Will Starling (27 page)

“I'm going to find them out,” I said. “That's my promise to you, Jemmy. I'm going to prove what Atherton did, and I'm going to see him hang.”

Jemmy understood, though he gave no sign. I knew, cos that flicker had been there.

And I'd seen something else as well. Each time that Jemmy rocked backwards — the
chink
of the chain pulling taut — he was wrenching at the iron ring bolted to the floor. And gaunt as he was, Jemmy Cheese was still strong. He was stronger than you could believe — and the bolt was coming loose. In due course it would surely give way, unless someone informed the Keeper.

I left Dr Paxton's house without saying a word.

Horrifying Assault Near Southwark Bridge

 

 

From a Broadsheet Account

21st May, 1816

A new and shocking depredation is reported in the matter of Boggle-Eyed Bob, concerning a Sailor who was attacked two nights ago walking eastwards along Bankside Street, near the Docks. Passing through a narrowing of the road, he was suddenly struck a Fearsome Blow from above, as by an Assailant dropping bodily upon him, from a ledge or rooftop. Precipitated to the ground, the Sailor was sensible of the stench of putrefaction before experiencing a Great Agony, as the Assailant sank its teeth into the flesh of his right shoulder. His cries brought men running from a nearby public house, to be confronted by an Appalling Tableau: an egg-eyed Creature crouched above the fallen Sailor, hair standing on end and mouth smeared with gore. The Creature snarled most horribly but fled at once, shambling hunched and herk-a-jerk into the night, at a swift and uncanny velocity.

6

The Wreck of Tom Sheldrake had chambers at the Inns of Court, just north of Fleet Street. There was an outer room where a Spavined Clerk worked at a table piled high with papers, the dust of ages rising and settling as he stirred. Beyond was Sheldrake's sanctum, an inner room with a desk and shelves of leather-bound books, and a Turkey rug and a window facing west, through which in happier days the afternoon sun would respectfully decline, irradiating the barrister with an amber light, as if he glowed from within with his own superiority. Today he sat shrunken, his eyes too large for his face. His wig lay strewn and lifeless in the corner, as if it had scuttled into the street at the unluckiest of moments and been run over by a carriage wheel.

“The fault was not mine,” he said. Clutching it like a sailor to a life-rope. “I require you to understand this, Starling. I bear no blame for the death.”

The Spavined Clerk had straightened as I'd come creaking through the door five minutes earlier. Eyebrows arched at the sight of me, like chalk-dusted caterpillars. But despite visible misgivings, he'd escorted me through to the Wreck.

“I ent here to accuse you,” I said to Sheldrake now. “I ent here to talk about Bob Eldritch at all.”

But the name itself was enough to set him off. His face folded in on itself.

“It was a jest,” he said.

“I need to ask you about Meg Nancarrow.”

“I was larking — that's all it was — everyone in the room knew that. Everyone except for Bob Eldritch, who got it all wrong, like the cork-brain he was, and died!”

Behind me, through the open doorway, dust rose slightly. The Spavined Clerk had lifted his head, gazing sorrowfully in at the Wreck of Tom, who lurched to his feet and began to pace distractedly, back and forth across the inner room.
Oh, yes
, said the Clerk's mournful eyes, as they briefly met mine.
Oh, indeed; it is thus, and has been so, and each day it is worse. Behold the Wreck as it Splinters
.

“What did he say, when he came to you?” I asked the Wreck of Tom.

He froze in mid-lurch. “
What?
”

“The surgeon,” I said. “Mr Atherton. Why did he want you to defend Meg Nancarrow?”

He stared at me for another moment, as if certain I had asked him something else. At length he looked away. “That woman? God knows. Someone had to.”

“But why
you
, Mr Sheldrake?”

Cos there was the question, wasn't it? Of all the barristers in London — clever and capable men, any number of them — why the Wreck of Sheldrake, drunk and bungling?

“What were his instructions?”

“His instructions?”

“When he hired you. What did he say?”

Sheldrake blinked, still half distracted by whatever it was that had clutched his thoughts a moment earlier.

“He believed the woman was guilty,” he muttered.

“He told you that?”

“Guilty as Fallen Eve, poor bitch. But the forms must be observed. A fair trial, and then the hanging.”

“And Meg — you met with her, to prepare the case. You must have done — yes? Before the trial, at Newgate.”

“Of course.”

“Did she say anything to you, Mr Sheldrake? About Atherton? Did she seem to possess any knowledge about him?”

“What are you talking about? What sort of knowledge?”

“That's what I'm asking. Anything at all — a hint — some secret she might have known . . .”

“Some secret?”

He blinked again, brow furrowing. “I seem to recollect . . .” And then broke off, visage darkening. “The Devil business is it of yours? What's this to you, or you to me?” He swelled into his old imperious self, or leastwise managed a wretched approximation. “The likes of you, coming here — presuming upon my time. Presuming upon privileged information.”

“Meg was my friend.”

“Some draggle-tail he'd had, and felt a fondness for. I have no idea what it was between them, and I wouldn't tell you even if I did.”

And then he burst out again, abruptly. He gave a cry, as if in physical pain. “A human limb? Bob Eldritch, gnawing on someone's
arm
?”

There was a copy of the broadsheet amidst the clutter on his desk. He snatched it up and crumpled it, and flung it across the room.

“God's teeth!”

Christ knows I'd been unsettled myself, when I'd seen the broadsheet report first thing that morning — despite knowing what I did about the actual whereabouts of Bob Eldritch's corpse, bloated and rotting in his grave. Or leastways so I
thought
I knew, although a report like that can set certain doubts to squirming in the deep rat-haunted caverns of the brain. But Bob Eldritch was not my priority just now.

Sheldrake had lurched to retrieve the crumpled broadsheet. When he spoke again, it was hoarse and low. “Four nights ago. That's when he came to me.”

“Atherton, you mean?”

He stood by the window, shoulders hunched. Uncrumpling and smoothing. A small despairing laugh.

“Fingers at the window. I thought it was dead leaves, blown by the wind. But oh, no —scritch-scratch — that hand.”

And I realized. “You mean Bob
Eldritch
?”

“That face of his, staring in. Those eyes — and the hair, straight up. Oh, God help me. And every night since.”

Despite myself, I felt a pricking at the back of my neck, as if my own hair were rising. And I found myself asking the question, dumbfounded: “What does he want?”

Sheldrake began to moan.

“He wants me to open the casement. He wants vengeance.”

*

And of course I wanted vengeance of my own.

I could deny that, and present myself to Your Honour as naught but a selfless seeker after Truth. What would stop me, after all, since I'm the one who's telling you this tale? But let's have truth-telling between us, even if larger Truths are too much to hope for, in the roiling murk of this world's equivocations.

I wanted revenge on Dionysus Atherton. I desired it more bitterly by the moment, as I left Tom Sheldrake's chambers that afternoon and found my steps tending towards Crutched Friars, where I stood for more than an hour in the shadow of a tree across the street from my uncle's house, just watching. The curtains were drawn; no sign of life. No sign of life at all — though life there was indeed, as I know now. More life than I could have imagined, standing there on that Tuesday afternoon, eight days after Meg Nancarrow was hanged. When I look back now my blood runs cold, just to think of it: the life that was in that house.

But nothing moved within, or leastways nothing I could see. The street outside just trundled about its business as I watched from my place of shadow, a silent Changeling seething with dark imaginings. Trying to conjure the pictures in my mind: what he was doing this moment, and the next. What he had been doing all along.

And of course I wanted vengeance. A Revenger in a Tragedy of my own devising — I wanted it as dearly as ever did Vindice in the grand old gore-drenched play, carrying the skull of his beloved about with him, lest he should otherwise for an instant forget what villainy had been done to her, and to himself. I'd wanted it since the first moment I'd stood outside this house, just after my return from the Midlands half a year earlier, carrying my own discovery with me — about my Ma, and who she was, and what had happened. Lugging it like an old brown skull in a sack.

*

Miss Smollet was at Cripplegate when I returned. Sitting on the steps outside like my own better angel, in a summer dress and a straw bonnet with flowers, nibbling at a jam puff that she'd bought from a man with a basket, and feigning superb unawareness of several young men who'd stopped across the street to smugger in admiration. All of her attention was fixed upon a dollop of jam — red as a naked heart — that balanced precariously at the corner of her mouth and must be retrieved just in time by a delicate darting of the tongue.

She'd come to Cripplegate several times since my mill with the Under-Sheriffs, just to see how I fared. I was still creaking and limping, but at least my phiz was no longer such a bloom of jaundice and vermilion — I knew this from checking my reflection in a bit of glass, each time I heard her voice asking after me. I expect these visits were partly just an excuse to get out of her lodgings and avoid Janet Friendly. Still, she could have gone anywhere in London, and she chose to come here to see me.

And she came smiling, even though today she'd seen that broadsheet report about Boggle-Eyed Bob.

“He is Dead,” she said, with fine conviction — so fine that I wondered how much rehearsal had been required. “We have seen him, Dead and Mouldering. So let them print what they want, Will Starling — becos We know the Truth.”

That ability of hers to rally from any ordeal. Let the storm-wracked seas of life crash down in all their briny malevolence, and — lo — she'd come bobbing back to the surface like a cork. We were walking, now, her hand on my arm. She began to chatter on about this and that, and for the span of an hour or two an oppressive cloud lifted and I could almost forget about all the rest: about suppositions and black half-certainties that hovered and swooped like rooks, and Meg Nancarrow's white face upon the scaffold, and my own solemn vow to Jemmy Cheese as he rocked forwards and back again, forwards and back, the tears trickling down his cheeks.

Miss Smollet was selling flowers again, outside Drury Lane. Kean was appearing these days in
Bertram, or The Castle of St Aldobrand
, a gothick tragedy about the leader of a pirate band. Miss Smollet had seen it. It was very fine, she said, with much of what you'd most want in a play, such as crumbling ruins and a wicked monk and a hero tormented by midnight broodings.
Bertram
would close at the end of the month, when the major London theatres would go dark for the summer; Miss Smollet might then sell flowers outside the Theatre Royal Haymarket, which offered a summer season. But she had also spoken to a man who might offer her a place in a company touring the provinces — intelligence that was communicated in a sparkle of green-eyed hopefulness, and received in secret dismay by Your Wery Umble.

“The provinces,” I exclaimed. “For the entire summer?”

“Oh, for longer than that. His circuit goes up into the Midlands, and then all the way south again to Kent. I shall be tramping for Months, like a Gypsy.”

“On foot, you mean? This company
walks
?”

She laughed. “'Course not — not literally. Nobody walks from Kent to the Midlands — leastways nobody who has any money, or any sense.”

“I did that once. When we come back from the Continent, me and Mr Comrie, after Waterloo.”

And somehow I found myself telling her the tale, of the search I'd made for my Ma. I'd never intended to say a word of it — and certainly not to Miss Smollet, my better angel — but it ended in spilling out. I suppose a skull in a sack just grows too heavy, in the end. You need to set it down.

We were sitting on a bench by this time, in a scrubby patch of green behind St Paul's. The great dome golden in the afternoon sun, and the ruffianly pigeons stalking past. “I was raised up in Kent,” I began, “or leastways so you might say, after a fashion. That's where I'd been put out to nurse, after my Ma gave me up to the Foundling Hospital, so that's where I went last autumn to start my search. I had a notion someone there might recollect who she was.”

And astonishingly enough, they did. I found a midwife who knew many of the women who'd taken in foundlings to nurse. And through a process of narrowing-down — what year I'd been born, and a hazy recollection that my nurse's name may have been Dolly — I arrived on the doorstep of Dolly's sister. Dolly had died just two months previous, I learned, which left me to feel surprisingly bereft, considering as I recollected almost nothing about her. But the sister led me to an old neighbour, who pointed me in turn to a man at a public house whose cousin had for years been in the transportation line, and made extra money by carting foundlings back with him from London. This cousin, when located, had a vague recollection of a dark-haired girl with a sweet sad triangle face, and a vague notion that she had mentioned hailing from somewhere in the Midlands, if only memory could dredge up a specific from the deep silt of two decades. After much furrowing of brow, and multiple drams of pale to prime the machinery, the name of a town came lurching from the depths.

“Lichfield, it was,” I told Miss Smollet. “So I went there.”

“And you walked?” Miss Smollet exclaimed.

In fact I'd taken mail coaches most of the way, paid for with coins liberated at public houses by means of three cups and a pea. But Miss Smollet's green eyes were shining, and walking suited the tale much better.

“Every step,” I said gravely, “of the way.”