Letter from Mr Dionysus Atherton
6th June, 1816
Comrie —
You will forgive the scrawl. I fear we are past the point of penmanship.
By the time this reaches you, I will be gone. The street arab who delivers it may solicit a reply, but don’t bother. His name is Barnaby, and he will be trying to extort payment for a note he knows damned well he can’t deliver, as I am leaving London directly. I may go abroad, at least until the present to-do passes. Fleeing in the night, with my reputation in tatters and the Fleet Ditch Fury — so I am reliably informed — shrieking for my blood. Such a turn of events, old friend. Such a shock to your quondam school chum — discovering himself less than universally loved. You must imagine him scribbling in heartsick disillusion. Picture a teardrop sparkling in his eye.
But hear this, Comrie. You must understand: the tales they are spreading are lies. I am a healer and a man of Science. I have done nothing that you have not done, or attempted, or leastways wished you dared — you, old friend, and every other surgeon in London. If I am guilty, then so are you. So are all the others. Not one of you has the right to judge.
You must hear something else, as well: I would have done my duty to the boy. I could have — would have — opened my house to him, and my arms, but he would never allow it. He hated me from the very start, old friend — hated me long before he first laid eyes. He looked at me and saw Belial leering back. And what chance did your old school chum ever have, against the Devil?
The War destroyed him, I think; and I think you know that too. War destroyed Will Starling, and you took him there. Perhaps you can make your peace with that knowledge. I hope so, for your sake.
Be well, old friend.
Yours,
Atherton
The assault upon Crutched Friars commenced just after nightfall, as was reported in the newspapers. Much of their information came from the one misfortunate servant who was inside when it happened, and who still had the swooning vapours twelve hours later: Missus Tolliver, the housekeeper. She’d gone to bed early with a headache, and was awakened by the sound of a hob-nailed boot kicking down the front door. When asked how she could tell the boot was hob-nailed, Missus Tolliver replied that you should have your door kicked in at all hours of the night, and then talk to her about footwear. Hurrying out onto the landing, she discovered that the house had been overrun by shrieking banshees. No, she had not previously seen a banshee, but she knew very well what they shrieked like.
Here Missus Tolliver’s account grows patchy, owing to the fact that she flung herself headfirst into a closet with her arms up over her head, on the reliable principle that horrors are best confronted back to front, arse upwards. But accounts from neighbours suggest that some dozen persons entered the house, of rough attire and desperate demeanour, carrying lanterns and cudgels. Leading them was a lumbering slack-faced giant.
They rampaged through the premises, overturning beds and wrenching hangings from the walls, shouting for the surgeon to reveal himself. Others began ripping up floorboards, in search of the Evidence that Odenkirk had sworn was here. When Atherton did not offer himself up, nor mouldering corpses neither, they commenced to smash whatever they might reach, starting with the ghastly room stacked with Specimen jars, the contents of which could be seen the following morning, strewn like blown-up bits on a battlefield. Howling from the house, they kicked open the door of the stable in the back, setting free the creatures within. These turned out not to be Bengal tigers and two-headed apes, as popular rumour had always supposed, but just the usual candidates for anatomical study: rodents and rabbits and moggies and mangy dogs. They were a wretched lot for the most part, skin and bones, but overjoyed to be at liberty, and some of them had considerable spirit left. One elderly German boar-hound took it upon himself to guard the property, as a Prussian gentleman would do, and rising to the occasion bit the first Constable who arrived to investigate.
Storming back into the house, the attackers laid hands on Missus Tolliver and dragged her caterwauling down the stairs, where she was hauled to her knees and found herself facing a female creature all in black, so thin and gaunt that she might have been made of sticks bound together.
“Where is he hiding?” the creature demanded. Two great glazed eyes were blazing.
Missus Tolliver near to died, recognizing who it was.
“Flitty!” she exclaimed. “Miss Deakins — don’t you know me? We are friends!”
“We are not,” said Flitty Deakins. “And I ask you again: where is Dionysus Atherton?”
“Gone!” cried poor Missus Tolliver. “Gone, Miss Deakins — fled this house. Left half an hour ago, with a few possessions thrown together.”
“Gone where?”
“He would not say! Oh, Miss Deakins, as you are a Christian, let me be!”
Flitty Deakins would have done no such thing; Missus Tolliver saw this writ like Judgement on that face. Flitty Deakins would have cut her throat and had her liver afterwards, sliced paper-thin like the famous ham they served at Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens — so thin, they swore, you could read a newspaper through it.
It was commotion from the street that saved her life. A crowd had gathered despite the hour, and a shout went up that the Constables were on their way. The attackers milled in a moment’s confusion, then fled out the back door, taking Flitty Deakins with them. She was shrieking for vengeance with each receding step, said Missus Tolliver, who by now had fallen face down again and resumed the proper posture for such moments: arms over the head, haunches to the moon.
I read the accounts in the newspapers myself, days afterwards. Read them at my leisure, having very considerable time on my hands thereafter — nearly six months of it, as events would transpire, in Newgate. But on the evening in question, the evening we stormed Crutched Friars, I was very much preoccupied. While the rest of them had been rampaging after my uncle, I had rushed through the house in desperate search of Miss Smollet instead. Lunging into rooms and shouting out her name, fearing at each turning that I’d find my Annie murdered, or much worse. But she wasn’t in the house, nor in the stable neither, cos I searched there next, by the light of a bull’s-eye snatched from a fellow marauder. I cast round for a shovel — a pickaxe — something to dig with — the wild fear clutching that she might already be buried. Here beneath the floor, or outside in the garden — mouldering with all the others that Odenkirk had sworn he’d concealed, though we hadn’t begun to root them out, not yet.
I found something else instead. In a corner of the stable was a rough wooden door, and a room behind it smelling of mould and rot, with shitten straw strewn across the floor. There was a lantern hanging on a hook, and a work-bench in the corner, on which a skeleton had been most carefully laid out. The bones were brown with boiling, and awaited articulation with wire.
A boy’s skeleton, with little twisted legs, and a spine bowed like a barrel hoop.
I howled.
*
I found Barnaby at an ale-house in Smithfield, in the midst of a rabble clustered round a rat-catching ring.
“Tell me where he went!” I cried.
“Where ’oo went?” said Barnaby, slantways.
But he knew very well, cos the sly little bastard had left Crutched Friars earlier that evening with a message to deliver — I’d learned that from Missus Tolliver, before fleeing Crutched Friars myself. The others had scattered, Jemmy and the rest; I’d no idea where they’d gone.
“Atherton!” I cried. “Where is he? Say it!”
Presumably he saw pure murder in my face, cos he didn’t even ask for money first.
“’Ee’s staying at a coaching inn tonight. Leaving London by mail coach first thing tomorrow.”
“You know the name of the inn?”
“I b’lieve I ’eard it mentioned.”
“Is she with him?”
“The girl?”
“Yes, the girl! Did she go with him, when he left Crutched Friars?”
“She did,” said Barnaby. “Most dramatickal she was,” he added. “Like a hactress on the stage.”
Behind us in the ratting ring, a one-eared terrier named Titus was doing mighty execution upon the vermin, to roars of approval. He’d killed a dozen already, breaking their necks with a lunge and a toss; the corpses lay strewn about him, and the remainder huddled together in a corner. There is doubtless a legend burgeoning this instant, in dark holes where rodents gather: One-Eared Titus Ratsbane, who comes for vermin children who disobey.
“Tell me the name of the coaching inn,” I said.
“The White ’Art,” said Barnaby. “In Islington.”
*
And looking back, I scarcely know that boy — the Wm Starling who left the ale-house and set off alone towards Islington, with all the deadly resolve of Titus Ratsbane himself. I can watch him in my mind; I look down on him in fearful wonderment.
I found the White Hart by pounding on doors. A tidy gabled building in a rutted yard, with stables to one side for the post-horses, and lamplight glowing dimly within. A candle-point winked into existence at my repeated hammering, and the door was opened at last by a squinting Innkeeper.
“Full,” he grunted, peering out. “Got no room.”
“Atherton,” I said.
“Atherton? Got none of them. No Athertons — no room. Good night.”
My foot stopped the door.
“Tall man,” I said. “Yellow hair.” Cos of course he’d be using another name. “A young woman with him.”
This rang a bell for the Innkeeper, and a shilling provoked recollection. A man of that description might possibly be in the taproom.
A low room with benches and heavy wooden tables. A gaping hearth at one end, above which a boar’s head glared glassy loathing. Atherton sat by a mullioned window, writing by candlelight. He sat alone, the other guests having long since retired.
He startled to see me in the doorway, bleak as death.
“I’ve come from Crutched Friars, uncle. I saw Isaac’s bones. My friend Isaac Bliss.”
Just the two of us, in the guttering light of the single candle. Paintings of hounds and hunters on the walls, and portraits of famous highwaymen staring insolently from the shadows, barkers primed. I had a pistol of my own, purchased at a pawn-shop in Temple Bar with one of Mr Comrie’s guineas. Atherton had begun to rise; now he froze.
“Will, what the Devil are you doing? Put it down.”
“Experiments on the living, uncle. Finding the point of death, and trying to bring them back. Yes? And how long did it take my friend Isaac to die?”
“Isaac was dead when he came to my house.”
“You’re a liar. Odenkirk confessed it all, before Meg killed him. A rehearsal for reviving Meg — is that what Isaac was to you? Was he practice, uncle? And how hard did he die?”
“Odenkirk is dead?”
“I don’t care about Odenkirk!”
But evidently Atherton did. He hadn’t known about the killing, and it shook him.
“Christ Jesus,” he said.
He was haunted now, and hunted. And I seemed to glimpse someone else gazing back at me, someone strange and familiar all at once, in the shadows and lineaments of that stricken face.
“No,” he said. “No, Will — you won’t kill me.”
I cocked the hammer.
“You’d murder your own father?”
The world stopped then, and everything in it.
The ghostly lines of my own face, tracing themselves through his, like the shadow of a palimpsest emerging. And I have known this, haven’t I? In some dark instinctual part of me, in some foetid hole where rodents writhe, I have known it from the start.
And it seems to me that I can watch him now — look down from my Newgate eyrie upon Will Starling, the one who went to the White Hart Inn that night. Watch him blink his glims in stunned incomprehension, and take one tottering half-step back, like a prize-fighter who has taken a good old English peg to the liver from Tom Cribb himself. Cos it takes an instant to be felt, a blow that terrible. It freezes a man first, leaves him paralyzed and gasping, before the agony rises on white-capped waves of nausea and the bottom falls out of the universe. I can hear myself stammer a furious denial, even as the certainty takes hold.
It is the truth. Yes, of course it is. He is monstrous — and I am his — and I have known this all along. I am tainted with him, and everything that is in him. The world is foul with the both of us.
Candlelight flickered over Atherton’s face, and shadow. A reflex of purest guilt — something furtive and unutterably ashamed. And then the beginnings — oh, God damn him — of a smile. A small defiant creeping smirk, both loathsome and self-loathing. The cleverest boy in Lichfield, and a small dark sister sobbing.
I fired.
Atherton lurched backwards, clutching at his shoulder. Hit, but not killed. I snatched then for my knife, as a woman’s voice cried out in Capital Letters.
“Help — O, Help! — O, Villainy!”
Annie Smollet had come down the stairs. I glimpsed her, framed in an attitude of operatic horror, as through the chaos I was aware of something else: the thunder of footsteps without, and something the size of a bullock bursting through the door. It would reveal itself to be a red-haired Bow Street Runner, with a smaller darker colleague on his heels. They had come in fearful haste, so I would afterwards learn, acting upon intelligence that the fugitive Starling would be here. In the moment I knew only shouts and blows and a fearful weight crushing down upon me, and another glimpse of Annie Smollet as she rushed to support the wounded Atherton.
And outside the door, someone capered all this while. The urchin Barnaby, madcap in his triumph.
“Pay up!” he was crying. “Pay up, you fuckers — fifty guineas on ’is nob, and every one of them is mine!”