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.”
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.
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.
“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.
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.
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.”
The liquid of her breathing, and the night wind prowling in the trees. The mournful hound, wherever it was, had fallen silent. She gazed fixedly across at his house.
“Are you going to kill him?” I asked.
“First I need to be certain.”
A face in a tangle of wild dark hair, and two eyes as red as blood.
“Miss Deakins would have done it long since. Just judge him, and kill. But that’s what they done to me, Will Starling — and I’m better than they are. Whatever else I am, I’m better than them. And I will have the truth before I decide.”
*
Odenkirk emerged from the house just at dawn. The time in all the day when the air is soft and London itself smells almost fresh, and a man may yawn and scratch his danglers and feel that there is Hope still stirring in the world, and Promise stretching out before him. The darkness was half-leavened into grey, and he saw me standing in it. Standing alone across the road, staring back at him.
I watched him subside into stillness: glims narrowing to slits, danglers abandoned half-scratched.
“Friend Starling,” he said, and sidled closer. “Is there something brings you here?”
“I been waiting for you,” I said.
Birds had begun to sing in the eaves along the street. At the end of it a solitary cart rattled through the gloom. Odenkirk sidled two long steps, and then two more. He stood now in the middle of the road, six swift strides and a murderous clutch away. And here we were, just we two: Little Red-Cap and the Wolf.
Little Red-Cap gets eaten. That’s the true original ending of the tale — leastways the tale as I heard it at my blue-veined breast in Kent. There’d been another version since, written by two German brothers. I’d heard this from a Prussian cavalry officer in a field hospital, who discoursed upon children’s fables while he lay rotting slowly upwards from the left stump. In the telling of the German brothers, he’d said, the wolf ends up dead instead — which was preposterous, it seemed to me. Cos who’d give odds on Little Red-Cap, up against a wolf?
“I am a Gypsy,” I said, “come to tell your fortune.”
“My fortune?”
“You are a dead man.”
I saw then the look that ten thousand pigs had seen, in their final instant upon this earth. Ten thousand pigs and Uncle Cheese, and Little Hollis last of all. I turned and ran for my life.
Odenkirk lunged in pursuit. Down the road, his long strides devouring the distance between us. Oh, he was horribly swift, and in half a moment more he would have me in those hands. Then we were round a corner and into the alley that lay beyond, and Odenkirk slid to a stop as he saw them waiting in ambush: a dozen dark shapes with cudgels, and stone walls rising up on either side.
“You see?” I said. “A dead man.”
Odenkirk swore a mighty oath, as villains do upon the stage — or in secluded alleys, near Crutched Friars. He snatched out a cosh he kept concealed, preparing to lay about him, right and left; breaking the heads of every man present, and saving the brainpan of Wm Starling for the last. I expect he might have done it too. Odenkirk was a terrible man.
But not half so terrible as Jemmy Cheese, who rose now in the gloom behind him, like the spectre of Reckoning itself.
There was another boy I especially recollect, the night I went out to look for Danny Littlejohn. A raw recruit, this other lad had been, one of the wave who took the shilling after Corporal Bonaparte returned from exile in March of ’15, and the whole bloody lunacy started up again. A stone-cutter’s son from somewhere in the North, with a red coat two sizes too small and great raw stone-cutter’s hands. A spent ball had come trundling along the ground towards him, moving scarcely faster than a man might jog. Without thinking — without knowing — he stuck out one large foot to stop it, the way you’d stop a child’s ball bouncing away from a game. It did for him, of course. Spun him sideways and left him to sit in blinking stupefaction, with the leg so bent it was practically torn off. The femoral artery was shredded in the process, and so naturally he bled to death sitting there. He was still half-sitting when I came across him long hours later, with shoulders slumped and head hung low and the whitest phizog on all that chalk-faced field.
Danny Littlejohn was no raw recruit, having fought for more than a year all along the Peninsula. But he’d left in the spring of ’14, and that’s what somehow made it ten times worse. Set sail on a troop-ship and gone home, with a “Ta-ra, Will — look for me in London when you’re done.” But then he’d turned around and signed back up. I never understood completely why, and Danny never quite exactly said. I think it hadn’t gone as he’d hoped, back home; I’ve a notion there was not much work, and bad company instead — some matter of thieving, and the long arm of British Justice reaching out. However it was, he came back, and Quatre Bras was the very first action he saw, this second time.
A line had been buckled by French lancers, and was pulling back — so I was told by an old Infantryman who saw Danny fall. “He was just there, beside me,” the Infantryman gasped, “and then he weren’t.” He knew the two of us were particular friends; he’d watched us singing a comical song just the day before, and chuckled gruffly along. It was in a field hospital just at nightfall when he told me this, the old Infantryman having subsequently fallen himself, a ball shattering his shoulder.
As darkness closed I went out to find Danny — just up and left, with men still on tables with legs half hewn and Mr Comrie behind me bellowing for light. I searched all that long dark night, picking through the legions of the dying and the dead, who lay strewn across the battlefield like leaves. But I was going to find my friend, even if I had to sift every fallen leaf in all Creation, and at last — at the end of a thousand others — there he was, still alive, sitting on a hillock against an overturned cart.
“Long Will,” he said. “Bugger me, you took your time.”
Against all odds he wore that crooked grin, the grin that was purest Danny. His head lolled a little as he sat and his two hands were folded across his belly, just exactly as if I’d found him at his post-prandial ease, belching somnolent satisfaction at his supper.
“Long Will, I b’lieve I may require a surgeon. P’raps you should fetch your friend Mr Comrie. D’you think?
I knelt. “Let me see, Dan.”
“I’m afraid I been a bit of a fool,” he said, “to end up in this manner.”
He tried to laugh a little, but the pain rose up to choke it. His hands clenched upon his belly, as if by dint of careful effort he could hold his guts inside. But they kept slithering out, shiny and coiled, to spite him.
“Oh, Christ, Long Will. Go fetch a surgeon.”
But no surgeon on earth could help Danny now, cos you couldn’t cut into the abdominal cavity. Corruption was certain if you tried, a worse death than if you’d done nothing at all. And Danny’s death would be bad enough as it was — I’d seen that at once, with a certainty that hollowed me inside. Danny’s death would be worse than bad, and such deaths could take days.
I held his head and gave him a mouthful of water. He sputtered it down.
“Go now, Long Will — hurry. But first give me something for the pain. You’re so clever with the potions, and I don’t believe I can stand this anymore.”
“I’ve nothing, Danny.”
“Yes you do. I know it.”
He wept then and cursed me for keeping it all for myself.
“Judas himself would share a potion with his friend,” he said. “Judas who’s burning in Hell this second. I wouldn’t let you suffer so, you bastard. I couldn’t bear it.”
“Nor can I, Danny,” I said. “I can’t bear it neither.”
I took his nose between my thumb and forefinger, and covered his mouth with my palm.
“I’m so sorry, Dan,” I said.
He struggled, of course, though every movement brought fresh agony. He jerked and juddered like a man on a rope at Newgate. His eyes huge and horrified found mine, and I have wondered ever since what he saw in those final moments, as his lungs screamed out and the blood vessels burst: the leer of Old Bones himself, or just his poor friend Will?
Or perhaps did he see — and this was the worst thought of all, and one that only intruded long afterwards — did he see at the last a hard cold glint such as others in their dying had glimpsed in my uncle’s eyes? Those who had drowned in the bottomless blue gaze of Dionysus Atherton.
*
They carried Odenkirk back into the Holy Land between them: feet dragging, head lolling, like a man fished out of the Thames. And who would look twice at that, in the glimmering of dawn? Just another merry London buck who’d outdone himself on the ran-tan, and was being taken home by his friends. They slapped him back to consciousness in the cellar, and then commenced to beat him all over again. It was Flitty Deakins who did this, Flitty and some of the others. When Meg came down the stairs, she was very angry. “We ent animals,” she said to them. “We are not wolves.” They stopped then, Flitty and the others, falling silent and shame-faced and then shuffling back as Meg came amongst them, followed by Jemmy. I was watching from the shadows as she knelt by Odenkirk, like a mother comforting her great bleeding boy, and asked him for the truth.
He had no fight left in him, and babbled it out through broken yellow teeth. Yes, he said, he’d killed Edward Cheshire, murdered him on my uncle’s instructions. He’d helped in the killing of others as well, orphans and strays and derelicts used in medical experiments, just as Flitty had been claiming all along.
Meg was cradling his head now, in her lap. Odenkirk gazed up into her face, imploring her to understand.
“Ned Cheshire knew,” he said. “That’s why he had to die.”
“He’d heard rumours, that’s all,” said Meg, looking bitter and very tired. “There was rumours about, of Doomsday Men being asked for corpses not quite dead. Rumours is not the same as knowing.”
“But Atherton feared that you knew,” said Odenkirk. “And then someone called in the Law, when the money-lender’s body was recognized. Uncle Cheese, on the Death House table. So a murderer was needed, somebody to take the blame. Someone else had to hang, Miss Meg — and he decided that would be you.”
Their voices were low. A great intimacy had begun, between them. She brushed a matted clump of hair from his forehead, and her fingers came away blood-red.
“Then why didn’t he leave me dead?” she asked. “I was dead, if that’s what he wanted. But then he brought me back again.”
“Becos he could.”
“That’s all?”
“A woman hung before all of London? He could never resist a chance like that, to show what he could do. And so he went ahead and done it.”
“And afterwards. At the end of all of that, he thought I’d — what — thank him?
“He thought you’d love him.”
Another voice had said this, from the shadows. My own voice, constricted by a coiling certainty.
They stared towards me, Meg and all the others.
“There was a young woman who died,” I said to her. “Choosing you out — then deciding to raise you up — it was all tangled up with making amends, somehow. With making amends to his sister. That’s where it all begins.”
Meg blinked once, very slowly.
“Beginnings is all very fine,” she said. “But what matters is making an end.”
Odenkirk had commenced to blubber softly.
“Oh, Miss Meg, he’s a dreadful man. A most terrible man, is Dionysus Atherton. He drug me down, but I swear I’m not like him.”
“I believe you. Hush.”
“And I can help you now. I know where bodies is dug, at Crutched Friars — I know every one, cos I dug them myself. I can show you.”
“I believe you’ve done enough,” she said.
“Oh, Miss Meg, I done such deeds. Such horrid deeds I done. Can you forgive me?”
Her left hand supporting his shaggy head, lifting it closer. Those eyes as red as blood, and a soft smile on her haggard face; it hardened.
“No,” she said.
His own eyes grew very wide, at that, and his feet began to judder. Meg with her right hand had slipped a knife beneath his ribs and pushed it quick and clean into his heart. Odenkirk gave a last soft exhalation, as of an infant drifting off towards slumber, and was gone.