Will Starling (35 page)

The Wreck of Tom Sheldrake had not yet sunk, but the icy waters were rising. He would appear from time to time at his chambers, but with each manifestation he grew thinner and less substantial. This I was able to ascertain through young Barnaby's nosing and prying, since naturally I could no longer risk going to the Inns of Court myself, or even trying again to contact his Spavined Clerk.

Hollow-eyed and unshaven, the Wreck would drift into the outer chamber where Mr Nuttall still laboured at his desk, the pile of papers — now sadly dwindled — at either elbow. With a rictus of greeting, Sheldrake would flinch into his inner room, where he would be heard pacing and muttering. Sometimes he gave out a spectral wail, as if he were become the ghost of his own still-living self, here to haunt Tom Sheldrake down into the grave. Then suddenly he would burst out again, looking wildly round and demanding to know if anyone had come looking for him. Once he had a razor in his hand, and a thin ruby line beading his throat. This alarmed Mr Nuttall considerably; no shaver misses his chin by several inches, however much he is distracted.

He had tried then to ask after Sheldrake's health, but it was no use; the Wreck retreated into his chamber, slamming the door. There came dolorous mussitations and the telltale sounds of furniture scraping, from which the Clerk deduced that the entrance was being barricaded. This caused him much disquiet, as he had seen such a change before: an aged relation, his mother, who had grown convinced that the neighbours were massing in secret for an assault upon the house. The family had in the end been forced to lock her in an attic, from which she had periodically escaped, with high determination and shouts of wrath, to do battle.

Abruptly Sheldrake disappeared. For several days he was not seen at all, and Mr Nuttall began to entertain dire visions: Sheldrake hanging pear-shaped from a rafter, or bobbing blue and ghastly to the surface of the Thames. Then just as suddenly he was back. It was evening, just at twilight, and the Clerk — down to the last three papers in his pile — looked up to see his employer in the doorway. Tom Sheldrake was paste-white and reeking of gin, and so wasted by lack of eating that he seemed scarcely more than sticks and twine. But he wore a new frock coat with a bright canary weskit, and a gay sprig of flowers in his lapel.

“Mr Sheldrake,” exclaimed Mr Nuttall. “Has something happened?”

“
Happened
?” Tom exclaimed. “Everything has happened, Nuttall — life, death. All of London is happening, at this instant. The world is happening — look out the window! We are spinning at this minute, sir, upon our axis. We are hurtling through Infinity. And you ask, has something
happened
?”

“I meant, are you quite well?”

“I am very well indeed,” said the Wreck of Tom.

This seemed unlikely to be true, and Mr Nuttall hesitated. “I was about to close up for the night, sir,” he said. “Would you have me stay instead?”

“I would have you do as you will,” said Sheldrake. He leaned in closer as he said it, as if imparting words of great significance. “Do you understand what I'm saying to you? I am saying,
do as you will
.”

His breath was as foul as a three-day corpse; his eyes glittered with desperate animation.

 

Thus he appeared as he returned to his home that night. He had rooms near King's Cross, where he lived alone, with a cat called Roger for company. I almost liked that in him, when I found it out. It is more difficult to despise a man with a cat called Roger.

This was on a Tuesday, 4th June. I had remained inside the room at Holborn for two whole days after awakening to find Annie Smollet gone. The first I spent in anxious expectation, thinking at each minute to hear her footsteps tripping up the stairs. But she didn't come, not that day nor the next, which I spent curled alone upon the bed with the Black Dog pacing on the landing and birdsong and birdstink rising from below. Finally I roused myself, and leaving a woebegone note slipped lorn and lightheaded down the stairs — two days it had been, with nothing to eat — into the mutter and snarl of Holborn. With the darkness, I was waiting outside Sheldrake's lodgings.

He came along the Gray's Inn Road, his bull's-eye bobbing him into view. As he passed, I stepped swiftly in behind him.

“You sent word you wanted to see me, Mr Sheldrake?”

He turned with a gasp, and I let him see my knife.

“Just so's you know, Mr Sheldrake — if this is a trick or a trap, I'll kill you. Nothing personal — not a threat — just a solemn promise. Play me false and you are a dead man.”

He gave a laugh at that, a high queer sound of strangled mirth. “Dead, sir? Whatever can you mean by
dead
? I think you must be more specific, sir, for death” — a finger to the side of his nose, and a ghastly wink — “death is not entirely what it was. Indeed, I think you may be behind the times.”

His eyes had grown to unnerving size as his phiz had hollowed around them, just as Barnaby had reported. Cadaver-gusts of breath. But a fine new weskit as well, and a sprig of flowers — I thought of descriptions I had read, of condemned men in the olden days being trundled to Tyburn Tree on a cart, bung-eyed with drinking but determined to exit game, making desperate merriment with the crowds along the way.

“Is she alive?” I demanded.

“She, sir?”

“Meg Nancarrow.”

“Ah. Then that depends, sir. That very much depends.”

“On?”

“On what you mean, sir, by
alive
.”

I raised my knife, touching the tip to his throat. His apple bobbed.

“You went looking for me, Mr Sheldrake. You said I'd been
summoned
. If you know where she is, then tell me now.”

He offered the rictus of a rakish smile, essaying the gay sad dog of old.

“Indeed, sir. Come, sir. Sheldrake's just the fellow. Follow Tom.”

We crossed the Gray's Inn Road and continued, heading west. I was still half thinking this must be a trap, and that round each corner a clutch of Constables would be waiting, cudgels in hand. But there was no one, except the usual night-walkers of London.

“It wasn't murder,” I said, matching his shambling pace. “The actor — Buttons. They're saying I murdered him, but it wasn't that.”

I don't know why it seemed so important that he understand this. But I might have saved my breath.

“No murder done.” A ghastly wink. “Quite right. No blood upon my good friend Starling's hands — no stain upon those soft white daddles.”

“I said it was never
deliberate
.”

“And why those hands should be unstained — of all the hands in London, sir, drenched in gore up to the elbows — why these alone should be so pure, remains a mystery. But there you have it. There it is. Starling's hands are white.”

He touched his finger once more to the side of his nose, raising the bull's-eye with the other hand as he did so. His face was a jack-o-lantern in the glare.

Sheldrake quickened his pace now, angling west and south, until we crossed Kingsway and reached Great Russell Street.

“Where are we going?” I demanded.

But I'd guessed the answer already.

The Holy Land — St Giles Rookery. A vast squalid labyrinth, stretching out from Great Russell Street in the north, to the church of St Giles to the south. St Giles-in-the-Fields — cos there had been green fields here once, and trees, instead of bricks and filth. Tonight fires flickered here and there in the tangle of courts and narrow stinking streets, with human creatures crouching round them. Derelict buildings jumbling together, leaning drunkenly shoulder to shoulder like old reprobates conspiring. Streams of filth down the middle of the lanes, in place of the brooks that trickled in that long ago unfallen time, with lumps of excrement instead of smooth wet stones. And now I had no further fear of Constables. No Officer of the Law would set foot here, not by night — nor even by daylight, without a dozen more to back him, armed with muskets. And even if they did, what could they hope to accomplish? Anyone familiar with these narrow streets could disappear in half a minute; and if you truly knew the Holy Land, you didn't need to use the streets at all. You'd know of doorways connecting one building to the next, and passageways leading from cellar to cellar. You could disappear into darkness and never come back out into the light of day — by your own choice, or by someone else's. You could rot in one of those cellars until you were nothing but bones and fungus, and no one who knew you would ever be the wiser.

The Wreck of Sheldrake tacked onward, hurrying down one alleyway and turning into another, forging through the murk and stench while unseen eyes peered from the darkness and shadows in the night retracted into holes upon our passing. We stopped at last in a slanting doorway, somewhere in the dark heart of the maze. A sliver of yellow moon peered down askance, then slid behind the clouds again. I had tried as best I could to keep track of all our twists and doublings back, bracing myself against the prospect that I might have to extricate myself at speed from this dreadful labyrinth. And Christ only knows what Minotaur awaited.

Sheldrake's mood had changed. “Lily-white hands,” he said, looking bitterly down at me. “Of all the daddles in London.”

“Is this where she stays?”

“I did not ask to see these things,” he burst out suddenly, “or know them!” On his face was the same look of anguish as on that afternoon in St Mary-le-Bow churchyard, when he'd flung himself into Bob Eldritch's open grave. “Did I ask Meg Nancarrow to hang? No. Did I ask Bob Eldritch to choke himself to death? No, sir — never in life! I say again, sir; I did not. I did not wish it — I was not consulted!”

Then he lurched through the doorway and into the blackness within. I followed.

Stench, and uncanny stillness, and the certainty that eyes were watching: this was my first impression, and it was overwhelming. There might be three floors and two dozen separate rooms in such a dwelling, each room housing six — or ten — or twenty. From time to time a teetering building would give a terminal lurch and then collapse right there on top of itself, with Ragged Souls scrambling like ants to escape out the windows. There must be dozens in the house with us now, but in that moment you didn't hear a single one of them. In the glancing light of Sheldrake's lantern, I glimpsed for an instant a twisted boy peering down from a half-landing above us, with a parent — or some larger Imp — behind him. Then they were gone, and I followed Sheldrake onto some rickety stairs leading down into deeper darkness.

There was no railing, and often enough there was no step either, the boards having long since rotted through, or else been ripped up for firewood. Houses in the Holy Land were all consumed by fire in the end, but this mainly happened piece by piece. The winters here were the worst in London, with January knifing through broken windows patched with paper and rags. Twice I missed my step and nearly fell headlong, until we reached a level passageway. It was dank and strait, with puddles of water — I prefer to think it was water — gathering underfoot. Rats scuttled in the blackness behind us, and the Wreck of Sheldrake sloped on. There was a branching passageway, and another doorway.

Sheldrake stopped.

“Through there,” he said, pointing. “Down.”

I waited for him to lead the way. But Sheldrake was shying back now, like a horse that has balked with white rolling eyes at a gate and will not be driven one foot farther, not if you were to beat him 'til he bled.

“No,” he said. “Not Tom.” His voice had broken, with his nerve. “I've done what was demanded of me. No more. She wants to see
you
.”

He bolted, taking his light.

More steps led down, at my feet — but the blackness below was not quite complete. A faint garish glow seeped upwards from the depths. I took one very deep breath indeed, and started down into the void. Six impossible steps descending to a half-landing, and the seep of light grew more discernible with each one, as if it would rise like Stygian waters to my ankles, and then my knees. A turn to the left at the landing, and then six more steps, down into a space that surely squatted just atop Signor Dante's First Circle. Or beneath it.

A cellar room, stinking of smoke and human creatures, with a ceiling so low that even Your Wery Umble could scarce stand upright. A table with candles burning, and three or four ragged forms crouched round it, at a meal. White faces stared up at me, and then a tatter of black shifted out of the shadows in the furthest corner of the room. An ancient woman, as angular and sharp as Atropos the Third Sister snipping thread.

Except she wasn't old at all. I saw that now, as my eyes began to adjust to the stinging gloom. Her face was pinched but scarcely lined, and her own eyes were bright with laudanum and zeal.

“Mr Starling is here. A friend is come. We rejoice,” said Flitty Deakins.

 

She had been staying until very recently at a Servants' Lurk — a low lodging-house inhabited by domestic servants who had lost their place. There were such dosses throughout London, full of wretches who had been dismissed for thievery and bad character, and who now devoted their waking hours to plotting robberies — and worse — in retribution. This particular Lurk was near Charing Cross; Miss Deakins had returned there after I had left her on the morning of the hanging.

This much I would piece together afterwards. But in that first moment, as you'll understand, Miss Phyllida Deakins's domestic arrangements were not foremost in my mind.

“Where is she?” I cried. “Is she alive? Can I see her?”

Miss Deakins cocked her head. “I don't know, Mr Starling. Can you?”

I looked round urgenttly. But it was just Miss Deakins and I in this reeking cellar, and the ragged shapes round the table, and not one of them was Meg Nancarrow.