Will Starling (36 page)

“I fear I am being mischievous with our friend,” said Flitty, addressing herself to the others. “Poor Mr Starling.” Her face had crinkled itself into amusement. “I fear I have always been mischievous. My father would say this, Mr Starling. ‘Phyllida is my own dear darling girl,' he would say, ‘but I fear there is mischief in her.' My father was a man of the cloth, a clergyman in Devon. Did you know that?”

“I want to see Meg.”

“I was the youngest, Mr Starling, and the apple of his eye. I would walk with him across the fields to visit his parishioners, and I was a good girl, good as gold. They would all tell you so; they were unanimous in this opinion. ‘But I fear my Phyllida is mischievous,' my father would say, ‘and I pray this will not bring her to a Reckoning.' This was a great preoccupation of my father's, Mr Starling — the Reckoning that awaits each one of us, at the appointed hour.”

“
I want to see Meg!
”

It came out of me as a shout, shatteringly loud in the cellar room. Miss Deakins flinched back a little, her mad eyes squinting like a cat's recoiling in distaste.

I turned at the sound of creaking on the stairs. More ragged shapes had come down behind me — two or three of them, blocking the way. It occurred to me then that I couldn't get out, unless they should allow it. I expect the same thought occurred to Flitty Deakins; she smiled just a little.

“Who are these people?” I asked her.

“Friends,” she said.

“Of yours?”

“Of hers. We're all friends of hers. That's why we're here.”

“Is Meg alive?” I asked again.

“Unlike the children who went into the surgeon's stable at Crutched Friars.”

“You know this for a fact?”

“I saw them go in. I have no doubt what was done.”

And here she stood: the eye-witness I had been seeking. Black tatters and poppy-bright glims.

“Experimentation, Mr Starling. Taking them to the brink of death, and beyond. Seeing how far they could go, and still come back. Animals first, and then children. Beggars and waifs, whom no one would miss. An old man went in once, and a girl — some dolly-mop who'd been fished from the Thames. She'd flung herself in, I believe, for some such reason as dolly-mops have when they do these things. Odenkirk had her over his shoulder — she'd drowned herself, but she wasn't quite dead. I saw that, because she opened her eyes — right at the very end, before the stable door closed behind them.”

She had grown so thin that I wondered if she was eating still at all, or whether all her sustenance now was opium and milk. And in dwindling she had somehow hardened, as if some alchemical process had begun, distilling her down to the purest essence of herself. She was more Flitty Deakins than she had ever been before — and more purely, profoundly mad.

That's when the first true doubt began to lodge.

“I was to be next, Mr Starling. They'd have done for me next, if I hadn't escaped. My father's own dear darling girl, on that table of theirs . . .”

“I need to see her, Miss Deakins. I need to see Meg Nancarrow.”

The ravings trailed into silence. The hooding of mad eyes.

“You need proof that she's alive. Is that what you're saying?”

“I'm saying I want to see her.”

“And she wants to see you too, Mr Starling — that's why we brought you here. She's grateful for what you tried to do, and she hopes you might do more. But first we need proof from you.”

“Proof of what?”

“Proof that you are with us, Mr Starling. To the uttermost extremity.”

An Epistle to the Londoners

 

 

As printed in The London Record

5th June, 1816

There was a terrible surging in her head, she said to me, as if her vital essence were being forced upwards by the weight of her body against the rope. Her skull was swollen to grotesque size and must surely burst, like the belly of a lamb with bloat. This went on, she said, unbearably. At last there was an explosion of light, and in that awful radiance she saw the angel.

“But this was no Nursery-Angel,” she said to me, “for children. Nor like unto the two bright angels, Phyllida, that once were in your care.”

No, this was a great and terrible Being, taller than trees. In its hand was a flaming sword, and in its visage she glimpsed an overwhelming Truth.

“What Truth was revealed to you?” I asked.

The Great Question that was never put to Lazarus. He rose up and walked — so the Gospels say — but Lazarus never spoke a word of where he had been, or what he had seen. Nothing to cause his sisters hope, or horror; no word to oppress his friends with mortal trembling, or to gladden their poor hearts with joy.

She replied: “I saw that we are free.”

We were standing on the rooftop as she spoke. There is a rooftop where she will stand with her Jemmy in the grey of twilight, the setting sun behind them and their shadows stretching out across London.

“We are free,” said Meg Nancarrow, “and may do as we will. And O! — there will come such a Reckoning.”

17

I had picked up a copy of the newspaper at a street stall near Covent Garden, not long after dawn. The Epistle was printed at the bottom of a page, where it had already been discovered by a group of dishevelled Corinthians lurching home from a spree. One of them declaimed aloud while his friends clustered about him in hooting incredulity.

There are moments in life when you blunder in front of a window, or a glass. And you stop to see the most risible creature peering back at you, in some hideous weskit that he has mistaken for the very pineapple of fashion, a kingsman slung round his neck like the banner of his pretentions, with an expression of adolescent constipation that is clearly intended as Deep Sagacity. You blink — you may even for an instant begin to laugh — until the realization dawns:
this is a reflection, and it is mine
. You've draped yourself in Rainbow togs and swaddled yourself in fervent convictions, but in that reflection there you stand: exposed in the knobbly white nakedness of your own absurdity.

The Epistle of Flitty Deakins was my looking-glass that morning. The anxious chitter of voices started up again, somewhere deep in the rat-holes of the mind. The rats had begun to skitter as I stood in that cellar the night before, listening to her raving about dead children and poor doomed dolly-mops. Even in that ghastly cellar, I knew what I was hearing: a tale told by a madwoman. And here in the light of a London dawn, could a sane man continue to believe it?

Far better men than Your Wery Umble have lost their faith in God, and been left quite shattered. I think, looking back, that I had plunged into my own crisis of faith that morning in Covent Garden. A different manner of crisis, but no less devastating.

I'd begun to question my certainties about the Devil. And without the Devil, then how are we to proceed? Where are we to point, and blame? There is no one and nothing left to loathe, except the reflection staring back.

 

Last night had not gone well, even after I'd climbed back out of that cellar and stumbled my way free of the Holy Land, back to the nethersken by the Docks where I'd stayed before going to Holborn with my Annie. Arriving at the head of the street, I stopped myself just in time as I glimpsed two forms in the darkness on the corner nearest the house, revealed in hints and flashes by the light of their lanterns. A red-haired man in a scarlet weskit, and a smaller and darker companion, impersonating as best they could two fellows merely out to take the air on a rain-drizzling night down by the London Docks, and finding this stinking corner to their liking.

Bow Street Runners.

I didn't recognize this particular pair, but I was familiar with the species — Special Constables hired by Bow Street Magistrates' Court, to run down malefactors. Someone at the nethersken had recognized me, and sold me.

I shrank back into the night before being spotted, but it had been a near-run thing, and now the hounds were clearly closing in. I slunk all night through an oily rain, arriving in Covent Garden as the market was stirring to life. That's where I picked up the newspaper, and read the Epistle. Afterwards I slunk some more, and then I went to Milford Lane.

The rain had stopped an hour or two before, the cobbles still slippery as the morning sun rose above the houses. A shopkeeper was outside taking down his shutters, and a boy threw a knotted rag for a flop-eared puppy while the city rumbled to life beyond.

Janet came out the door of her shop, stopping dead as she saw me and then looking round in dread, as if half-expecting Constables to loom along the rooftops. “You can't be here,” she hissed, seizing my arm and dragging me to a more sheltered spot in the mouth of an alley. “They come again last evening — Bow Street Runners. Asking after you, up and down the lane. Will, they're watching this place.”

The man at his shutters was looking our way — the way you do, idly wondering if something is the matter, when voices are urgent and phizogs tight. The little boy had glanced over too, partway through retrieving the knotted rag.

“Is she here?” I asked.

“La Smollet, you mean? No. I ent seen her, nor heard from her neither, since the night I met you at St Sepulchre's.”

Here was news that brought fresh desolation — and an ever-deepening unease.

“D'you know where she might go?” I asked.

“No.”

“Would you tell me if you did?”

“Yes! Will, I swear to you — she left three nights ago, and she ent come back. I can't abide the giddy twat, but I wouldn't lie to a friend.”

“D'you think she's all right?”

“The fuck should I know how she is?”

But she saw the expression in my face. Softening, she touched my arm.

“Will, I'd lay good odds that she's fine — I'd wager the shop on it. And cos why? Cos coming out all right is what La Smollet does. Whatever happens, her sort will end on their feet. At the end of the world, it'll be the rats left standing — and Annie Smollet. And I say this in tolerance, if not exactly love.”

A cart had lurched into the lane, here to collect night-soil. Another door or two had opened; more glims were sidelonging our way. The little boy and his puppy stared with the slack-jawed idiot interest that runs in both species.

“If she comes — if you hear from her — tell her I'm leaving.”

I meant it this time.

“Say goodbye for me. Can you do that?”

“Yes, I can do that, you fucking eejit.”

It came upon me, then: this was really the last time I'd ever see Janet Friendly. That long scowling face and those red hands balled into fists. I discovered the thought made me remarkably sad.

The puppy had commenced barking at us, dancing back and forth.

“Will,
go
.”

And I went. I turned and hurried from Milford Lane, after a last shoulder-snotting clutch against Janet, and a last despairing gaze towards Annie's window.

But I couldn't leave London — not quite yet. Not 'til I had paid one final call.

18

They would go out riding in the fields together, my uncle and his sister — so one of the Lichfield neighbours had recollected. My uncle had a spirited chestnut gelding, sixteen hands at the shoulders; she would ride behind on a fat white pony.

One afternoon she took a fall. She had been six or seven years old at the time, the neighbour recollected; her brother had been nine or ten. She had tried to follow when he jumped his horse over a fallen log, cos she would follow him in anything. But the pony had stumbled and pitched her headlong; she lay horribly, like a discarded doll.

Dionysus had carried her home in his arms, gasping through the wood in horror that he had killed her. But she came round after a time, and was laid out on a settee when the waddling red physician arrived. She wailed when he touched her twisted ankle, and her brother rose in impetuous rage — Dionysus, nine or ten years old, driving the physician from the house and announcing that he would care for Emily himself. This he did, swaddling the ankle with a blanket she'd had since infancy and sitting up with her the whole first night. She was on her feet three days later, and by the end of a week was hobbling gamely along the lane with her brother's arm for support. A wisp of a girl in a white muslin dress, and her brother beside her: tall and golden and shining with solicitude.

On the November night that would follow ten years later, when she was driven weeping from the house, her brother would stand as white as marble, and as hard.

The rounding of her shoulder as she turned. The spatter of footsteps receding and the tatter of a wind-wrenched cloak, ghosting into insubstantiality.

She had haunted him ever since.

*

By mid-morning the heat was rising. It would be the first truly warm day of the year, a foretaste of August days to come, when the sun would bake through the brown haze and London would ripen with the stench of itself. Offal and livestock and rotting vegetables; on such days the backstreets might just as well be open sewers, and churchyards could gag you at a hundred paces. There'd been hotter days in the Peninsula, of course — any number of them. I can recollect marches through hundred-degree heat and humidity, and sweltering field hospitals where sweat ran in rivers down Mr Comrie's face and you expected that limbs must commence to rot before the bone had been sawed halfways through. I have no doubt that Hell will be hotter yet, when I get there. Still, for sheer stinking wretchedness, you have to admire a summer's day in London.

Bloody Bill Starling might dispute that — Bloody Bill my pirate father, with tales of whose exploits I had regaled the wide-eyed foundlings at Lamb's Conduit Fields. Bloody Bill had after all sailed round the Horn of Africa, and straight along the Equator, for weeks.
Now that was heat
, he would surely have said, had he been here present at this moment. Heat was drifting becalmed for two months in the middle of the South China Sea, as Bill had done in the Year '03, with the barrels bone-dry and tongues swollen black. Heat was the Black Hole of Calcutta, of which Bill might on some subsequent day tell a tale that would congeal the blood. But Bill would not be weighing in just at the moment — nor indeed at any other moment I could think of — cos of course Bloody Bill Starling did not exist.

Janet Friendly had taxed me with that, in our days at the Foundling Hospital.

“You pure made the fucker up,” she accused me one afternoon by the railings. “But you just can't admit it, can you? And you know why?”

“No, I don't — but I expect I will in two more seconds,” I flung back, “cos I expect Miss Janet Know-All is about to tell me.”

“You can't admit it, you eejit, becos you've started to fucking believe it. You've told it so often, you've forgotten you made it up in the first place.”

I cursed her roundly for that, earning myself a drubbing in return, after which I went off in the highest of dudgeons, vowing I would never speak to Janet Friendly again — and didn't, for nearly a month. But the worst of it was, she was right. I'd invented Bloody Bill. I'd cobbled him together from bits and scraps, and then I'd told his tale so eagerly and so often that it came to seem not just plausible, but real.

Leaving Milford Lane, I made my way east through the winding lanes along the river. Gradually I found myself tending up Ludgate Hill and past St Paul's Cathedral, where I bought a cake from a coster-stall and forced down three mouthfuls before tossing it aside. The pigeons were upon it instantly, like Death House sparrows upon a choice bit of finger — or like Bow Street Runners upon a fugitive. Then I found that I was moving farther east, slipping into the jostle along Cheapside and then tending southwards again, crossing Gracechurch Street and veering onto Fenchurch Street.

And just as All Hallows' clock began to strike ten o'clock, I arrived at my uncle's door in Crutched Friars. The housekeeper came to answer my knock.

“Ohhhhhh,” gasped Missus Tolliver. Her eyes flew wide.

She'd seen me before, of course. She knew who I was. And she'd read the newspapers.

“I need to see him,” I said.

“Ooooooh.”

This latter vowel may have been a question:
Who?
But I think it was mainly the quavering astonishment of a housekeeper who discovers a ragged murderer on her doorstep, at ten o'clock of a morning in June. I forced past her, into the house.

The entrance hall seemed smaller when you saw it in the light of day. A paltry thing when compared against the hall that Atherton imagined for himself in Mayfair, once he stood alongside Mr Astley Cooper as the leading surgeon in London. His entrance hall in Mayfair would be airy and wide, with oil paintings upon the walls and a marble staircase sweeping upwards. There would be an entire wing for his Specimens, and a drawing room done in the Egyptian style, which remained very fashionable this season — had been so ever since Napoleon's campaign upon the Nile — and a vast dining room where Atherton would host Lords and Baronets, men with grouse moors in Yorkshire and five thousand a year, and all the foremost men of Science and the Arts. Lord Byron himself would no doubt attend, if ever he returned from the Continent. Edmund Kean would yearn to come, but would not be invited.

Here at Crutched Friars, the stairs lay directly ahead, a narrow corridor leading past them. There were two closed doors; a third at the end was half open.