel understands that there is more food in the house, and that he is being invited.

And why would he not follow, after all? The bread and cheese are very good, and he and Jack are hungry, and the long grey man is a nice man, once you begin to know him.

 

A Crossing-Sweeper works regularly on the next corner. He worked quite late, on that particular evening. When asked a number of days later, he will recall seeing Miguel go into the house — the boy in his cap and bottle-green weskit, with a monkey on his shoulder, escorted by Odenkirk. And does he recall seeing them come back out? He will frown in recollection, and shake his head. No, he does not recall seeing either come out, nor has he seen either one of them again.

“Why should you want to know?” he will ask Your Wery Umble, warily.

“It is in connection with an investigation,” I will tell him.

“A inwestigation? Whose?”

“Mine.”

2

If a man describes a battle to you, then he is a liar. Not one of the great battles, I mean — the genuine article, between two armies — and not if he took part in it himself. Oh, it's possible to piece together afterwards what must have taken place — comparing notes with other sodgers in the days and weeks to follow, magpieing shards and scraps of who-seen-what and fitting them into a pattern. But when you're right there in the middle then it's nothing but shouts and confusion, with a fog of musket-smoke hanging as thick as a London Partic'lar in the depths of November. There's wraith-shadows lurching out of it, and roars and screams, and all you know for a fact is you're still alive — though this can change in the next half-second, with the hum of a musket ball like a ghostly beetle — and all you can see quite clear is the friend dropping down right next to you.

You can see the field much clearer at night, after the battle's done. The haze of smoke has gone and it's just the darkness now, with a silvering perhaps from a moon and stars overhead. There are lights reflecting upwards from the ground as well, thousands of tiny points: the pinpricks of reflection from the buckles and breastplates and sabres and guns of all the men lying broken and dead. Moans and cries and the lamentations of horses. Here and there trudge stretcher-bearers, carrying one or two of those as might still be saved — but you don't usually bother, you know; there's no point in going out at night to bring more of them back, cos the field hospitals are full to bursting already, with the surgeons overwhelmed and the saws no sharper than butter-knives. So soon enough the field is left to those who fell, and the scavengers who'll come out with the darkness, scavengers human and otherwise. Quick, sharp movements on the periphery of sight: the hopping of ravens and the hunched stealth of larger shapes. The glint of a blade and a swallowed gasp as some poor sodger not quite gone is finished off.

The field at Quatre Bras was like that on the night of 16th June last year, when I went out to look for Danny Littlejohn. Marshal Ney had thrown half the French army at us here, while Napoleon led the remainder against the Prussians at Ligny — two days it was before Waterloo. There was a boy with no arms sitting in woeful contemplation who was not Danny Littlejohn, and scores bent higgledy who were not Danny neither, and hundreds more yet for me to sort through as I stumbled over limbs and called out his name. Corpses stretching on into the night, corpses strewn and maimed, on and on and on and on, as if an ocean wave of unimaginable size had dashed them onto an endless shore and then receded hissing.

A man begins to be a little mad, I think. Begins to think: too many. Too many have died here, on this field and on this earth. The world has surely reached its limit, and so have I. I cannot stand the thought of one more death.

All of this was somehow mixed up in my thinking as I ran towards Newgate on the morning — one year later — when they hanged Meg Nancarrow.

 

I have bits and flashes of memory from that morning, though these are as partial and fragmented before the beating as afterwards. The sea of humanity stretching out as I pell-melled down the hill; the stick-figure of Meg on the far-off gallows platform, and her tiny white face before the hood went on. The suffocation of the press, and the desperation to fight through — limbs and elbows and “Oi, feck off!” The sudden sick impact as I felt myself slammed to the cobbles, and the blackness of an Under-Sheriff's boot looming to fill every inch of my vision.

I recollect arriving at Janet Friendly's house later, though not how I got there. I believe my conviction was that I must see Miss Smollet directly, and explain to her what had been done. I remember the look of shock on her poor face as I stood swaying in the doorway, and the phizogs of Janet and Mrs Sibthorpe too, cos it seemed that I was blood all over, with my coat ripped from my back and one of my boots — the fine Hessian boots of which I'd been so proud — missing entirely. “Couldn't stop 'em,” I remember saying, over and over, hearing the words slurred like an old prize-fighter's, who has taken one too many grave-diggers to the nob. “Too many.” They convinced me to lie down, though I kept wanting to get up again, despite the pain that was throbbing now in every inch, daggers of it stabbing with each movement. They must have sent to Cripplegate for Mr Comrie; I remember him arriving some while later, and exclaiming as he saw me.

“God's bollocks!”

“Been attacked,” Janet was muttering. “That's all we can smoke out of him.” Evidently I'd been murky about the details.

They managed to get me sitting on a stool while Mr Comrie probed my skull for fractures, and tried to ascertain whether my glims would point themselves in the same direction instead of wandering asunder like two drunkards reeling home. Janet stood glowering with a cloth and a basin of bloodied water — she'd been doing what she could to clean me up — while Miss Smollet and Mrs Sibthorpe hovered nearby in a flutter of distress.

I asked Mrs Sibthorpe what was the time, and she said past one o'clock. This was a considerable startlement: evidently Your Wery Umble had been staggering about London for hours, bloody as Banquo's Ghost, with scant recollection of any of it. But I was beginning to remember a few things clearer, and managed to explain to Mr Comrie. Arriving at the hanging and fighting through the crowd, desperate to tell them what I had discovered, and what a terrible mistake was being made. Finally reaching the scaffold, only to be battered down.

“They wouldn't listen,” I told him. Weeping openly now, but no longer caring. “I fought them, but they were too many.”

They were staring at me slack-jawed, Mr Comrie and the women. I expect they'd been thinking that I'd been set upon by villains in an alley — the usual explanation for such an appearance as Your Wery Umble had presented.

“Wait,” said Janet. “Wait, now. The
Under-Sheriffs
at the fucking
hanging
?”

“Janet,” said a small voice. “Language.”

“Oh, Will,” breathed Miss Smollet, whose glims — I do recollect this detail, despite the general confusion of the moment — were wide and shining.

And Mr Comrie was looking at me as he might through the bars at Bedlam Hospital, at a poor shitten lunatick chained naked to the wall.

“God's mighty swinging bollocks, William.
Why?
”

And it was imperative that they should know. All four of them, but Mr Comrie most of all. It was too late for Meg Nancarrow; she was dead — and more than dead, dissected. They'd have had her to one of the hospitals by half past nine, and laid out in the Death House five minutes after that. While Wm Starling had been reeling about London, raving about fearful injustices, Meg had been lying as naked as Eve while surgeons and students commenced to carve. Sparrows and rats and the guttering light of those reeking unspeakable candles.

But I couldn't think like this. I must be clear in my head, cos Mr Comrie must know.

“She never killed Cheese,” I said.

“I know you believe that, William. I wanted to believe it too, but — ”

“It was Atherton.”

“What?”

“I have witnesses.”

“William!”

Cos I was rising from the stool, and pushing away his restraining arm. My nob swam with it, and I almost fell again, but they had to know. I had to show them.

“Come with me!”

Then through the door, and into the blinding light of afternoon.

It has always amazed me, what men can do when the shock of injury is still upon them. I recollect a black-haired lieutenant at Vitoria who was carried into the field hospital with a shattered leg, and had it taken off above the knee. After we'd finished, he refused all assistance, saving only a tot of brandy, which he gulped down with a thick slurred mutter that losing limbs was thirsty work. Then he shook us off and heaved himself from the table to his feet — or to his foot, which is more to the point. And when I pointed him to the cart that was come to bear him off behind the lines, he hopped to it unassisted like a derelict crow. My last sight of him was sitting in the back of it, straight-backed and chalk-faced, rattling into the setting sun with an air both ruined and regal.

It was the same that day with Your Wery Umble — or so I suppose, looking back. My injuries were hardly as grave as an amputated trotter, though they were quite enough to lay me low for three full days afterwards, and leave me creaking subsequent like the image of my own great-grandfather. But as I staggered northwards onto Fleet Street and turned east, I scarcely felt the pain at all, so intent was I upon my destination. Mr Comrie bandy-legging beside me, and Janet Friendly and Miss Smollet hurrying after.

Where the Devil were we going? That's what Mr Comrie kept asking, and I told him: Flitty Deakins. Miss Deakins had come to me with the proof, and now the others should hear it from her very mouth.

“Atherton's sairvant?” Comrie was demanding. “The one addicted to laudanum?”

“This way.”

“Whaire is she?”

A confusion come upon me then, and a dawning realization: I did not know.

“William?”

I had trailed to a stop, and now I looked to Mr Comrie, as if perhaps the answer might be written across his own furrowed phizog. But it wasn't there, or in the faces of Janet Friendly nor Annie Smollet neither, staring back at mine. I looked about me then, feeling myself begin to totter, but the answer was nowhere upon Fleet Street, nor on the faces of the houses looking down.

Miss Deakins had appeared to me out of the morning. I had turned away from her and run, all the way to Newgate. But where had she gone?

“She's here,” I stammered.

“Whaire's
here
?”

“Somewhere in London. And she knows — she can tell you.”