Will Starling (32 page)

“Lying about the five hours? Aye. Unless I'm wrong, and he was lying about all of it.” Mr Comrie scowled down into his glass. Despite everything, he retained his old fondness for my uncle. “All of it, start to finish, and he never had the body in the first place. But why would a man do that? Any man, and Atherton most of all? To make himself a laughing-stock — ruin his reputation. And for what? It makes no sense to me, William.”

There was something that made even less sense than that. A question had been tugging relentlessly, like the small dark demon of doubt at my sleeve. If Atherton had wanted Meg dead, then why would he try to revive her at all? If Uncle Cheese had been murdered to keep him silent — if Little Hollis had been topped for the exact same reason — then why in the name of God and the Devil would Atherton bring Meg back to life?

In the old days, I could have shared this with Mr Comrie. But a shadow had fallen between us of late, and I left feeling more alone than I'd done since the night my friend Danny Littlejohn had died, and haunted besides by a spectre near as unsettling as the horse with half a head: the gnawing fear that I had somehow got it all wrong, and misunderstood everything that Atherton had done — and why he had done it — and where it would lead.

But in the morning came two revelations, and suddenly everything had changed.

The first was the news that Jemmy Cheese had escaped from Dr Paxton's asylum. It seemed he had somehow wrapped his chain round a Keeper's neck; snapping it like a twig, he had barged up the cellar stairs and then out into the night before anyone could stop him. And hard on its heels came a second piece of news — news I'd been seething for ever since Meg's trial.

Master Buttons had been found.

 

I'd had eyes watching out for him, all over London.

It sounds considerably grander than it was, put like that. You may conceive an image of Your Wery Umble at the centre of a web, his ogles hooded and his cogitations deep, dispatching agents across the length and breadth of the Metropolis. In fact I'd slipped coins to a few of the street arabs who loitered about Smithfield and Cripplegate, with a promise of more if they brought me information.

And one of them did. Barnaby, his name was. Ten years old or thereabouts, with a hatchet face and a sly knowing air — the sort of lad who would make a success of himself one day if someone didn't hang him first, which seemed on the whole more likely. He was waiting for me as I came out the door of the gin-shop.

“Seen 'im,” Barnaby announced. “Buttons.”

Barnaby never quite looked straight at you. He had a habit of squinting towards the horizon instead, as if something much more interesting was off in that direction.

“You're certain it was him?” I demanded.

“Said so, dint I?”

“Where is he?”

Barnaby grew absorbed in studying the clouds that were forming high above the dome of St Paul's. I fished out sixpence.

“A shilling, this is worth,” he said.

“I'll give you another tanner, if the information turns out correct.”

“Prime fucking intelligence, this is.”

“First you tell me where he is.”

“Fuck you very much,” muttered Barnaby. But he told me. “Got a crib just south of Piccadilly, this Buttons. Near Haymarket.”

 

It turned out to be a lodging-house in a lane off of Norris Street, where a ragged old man with a prophet's beard lay in a spreading puddle, and three younger men played pitch-penny against a wall. Yes, said the Landlord who answered my knock; Master Buttons lodged here, though he was out at present.

I kept my voice calm. “D'you know where he might be found?”

The Landlord hawked and spat, in the direction of the derelict prophet. “Try Fishmonger's Hall.”

I knew the place: a gambling hell not far away in King Street, just west of St James's Square. It doubtless had a proper name, but everyone just called it the Fishmonger's, on account of its being run by William Crockford. A rising man, was Crocky, who grew up in a fish shop next to Temple Bar, and made his start in low hells out by Billingsgate. He'd migrated steadily westward as his wealth grew, and undoubtedly aspired one day to a club in Mayfair, where the likes of Beau Brummell gamed, and entire estates were won and lost between dining and dawn. Just now he was in between the two extremes, catering to a middling class of blackguard.

The club in King Street was rough enough, with bitter complaints from the neighbours, concerning bellows and fights and cries of “Help!” and “Murder!” in the night. But it was still too respectable for the likes of Your Wery Umble. God knows, it was too respectable for the likes of the Fishmonger, who remained what he had always been: a short wide shark of a Cockney, with dropped aitches and fawning politeness to his betters, and the keenest mathematical mind in London. But here I had my stroke of good fortune — or so it seemed at the time. As I arrived, the bully at the outer door was preoccupied with a drunken half-pay lieutenant who was convinced that he'd been cheated, and needed thus to be escorted out quicksticks before words unduly rash could be uttered, and challenges issued, and two chalk-faced punters with barkers drawn should find themselves standing across ten paces of Hampstead Heath in the mists of a bleak chill dawn, instead of being where such gentlemen belonged instead — safely inside, losing money to the Fishmonger. And before the frogmarch had been concluded, I was through the door and in.

The club was one large room, with a threadbare carpet upon the floor and candelabra hanging over the crowded tables, all of it reeking of smoke and sweat. There was Crockford, greasy and obsequious, gliding sharp-eyed through the press. Merchants and half-pay officers, a few flash-talking ruffians and the seedier species of professional sharpers, and of course their favoured prey: town toddlers, sprigs and second sons who lacked the wit to see how easily they were taken in.

And there in the midst, playing at hazard, was Master Linwood Buttons. A sheen of desperation was upon him.

He didn't belong here, any more than did Your Wery Umble. He should have been haunting the copper and silver hells near Covent Garden, where you could gamble with half-crowns and shillings. But it seemed he'd risen in the world since I'd seen him last: on his hind legs at the Old Bailey, dispatching Meg Nancarrow to the gallows. He wore a double weskit now, as the dandies do, with a long white scarf wrapped round his neck. It was fastened with a gold pin, and somehow he'd come into the requisite guineas to hazard here in King Street — though he surely would not have them for much longer. Crocky was at this moment gliding into the vicinity, as sharks will do when blood is in the water.

“Five, now — I call five!” Master Buttons's voice rose above the general din. “Five is a certainty, gentlemen!” He dashed the dice onto the felt. Two fours came up.

“Oh, bad luck, Squire,” murmured the Fishmonger at Buttons's elbow, the very image of carnivorous sympathy. “Foul fortune hindeed, but no matter —
nil desperandum
, Squire, as the hemperors of Rome was wont to say — cos why there's never fortune so foul as it may not change.”

“Eight, then — here's my eight!” cried Buttons, cursing bitterly when six came up.

I watched him, still and silent as a spider. Confront him now? No, surely not. Wait for him — follow him outside, shadow-footing to some private place. With luck his blunt might hold out 'til nightfall, which would make my shadow-footing so much easier. I found myself actually hoping he would win, just a little, to prolong his stay at the table.

“Eight!” cried Master Buttons, rolling again. “This time eight is guaranteed!”

And would you credit it? The God who watches over knaves and villains was smiling upon us both. A five showed, and a three, and Buttons crowed in triumph.

 

I watched from my shadows for another while, then withdrew back out the door and waited on the street. Then I waited some more — four hours, by my watch, as the sun declined and the night came on.

Eleven o'clock, and the night was alive with din. Carriages a-clatter, and shouts from a chop-house at the corner. Nearby New Street would be bustling, and Haymarket beyond would be a second Gomorrah, with gin-shops crammed and Nymphs of the Pavement laughing like crows. An argument erupted across the road — two Cyprians, considerably the worse for drink. They proceeded to shrieks and hair-pulling, and that's when Master Buttons stumbled out of Fishmonger's Hall, behind me.

“She lifts us up upon her wheel, the goddess Fortune. And then she dashes us down again, the bitch!”

His voice rose into the upper reaches of tragedy. He was addressing the warring Cyprians, I think, but mainly he was shouting at the universe. He tottered in the spill from a gas lamp, pale with drink and dejection. His gold pin was missing, and his white scarf trailed down into the mire. The Cyprians paused in their hair-pulling, advising him to go fuck himself, which he took as an example of exactly how things are in this cess-pit of a world. Then he was off again, unsteady but moving briskly nonetheless.

I touched the knife in my pocket, and spidered after. He crossed the square and staggered towards New Street. Here he stopped and stood swaying, as if baffled by the traffic; then abruptly he lurched into the midst of it, defying it to run him down like a dog. I darted after, and was very nearly run down myself by a rattler in full career. Reaching the other side I discovered that I had lost him.

But no — there he was again, illuminated by the glow from a gin-shop. Sloping into a passageway that would lead towards Norris Street, to the north and east.

I broke into a run.

The passageway was narrow, no more than three feet wide, and black. I heard him before I caught a glimpse: a sporadic splish-splashing upon cobblestones, and thin wretched blubbering to go with it. Master Buttons was weeping as he pissed.

My glims adjusted and I made him out. Standing in a silvering of moonlight not three feet in front of me, phiz to the wall, bracing himself against it with one hand while the other directed the dragon. His head bowed in such abjection that even a spider might feel the tiniest pang.

“How much did it cost them, to buy you?”

He gave a cry of startlement and lurched round, midway through his business.

He he had no idea who I was. But he surely saw the knife in my hand.

A sharp intake of breath. “What do you want? Leave me be!”

His breeches were unbuttoned, the one-eyed lad still free and flopping. A decent size but shrivelling by the second.

“Thievery, is it? Money, you want? Well, you're too late — I lost every penny!”

“Odenkirk,” I said.

That stopped him.

“Atherton's man. I'm supposing they needed an actor, so they hired one. One who owed Cheese money into the bargain, and was only too pleased to see him dead. Am I close?”

His mouth opened once, and closed. He tried again. “I don't know what you're talking about.”

“I think you do. And I think you'll tell me.”

Leastways that had been my plan: to terrify the truth right out of him. I'd know what Odenkirk had said to him that night outside the Three Jolly Cocks, and I'd know why Buttons had lied at the trial. And by the time he'd finished squeaking it out, I'd have testimony that my uncle had ordered the killing of Uncle Cheese, and the fitting up of Meg Nancarrow for the crime. It would remain the barest fraction of the whole — but I would have made a start.

But Master Buttons turned out to have more spirit than I would ever have suspected. He licked his lips, and I saw him weigh his choices. Turn and try to flee? Or caterwaul for help?

“Tell me, or I swear I'll slit your throat.”

He lunged instead.

He was banking on his superior size, I expect. He'd gambled that he could seize the knife and wrench it away — and he might very well have done it, cos he was quicker than I'd expected. But this was not his night, from start to finish. His breeches were still unbuttoned. They drooped about his hips, and now they snagged him. He lurched forwards and down with a frantic curse, grabbing at my wrist as he did.

I wrenched back, but the blade had been turned upwards in the struggle. Or so I could only suppose, piecing it all together afterwards. In the moment it was nothing but confusion, and struggling, and a queer wet gagging sound.

He was suddenly haloed in yellow light. A strange and remarkable effect, produced by the arrival of a lantern in the mouth of the passageway behind us — though this didn't occur to me, just at first. At first, I just stood there gaping. Master Buttons was on his knees before me, face upturned, as if savouring one last triumphant moment upon the stage. His mouth moved but no words came out. A gurgling rattle and a gushing of blood, like water pumped from a faucet. Then slowly, almost elegant, he slumped sideways against the wall and subsided onto the cobbles. The handle of my knife protruded from his throat.

And there stood Your Wery Umble, with Buttons's life's blood bubbling about his boots, and an exclamation — “
Christ!
” — behind him. I turned into the yellow glare. The bull's-eye was clutched by an elderly Watchman. He had a staff in his other hand, and a look of holy horror on his face.

“Ho!” cried the Charley. “Help! Murder!”

Tragic Passing of an Infant Prodigy

 

 

The London Record

28th May, 1816

With sorrow we must relate to our readers, and especially to those whose memories extend to theatrical activities in the closing years of the century past, that a once-bright light in the Firmament of Thespis has been extinguished forever. In the small hours of Tuesday morning, “Master Buttons” was discovered, slain, in an alleyway near Haymarket. “Out, out,” as the Bard has inimitably summed the quintessence of the human condition, “brief candle.”

Born to theatrical parents, the star that was Linwood Buttons ascended to its apogee during the brief vogue of the Infant Prodigy a quarter-century ago, appearing upon the London stage in numerous incandescent performances, some of which may still be called to mind. A cherubic stripling with a piping treble voice, he was much lauded for the melodic cadence of his delivery, and for the ingenious “points” of his performance — those crucial flourishes by which each Player may be measured against the great pantheon of the Lions of Tragedy which extends from Burbage through Garrick to Kemble and Kean. When, in blackface, he essayed the Moor, his voice swooped thrillingly into its lowest register upon the fatal utterance, “O blood!”; whilst as the Melancholy Dane he shuddered convulsively in all his limbs upon first seeing the skull of Yorick, before fluting, in such manner as perfectly to express the futility of all mortal aspiration, the plangent bi-syllable: “Alas!”

In latter years he appeared less frequently “to strut and fret his hour upon the stage,” and in due course passed from the recollection of that notorious admirer of each succeeding bauble of novelty, the Public. From time to time Rumour hinted at a quondam Prodigy, much fallen in the estimate of Fortune, who had been glimpsed at a gaming table near Covent Garden, or in some low tavern in the Seven Dials, cap upturned before him, declaiming Bardic pearls before the swinishly besotted. And now the fall from Fortune is complete. A gentle Child of Thespis has been struck down by an assassin's hand, in that Sink of London widely known as
H
—
—
Corner; from which Infernal Depth we pray that he may be lifted up, and “flights of angels sing him to his rest.” We pray fervently as well that Justice may “with Tarquin's ravishing stride” tread down his murderer.

We are able to report that the assailant is identified, and that the hunt is well advanced. Our sources at Bow Street relate that the villain is known to have sought the Poor Player at his lodging earlier that same day, and subsequently located him at a gaming house in King Street. Evidently he stalked Master Buttons as the latter left this establishment, setting upon his victim from behind and striking him down “unshriven, with his sins upon his head.” Eluding pursuit the felon fled, but subsequent enquiry at the gaming club established his identity, for he had been recognized there; one of the patrons had recently sought out the services of a surgeon by whom the wretch was employed.

His name is Starling. He is described as a youth of diminutive stature, a known thief and blackguard who scavenged the battlefields of Europe during the late war against Corporal Bonaparte. Latterly he has served to assist a surgeon in Cripplegate, in the course of which occupation he has had cause closely to collaborate with the unholy gentlemen of the Resurrection Trade. No doubt he has gone to ground in some rat-hole of the Metropolis. But the Arm of British Justice is long. We are confident that it will reach out, and seize the murderer of Linwood Buttons, and haul him wriggling into sunlight.

13

And there you are. You're haring through the streets of London, and it did not happen. It could not possibly have happened — but it did. And the crunching underfoot is the shards of all you ever hoped for, as the realization comes:
This is you, done
.
The one life you're ever going to have, and you've just slung it aside.

East and south across the Strand, towards the river. Cripplegate was too far. I needed to change these clothes; I needed to think.

Janet Friendly.

The house was dark. I scrambled for a pebble, beneath her window. A second and a third, 'til finally a candle glowed. The scrape of the casement opening, and a long dour face beneath a nightcap, glowering down through the mists of sleep.

“Will? The fuck — ?”

“Just let me in. Please.”

A minute later the door was opened. “I should of thrown a boot,” she muttered, as I slipped past. The shop was ghostly in the light of Janet's candle; mounds of clothing lay like silent sleepers, or the dead. “Swear to God, I should of emptied a chamber pot. I should — ”

The words died as she saw me more clearly.

“Jesus Christ,” she said. “You're hurt.”

“No.”

“You're covered in blood.”

“Not mine.”

“Oh, Will. Oh, Christ on a biscuit. What have you done?”

I told her and she sat down — whump — on a wooden chair. It took a considerable deal to poleaxe Janet Friendly, but Your Wery Umble had just succeeded.

“I never meant it,” I said, dismally.

“They'll hang you anyways.”

And of course they would. I'd plead my innocence of heart, lighting the courtroom with the most abject smile that ever foundling wore, and the black cap would come out inside half an hour. They'd have me onto the scaffold the very next Monday morning, and there'd be no Jack Ketch with his own neck in a noose and Mr Punch tooting huzzah; but only Wm Starling, kicking his heels for the edification of all assembled, with his last dying confession available for a penny, blaming it all on Avarice, and Want of a Father's Correction in Boyhood.

Janet took a breath, and stood. “Right. You need to get out of London. Now. Tonight. Take off your clothes.”

“What?”

“Look at you. Like fucking Macbeth, emerging from Duncan's bedchamber. And don't let's stand upon maidenly modesty, like virgins on our wedding night. Off! Chrissake, no one cares.”

I pulled off my jacket and shirt and let them drop, as Janet sifted swiftly through the piles of clothing and slung a pair of breeches at me.

“Do you have money?”

I had blunt squirrelled away in my room at Cripplegate — but how long would it be 'til the Law was there? It depended how long it took them to retrace Buttons's steps to Fishmonger's Hall, where one question must surely lead to the next.

“Never mind,” said Janet, reaching for a tin beneath the counter. “I have some — and yes you can fucking well accept it, so shut your cake-hole. Now go! You might of been followed.”

She saw my gaze go longingly to the narrow stairs that led to the rooms above. Where Mrs Sibthorpe was still asleep, and Annie Smollet.

“There's an idea,” snapped Janet. “We'll wake La Smollet, and have a scene. We'll have
Romeo and Juliet
, right here at Milford Lane. Exactly what we need — more drama.”

She was right, of course. Not that it helped.

“I'll explain to her,” she muttered, softening just a little.

“Tell her I never set out to kill anyone.”

And it was starting to sink in, the finality. Master Buttons, slumping sideways with my knife outthrust from his throat. And he wasn't rolling over, neither, and rising to take his bow, as huzzahs rained down from the gallery. He just lay as he had fallen, gazing up at me with Danny Littlejohn's disbelieving eyes, their last light dying into bottomless reproach.

“I'll tell her, Will. I'll get word to Comrie too.”

“Tell her — ”

I didn't finish the thought, on account of its constricting in my throat.

“Tell La Smollet that you love her, Will? Why, of course. I could clasp her lily hand as I did it, if you like. I could blubber up the contents of my overflowing heart, and weep whole buckets, you fucking eejit. Now go, before someone finds you here! Get yourself out of London — get yourself out of England. Send word to us when you're safe.”

Next second all the oxygen left the world, cos Janet had taken me in a hug so fierce that it nearly stove my shoulders together. It nearly set my hair afire as well, since she hadn't set down the candle first. But she stepped back before permanent damage was done, and for the barest of moments there was something stricken in her phizog, and a glimmer in her eyes that could nigh on be mistaken for tears.

“I should of emptied the chamber pot,” she said.

14

A light rain is falling as Alf the Ale-Draper padlocks the door of the public house behind him, and commences on his waddling way along Black Friars Lane. It is very late, past two o'clock, and the dark street is otherwise deserted. After pausing to piss he continues, weaving just a little; for what publican would be sober at such an hour? He belches, and begins to warble an air. He has a high reedy voice, does Alf, quite comical in a man so large.

“On the green banks of Shannon when Shelah was nigh

No blithe Irish lad was so happy as I.

No harp like my own could so cheerily play

And where ever I went was my poor dog Tray.”

It is a sad air, this one; it does not end well for the dog. But Alf himself is in a contented mood, a man at peace with the universe. The public house has taken on a new girl, whom Alf had just an hour earlier, on the flagstones in the cellar. Just as he has all the girls who come to work at the Three Jolly Cocks — as he'd on various occasions had the Nancarrow bitch, the one who went and got herself scragged. He has a notion he may have been rough with the girl tonight, as sometimes happens, Alf being a large man with exuberant appetites. Still, they deserve what they get, being nothing but filth. They're unfit for wiping boots upon, as he is often reminded by his mother, with whom he lives. His mother is a Christian woman, very nearly a saint.

“Poor dog! He was faithful and kind to be sure,

And he constantly loved me, although I was poor
. . .”

The rain is falling more heavily now. Through the darkness, Alf discerns two shapes ahead of him: one massive, the second much smaller. They appear to be waiting for someone.

“When the sour-looking folks sent me heartless away,

I had always a friend in my poor dog Tray.”

They don't move, whoever they are, remaining just outside the penumbra of light from a street-lamp. Alf squints, rhinoceros-eyed; he does not see well at the best of times, and should have brought his lantern. The first is an immense man, he discerns after a moment, with ragged clothes hanging loose, as if he had once been larger still. Alf has the vague notion that he might recognize the man, if he could see more clearly. With him is a woman, slender and dark-haired, her face muffled in a cloak.

Alf slows a little as he reaches them, but continues singing.

“But he died at my feet on a cold winter day,

And I played a sad lament for my poor —”

He breaks off with a grunt. He has stumbled, one of his size-fifteens catching against a cobblestone. The immense man puts out an arm to brace him, which is considerate, Alf thinks. The arm goes around him; so does the other.

“Set him straight,” he hears the woman say. Her voice is a strange, low rasp.

Alf makes a sound like: “Woof.” It is unrelated to the song, having more to do with the fact that the man has taken him in a bear hug, so powerful that it squeezes the breath from his lungs.

“That's the way,” says the woman, in her rasping voice.

Alf would dispute this, if he could find the requisite wind. It is not the way at all, he would say, no matter how kindly the hug is intended. He would further explain that he needs to be going now, for his mother lies awake if he is late returning home, and frets herself.

“Argh,” he says instead.

The man picks him up, right off the ground, which might cause Alf under other circumstances to exclaim in admiration, considering that he weighs twenty stone and this man has just hoisted him like an empty barrel. The arms continue to tighten.

Alf's mouth goes very wide. This is in part because his ribs are cracking, but also because he has had a considerable shock. The hood of the woman's cloak has fallen back, and in disbelief he has recognized her: a narrow face, pale and gallows-grim, with two eyes burning at him red as blood.

“Set him straight, Jemmy,” he hears her say. “Set this fucker very straight indeed.”

*

Alf will be discovered some while before dawn, when an early rising Crossing-Sweeper espies through the gloom what he takes at first to be a dead horse, lying at the side of Pilgrim Street. Identification will follow, and the newspaper reports will speculate that the victim must have been struck down accidentally by a heavy dray, or cart, and run clear over by the wheels, so cleanly had the back been broken.

15

It is no hard thing to disappear in London. A million souls to mingle with, and tens of thousands of rooms in attics and cellars across the Metropolis, where a penny would buy you a bundle of straw and three pennies an actual bed — with four or five others in it, of course, not counting the vermin, but still — under any name you might care to invent. Even if you had the ill-fortune to be recognized, there were a thousand lanes down which a sharp lad might slip, and if all else failed and the hounds had your scent, there was always the rookeries. The tangled slums of Jacob's Island and the Old Mint, or the Holy Land itself: the vast appalling rookery of St Giles, where an entire regiment might go to ground.

I stayed for a night at a lodging-house in Aldgate, then moved on to another along the Ratcliffe Highway. I told myself that I was just gathering my thoughts, and deciding where best to flee. But as two nights stretched into three, and I shifted to another ken farther east, I had to admit the possibility that I wasn't leaving London at all. On the fourth morning, I woke up in a nethersken down by the Docks, wedged on a pallet in the sleeping room between an old man in an ancient shooting jacket with wooden buttons, and a younger one with whom I had shared a tot of gin in the kitchen the night before. My new friend wore a brown shirt that had once been check, and a pair of ladies' boots with the toes cut out. He had been a partner in a counting house, he said; an educated man, and now here he was, fallen all the way to this. “But once a man falls far enough,” he said with a sort of lugubrious satisfaction, smacking his lips and eyeing me bleakly, “he might as well finish the job. Eh? He might as well go the whole hog. And here we are, boyo. The pig in its entirety, bristles and all.”