Will Starling (3 page)

And the truth is: no, I was not. Not on the day I've just been describing, or on many others still to come. But I know what Atherton did, on each of them. I've ferreted out the pieces, one by one, and puzzled them together. Oh, he's a great one for puzzles, is Your Wery Umble Narrator. A great one for ferreting, as you'll come to understand once we've been properly introduced.

So yes, I know what Dionysus Atherton did. I know what he did next, and I know what he was thinking while he did it. And what I don't know, I can guess — because I
know
the man. I have come to know his heart as I know my own.

Look at him now, striding down Aldersgate Street.

The streets are still choked with crowds from the hanging. Carts clattering, coachmen bellowing, drunken louts lurching amongst the long-suffering respectable, who hold their wives close and their purses closer. Outside a gin-shop some Nymphs of the Pave exchange jeers with a clutch of passing Rainbows — gay young bucks, that is to say, on a roister. Around the corner a half-pay officer trembles one of their sisters against the wall, to the great disgust of all right-thinking passers-by, and the greater delight of a murder of apprentices, who commence pelting the amorous couple with clods of horse-shit. In other words, London is being London, in this year of 1816.

It is a year since Waterloo. Bonaparte is in exile on St Helena, and our Redcoats are back home. Many are missing bits, to be sure; an arm or a leg. Tom Lobster may be seen hopping himself along any street in London, or sitting on the corner, cap in hand, such being the fortune of war. There is a public house with this very name — the Fortune of War at Pye Corner, which will shortly come into this narrative — so named by one of its long-ago owners who had lost one arm and both legs in a battle at sea. But there is a new energy surging through the Metropolis, after a lean and anxious decade. A sense that much may be possible again — and very little may be forbidden. The topsy-turvy feeling that something has utterly fallen apart, though you can't be sure what it is, and that something throbbing and burgeoning has begun. There is a mood of seeking and striving and seizing, and Atherton is as one with the Spirit of his Age. He glistens with it.

Amidst the throng, he is half a head taller than all but the tallest, and handsomer than any. He wears fawn-coloured breeches and a sky-blue coat, and his hair is long and golden. He would have a man come in to curl it for an hour each morning, except he'd never have the patience. So it is wild instead, which suits him all the better.

Crossing Cannon Street he makes towards the Thames, bound for Guy's Hospital, where he is the brightest rising star in the chirurgical firmament. Guy's is on the south side of the river; he will hire a lighter to ferry him across.

He redoubles his pace.

He is forever eager to arrive, wherever he is going. Once there, he is eager to be away. He was in motion well before dawn today, when he arose to supervise a dissection, and many times he is still in motion when dawn comes peeping again. At Guy's he will conduct his rounds in a whirlwind, with worshipful students flapping behind. He will scarcely slow down when he lectures — pacing back and forth, words cascading.

There is no one swifter in surgery, either. Not even his old schoolmate Alec Comrie, whose own speed is legendary. And there is certainly no one swifter to reach for the scalpel to begin with. No one even half as swift, not when patients must be held down shrieking, and surgeons themselves are chalk-white as they commence. The only exception occurs at the dissecting table. There in the Death House — with the rats and the stench and the horror and the sparrows (oh, I'll tell you of the sparrows) and the corpses carved and grinning — Atherton is stillness itself. He'll stand for hours in searing concentration, separating layers of tissue with tiny measured movements.

“Soon I shall know the Great Secret!”

Ronald Peake's last words upon the scaffold. And by now Peake knows it, doesn't he? At ten minutes past eleven on this Monday morning, as Atherton is borne across the Thames with the air of a man who might choose to part it instead, the poisoner has arrived upon another shore. He knows what the surgeon does not.

Not yet.

 

2

When Jemmy Cheese was very young, his brother Edward had warned him about the fireplace. It gaped like a maw in the middle of the room, and if Jemmy ventured too near, the Devil would come bursting from the chimbley with a shriek and a bang, to hale him away with all the other wicked boys who fiddled with their willies. Unless the gobbling witch in the jakes got him first, clutching with her talons from beneath him as he squatted. Jemmy had in consequence spent his boyhood with a dismal clammy squirming in his guts.

He feels that way again tonight.

He breaks stride as they cross Whitechapel Road, switching the sack from one shoulder to the other and casting a chary look skyward, cos he does not like the looks of that moon.

“'S nothing to fret about,” mutters Little Hollis, skulking alongside.

But a moon is always bad. This one has slipped behind the clouds, plunging them back into darkness. It has been doing this for some time. It disappears, but then an edge will come sidling out again, dirty-white and deceitful, like an old whore leering from a window.

Jemmy follows, but the clamminess grows worse. Another man might put this down to the oysters, which slosh with his long clumping strides. Jemmy Cheese has partaken of two dozen, along with four quarts of porter; tonight's enterprise is not of a sort that a man can approach in the nakedness of sobriety, with nothing to stand between him and what he is up to. But it isn't the oysters. It is the old gobbling-witch-down-beneath sensation, coming on all sudden and sick. It dawns upon Jemmy that he is having a whatsit, a thingummy, when a man senses that something dreadful is about to happen.

He had met Little Hollis at the Fortune of War Tavern, which is where these nights customarily began. After a period of fortification they had set off, stopping briefly at the alley where Little Hollis had stashed the implements. Now they are on the Ratcliffe Highway, angling east towards St George-in-the-East churchyard.

A premonition. It occurs to Jemmy that he is having a premonition. It is strong enough to make him break his stride, and puts him on the cusp of turning round again and long-shanking it straight home to Meg. Except how would he explain this to his brother? Ned would fly into a rage and call him
obtusus
and sundry cruel words besides, many of them in Latin, for Edward Cheshire is a scholard. Ned is cleverer than the surgeons themselves. He owns a pawn-shop near Old Street, and is going to become a dentist.

The moon slides through the clouds again, illuminating Little Hollis looking back. He hisses — “'S this way” — and gestures.

There is a wall around the churchyard, with spikes on top and doubtless broken glass as well, this being the sort of low trick they are up to nowadays, to thwart the Doomsday Men. A wide gate in the front, and another along the side, much narrower. Unlocked, just as Ned had promised; he had fixed it with the Sexton. It creaks on rusty hinges, and the trees along the graveyard wall stir uneasily. Barren branches rattle.

“Wait,” says Jemmy.

Something is wrong.

Jemmy Cheese is not well suited to this work, even at the best of times. He has too much imagination for it, to begin with. But something is doubly wrong about tonight.

Little Hollis is already scuttling ahead, however, and Ned's wrath would be unbearable. Worst of all his lovely Meg might shake her head in that way of hers and wonder — for the ten thousandth time — what the Devil she was to do with him.

So he follows.

There are scores of graveyards dotted about the Metropolis, unweeded gardens of death. St George-in-the-East is one of the largest: three acres of festering putrefaction, with headstones jumbling higgledy like an old woman's teeth. This graveyard serves a parish of forty thousand souls, and Londoners die at a relentless pace, bless their hearts. They must be buried, and lie in peace 'til Gabriel's Horn sounds the dreadful Day of Judgement — or 'til the likes of Little Hollis and Jemmy Cheese emerge from the sable of the night, with shovels and sacks. Little Hollis hazards a wink of his bull's-eye lantern, sliding the gate open an inch. By the yellow gleam they find the grave they're seeking: fresh dirt piled on from this morning's burial, and a plain white cross.

There are pebbles as well, strewn apparently at random, and small white shells. These must be carefully moved, and meticulously replaced after the exhumation, for there is in fact nothing random about them at all. Friends of the departed with guile in their hearts will arrange such items directly after the burial, returning to see if they've been disturbed. If so, there will be exclamations of dismay, and the fetching of shovels, and louder exclamations if the grave turns out to be empty, and the swearing of terrible oaths. Often this will excite wider suspicion; neighbouring graves will be dug up, leading frequently to the discovery that these are equally vacant. In extreme cases it will be discovered that an entire graveyard has been honeycombed, as if it had been filled with corpses so saintly that the Almighty had been moved to rapture them directly skyward, snatching them from the very mouths of indignant maggots.

Such discoveries are always bad for the Doomsday trade. There is furious denunciation in the news-sheets and heightened vigilance, with Watchmen poking their snouts about. Worse yet, friends of the newly departed come into the churchyards at night. They lurk in places of concealment, with cudgels.

Little Hollis sets the lantern down, and they begin.

It is Necessary, this act they are about to perform; every Doomsday Man in England would tell you that, and so would every surgeon. There are hundreds of surgeons and medical students in London alone — never mind the rest of England — working at the hospitals and at the private anatomy schools, of which there are dozens; and each one of them needs cadavers to carve. How else are they to learn and experiment, save on living patients, pinned down and squalling? And there lies the foundation of the Doomsday trade. The Law entitles the College of Surgeons to take possession of four murderers hanged at Newgate each year — but only four, and thousands are required. For all the rest, the surgeons and anatomists must rely on the Doomsday Men — Resurrectionists — grave-robbers.

Dig a narrow slanting shaft down to the head of the coffin: this is the knack of it. The shovels are wooden, for these make less noise. It can take an hour or more, if the dirt is packed down and the coffin lies deep. But a proper planting costs money, and tonight's subject is only a coachman. The poor aren't dug so diligently. Often they'll be stacked atop of others, two or even three in the same grave, the topmost scarcely deeper than a potato.

Sure enough, they are barely two feet down when Jemmy's shovel thuds. They clear enough dirt away to expose the very end of the coffin, and Jemmy reaches for a crowbar to prise the lid — gently, now, to minimize the noise — snapping the cheap wood against the weight of the earth above. Little Hollis fixes a grappling hook to the burial shroud and then stands back as Jemmy sets his heels and hauls on the rope, like a fisherman raising his net.

Wind agitates the trees. They creak their consternation, as if appalled that such wickedness exists in the world. As the body flops onto the ground, the coachman's face peeps out of the shroud, a bruised pupa unpeeled in its grim cocoon. It is the faces that haunt Jemmy: blue-veined and slack-jawed and ghastly white. It seems to him there is something he ought to do or say, if only he could think what it is.

He had confessed this once to Meg. She'd been drinking gin that day, and laughed at him. “Tell them to rise up and walk,” she had said. Meg would get that way on the blue ruin. She is angry, Meg — the angriest person he has ever known. She keeps the anger stoppered up, but down deep she is seething and blue ruin uncorks the bottle.

Jemmy loads the coachman into the sack, and they shovel the dirt back into the grave. There is something special about this one, it seems. One of the surgeons, Mr Atherton, is particularly keen to have this one upon his dissecting table, and is paying extra for the privilege — six pounds, half again the going rate. Jemmy hasn't asked why, though he guesses the surgeon once performed some procedure on the subject, and wants to analyze the results. Surgeons are known to keep track of former patients for years, awaiting their chance.

Four pounds for a Large — that is the normal price. Things come in three other sizes besides: Large Small, Small, and Foetus. By definition a Small is less than three foot long, and such items are priced out by the inch. Jemmy Cheese hates harvesting a Small; these haunt him worst of all. Dead children come to him in the night. Spectral waifs with empty eyes, scrabbling with their fingers at his window. He will wake up in a panic, crying out. Sometimes Meg is angry at this, but other times she is soft. “There's nothing to fear,” she will say. “It's all right, Jemmy. You're safe with Meg.”

Not long ago she had thought she might be having a child of her own. Jemmy's heart had soared with this, and he begged her not to go to the Old Woman two streets over, who took care of such matters.

“How could we have a child, the likes of us?” she had said to him. She said it savage, being on the blue ruin that day.

“I'd look after you both,” he said.

“You?” she said. “Look after a child? And what makes you so sure it's yours to begin with?”

That had dished him, a little. He'd had to go out for a walk, to consider. But he came back thinking it would be all right.

“I'd look after it anyways,” he told her. “It might be happier, being someone else's. Prob'ly be smarter.”

She swore at him for saying so, but her eyes went soft and afterwards she held him close. A few weeks later, when she bled and lost it, Meg was just as sad as he was. She has been sad ever since.