Will Starling (38 page)

And listen to me now — rambling like a sad old pantaloon, with time so short and so much still unsaid. You could almost imagine me ravaged with woe, subsiding into tearful reminiscence. You could picture me shackled and despairing, rocking myself forwards and back again, forwards and back.

Garrick. That trick of his.

He would hold himself just out of view behind a doorway. Stepping quickly into the opening he would project some attitude or emotion — joy, love, fear. Then he would disappear from view on the other side of the door, and in an instant reappear, this time projecting another emotion entirely. And not just projecting, but
becoming
it. Back and forth he would go, in and out of the open doorway, all human emotion embodied in quicksilver sequence. Love, jealousy, rage. Back and forth — twenty-five times, thirty, in less than a minute — despair, elation, torpor, resolution. A master of his technique, was old Garrick.

But acting is more than technique. It is feelings too — and Garrick had something intriguing to say about that. A player in the white heat of the moment may be amazed, he said, by the intensity of his own emotion, how the surge of it could come on all of a sudden — and no mere make-believe of feeling, either, but the genuine article. True emotion, kindled by the joy of playing, lifting him like a kite.

Looking back, I've come to think that this is what happened with Annie Smollet. She'd cast herself in a role, that evening she followed Janet Friendly to St Sepulchre's churchyard and found Your Wery Umble standing there. And as she played her part, a great gust of Feelings began to blow. This bore her aloft and swept her down Holborn Street to the room above the bird-fancier's shop, and it never subsided 'til dawn came peeping through the window, bringing the light of Reality with it. Then finally she did what all kites must, and came fluttering softly down. And who can blame a kite for being a kite?

As I say, I came round to this way of thinking long afterwards. I wasn't so philosophical on that morning at my uncle's house, when Annie came through the vestibule door and stammered to see Your Wery Umble. I would like to relate that I drew myself to the uttermost extension of my height, delivering a cool observation that buckled Miss Smollet with shame, and left my uncle riven with the icy knowledge that he had earned a Dreadful Enmity. But I'm afraid this would stretch the truth.

I stood stuttering in distress. I babbled something incoherent to Annie, and shouted something else at my uncle. Then I turned and fled the house.

I went to an ale-house after that, then to another, and a third, where I maundered for a time and then erupted into bitter denunciations of Mr Dionysus Atherton — calling him traitor and hound — until the other patrons wearied of this and one young fellow loudly invited me to take my mewling elsewhere. He was a butcher's boy, I think — I'd been stumbling in the general direction of Smithfield. I challenged him, as any young man of spirit would do, provided that he were sufficiently drunk and broken-hearted, and an imbecile into the bargain; and I have no doubt that I would have fibbed him senseless, except that a fist came thundering like a coach and four and the world went suddenly sideways in a clatter of tables and stools. I sat in the lane outside for a time after that, staunching the claret that dripped from my nose, and drooped like an expiring tulip.

In due course I was no longer alone. A pair of battered boots stood before me, above which two shins disappeared into breeches too short. These were tied at the waist with a length of twine, and my gaze travelled up a filthy weskit to a familiar hatchet face.

“Bugger me,” said young Barnaby, looking elsewhere, “if it ent the fugitive.”

It didn't occur to me to be surprised to see him. It had a certain logic, after all, this district being Barnaby's customary haunt. On another afternoon, when Your Wery Umble was more sober and less despairing, it might indeed have seemed just that tiniest bit unlikely — that Barnaby would be the one to come across me, of all the street arabs in Smithfield. It might have crossed my mind to wonder whether Barnaby had in fact been keeping an eye open for Wm Starling, for reasons best known to himself. But not today.

“I need you to deliver a message,” I said.

There was a house in Crutched Friars, I told him — a surgeon lived there, named Atherton. A young woman was with him, Miss Smollet.

“Tell her I need to see her. Tonight.” Eight o'clock, I said, and named a church, St Alban's in the City Road. “Can you do that?”

Barnaby held out his palm.

“Tell her she must come alone,” I said.

 

I arrived at St Alban's as the bell was striking eight. The church was empty, except for a pair of old women in black, bowed in prayer like penitential rooks, and a Sexton pottering at the back. It smelled of must and piety, as churches do, with a sick-sweet residue from the churchyard beyond. The last rays of twilight slanted through stained glass, and in the dimness dust-motes danced in rainbows.

I hadn't been inside a church for more than a year; not since Danny Littlejohn died. Not that Your Wery Umble had been a great habitué of churches to begin with. I'd been to my share of them on the Peninsula, but they had been converted to field hospitals by the time I got there, with mutilated men for a congregation, and surgeons red with gore standing in for priests. You could say I served five years at that altar, if you were inclined to see it that way, handing up the scalpel and bonesaw in place of the wafer and wine. But I couldn't say it breeds in a boy a spirit of True Religiosity, that sort of a church. The conviction that a Merciful God is gazing down with all His Saints assembled, and that there will one day very soon be archangelic singing in place of shrieks and moans, and that the stench of blood and shit and rot will be lost in the hyacinth waft of the Fields of Heaven. And what happened to Danny left me less convinced than ever that there was any place for Wm Starling in any House of Redemption in all this great wide weeping world.

Still, I'd asked Miss Smollet to meet me in a church tonight. So who knows? Perhaps I had inchoate notions that meeting in a church might yet invoke some crucial Blessing; that Miss Smollet stepping through the door might see the configuration — Wm Starling standing in the nave in an attitude of Patient Suffering, lit by candles and dimly irradiated by the last glow of the dying sun through stained glass — and begin to discern the depth of her folly. And I would say that I did not blame her, not for anything at all; that I had no claim upon her, nor the slightest justification for believing that she had ever been mine in the first place, not even for the span of a single night. I was going to tell her all of this, but in such a way that she would perceive what a Noble Heart stood here Crack'd, and understand in a sudden dazzle of remorse that she had Erred most calamitously, cos she
did
love Wm Starling, and had loved him to distraction all along.

Eight-thirty, and Miss Smollet had not come.

A dying bluebottle beat its head against the stained-glass window beside me. In the glass was an image of St Peter, robed and haloed. You could tell it was Peter by the golden key he held — the key with which he opens Heaven's Gate, as I've no doubt he will on the morning Your Honours arrive.

Eight-forty-five. The penitential rooks had left, as had the Sexton, after lighting candles here and there about the church. I'd done my best to clean myself up before coming, brushing my coat and washing my face at a stand-pipe in the road. I was fragrant as a courting beau, allowing for the residual waft of gin. The drunkenness was ebbing now, and the sick nob-splitter that follows was taking hold.

The clock struck nine, and what had I been thinking? I looked towards the window, and I swear that St Peter himself in stained glass avoided my eye, as a plain gruff fisherman must do when the truth is too awkward to acknowledge.

I am Fond of you, Will.
That was the word she would use, if ever she came.
We've been Friends to one another, and I'm so very sorry if you somehow misunderstood
. . .

But she wasn't coming. I knew that now, though I waited for another hour and more, as the last light died behind St Peter and the church was dark in the gutter of candlelight. I left just after ten-thirty.

And now here I stood again, across the street from the house at Crutched Friars.

The night had gone quiet, or at least as quiet as a London night can be. Traffic on the streets beyond, and the mournful baying of a hound, rising and falling nearby. From the stable, perhaps, behind my uncle's house. Dim light glowed behind two or three of the windows; through one of them, a window on the second floor, I suddenly saw — or imagined — a shadow behind the curtains, as of someone passing.

Was she still there?

The window had been left open, against the heat of the day. The curtain stirred with the whisper of a breeze, and in that tiny movement I could almost believe myself certain. Fingers reaching to twitch back the edge of the fabric; a slim form in a white nightdress, and a tumble of strawberry ringlets.

But was she there? And was she alone? Or was she in his arms?

It is the worst rack that ever was devised, and we twist ourselves upon it most exquisitely. You'll know this only too well if you've ever stood outside a lover's house in the blackness, gazing up at a lighted window. And of course you have — admit it. We've all been that dark and malignant imp, if only in our thoughts; banished from the wedding feast and peering from the ring of outer darkness, with suffocating heart and gangrenous imaginings. You'd climb to the window — you truly would, if only in your thoughts. You'd find a trellis, or lizard your way right up the wall, if only to confirm the Very Worst and force yourself to watch it.

And if she was still there, was she somehow in danger?

The most gangrenous imagining of all, and I kept circling back to it. I had all but resolved to pound at the door — to burst through and confront whatever awaited inside, be it Hell itself, or Odenkirk. But in that agony of indecision, I realized something else: I was no longer standing alone. There were shadows behind me — two dark substantialities in the greater darkness of the night. Two silent shapes, one hulking and grim, and the second a wisp beside him.

The red-haired Bow Street Runner and his smaller, darker colleague — that was my first conviction, and it stopped my heart. But it wasn't the Law at all.

“So it
is
you. The surgeon's boy — haunting the darkness,” said Meg Nancarrow.

Her dark hair loose and tangled; a shawl clutched round her shoulders. She shivered as the breeze came up, despite the warmth of the night. Jemmy's arm was around her; he drew her close.

“You done what you could for me, Will Starling,” she said. “You have my gratitude for that.”

Her voice a ragged whisper, and her eyes were pools of blood — exactly as they'd said. The blood vessels had burst, with strangulation. I'd seen the phenomenon before, though never so shockingly. Her neck was cricked to one side, and one corner of her mouth quirked down, the way you see sometimes in those who have suffered convulsive seizures.

“It's true, then,” I said, finding my voice. “You're alive.”

Cos it's something to stop up the syllables in your throat, believe me. Standing in filtering starlight, with a woman they'd hanged 'til she was dead three weeks ago last Monday.

The shadow of a thin, ironic smile. She reached out her hand.

“Go ahead and touch me. I'm not a ghost.”

Bones as frail as a sparrow's.Her face was pinched and grey, as in someone whose pain is constant.

“Is it very bad?” I said to her.

“Don't matter.”

Liquid rattled in her breathing, which I liked least of all. It made me suppose that the heart had been overtaxed. Some permanent damage sustained, during the ordeal.

“If I could suggest — a compound of succotrine aloes. Any pothecary will have it. A wine glass full, taken every other morning . . .”

I trailed away. A remedy against Decline of Life; I had sometimes seen it work to some effect. But my magpied knowledge of potions seemed suddenly laughable.

Jemmy held her closer. It was the first time I had seen him since that day in Dr Paxton's cellar. His eyes were remote, but there was someone behind them, gazing as if from some distant mountaintop.

“It's good she has you,” I said to him.

“Yes,” said Meg. “I'd be lost.”

I think he smiled at that. He made a movement with his mouth. I'd seen this in field hospitals — men who'd suffered traumatick injury to the brain. Some of them would recover, more or less, over time. Some would erupt into sudden rages, out of nothing. I'd never seen one the size of Jemmy Cheese, standing by his Meg.

“What did you see?” I asked her then.

How could I not ask it, after all? A woman who had crossed the River, and come back again — if that's what had truly happened. Except she hadn't come all the way. The current had taken hold before she could reach the shore, and was trying to draw her down.

“When I was dead, you mean?”

A sound like pebbles sliding. Meg had laughed, bleak and brief.

“I saw Atherton's face,” she said, “staring.”

“Nothing else?”

“I don't claim there's nothing. How would I know that, after all? Just, I never seen it.”

A warm wind continued to rise. Meg shivered again.

“You should go to someone for help,” I said.

“A doctor, you mean? Or a
surgeon
?” That sound again, of pebbles.

I heard myself blurting: “What did he do to you?”

“I couldn't rightly say. It was dark, and then it wasn't. You prob'ly know better yourself — consorting as you do with surgeons. But you're right to ask. What
did
he do to me, and why? I have a right to know.”