Will Starling (25 page)

A look exchanged between them, then. Janet and Mr Comrie.

“Will,” said Janet, carefully. “It's all right.”

“It isn't! Atherton wanted her dead — and he's killed before.”

“Will, you've taken a fearful knocking on the head.”

“Wait!”

Cos it came to me then, in a flash of hope rekindling. Flitty Deakins wasn't the only one — there was a second witness who could corroborate my story.

“He seen Buttons on the night of the murder — the night Uncle Cheese was killed. Seen him with Odenkirk. Conspiring with Atherton's man!”

“No, listen to him,” Miss Smollet was exclaiming, cos she saw Janet Friendly shaking her head. “I have a Belief in Will Starling.”

I wanted to seize her hands in mine, and pour out my heart's gratitude. I wanted to wrap her in my arms. But first I must show them.

“He knows the truth,” I cried. “Charley knows!”

Eastwards again, hurrying through the crowds. Pain throbbing cruelly now; the sunlight splitting through my nob, and I recollected my missing boot with the stab of each sharp stone. But we came to the bottom of Ludgate Hill at last, and there amidst the crowds and the clatter sat Gibraltar Charley with his hat upturned, while Tim danced dutifully on his two hind legs.

“Charley!” I heard the ragged elation in my voice. I'd brought them, and now they'd know, even if I should drop down dead with pure exhaustion. Cos in truth it was harder each moment to catch my breath, and Ludgate Hill was beginning to spin. “The man outside the Three Jolly Cocks — the man who was talking to Buttons that night — tell them!”

Charley lifted his milky eyes. “Pray encourage him now, my tender-hearted Christians. Pray show encouragement to Tim, the Real Learned French Dog.”

“No, look — Charley, it's me. Will Starling. We spoke . . .”

But Charley's eyes looked blindly off towards the distant rooftops.

“A copper would give him joy, my tender-hearted Christians. A copper for Tim, the True Genuine Learned French Dog.”

In my bewilderment I looked to Mr Comrie. I saw a great sadness in his face, and felt his hand take my arm.

“Come, William,” he said quietly. “I'll take you home.”

I believe I tried to pull away. But there was a rushing sound then and a darkness rising with it, which is the last thing I remember.

Letter to Mr Comrie from Miss J Friendly

 

 

15th May, 1816

Sir:

You said to me yesterday, when I come to visit Will: could I tell you anything obtaining to his state of mind, prior to the lamentable events of the day previous, which could of led to them? I recollect answering shortly, and saying that you might be better placed than I to offer such information, considering as I had not 'til t'other morning seen Will Starling once since leaving the Foundling Hospital six-odd years ago, whereas you been with him every day. I expect my mood was also affected by the sight of him, battered and swole as he was, and moaning senseless in his bed with fever. You ended in saying I might send you a note if I should think of anything, presuming of course that I knew how to write.

I'm sure this was very thoughtful in you, to consider that I might be an eejit.

Yes, Mister Comrie: I can write. This is me writing now. If you will come by the shop some evening, you may see me reading as well, and doing sums, and even counting up beyond one hundred.

But you also asked me something else, before I left. You asked: What was Will like, when he was a child? And there was something so very sad in you as you asked it, that last night I began to think you deserved a reply.

Let me start by saying this.

Will's father was a sea-captain — which possibly will surprise you to hear — though not of the philanthropical sort like Thomas Coram. He had been called from his bed in the chill of a December dawn, Will's father, and sailed from Southampton the following evening, leaving nothing for his unborn son but his blessing and a brass chronometer, the which had been given to him by his own father under circumstances remarkably similar, thirty years before. Thus Will revealed one day to a clutch of breathless foundlings, for Will could always tell a tale. He would say no more, leastways not at first, for Will was not at liberty — so he give us to understand, from certain cryptic looks and utterances — to divulge further details. But we naturally winkled them out.

He was a Privateer, Will's father, which did not make him a pirate but something altogether superior, for a Privateer sails under a Letter of Marque, signed by the King himself, authorizing him to plunder His Majesty's enemies. Will's father was doing so this very instant — so Will would confide to us in stolen moments in the corridor, or at the railings when we was outside taking air. He was attacking French merchantmen and sinking them as would not yield, all in the cause of confounding Bonaparte. He was sailing out of Gibraltar, in command of the French ship
Hercule
, which had been captured at Trafalgar and re-named the
Eleonora
. It was a sloop, small but wonderful swift, with twenty-eight guns and two long-nines in the stern that Will's father in a whimsical way had named “Claude” and “Duvall,” after the celebrated gentleman highwayman who once marauded upon Hampstead Heath with a barker in either daddle. Will's father was famous for his gallantry as well, though also for ferocity, which earned him the nickname of “Bloody Bill” Starling. If Will's father and Thomas Coram had met upon the bounding main, Will confided, Bloody Bill would most assuredly have sunk him.

“Bill — short for William,” exclaims one of the smallest boys in the cluster on that particular day. “The same as you!” This being Isaac Bliss, who'd been listening with his twinklers round as dinner plates. Isaac wasn't near so badly bent in them days — no worse than a question mark.

“Aye,” says Will, and swore us to secrecy. He'd of been nine or ten years old at the time.

“A remarkable coincidence, then,” says I. “Considering as your name weren't Starling at all, nor William neither, 'til the Governors sat down to choose one for you, and one of them heard a bird sing outside the window. I wonder, if it had been a pigeon, would your Pa be Bloody Bill Squab instead?”

“Shut your cake-hole, Janet Friendly,” says Will hotly, “cos you only shows how ignorant you are.”

I told him to take his own advice, before someone earned himself a peg on the smeller — which someone duly did. But he bore it like a good 'un, and didn't peach, even when they whipped him for having blood on his jacket, claiming that his nose had bled on its own accord, out of pure contrariness.

So how much of the Tale of Bloody Bill was true? Well, I have my own opinion on that, Mister Comrie, as I do on many topics. But Will did possess a brass chronometer. He kept it wrapped in a bit of flannel, at the bottom of the little tin box he had for his personal treasures. He showed it to me once, so hushed and solemn you'd of thought he was unwrapping the pocket-watch of Moses himself, retrieved from Egyptian bulrushes. I've no idea where he got it from — and if I had to take a guess, I'd hazard that Will was no longer sure himself. He'd been claiming for so long that it come from his own father's hand, I suspect he'd come three quarters to believe it. And there actually was a ship named
Eleonora
, a 28-gun sloop. It was sunk the following year, by a 36-gun frigate off the Spanish Coast, with all hands aboard feared lost. There was an item in the shipping column of the newspapers. Will turned ashen when he learned of it, though afterwards he claimed to believe that some of the crew at least had escaped, and were even now scheming a triumphant return to England, with Bloody Bill to lead them.

So what am I telling you? I'm saying: Will Starling as a boy was far from a fool — the very opposite, in fact. He weren't exactly what you'd call a liar neither, leastways not in the customary way. But he'd make up tales in his head, and repeat them so often — to the rest of us, but most of all to himself — that he'd actually start to believe they might be true.

I believe he's begun telling himself another tale. A tale concerning a man called Dionysus Atherton, and I begin to suspect it's as dark a tale as you could ever dream.

I made a discovery this morning, Mister Comrie. La Smollet began to babble. That's the second reason I'm writing you this letter.

Were you aware that they dug up a body? The two of them — Will Starling and La Smollet, on Saturday night. A man called Aldridge, or Elditch — I didn't quite catch it, for La Smollet was in Full Flight — who'd been killed and then brought back to life.

Or some such.

God only knows.

If Will survives, I expect you'll want to ask him.

3

Sunlight trickled through the window, puddling round the bed where I lay propped against a bolster. Mr Comrie's own bed, as strait and hard as the Way to Salvation.

It was Wednesday afternoon. Apparently I'd been lying here, delirious and moaning, since Mr Comrie carried me back to Cripplegate on Monday. I'd been raving about Meg Nancarrow and Christ knows what else — Boggle-Eyed Bob and a bloated blue corpse, and a shrieking peacock with brilliant plumage who turned into Master Buttons on the stand, and a golden-haired Fiend who was not the Fiend at all but Dionysus Atherton. Miss Smollet had come by twice, I was to discover; once to deliver a sprig of flowers, which now wilted in a shaving-mug on the window sill, and once just to sit beside me. Janet Friendly came once as well, and Mr Comrie himself had kept vigil through the whole first night, fearing to let me fall asleep with an injured head.

He now sat beside me on a stool, spread-legged in his shirt, spooning broth into the invalid. As ungainly a nursemaid as ever clucked a tongue.

“God's mighty swinging danglers. Look at you.”

He chuckled sourly. Mr Comrie was never a man to grow soggy at your pain.

“Half a dozen Under-Sheriffs. What were you thinking? Thrash them all, leap onto the scaffold and save the poor woman's life?”

I gave a small shrug, which brought on a spasm of agony. It began in my shoulders and neck and then worked itself down the entire length of me, such as it was. Mr Comrie waited while it passed.

“I went to Crutched Friars yesterday,” he said then. “Asking after the Deakins woman.”

That had my full attention, agony or no.

“The housekeeper told me the woman had disappeared. Gave me an address where she thought the Deakins woman might have gone — a doss-house north of Smithfield. So I went.”

“And?”

“They recognized the description. Said she'd stayed for a night or two, last week. Then she moved on — said she was going to her people in Devonshire.”

“No,” I said. “That's not possible — cos I seen her, just outside, on Monday morning.”

“Did you?”

“Yes!”

“Are you sairtain of that?”

Eyeing me keenly now.

“'Course I am.”

But in the puddling Wednesday sunlight, was it possible that I had this all wrong? Perhaps Flitty Deakins had lied to me — or had never been here at Cripplegate at all. Perhaps she'd been some wisp of hallucination, produced by running myself ragged. Something I'd made up in my head, just as I'd made up that Gibraltar Charley was not quite blind at all, like half the other blind beggars in London.

“I ent completely mad,” I said.

I confess the notion had crept into my own head, somewhere between the breaking of the fever and the first blessed light of dawn. Perhaps I had lost my way somehow, and would end as such poor wretches did, chained and wailing in Bedlam Hospital, for the entertainment of Sunday visitors. There was a notion to buoy the heart through the coal-black solitude of night.

I was waiting for Mr Comrie to give another sour chuckle, and wave the notion away. But he continued to gaze, keen and troubled.

“There's different kinds of madness, William. Hatred can be one of them.”

“You can think what you want . . .”

“Digging up the Eldritch bugger's grave? God's bollocks!”

It burst out of him, more violent than he'd intended. Broth slopped over the lip of the bowl, and he set it down.

“There's no excusing what Atherton did. Not to Eldritch — I'm meaning what he did to
you
, William. Turning you from his door like that. Renouncing his obligation.”

“He has no — ”

“Aye, he damned well does. He has every obligation, William. He was my friend — he
is
my friend. But Christ I think the less of him, for the way he's treated you.”

He remained flushed, but had succeeded in stamping the emotions back down into their hole, where they wouldn't humiliate us both by flapping about naked. Then he hitched the stool closer. We had never had this Talk before; it seemed we were about to have it now. He cleared his throat.

“I can understand how you'd hate him, William. The only kin you have, and he won't own you.”

“I don't care.”

“You're a liar.”

Under other circumstances, I'd have turned my back. But I managed at least to avert my eyes, and stare past his shoulder.

His bedchamber was as Spartan as a barracks. The narrow bed, and a table with a basin and a pitcher. On one wall hung a bad watercolour of a Highland glen, and across from it was Sir Charles Bell's appalling scrotum. I fixed my squint upon it, as a vista well suited to my present state of mind.

Mr Comrie cleared his throat.

“He blames himself, in some wise — I expect that's what it is. For what happened to your Ma. I've a notion they'd been close. But he sided with the family when they cast her out. The disgrace of it, and all. Still — his own sister. And then she died. And then the sight of you, all these years later . . .”

“It's lucky he has you to excuse him.”

“There's no excuse. But hatred can twist a man. That's what I'm wanting to say. A man can destroy himself, with hatred.”

There was silence then. A hand upon my shoulder. Astonishingly gentle, for a man so ham-fisted with sensibilities.

“Meg's dead, William. So's your Ma, for the matter of that. Let them both rest.”

 

I remained in bed for two more days with the pain, and for two days beyond with the Black Dog curled about me. At night the horse with half a head stalked through my dreams, with Danny Littlejohn on its back. But finally I got up.

Missus Maggs herself was observed to wince as I creaked myself down the stairs, and Mr Comrie asked where I was going. But I just kept on creaking, out the door and down the street, and all the way south to the foot of Ludgate Hill, where Tim the Learned French Dog danced and Gibraltar Charley played the organ. Just now he was playing an air that may have been an Irish reel, or possibly “Abide with Me” — blindness being his talent, more than virtuosity. Tim stopped for a moment as he saw me, as if he would exclaim: “You look a right piece of
merde
.” Gibraltar Charley lifted milky eyes, sensing someone beside him.

“I've come alone,” I said, “whether you can see that or not. I need to know the truth. Did Buttons meet with Atherton's man, that night?”

Amidst the din of London, the blind man sat in silence.

“If 'ee did, then it's too late for Meg,” he said at length. “There's nothing for a blind man to say that could 'elp 'er now.”

The milky eyes slid towards me.

“Christ,” said Gibraltar Charley. “They done you up proper, didn't they?”

4

This is how it must have taken place:

It is well past midnight as she emerges from the boozing-ken. She has not gone many paces when she hears the coach coming up behind; rattle of hooves and creaking of wheels, slowing as it overtakes her. The blind slides down, and the smile of the gentleman within gleams out.

“It is very late for a young woman to be on the streets of London, all alone.”

This is happening in March, I think. It must be March, or February — a month or two prior to the events I've been describing. I wasn't there and so I can't say precisely how it was. But such a great deal of time I've had lately to speculate and ponder — nothing at all but Time on my hands, and shackles. Time to sift through all the pieces I've scavenged, arranging them first in this way, and then in that, 'til slowly a pattern has emerged, and the shadow of a Truth has taken shape like a ghostly ship at sea.