Will Starling (37 page)

“Stop!” cried Missus Tolliver.

It was a modest library: two bookcases, an armchair and a fire, with a second door — closed — leading through to the rear of the house. Atherton had been sitting at a cluttered desk in the corner, scribbling at some papers. Now he turned at the commotion, and rose.

Missus Tolliver huffed up behind me. “'Ee barged in, Mr Atherton! I couldn't stop 'im!”

“Tell her to leave us,” I said. “Tell her don't go running to fetch Odenkirk — or the Law.”

“It's all right, Missus Tolliver,” he said. “Go upstairs. My nephew is welcome here.”

Missus Tolliver's mouth rounded into another O. “Your
nephew
, Mr Atherton?”

“That is what I said.”

The first time he'd ever acknowledged me. Missus Tolliver flabbergasted several more vowels, then withdrew in confusion, leaving us alone.

The curtains were drawn against the morning sun; my uncle stood in shadow. “There's a price upon your head,” he said. “Did you know?”

In fact I'd discovered it just this morning, noted in the newspapers. Fifty guineas, placed upon my nob the night previous by no less a personage than Edmund Kean. Apparently Kean when just a lad had once seen Master Buttons on the stage, and now felt a great sense of grief, arising from his generous spirit. It seemed Kean often felt generous towards his rivals, especially once they'd been reduced to shit-arsed ruination — or better yet, murdered dead in alleyways — so he'd raised a subscription and posted a reward, which would doubtless win him considerable approval. With luck it might also attract larger audiences to his
Bertram
.

“So you're a murderer,” said my uncle.

“They're saying worse of you.”

“We have something in common, it seems.”

“We have nothing in common.”

“What do you want?”

He looked dreadful: haggard and unshaven, his shirt hanging open to the navel. I guessed the rumours had been very close to the truth — he had been searching through the sinks of the Metropolis ever since Meg's disappearance, ranging down dark passageways and wrenching through doors. He had the look of a man who has not slept in many nights, and begins to think he may never sleep again.

“I want to hear it from your mouth,” I said. “What you did.”

“I told them that night at Guy's Hospital. You were present.”

“I want the truth.”

“The Truth.” There was wormwood in his voice. “As little a thing as that.”

There was a decanter of brandy on a table in the corner, and a tumbler. His hands were unsteady as he reached and poured, and swallowed half at a gulp. “The truth is, I saw an opportunity.”

“To be rid of a woman who could put your head in a noose?”

“No,” he said. “To confound them.”

“And that is all?”

He actually barked a laugh.

“
All?
To resurrect a woman, hanged before half of London — and you say, ‘that is
all
?' We have differing perspectives, you and I.”

The drink seemed to settle him, a little. He drained the rest of the tumbler.

“I saw a chance to make my name,” he said. “And to save an innocent woman.”

“You knew her to be innocent?”

“So I believed. So I decided, at any rate.”

“So you bribed the Sheriff and brought her here, and left her lying for five hours. To make very sure she was dead.”

“Did I?”

“That's what you told them at Guy's.”

“Well,” he said. “Perhaps I exaggerated.”

A haggard half-smile, sly and sheepish at once. The smirk of a boy caught out in some clever transgression.

“I am just a bit of a showman, nephew. You've noted that? Perhaps I can never quite resist. So perhaps it was a little less time that passed.”

What
had
he been like, as a boy? The queer thought came suddenly, catching me off my guard. The tall golden youth who could smile like this — just exactly like this, rueful but winning — and disarm each one of them at every turn. The cleverest boy in all of Lichfield.

“And what did you expect they'd do,” I demanded, “when you trotted Meg out? That night at Guy's — if she hadn't escaped. What did you actually expect?”

“I expected them to
see
. All those narrow eyes, and narrow minds . . .”

“And what about the Law? They'd have took her and hung her all over again.”

He dismissed this impatiently. “They'd have done no such thing.”

“Why the Devil not?”

“Because I would not have stood for it.”

“She was —
is
— a convicted murderess. She signed a confession.”

“And I had sworn to protect her. I had given her my Word.”

“Listen to yourself,” I cried, incredulous. “Can you actually believe — ?”

“Christ! Can no one understand what I've done? Five hours — two hours — what does it matter? The woman was dead — I gave her life. I did that, Will.
I did it
. I called to a woman on the farthest shore, and she came back to me!”

It burst out in genuine passion: grievance and rage and — above all else — confusion. All his hopes and golden prospects, dashed to flinders. Here he stood in the rubble, bewildered and desperately injured, and it came creeping upon me then, the vertiginous realization: I could learn to pity him. Worse than that — oh, ten times worse — I could begin to
understand
him.

The boy who was always first, from the day he was born. The first to propose some daring exploit, and the first to prove he could carry it off. The foremost boy in every room, with a charm that burgeoned before him like the bow-surge of a frigate. You'd forgive him almost anything, a boy like that — his small transgressions winked at, and the large ones overwhelmed by the swell of his passage. Capsized like skiffs that blunder across a tall ship's course; left broken and scattered and bobbing in its wake. A father whose buttons burst with pride, and a dark little sister who worshipped him. It must shape a man, to begin his life that way. It must free him, in ways he can hardly guess. And limit him.

His back was to me again. He poured another drink and threw it back.

“I need to find her, Will,” he said. Using my Christian name, for the second time. “I only wanted to help her, and now I must find her again. I have posted a reward.”

“I know that. A hundred guineas.”

“Is that why you're here — for the money?”

“I don't know where she is. But I've seen Flitty Deakins.”

He looked round quickly, not quite comprehending.

“She claims she's seen Meg,” I told him. “That letter, in the newspaper . . .”

And he realized.

“Those ravings? That's Phyllida Deakins?”

Cos of course he'd read the Epistle, the same as half of London had by now. This morning's newspaper was amongst the pages strewn across the desk top.

“The deranged, drug-addled bitch.”

“Yes,” I said. “Poor Miss Deakins.”

That gaze — impossibly blue — held mine. There was an uncanny depth in those eyes, a fathomless quality like the sky itself, or the sea, as if you could search forever without finding the bottom. I had the unsettling sense of being searched in return, as if my phizog was a code that could be deciphered, and after a moment Atherton's own face altered.

“You're right, of course,” he said. “Poor Miss Deakins. We must keep that in mind.”

There was something that Keats had said about him once, a curious observation. “It's as if he doesn't
know
,” Keats had said. “Watch him, sometimes — the way he watches others. As if he isn't sure how he should respond, until he sees the proper sentiment in someone else's face. Then he can mirror it back to you. As if he's — I hardly know how to frame it — a child in all his feelings, just learning to toddle his first steps. Such remarkable development of the intellect, and yet so stunted in the heart.”

“Poor Miss Deakins,” Atherton repeated now, shaking his head. “Some buck ruined her — that was the story, when Odenkirk sought it out. Down in Devonshire, where she'd been hired as a governess. It was another servant, I suppose — or one of the sons of the house. A child was conceived, and of course Miss Deakins was turned out. God knows what happened to the child, though I think we can guess. Born in a ditch by the side of the road, and left there. Her own family disowned her.”

“Just like my mother's family.”

He flinched, and stood quite still.

“Who was my father?” I asked him then.

“She would never say.”

“Not even to you?”

“I turned my back on her, along with the rest.”

And it cost him something to say that — to admit the truth, and to me of all people. I watched his face harrow at the memory, and I knew it had cost him dearly.

“Have you ever seen an image?” he asked.

“Of my mother? No. How could I?”

He gestured.

“On the desk.”

Amidst the shamble of papers, there were other objects. A round polished stone and a cat's skull for a paperweight; an old scalpel used for sharpening quills, and an overturned inkpot, bleeding its last onto green blotting-paper. Nooks with correspondence tucked in, and in one of them an oval cameo. The portrait of a dark-haired girl of sixteen or seventeen years — younger than I was myself, as I stood gazing down at her. Dark hair and dark eyes, and an elfin loveliness. My own face smiling back at me, but transformed into something beautiful.

“You see it, of course,” said my uncle. “The resemblance.”

The room was beginning to swelter now, with the rising heat of the day outside. The heavy green curtains were open just a crack; a yellow line of sunlight stole through them, bisecting the Turkey rug upon the floor. The cameo was cool as ivory in my palm.

“She'd have come for you, Will. If she'd lived, she'd have fetched you out of the Foundling Hospital, as soon as she was able. She'd have cherished you, and giving you up would have riven her heart. I knew my sister, better than anyone in this world, and that is what she would have done.”

More silence, then. The sound of two men breathing.

“I could have helped her,” he said. “If only I'd found her in time. Even a day or two, before the fever had taken such hold. I had no training then, not in those days. But even so I would not have let the fever take her. I am convinced of that.”

He spoke with such dogged conviction that I swear I could see the great Truth taking form. A citadel that he had built up in the telling, stone by stone, mortar and pestle, each day since my mother had slipped away from him forever.

“I'd have saved her — as I saved Meg Nancarrow. I gave back Meg Nancarrow's life, however much she hates me for it now.”

“You need to get out of London,” I said then. “They're planning to kill you.”

And I found myself telling him all of it — what little I knew.

“There's a band of them, in the Holy Land. Flitty Deakins is one. The others are just — I don't truly know what they are.” A handful of outcasts, paupers and ragged outlaws, some of them surely as mad as Flitty herself. But they were dangerous. And if Flitty Deakins could be believed, there were more of them every day. “They say they're following Meg Nancarrow, though they won't say where she is. And Christ only knows how far they might go.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“So you can save yourself.”

My uncle remained in shadow. It cut him past bearing, to hear how bitterly he was hated. But I believe — I am almost certain — there was wonderment on his face.

“You have done me a kindness,” he said. “More than I have ever done for you.”

And there we stood, just two men: an uncle and a nephew, separated by a chasm, but bound together by so much else. Bound by all the ties of blood, and aching.

I see myself in this face as well.

There was the thought that came on the moment, unnerving me with its intensity.

I have always seen myself
.

“I won't say let bygones be bygones,” my uncle said. “I won't insult you like that. But I wish we were not enemies, Will. I wish that of all things.”

He extended his hand. God help me, I reached out to take it.

And the side door creaked wide. It opened onto a vestibule, which led in turn to a hallway beyond. Someone was standing, slender and tousled with slumber. A tumble of strawberry hair upon the shoulders of a thin white nightdress. She blinked through the dissipating mists, and then stopped short as she saw Your Wery Umble. Stopped dead in the act of stretching, like a kitten in a patch of sunlight.

“Will,” exclaimed Annie Smollet.

19

Garrick had a trick he would perform in parlours. David Garrick, Sam Johnson's great friend, and the foremost actor of his age. This was many years ago, of course — I never saw Garrick myself, nor Sam Johnson neither.

I first came into possession of Sam's dictionary shortly after the Battle of Salamanca in July of the year '12 — a dog-eared copy, much thumbed and stained, given to me by a sweet-faced Geordie sapper with a scholarly inclination, who lay dying by horrid half-inches from a stomach wound. I have it with me at this moment, lying open at my elbow as I sit here at my lucubration — from the Latin
lucubratio
, “study by candlelight; nocturnal study; anything composed by night” — my thanks to you, Sam. I would thumb through the pages in spare moments, scavenging bright bits to try out in speech, and thus gaining a regiment-wide reputation as a curious hybrid, half waif and half parrot. I gained as well the whimsical feeling that Sam and I were old chums and travelling companions, and imagine my wide eyes when I learned that I was — just like Sam himself — from Lichfield, or leastways my forebears were, on one side. When I was there I asked after the house where he had been born, but they looked at me oddly and shrugged.