Will Starling (6 page)

The drilling took several minutes. A T-shaped handle was turned clockwise, once the drill-blade was placed against the skull. The blade was conical, the width of a shilling at the top, with depth-guards to stop it from delving too deep and damaging the brain. It was tricky, though — skulls come in varying thicknesses, and it's ever so easy to drill just that fraction too far. Once the hole had been drilled, relieving the pressure, Mr Comrie raised the depressed edges of the fracture, fishing out with his forceps stray slivers of bone, shockingly white against a brain as pink as blossoms. Then he screwed into place the coin — hammered wafer-flat by a blacksmith I'd found in Paternoster Lane — and sewed the flaps of scalp back over. A wonder with needle and thread, was Mr Comrie; he sewed like a seamstress.

Finally the wound was dressed and wrapped. Jemmy Cheese lay in waxen pallor.

“If he awakens, he'll want water,” Mr Comrie said, straightening. “Don't give him too much.”

“A half-a-crown,” said Edward Cheshire. “In his
head
.”

I swear he was mentally marking the spot, with an eye to retrieving it should his brother hop the twig. But of course the coin had been ruined. With a muttered execration, he left the room.

Mr Comrie left as well, and the spectators dispersed, leaving me alone with Meg and Jemmy Cheese. She sat still and silent by the cot, in slanting light from the window. Shadows haggarded her face, and I realized that she was younger than I had been supposing. She was not much older than I was myself: nineteen years. I can tell you that with certainty, since they kept records at the Foundling Hospital — though I couldn't tell you who my father might have been, or where my mother went after she bundled me up and left, or what name I had been born with.

“I'll come back this evening,” I said, gathering up the instruments. “I'll bring a healing essence — you can use it when you change his dressing.”

My organ of compassion had been stirred. I am also a shameless little show pony, as you have surely begun to guess, and I proceeded to trot out my knowledge of physick.

“It is rectified spirits of wine, with tincture of lavender and oil of origanum. Very efficacious” — another word magpied from Sam Johnson — “and stimulatorious of the healing processes. I will mix it for you beforehand, missus, having a modest expertise in the pothecary line, picked up along the way.”

Meg Nancarrow had forgotten I ever existed. Her dark hair had fallen forward, curtaining her face.

I tried again. “He'll awaken. You'll see. I've seen men brought back who were ten times further gone — seen it often and again, on the Peninsula with Wellington. We saved men with musket balls in their brainpan. ‘We' meaning Mr Comrie,” I added, “myself being strictly speaking only his assistant. However valuable I may have proved, as he kindly said on several occasions. Being kind, Mr Comrie. Very kind indeed, despite appearances.”

I once saw a hot-air balloon rising up from Vauxhall Gardens, as a breathless crowd looked on. It began with great promise, but sprang a leak as it cleared the trees and commenced losing altitude almost immediately. After sagging onward for a bit, it gave up and subsided into a gorse thicket, where it ended up sideways and tangled, with aeronauts limping and plucking out thistles. I had that feeling now.

Meg was speaking. “I won't let the surgeons have you, Jemmy.” She spoke very low, dabbing his forehead with a bit of rag she'd moistened in rainwater. “They won't have you, if you die. I'll carry you on my back to the sea, if that's what it takes. I'll build a fire on the shore, and burn you. That's my promise to you, my love. And dogs can piss on the ashes, if you won't come back to me. I'll piss on them myself, I swear to Christ. I'll hike my skirts and straddle what's left, if you go and die on me, you bastard. Please Jemmy, God damn you, don't you go away.”

5

The London Foundling Hospital was built by a philanthropical sea-captain named Thomas Coram, on the site of an old cricket ground at Lamb's Conduit Fields. It squatted — and still squats today — at the end of a sweeping drive on the north side of Guilford Street, where the jumble of the Metropolis begins to peter into fields and open spaces. Behind a sweeping semicircular wall with iron gates are kept the little wages of sin, for such is the governing notion of the place. The foundlings gathered into Thomas Coram's arms are the offspring of virtuous women who have Fallen. There are two plain brick buildings and a chapel, fronting onto an open courtyard; the west wing houses the little male wages, and the east is for wages of the female persuasion.

Before accepting an infant, the Governors required evidence that the mother had previously been of good character, to which she might — God willing — be expected to return, once her little burden had been lifted. They also required evidence of the father's desertion. If there was satisfaction on both counts, then the fortunate mother could trudge away, leaving her infant to the permanent guardianship of the institution, in token of which the Governors would choose a new name to bestow. Inspiration had long since failed by the time Your Wery Umble arrived at the iron gates — or else it flared up in spurts of perverse whimsicality — the upshot being that the companions of Will Starling's childhood included Admirall Bembow and Richard Shovel, not to mention Edward Plantagenet and a gamine named Female Child, whom I loved to distraction for several years without the slightest glimmer of hope or acknowledgement.

Foundlings did not actually spend their earliest years at the hospital. Once accepted, they were farmed out to wet-nurses in Kent, where I lived 'til I was four. I have snippets of recollection from those days, but nothing adding up to a whole: a white cloud in a blue sky, the chill of a hard-packed dirt floor against my naked arse, the baleful ogle of a monstrous chicken. Most of all I recollect — or think I do — a red hand hoisting a vast white blue-veined breast. I couldn't tell you much about its owner, except that she must have been kind enough to the nippers in her care. After all, here I am today.

At length I was trundled to London on a wagon, and deposited at the Foundling Hospital, where I remained for the next ten years. They dressed us in uniforms and taught us to read from the Bible — taught the boys, at any rate. They taught odds and ends of skills as well, though nothing very ambitious. The girls would aspire to domestic service, it was supposed, while the lads would mainly end in the Infantry or Navy. A foundling might serve for fodder just as well as the next young man.

At fourteen years, the foundlings were apprenticed out to employers. I caught the eye of a chimbley sweep, as you might expect.

“Is he honest and reliable?” the sweep demanded of the warders who flanked me, one on either side.

Oh yes, they assured him, lying through their ivories. Yes, this was the very lad for slithering up his flues.

“I will do my utmost, sir,” I vowed, my smile as earnest as God's promise of salvation. “I will not let you down.”

I went off with him that same afternoon. The following morning he turned his back for a moment, and looked round again to see a scarecrow receding at speed: small, and growing smaller by the second.

 

I joined the Army some months later. I'd been making my way towards Kent, with notions of finding my old wet-nurse — I had it in mind that she might know something of my mother, who had never turned up at Lamb's Conduit Fields to reclaim me, as mothers sometimes did. How exactly I thought I might find my old nurse remains a mystery to me, considering as I had nothing to offer up but a description of one epic breast. That plus the chicken, which was assuredly dead by now. In any event I got myself off course, and ended up in Southampton instead, where I smiled my way into employment as a pot-boy at the Spyglass Tavern.

It was a boozing-ken near the docks, catering to sailors and sailors' whores. One night a recruiting party from the Ninety-Fifth Rifles came in, and as I cleared tables the Sergeant took to me remarkable: a red-faced man with a roaring laugh and magnificent sidewhiskers. They were sailing to Spain with the morning tide, and he was damned if he could see why Your Wery Umble should not come with them. He stood me drinks, and clapped me on the back, and exclaimed what a dashing figure I should cut in a bright red coat. One of his fellows stripped his off and put it on me to prove the point. The sleeves were half again as long as my arms, and the hem trailed down below my knees, but Recruiting Sergeant Sidewhiskers swore that this was no obstacle; we'd find a tailor and have it taken in, and requisition a half-sized musket. Until it arrived I should serve as a drummer, leading Tom Lobster into battle. Men would cry huzzah, he predicted, and girls would fall right over backwards with their skirts up over their heads.

In fact they were not a recruiting party at all. My new friend was mere Infantryman Sidewhiskers, who found the notion of Your Wery Umble in uniform wondrous comical — and I was such a flat that I did not see it. Still, how much could you expect from a boy who would set off from London to Kent in quest of a gigantic titty, and end up in Southampton instead? So I found myself lurching awake on a troop-ship in the middle of the Channel, with a pounding nob and last night's libations on my shirt. I spent the rest of the journey spewing into a bucket, and I have never seen a gratefuller sight than the Spanish coast as it loomed through a bank of fog.

The ship dropped anchor and they rowed us ashore, and I was staggering onto the sanctuary of solid ground when behind me I heard the sounds of consternation. A sodger had taken a fall while disembarking — so I discovered in the hubbub that grew as they ferried him ashore. His fellows clustered round and shouts went up for assistance. Finding a stretcher they carried him into a dockside tavern, sweeping pots from a long wooden table, after which the press parted and voices exclaimed that the surgeon had arrived.

He came through them like a man striding into a howling wind. Bent forward, arms pistoning, head outthrust like a snapping turtle's. Expression like a snapping turtle's too, and a first glance told him that the leg was badly broken.

“You, there,” he barked. “Take your thumb from out your arse, and be useful.”

I had wormed my way through for a closer look — a bad habit of mine. Cats, and curiosity. But surely he wasn't barking at me?

“Yes, you! Run and fetch my tools. Tell them Mr Comrie commands it.”

The instruments were still aboard ship, he said. That meant commandeering a boat — “Surgeon's orders, from Mr Comrie!” — and being rowed back out, to be hoisted aboard like a rat that had unsuccessfully deserted. But I liked saying “Surgeon's orders.” It's a phrase, I discovered, as will puff a lad's chest. So I did as I'd been bid, making my way back to the ship and following a grumbling subaltern down a ladder.

Mr Comrie had shared a small cabin with three field officers. His kit was stowed underneath a berth, along with a flat rectangular metal box, considerably scuffed and dented. I opened it, just to be sure, and there they were — gleaming back at me.

With luck, you've never seen a surgeon's tools. Ranks of them, laid out each in its place, with military precision. Most of them I could scarcely guess at, though I was to find out soon enough what each one did. There were needles and bone-handled amputation knives, two smaller ones and one long wickedly curving blade such as an Arabian pirate might clench in his teeth as he boarded your ship in a penny-blood tale. Forceps and tweezers and surgical hooks, and a long slender probe for musket balls, and a cranial drill and a sleek finger-saw. There were three separate bonesaws besides, the largest like a hacksaw with a detachable blade. You knew they were bonesaws just by looking; wedged amongst them was a sharpening stone. Sharpness of the blade was a constant issue in battlefield surgery — so I was soon to learn. If you're going to have a limb removed, try to be first up. After an hour or two, blades will start to bind as a saw will do in green wood.

I swear that they really did gleam, in the dim light that filtered through a porthole. I looked up to find the subaltern eyeing me slantways. You could see what he was thinking, of course. A box of precision-made tools, in the clutches of a shifty little chancer like Your Wery Umble.

“Got any idea what them things is worth?” he asked narrowly.

And yes, it had crossed my mind: close the box, flash the smile, and hotfoot straight to the nearest pawn-shop. But curiosity won out that afternoon — I won't call it virtue — and I did as I'd been commissioned. Clutching the box under my arm, I carried it back like a catamite bearing ritual knives to the priest who waited, bare-armed, at the sacrificial altar. Or no, not a catamite — wrong word — I looked it up just now, in Sam Johnson's dictionary. I believe I intended
acolyte
instead.

The crowd at the tavern had grown even larger, and in the midst of it Mr Comrie waited impatiently. “Thaire you are! Put them on the bench — beside me, close to hand.”

The stricken man lay on the table, raising himself on one elbow and clamouring for another dram of pale before they set the bone. I saw with a start that it was Sidewhiskers. Mr Comrie ignored him.

“You, you, you, and you,” he said, jabbing a finger at four strapping sodgers. “Hold him down.”

They exchanged looks of alarm, but did as they were bid.

“Knife,” he said to me.

“Knife?” cried Sidewhiskers, as realization dawned.

“Best to do it now,” the surgeon told him. “Straightaway, while you're still in mettle. More chance of survival. The agony is diminished.”

“You're not going to have my leg off — just set the thing!”

“Won't heal. Fester and rot, gangrene next. Dead inside a week, shrieking.”

“Look here,” someone was saying. “It's his damned trotter. His decision.”