Tragic Passing of an Infant Prodigy
The London Record
28th May, 1816
With sorrow we must relate to our readers, and especially to those whose memories extend to theatrical activities in the closing years of the century past, that a once-bright light in the Firmament of Thespis has been extinguished forever. In the small hours of Tuesday morning, “Master Buttons” was discovered, slain, in an alleyway near Haymarket. “Out, out,” as the Bard has inimitably summed the quintessence of the human condition, “brief candle.”
Born to theatrical parents, the star that was Linwood Buttons ascended to its apogee during the brief vogue of the Infant Prodigy a quarter-century ago, appearing upon the London stage in numerous incandescent performances, some of which may still be called to mind. A cherubic stripling with a piping treble voice, he was much lauded for the melodic cadence of his delivery, and for the ingenious “points” of his performance — those crucial flourishes by which each Player may be measured against the great pantheon of the Lions of Tragedy which extends from Burbage through Garrick to Kemble and Kean. When, in blackface, he essayed the Moor, his voice swooped thrillingly into its lowest register upon the fatal utterance, “O blood!”; whilst as the Melancholy Dane he shuddered convulsively in all his limbs upon first seeing the skull of Yorick, before fluting, in such manner as perfectly to express the futility of all mortal aspiration, the plangent bi-syllable: “Alas!”
In latter years he appeared less frequently “to strut and fret his hour upon the stage,” and in due course passed from the recollection of that notorious admirer of each succeeding bauble of novelty, the Public. From time to time Rumour hinted at a quondam Prodigy, much fallen in the estimate of Fortune, who had been glimpsed at a gaming table near Covent Garden, or in some low tavern in the Seven Dials, cap upturned before him, declaiming Bardic pearls before the swinishly besotted. And now the fall from Fortune is complete. A gentle Child of Thespis has been struck down by an assassin’s hand, in that Sink of London widely known as H—— Corner; from which Infernal Depth we pray that he may be lifted up, and “flights of angels sing him to his rest.” We pray fervently as well that Justice may “with Tarquin’s ravishing stride” tread down his murderer.
We are able to report that the assailant is identified, and that the hunt is well advanced. Our sources at Bow Street relate that the villain is known to have sought the Poor Player at his lodging earlier that same day, and subsequently located him at a gaming house in King Street. Evidently he stalked Master Buttons as the latter left this establishment, setting upon his victim from behind and striking him down “unshriven, with his sins upon his head.” Eluding pursuit the felon fled, but subsequent enquiry at the gaming club established his identity, for he had been recognized there; one of the patrons had recently sought out the services of a surgeon by whom the wretch was employed.
His name is Starling. He is described as a youth of diminutive stature, a known thief and blackguard who scavenged the battlefields of Europe during the late war against Corporal Bonaparte. Latterly he has served to assist a surgeon in Cripplegate, in the course of which occupation he has had cause closely to collaborate with the unholy gentlemen of the Resurrection Trade. No doubt he has gone to ground in some rat-hole of the Metropolis. But the Arm of British Justice is long. We are confident that it will reach out, and seize the murderer of Linwood Buttons, and haul him wriggling into sunlight.
And there you are. You’re haring through the streets of London, and it did not happen. It could not possibly have happened — but it did. And the crunching underfoot is the shards of all you ever hoped for, as the realization comes: This is you, done. The one life you’re ever going to have, and you’ve just slung it aside.
East and south across the Strand, towards the river. Cripplegate was too far. I needed to change these clothes; I needed to think.
Janet Friendly.
The house was dark. I scrambled for a pebble, beneath her window. A second and a third, ’til finally a candle glowed. The scrape of the casement opening, and a long dour face beneath a nightcap, glowering down through the mists of sleep.
“Will? The fuck — ?”
“Just let me in. Please.”
A minute later the door was opened. “I should of thrown a boot,” she muttered, as I slipped past. The shop was ghostly in the light of Janet’s candle; mounds of clothing lay like silent sleepers, or the dead. “Swear to God, I should of emptied a chamber pot. I should — ”
The words died as she saw me more clearly.
“Jesus Christ,” she said. “You’re hurt.”
“No.”
“You’re covered in blood.”
“Not mine.”
“Oh, Will. Oh, Christ on a biscuit. What have you done?”
I told her and she sat down — whump — on a wooden chair. It took a considerable deal to poleaxe Janet Friendly, but Your Wery Umble had just succeeded.
“I never meant it,” I said, dismally.
“They’ll hang you anyways.”
And of course they would. I’d plead my innocence of heart, lighting the courtroom with the most abject smile that ever foundling wore, and the black cap would come out inside half an hour. They’d have me onto the scaffold the very next Monday morning, and there’d be no Jack Ketch with his own neck in a noose and Mr Punch tooting huzzah; but only Wm Starling, kicking his heels for the edification of all assembled, with his last dying confession available for a penny, blaming it all on Avarice, and Want of a Father’s Correction in Boyhood.
Janet took a breath, and stood. “Right. You need to get out of London. Now. Tonight. Take off your clothes.”
“What?”
“Look at you. Like fucking Macbeth, emerging from Duncan’s bedchamber. And don’t let’s stand upon maidenly modesty, like virgins on our wedding night. Off! Chrissake, no one cares.”
I pulled off my jacket and shirt and let them drop, as Janet sifted swiftly through the piles of clothing and slung a pair of breeches at me.
“Do you have money?”
I had blunt squirrelled away in my room at Cripplegate — but how long would it be ’til the Law was there? It depended how long it took them to retrace Buttons’s steps to Fishmonger’s Hall, where one question must surely lead to the next.
“Never mind,” said Janet, reaching for a tin beneath the counter. “I have some — and yes you can fucking well accept it, so shut your cake-hole. Now go! You might of been followed.”
She saw my gaze go longingly to the narrow stairs that led to the rooms above. Where Mrs Sibthorpe was still asleep, and Annie Smollet.
“There’s an idea,” snapped Janet. “We’ll wake La Smollet, and have a scene. We’ll have Romeo and Juliet, right here at Milford Lane. Exactly what we need — more drama.”
She was right, of course. Not that it helped.
“I’ll explain to her,” she muttered, softening just a little.
“Tell her I never set out to kill anyone.”
And it was starting to sink in, the finality. Master Buttons, slumping sideways with my knife outthrust from his throat. And he wasn’t rolling over, neither, and rising to take his bow, as huzzahs rained down from the gallery. He just lay as he had fallen, gazing up at me with Danny Littlejohn’s disbelieving eyes, their last light dying into bottomless reproach.
“I’ll tell her, Will. I’ll get word to Comrie too.”
“Tell her — ”
I didn’t finish the thought, on account of its constricting in my throat.
“Tell La Smollet that you love her, Will? Why, of course. I could clasp her lily hand as I did it, if you like. I could blubber up the contents of my overflowing heart, and weep whole buckets, you fucking eejit. Now go, before someone finds you here! Get yourself out of London — get yourself out of England. Send word to us when you’re safe.”
Next second all the oxygen left the world, cos Janet had taken me in a hug so fierce that it nearly stove my shoulders together. It nearly set my hair afire as well, since she hadn’t set down the candle first. But she stepped back before permanent damage was done, and for the barest of moments there was something stricken in her phizog, and a glimmer in her eyes that could nigh on be mistaken for tears.
“I should of emptied the chamber pot,” she said.
A light rain is falling as Alf the Ale-Draper padlocks the door of the public house behind him, and commences on his waddling way along Black Friars Lane. It is very late, past two o’clock, and the dark street is otherwise deserted. After pausing to piss he continues, weaving just a little; for what publican would be sober at such an hour? He belches, and begins to warble an air. He has a high reedy voice, does Alf, quite comical in a man so large.
“On the green banks of Shannon when Shelah was nigh
No blithe Irish lad was so happy as I.
No harp like my own could so cheerily play
And where ever I went was my poor dog Tray.”
It is a sad air, this one; it does not end well for the dog. But Alf himself is in a contented mood, a man at peace with the universe. The public house has taken on a new girl, whom Alf had just an hour earlier, on the flagstones in the cellar. Just as he has all the girls who come to work at the Three Jolly Cocks — as he’d on various occasions had the Nancarrow bitch, the one who went and got herself scragged. He has a notion he may have been rough with the girl tonight, as sometimes happens, Alf being a large man with exuberant appetites. Still, they deserve what they get, being nothing but filth. They’re unfit for wiping boots upon, as he is often reminded by his mother, with whom he lives. His mother is a Christian woman, very nearly a saint.
“Poor dog! He was faithful and kind to be sure,
And he constantly loved me, although I was poor . . .”
The rain is falling more heavily now. Through the darkness, Alf discerns two shapes ahead of him: one massive, the second much smaller. They appear to be waiting for someone.
“When the sour-looking folks sent me heartless away,
I had always a friend in my poor dog Tray.”
They don’t move, whoever they are, remaining just outside the penumbra of light from a street-lamp. Alf squints, rhinoceros-eyed; he does not see well at the best of times, and should have brought his lantern. The first is an immense man, he discerns after a moment, with ragged clothes hanging loose, as if he had once been larger still. Alf has the vague notion that he might recognize the man, if he could see more clearly. With him is a woman, slender and dark-haired, her face muffled in a cloak.
Alf slows a little as he reaches them, but continues singing.
“But he died at my feet on a cold winter day,
And I played a sad lament for my poor —”
He breaks off with a grunt. He has stumbled, one of his size-fifteens catching against a cobblestone. The immense man puts out an arm to brace him, which is considerate, Alf thinks. The arm goes around him; so does the other.
“Set him straight,” he hears the woman say. Her voice is a strange, low rasp.
Alf makes a sound like: “Woof.” It is unrelated to the song, having more to do with the fact that the man has taken him in a bear hug, so powerful that it squeezes the breath from his lungs.
“That’s the way,” says the woman, in her rasping voice.
Alf would dispute this, if he could find the requisite wind. It is not the way at all, he would say, no matter how kindly the hug is intended. He would further explain that he needs to be going now, for his mother lies awake if he is late returning home, and frets herself.
“Argh,” he says instead.
The man picks him up, right off the ground, which might cause Alf under other circumstances to exclaim in admiration, considering that he weighs twenty stone and this man has just hoisted him like an empty barrel. The arms continue to tighten.
Alf’s mouth goes very wide. This is in part because his ribs are cracking, but also because he has had a considerable shock. The hood of the woman’s cloak has fallen back, and in disbelief he has recognized her: a narrow face, pale and gallows-grim, with two eyes burning at him red as blood.
“Set him straight, Jemmy,” he hears her say. “Set this fucker very straight indeed.”
*
Alf will be discovered some while before dawn, when an early rising Crossing-Sweeper espies through the gloom what he takes at first to be a dead horse, lying at the side of Pilgrim Street. Identification will follow, and the newspaper reports will speculate that the victim must have been struck down accidentally by a heavy dray, or cart, and run clear over by the wheels, so cleanly had the back been broken.
It is no hard thing to disappear in London. A million souls to mingle with, and tens of thousands of rooms in attics and cellars across the Metropolis, where a penny would buy you a bundle of straw and three pennies an actual bed — with four or five others in it, of course, not counting the vermin, but still — under any name you might care to invent. Even if you had the ill-fortune to be recognized, there were a thousand lanes down which a sharp lad might slip, and if all else failed and the hounds had your scent, there was always the rookeries. The tangled slums of Jacob’s Island and the Old Mint, or the Holy Land itself: the vast appalling rookery of St Giles, where an entire regiment might go to ground.
I stayed for a night at a lodging-house in Aldgate, then moved on to another along the Ratcliffe Highway. I told myself that I was just gathering my thoughts, and deciding where best to flee. But as two nights stretched into three, and I shifted to another ken farther east, I had to admit the possibility that I wasn’t leaving London at all. On the fourth morning, I woke up in a nethersken down by the Docks, wedged on a pallet in the sleeping room between an old man in an ancient shooting jacket with wooden buttons, and a younger one with whom I had shared a tot of gin in the kitchen the night before. My new friend wore a brown shirt that had once been check, and a pair of ladies’ boots with the toes cut out. He had been a partner in a counting house, he said; an educated man, and now here he was, fallen all the way to this. “But once a man falls far enough,” he said with a sort of lugubrious satisfaction, smacking his lips and eyeing me bleakly, “he might as well finish the job. Eh? He might as well go the whole hog. And here we are, boyo. The pig in its entirety, bristles and all.”
Clambering out from between them, I skirted past the kitchen, where some of the lodgers were already gathering. There was a yard outside with coster-carts scattered round, and several lumps of rags, still a-slumber. I washed myself as best I could at the stand-pipe, and then reached a decision.
It seemed that I was not leaving London at all. I made my way towards Smithfield instead, where I found young Barnaby watching a cock fight. The combatants were disputing against the wall of a slaughter yard, hemmed in by a ragamuffin crowd. Barnaby clocked my approach with one slantways eye, as if he were a species of rooster himself.
“Been ’earing about you,” he said cryptically.
“I need to send a message.”
“Sent one to that actor, didn’t you? Fuck me. I ’eard — oi!” He broke off to shout encouragement to the smaller of the combatants, a scrawny bantam which made up in poultricidal fervour what it lacked in stature. “Now peck ’is ’ead off!”
“A message,” I repeated. “I’ll pay you sixpence.”
“Sixpence now, and sixpence after.”
“Twelve pennies, for a message?”
He cock-eyed me again.
“Danger pay. You’re a desperado, you. Worth my neck to be seen with yez, and — oi! Yes! Now fecking finish ’im!”
I’d have sent young Barnaby to Mr Comrie, except they’d be keeping an eye for certain on Cripplegate. So I sent him to Milford Lane instead. He was back an hour later, extending a grimy palm. “She’ll be at the place you said. Eight o’clock tonight.”
I arrived at the churchyard just as the clock was striking the hour. Darkness had fallen and a chill wind had arisen, agitating the trees. A knot of vagrants idled by the east wall, passing a jar and casting glances in my direction, as I waited ten minutes and then another quarter-hour. Still there was no sign of Janet, which began to make me uneasy.
I was repenting as well my choice of a meeting place. St Sepulchre’s, I had said — of all the churchyards in London — directly across the street from Newgate Prison, squatting mute and malevolent in the night. I found myself staring towards Debtor’s Door itself, outside which Meg Nancarrow had kicked and choked just two weeks previous — and where Your Wery Umble would take his own last bow on a Monday morning yet to be specified, if the Majesty of British Justice had its way.
At half past the hour, I was beginning to wonder if young Barnaby had simply pocketed my twelve pence and lied. But that’s when a familiar figure came hurrying at last along the street outside the railings, and turned in at the gate.
“You fucking eejit,” Janet hissed by way of greeting, and cast a worried look over her shoulder. “I think I may of been followed.”
A prospect to make the blood run just that little bit colder. I looked swiftly round.
“Have you lost them?”
“I ent sure. I done my best. Jesus, Will. Christ on a biscuit. I expect you been reading about yourself?”
Yes, I’d read all the newspapers at a coffee-stall. And this afternoon I had paid a penny for a broadsheet account of the murder, in which I learned that I had done it to avenge the death of the Fleet Ditch Fury, with whom I had some sinister connection.
“There’ll be ballads soon,” I said, essaying negligence. “By next week there’ll be a play.”
“They’ve been to the shop. A Magistrate, and two Constables. First thing yesterday morning.”
News to make the blood run colder still. But it was something I should have been expecting — if they’d been to Cripplegate, then they’d assuredly have spoken to Missus Maggs, who’d have smoked out my connection with Janet and Milford Lane. Missus Maggs had doubtless smoked out a great deal about me, whilst minding her kews and peeze.
“What did you tell them?” I demanded, forcing calm.
“What would you think? I said I hadn’t seen you.”
“Did they believe you?”
“Christ knows. What matters is, they know who your friends are — they know where to look. And they’re looking everywhere.”
We had retreated deeper into the darkness by the church wall. A snatch of rough laughter from the vagrants, and as the wind shifted a waft from the burial ground on the other side.
“Will, what the Devil are you still doing here, in London?” Then, presuming to read the answer on my clock: “Aw, Christ — don’t tell me. Don’t even say it. La Smollet?”
She was right, or partly so. The thought of never seeing my Annie at all, for months or even years — that was bleak. So was the thought of leaving London itself: the Metropolis no more than a smudge on the horizon through the window of a mail coach, and then the green of England receding, along with every friend I had in this world, and Your Wery Umble greener still, hanging over the railing of a ship.
But above it all, I had to know.
“I need to find Meg Nancarrow,” I said. “I have to know what he did. To her — and to the others.”
“Who — Atherton?”
“Yes.”
“What others?”
“That’s what I need to find out.”
“Fuck ’im, Will. Fuck all of it. It’s none of your concern!”
“But it is. That’s where you’re so wrong. It is all of it my concern.”
“You must be mad,” said Janet.
She was right about that too, I think. Looking back, I suspect I was indeed halfways mad, that night in St Sepulchre’s churchyard. We go through times in our lives when we’re none of us quite sane. The sight of a man’s blood pooling about your boots — there’s a sight that will leave you feeling cold and sick and horribly unmoored, as I’m very sure you do not know yourself, and I congratulate you on your innocence. It sent Lady Macbeth running Bedlam-mad, that feeling, and she was forged of stronger steel than William Starling.
Besides, Lady Mac had just one murder on her soul, and my killing of Master Buttons was all mixed up in so much else. In the hanging of Meg, and the whispered words of Nuttall the Spavined Clerk, and the gnawing conviction that Dionysus Atherton had committed such deeds as banish us beyond the warmth and the light of the great communal fire that we cluster round together, all of us who are human in this world. My uncle: bone of my bone, and blood of my blood. And all of it reflected back in the dying light in Danny Littlejohn’s eyes.
Yes, I believe I may well have been mad, that night in St Sepulchre’s churchyard.
“No more of this,” Janet was saying. “You have to leave now. And here — I been to Cripplegate — the Scotchman gave me these.”
She’d pulled a handful of coins out of her pocket. Five gold guineas.
“His life’s fucking savings, I expect. Or else he sold some tools. There’s prob’ly some poor bastard on his table right this minute, about to have his leg cut off with the wrong-sized saw, and all so Will Starling could pay for passage to the Continent. And here he is, still in London, the eejit!” She forced the coins into my hand. “No, just take the money. He wanted you to have it, so it’s yours. Take it — go. Before someone else comes looking for you, Will, cos next time they may find you!”
And there was something about the way she’d said it. Something that struck my ear askew, and made me wonder if the Constables hadn’t been the only ones to come knocking at Janet’s door.
“Someone else?”
“Never mind,” she said instantly.
“Janet?”
She turned away, pulling her shawl more tightly round her shoulders. “Just — it don’t matter. It’s nothing you need to know.”
“Tell me.”
“There was a man,” she said at last. Grudging the words, as if each one of them must be extracted like a molar. “Come to the shop this afternoon, looking for you. Not one of the Constables — he was nothing to do with them. But he’d found out, somehow, that we knew you. Someone told him to come to us.”
“What man?”
“He said his name was Sheldrake. He said he had a message. ‘Tell Starling, she wants to see him.’ That’s all he’d say. ‘Tell Starling, he is summoned.’”
She.
All of London, stopping with that syllable.
“But forget about him, Will.” Janet was pleading now. “Forget about all of it — just go. Send us word when you’re safe. Cos God knows you’re not safe here — not in London, and especially not in this churchyard, if there really was someone following me. Just — please.”
I’d never seen that look on her face before. She gave me another of her rib-splintering embraces, and then she was gone, hurrying away into the darkness of London.
And I saw then that Janet’s intuition had been correct. She had indeed been followed, all the way from Milford Lane. Someone was standing in the gloom, just inside the churchyard gate.
“Oh, Will,” said Annie Smollet.
She wore a dark green cloak, borrowed from the shop. Snatched in desperate haste, no doubt, as she hurried after Janet out the door, and it was purest coincidence that its coloration suited her so perfectly.
“Janet wouldn’t say where she was going, Will. But I knew. I just knew she was going to meet you. So I followed.”
And Christ knows I was glad she did. Gladder than anything I could ever recall, standing there in St Sepulchre’s churchyard with a sweet slow ache of joy.
“I was so afraid I wouldn’t see you again,” I said.
“Can I be so very much worth seeing? I don’t think so, Will. I think I ent worth seeing so very much at all, not when it’s Worth Your Life.”
“I might, Miss Smollet, beg to differ.”
I actually said that. And I’ve a notion I accompanied it with a little bow, as another man might have done — such as Claude Duvall the highwayman, perhaps. In a corner of my mind I winced, imagining how Janet might have eyed me if she’d been here at the present moment, and hearing in the night wind a whisper of her judgement: Oh, you twat. But Janet was a quarter-mile distant by now, hurrying south and west towards Milford Lane, and here in the darkness of St Sepulchre’s churchyard it was just Wm Starling and Miss Annie Smollet.
She wore the hood of the cloak up, obscuring her face, as if she’d forgotten that she wasn’t a fugitive herself. But her eyes gazing out from the folds were bright with genuine emotion.
“Tomorrow morning,” she said. “You’ll go away from London. I want you to promise me. If not for your own sake, then for your friends’. For my sake, Will. I want your Solemnest Oath.”
And to this day, I am not sure what I would have said in reply, had we been allowed the span of just five more seconds. I might very well have melted in those green eyes, and relented, and done what the secret part of me already longed to do: climb down from the lonely steeple of my avenging zeal — Christ knows the wind cuts like a sabre when you’re up so high, and so very much alone — climb down to safety, and scurry like a sleekit for the tall, tall grass. But that’s when two bull’s-eyes winked at the churchyard gate, and two Watchmen peered in.
They weren’t looking for Your Wery Umble, in particular. Just a pair of Charleys making their rounds. But Miss Smollet gripped my arm.
“We can’t be standing here,” she whispered. “You need to be in Hiding.”
I did not dispute the point. Her grip tightened.
“I know a place you can stay tonight. Come with me, Will — quickly.”
“I can’t go to Milford Lane.”
“Not there. Holborn.”
The bird-fancier’s shop was dark when we arrived, the windows shuttered and the birds silent within, asleep in the scores of cages. It seemed the Badger had recently moved back into the room upstairs, having parted with her gentleman. “It Broke her Poor Heart, Will,” Annie had told me as we hurried along Holborn. He turned out to be a fraud, this gentleman, his two thousand a year pure ephemera, and two other Badgers on the go into the bargain. But through a stroke of good fortune, the Badger would not be using the room on this particular night. Apparently she had already scooped up the shattered fragments of her poor heart and gone off for a few days with a new gentleman, which Annie considered very plucky in her, and evidence of a Shining Spirit.
Annie still had a key of her own. She led me up two narrow flights of stairs, feeling our way in the dark. Arriving upon the topmost landing, she fumbled with her key in the lock, and then fumbled within for a match and a candle, and then finally the room glowed into existence, as if she’d conjured it herself. It was much as I had seen it last, strewn with clothes — evidently the Badger and her Shining Spirit had left in haste. Annie opened the window to dispel the must, admitting the waft from the privy in back and the rumble of Holborn Street beyond.
“Are you hungry?” she asked. “Wait here.”
She came back in twenty minutes with some bread and cheese and a meat pie, fetched from a public house, along with a pot of strong ale. We made a picnic of it sitting on the bed, and once we’d finished she brushed crumbs from her lap and raised her eyes to search my face, composing herself into gravity.
“Now,” she said, “you must tell me everything that has happened, from the Very Beginning right up to This Moment.”
“How much has Janet — ?”
“Janet don’t tell me much of anything, Will, on the grounds that she considers me a twat. No, you don’t need to deny it, cos it’s the Truth — that is Exackly what Janet considers — and the Truth is what we must live with. And I say nothing against Janet Friendly, neither, except she can be a towering twat herself.”
So I told her. Leastways told her more or less, leaving out some of the more lurid details, and those elements as risked provoking Miss Smollet into such flights of capitalization that she might never return to me again, but rise in ascending spirals like an escaping songbird, through the window and into the night sky beyond, where somewhere far above the choke of London the stars must shine in a sweet clear sky just exactly as they had shone on the first night of Creation. But I told her of my certainty that Atherton had fitted Meg up for the murder of Uncle Cheese — though why he should revive her afterwards remained a mystery that tormented and perplexed. I hinted at dark Rumours of other killings as well, for motives that remained unclear, describing my clandestine conference with Mr Nuttall the Spavined Clerk. I spoke of Flitty Deakins and the Wreck of Sheldrake and Jemmy Cheese; and last of all I told of my midnight encounter with Master Buttons, when I drew my knife to frighten him and it all went horribly wrong.
When at last I finished, the candle had burned halfway down. Somehow two hours had passed. Miss Smollet sat saucer-eyed, like a child transfixed.
“Oh, Will.”
I had bungled the ending of the other tale I’d told her — the tale of my journey to the Midlands. But apparently I had gotten this one right.
“There is one thing I still cannot understand,” she said. “Why hate him so much?”
I began to say that I didn’t hate Master Buttons — not as you can hate an enemy, cos I never knew the man. I hated what he’d done, that was all.
She shook her head. “Not him — the surgeon. Why do you hate Dionysus Atherton?”
There was confusion in those green eyes, but a kind of penetration too. Miss Annie Smollet was never a fool, no matter what Janet Friendly thought.
So I told her the simplest part of the truth.
“The man is my uncle,” I said.
Her eyes saucered again, more spectacularly than ever. “Your uncle? The one you told me of? Who won’t even admit you exist?”
I was regretting the confession already, and braced myself for escalation into opera. But Miss Smollet surprised me. She just shook her head slowly, side to side, in bitter wonderment.
“What he done to me, Will — that was bad enough. To sit there laughing, that night with the Wolves, when he should of been protecting me instead. But this . . .”
She shook her head again. “There are Villains in this world, Will. There are Contemptible Hounds — and then there is Mr Dionysus Atherton. And one of these days, p’raps, I shall Say So To His Face.”
“Just stay away from him,” I said quickly. An unsettling thought — what Annie Smollet might be capable of doing in a moment of Dramatic Impulse. “I have no actual proof — not yet. But I believe that he is dangerous.”
“Oh, yes,” she exclaimed. “If just one quarter of what you suspect is true — one thirty-second of one twelfth, Will — then Mr Dionysus Atherton is the most Perilous man in London!”
She had risen and moved to the window, where she stood in an actorly way. But when she turned back, both feet remained rooted in the world. “And now you’ll forget all about him,” she said firmly. “No, listen to me, Will Starling — cos you’ll do what I say. You’ll put that Villain from your mind, and you’ll go away tomorrow. You’ll go away, and stay away, ’til you’ve Cleared Your Name.”
Leastways I’d thought we had both feet in the world. Evidently one of them had lifted, just a little, and was tending in the direction of Drury Lane. She had already decided how this story would play itself out.
“You will clear your name, Will, and then Come Back.”
Cos of course that’s what would happen, if we were upon the stage. A Young Hero might very well expect to be in such a plight as currently faced Wm Starling, by the climax of Act One — indeed, it would not be much of a play if he weren’t. And matters would no doubt seem graver still by the end of Act Two, with our hero shackled in Durance Vile, awaiting execution in the morning. But Act Three could be relied upon to produce an Unexpected Witness and a Stunning Revelation, which would almost certainly concern the Hero’s ancestry, and never mind being the bastard nephew of a surgeon. He would be revealed as the heir to a title and a vast estate, shipwrecked at birth and given up for lost, now miraculously restored to the bosom of his et cetera.
There is a danger in going too often to the theatre. And Janet Friendly had been right about my Annie, to a point. She did not necessarily see life as it was — she saw potential roles for herself to play, and she was working herself up into one of them this moment: poised by the window in the tiny room in Holborn, illuminated by a single candle, treading on a discarded item of Badger wrapping. She was working up The Girl Who Would Wait, However Long It Took — which of course had more to do with the splendour of the role than with her actual feelings for Wm Starling. I know that for a certainty, looking back; I suspect I knew it on that evening too.
Yet there was something lovely, underneath. Annie Smollet might not go deep, but the shallows were genuinely sweet. I actually knew a good deal about her by now — more than I’m sure she realized. Things she’d hinted at, or tossed off without thinking. The only child of a pretty, fading mother; a succession of rooms and a succession of stepfathers, some of them less kind than others. One of them, at least, who would loom in a doorway in the night, reeking of brandy. A child, once trusting, shrinking back — and here she was at one-and-twenty. Open-hearted and lovely — never you mind the teeth — and against all odds, still prodigiously gifted with Hope.
“You will sail to France,” she was saying. “You will make your way to Paris, Will, and take a room there. And you will write to me — letters, Will, that I will Cherish Always. You will describe your life in Paris in these letters, and I will keep them tied with a ribbon.”
She spoke with such shining conviction that I could see it. Here in the little room in Holborn, I could almost for a space of time believe it.
“It will be a garret room, Will — a stone room, very cold in winter, and I fear there will be rats. But Will, it will be Paris. And you will become a pothecary. This comes to me, Will — I see it just as clearly as I see your own dear face. You’re so clever about potions, and will win renown as a healer.”
Returning from the window, she sat beside me on the bed.
“I will think of you Very Often,” she vowed.
We were sitting quite close now, a foot apart. My hand, on the blanket between us, brushed hers. Her face in the candlelight was half turned away.
“Perhaps you will think of me too,” said Miss Smollet.
A wisp of her hair had worked loose, and hung over her forehead; I took the liberty of brushing it away. There was colour in her cheek, and her lips were slightly parted.
“I expect it would be all right, you know,” she said. “If you wanted to very much.”
I’d been with girls before. I mention this now, in case it crosses your mind to wonder. Various of them, and no more than half requiring payment — cos how could a young man be alive in London, and not? A city with vitality burbling right up through the loins, with bosoms burgeoning and rakes a-roister everywhere you looked. But never like that night in Holborn.
Arching over me in the candlelight, her breasts swaying as she leaned. The first cascading moment, and a look on her face of pure beatitude. Somewhere in the midst of it all, someone whispered: “I love you.” She laughed happily to hear it, low in her throat. “He says it right out loud,” she said. Then folding herself down over me, her hair tumbling across my face and her breasts pressing, soft and firm.
Afterwards we lay curled beneath the blanket. “You’ll take the mail-coach in the morning,” she said, “to Plymouth. Then you’ll set sail on the very first tide.”
At length I slept a little, even though you don’t want to sleep on the best night of your life — cos that’s what it was, you know. The joyfullest night I ever had, before or since. The joyfullest I ever will have too, this side of Judgement — considering as I’m down to the very last few, and none of them looking better than graveyard-grim. I knew it too, that nothing could ever be better than this night, even as I was living it.
When I woke up, she was sitting at the window. The candle had gone out long since, but I could make out the shape of her in the first hint of dawn. Wrapped in a blanket, her hair hanging round her shoulders.
“Annie?”
“Your uncle.” Her voice was rich with indignation. “And to think I ever imagined having Feelings for that man!”
“Come back into bed.”
She did, and after a time I must have drifted into sleep again with Annie in my arms, cos in the darkness there was someone else in the room. On the escritoire by the window sat my friend Danny Littlejohn, legs dangling.
“Have you told her the truth, Long Will?” he said, looking down on the two of us together. “Go ahead — tell her what you done. And then watch her hike her skirts and run from you, boyo, just as fast as them slim white trotters will flash.”
He winked then, and grinned, in that sly larking way of his.
“Family tendencies — that’s what it is. Taking after that uncle of yours.”
When I woke again it was mid-morning. Sunlight flooding through the window, and birdsong rising from below.
I was alone in the room. My Annie was gone.
That very night Dionysus Atherton burst into a night-house in the Seven Dials with Odenkirk sloping at his heels, acting upon information that Meg Nancarrow was within. But the woman turned out to be a castaway Irish draggle-tail, her glims no more shot with blood than any other nymph’s might be who was reeking and bloated with blue ruin. Shoving her away from him, Atherton flung a fistful of coins at the other whores, crying: “There are a hundred guineas more — mark me! — one hundred gold guineas for information that leads me to her!”
Leaving the night-house he went to a low tavern by the river, where he sat brooding with a bottle of pale until the light of dawn crept upon him. He had the look of a Crusoe, shipwrecked into obsession.
*
In the light of the same morning a woman sits by the fountain in Trafalgar Square. The square is already teeming, despite the early hour, with crowds and street-hawkers and mendicants. An old man sells wooden toy rattles, and beyond him a shabby black sailor walks with an actual scale model of Lord Nelson’s ship Victory on top of his head, which seems with each loose-limbed step to dip and then rise again upon a turbulent sea of shoulders and hats.
The woman by the fountain wears a drab grey dress and a shawl pulled over her head like a cowl. She sits hunched with weariness, as if she were a Pilgrim on a journey grown far too onerous already. A man is with her, a great shambling man in rags, who has fetched food and drink — a meat pie from a stall, and a bowl of saloop — but no, she says, she thinks she is not hungry today. Her voice is like something dragged behind a cart.
She tilts her head to smile up at him, but as the shawl falls back she winces against the sunlight.
“Too bright,” she whispers.
Her neck is cricked a little to one side, like the stem of a flower that has been bent. The great shambling man draws her closer, in order that his bulk may block the glare.
At that exact moment another woman is crossing Trafalgar Square, towards them. This fact is asserted in certain strange Epistles that were shortly to appear, published in the Correspondence columns of newspapers, to the growing astonishment of the Metropolis. Flitty Deakins had been to a pothecary’s shop in a lane behind St Martin’s Street, from which she is now returning with a small brown bottle. Hurrying past the fountain, she sees the woman in grey lift her head, two eyes like red coals burning out from the folds of the shawl.
Miss Deakins has seen the face of Belial, leering in at her through the window of her chamber. But the face of Belial is as nothing at all, to this. Miss Deakins recoils with a cry, cos she once saw this face in life, when the woman came to Crutched Friars in the company of Doomsday Men. And now here is the face again in death — oh, surely it is Death itself, staring out of those terrible red eyes? — cos Meg Nancarrow was hanged outside Newgate two weeks ago.
Miss Deakins gives another cry, of terror and wonderment commingled, and drops in holy dread upon her knees.
*
This is where the tale grows wild. We will need dark nights and thunderstorms as we proceed; howling winds, and hearts afire with unspeakable yearnings. But upon my oath and upon my soul: what I am telling you is true. Even when I am left clutching after the facts, like poor Jemmy Cheese flailing blindly as Thoughts in darkness bat-wing past, I am sure beyond all certainty that the Tale itself is true, in the way that tales both great and tattered may point towards a distant Truth that the light of a thousand facts cannot illuminate — and never mind the frailty of the teller.
Besides, what reason would I have to lie? What could I hope to gain, in my position?
It is late on a Saturday night as I write these words, the 16th of November. Today dawned blustery and raw, and the night is bitter, even here cocooned in stone walls three feet thick. There will be a service for the Condemned tomorrow in Newgate Chapel, and the coffin for company, to aid in banishing trivial thoughts and fostering a spirit of true contrition. Appeals are still in process, though I have no reason to hope, Time being measured now in quarter-inches of the candle stub and the muffled tolling of St Paul’s bell.
It concentrates the mind most wonderfully — so Sam Johnson famously said — when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight. From this I conclude that even the great Sam Johnson could be a twat. In my own experience, the prospect does very little to concentrate the mind, and does much instead to panic it into wild chaotic flight, like a school of minnows beneath the long black sliding shadow of a pike. It brings on night-terrors that extend right through the light of day and on into a worse night still, as a fortnight shrivels to a week and the last remaining hours drop one by one like dying petals.
But there are blessings that remain to me, and I must count them. I have gloves and paper and ink that has not yet frozen. I am wearing two coats at this very minute, and a blanket round my shoulders for good measure, and there is no icicle at all at the end of my nose, leastways not yet. And I have a task. I write as swiftly as I can, and have asked my friends to see this narrative through if I am unable to finish. They are good friends — God knows, they are better than I deserve — and have given their word.
Yes, I’m afraid it has become that sort of tale.
Onward.
*
The Wreck of Tom Sheldrake had not yet sunk, but the icy waters were rising. He would appear from time to time at his chambers, but with each manifestation he grew thinner and less substantial. This I was able to ascertain through young Barnaby’s nosing and prying, since naturally I could no longer risk going to the Inns of Court myself, or even trying again to contact his Spavined Clerk.
Hollow-eyed and unshaven, the Wreck would drift into the outer chamber where Mr Nuttall still laboured at his desk, the pile of papers — now sadly dwindled — at either elbow. With a rictus of greeting, Sheldrake would flinch into his inner room, where he would be heard pacing and muttering. Sometimes he gave out a spectral wail, as if he were become the ghost of his own still-living self, here to haunt Tom Sheldrake down into the grave. Then suddenly he would burst out again, looking wildly round and demanding to know if anyone had come looking for him. Once he had a razor in his hand, and a thin ruby line beading his throat. This alarmed Mr Nuttall considerably; no shaver misses his chin by several inches, however much he is distracted.
He had tried then to ask after Sheldrake’s health, but it was no use; the Wreck retreated into his chamber, slamming the door. There came dolorous mussitations and the telltale sounds of furniture scraping, from which the Clerk deduced that the entrance was being barricaded. This caused him much disquiet, as he had seen such a change before: an aged relation, his mother, who had grown convinced that the neighbours were massing in secret for an assault upon the house. The family had in the end been forced to lock her in an attic, from which she had periodically escaped, with high determination and shouts of wrath, to do battle.
Abruptly Sheldrake disappeared. For several days he was not seen at all, and Mr Nuttall began to entertain dire visions: Sheldrake hanging pear-shaped from a rafter, or bobbing blue and ghastly to the surface of the Thames. Then just as suddenly he was back. It was evening, just at twilight, and the Clerk — down to the last three papers in his pile — looked up to see his employer in the doorway. Tom Sheldrake was paste-white and reeking of gin, and so wasted by lack of eating that he seemed scarcely more than sticks and twine. But he wore a new frock coat with a bright canary weskit, and a gay sprig of flowers in his lapel.
“Mr Sheldrake,” exclaimed Mr Nuttall. “Has something happened?”
“Happened?” Tom exclaimed. “Everything has happened, Nuttall — life, death. All of London is happening, at this instant. The world is happening — look out the window! We are spinning at this minute, sir, upon our axis. We are hurtling through Infinity. And you ask, has something happened?”
“I meant, are you quite well?”
“I am very well indeed,” said the Wreck of Tom.
This seemed unlikely to be true, and Mr Nuttall hesitated. “I was about to close up for the night, sir,” he said. “Would you have me stay instead?”
“I would have you do as you will,” said Sheldrake. He leaned in closer as he said it, as if imparting words of great significance. “Do you understand what I’m saying to you? I am saying, do as you will.”
His breath was as foul as a three-day corpse; his eyes glittered with desperate animation.
Thus he appeared as he returned to his home that night. He had rooms near King’s Cross, where he lived alone, with a cat called Roger for company. I almost liked that in him, when I found it out. It is more difficult to despise a man with a cat called Roger.
This was on a Tuesday, 4th June. I had remained inside the room at Holborn for two whole days after awakening to find Annie Smollet gone. The first I spent in anxious expectation, thinking at each minute to hear her footsteps tripping up the stairs. But she didn’t come, not that day nor the next, which I spent curled alone upon the bed with the Black Dog pacing on the landing and birdsong and birdstink rising from below. Finally I roused myself, and leaving a woebegone note slipped lorn and lightheaded down the stairs — two days it had been, with nothing to eat — into the mutter and snarl of Holborn. With the darkness, I was waiting outside Sheldrake’s lodgings.
He came along the Gray’s Inn Road, his bull’s-eye bobbing him into view. As he passed, I stepped swiftly in behind him.
“You sent word you wanted to see me, Mr Sheldrake?”
He turned with a gasp, and I let him see my knife.
“Just so’s you know, Mr Sheldrake — if this is a trick or a trap, I’ll kill you. Nothing personal — not a threat — just a solemn promise. Play me false and you are a dead man.”
He gave a laugh at that, a high queer sound of strangled mirth. “Dead, sir? Whatever can you mean by dead? I think you must be more specific, sir, for death” — a finger to the side of his nose, and a ghastly wink — “death is not entirely what it was. Indeed, I think you may be behind the times.”
His eyes had grown to unnerving size as his phiz had hollowed around them, just as Barnaby had reported. Cadaver-gusts of breath. But a fine new weskit as well, and a sprig of flowers — I thought of descriptions I had read, of condemned men in the olden days being trundled to Tyburn Tree on a cart, bung-eyed with drinking but determined to exit game, making desperate merriment with the crowds along the way.
“Is she alive?” I demanded.
“She, sir?”
“Meg Nancarrow.”
“Ah. Then that depends, sir. That very much depends.”
“On?”
“On what you mean, sir, by alive.”
I raised my knife, touching the tip to his throat. His apple bobbed.
“You went looking for me, Mr Sheldrake. You said I’d been summoned. If you know where she is, then tell me now.”
He offered the rictus of a rakish smile, essaying the gay sad dog of old.
“Indeed, sir. Come, sir. Sheldrake’s just the fellow. Follow Tom.”
We crossed the Gray’s Inn Road and continued, heading west. I was still half thinking this must be a trap, and that round each corner a clutch of Constables would be waiting, cudgels in hand. But there was no one, except the usual night-walkers of London.
“It wasn’t murder,” I said, matching his shambling pace. “The actor — Buttons. They’re saying I murdered him, but it wasn’t that.”
I don’t know why it seemed so important that he understand this. But I might have saved my breath.
“No murder done.” A ghastly wink. “Quite right. No blood upon my good friend Starling’s hands — no stain upon those soft white daddles.”
“I said it was never deliberate.”
“And why those hands should be unstained — of all the hands in London, sir, drenched in gore up to the elbows — why these alone should be so pure, remains a mystery. But there you have it. There it is. Starling’s hands are white.”
He touched his finger once more to the side of his nose, raising the bull’s-eye with the other hand as he did so. His face was a jack-o-lantern in the glare.
Sheldrake quickened his pace now, angling west and south, until we crossed Kingsway and reached Great Russell Street.
“Where are we going?” I demanded.
But I’d guessed the answer already.
The Holy Land — St Giles Rookery. A vast squalid labyrinth, stretching out from Great Russell Street in the north, to the church of St Giles to the south. St Giles-in-the-Fields — cos there had been green fields here once, and trees, instead of bricks and filth. Tonight fires flickered here and there in the tangle of courts and narrow stinking streets, with human creatures crouching round them. Derelict buildings jumbling together, leaning drunkenly shoulder to shoulder like old reprobates conspiring. Streams of filth down the middle of the lanes, in place of the brooks that trickled in that long ago unfallen time, with lumps of excrement instead of smooth wet stones. And now I had no further fear of Constables. No Officer of the Law would set foot here, not by night — nor even by daylight, without a dozen more to back him, armed with muskets. And even if they did, what could they hope to accomplish? Anyone familiar with these narrow streets could disappear in half a minute; and if you truly knew the Holy Land, you didn’t need to use the streets at all. You’d know of doorways connecting one building to the next, and passageways leading from cellar to cellar. You could disappear into darkness and never come back out into the light of day — by your own choice, or by someone else’s. You could rot in one of those cellars until you were nothing but bones and fungus, and no one who knew you would ever be the wiser.
The Wreck of Sheldrake tacked onward, hurrying down one alleyway and turning into another, forging through the murk and stench while unseen eyes peered from the darkness and shadows in the night retracted into holes upon our passing. We stopped at last in a slanting doorway, somewhere in the dark heart of the maze. A sliver of yellow moon peered down askance, then slid behind the clouds again. I had tried as best I could to keep track of all our twists and doublings back, bracing myself against the prospect that I might have to extricate myself at speed from this dreadful labyrinth. And Christ only knows what Minotaur awaited.
Sheldrake’s mood had changed. “Lily-white hands,” he said, looking bitterly down at me. “Of all the daddles in London.”
“Is this where she stays?”
“I did not ask to see these things,” he burst out suddenly, “or know them!” On his face was the same look of anguish as on that afternoon in St Mary-le-Bow churchyard, when he’d flung himself into Bob Eldritch’s open grave. “Did I ask Meg Nancarrow to hang? No. Did I ask Bob Eldritch to choke himself to death? No, sir — never in life! I say again, sir; I did not. I did not wish it — I was not consulted!”
Then he lurched through the doorway and into the blackness within. I followed.
Stench, and uncanny stillness, and the certainty that eyes were watching: this was my first impression, and it was overwhelming. There might be three floors and two dozen separate rooms in such a dwelling, each room housing six — or ten — or twenty. From time to time a teetering building would give a terminal lurch and then collapse right there on top of itself, with Ragged Souls scrambling like ants to escape out the windows. There must be dozens in the house with us now, but in that moment you didn’t hear a single one of them. In the glancing light of Sheldrake’s lantern, I glimpsed for an instant a twisted boy peering down from a half-landing above us, with a parent — or some larger Imp — behind him. Then they were gone, and I followed Sheldrake onto some rickety stairs leading down into deeper darkness.
There was no railing, and often enough there was no step either, the boards having long since rotted through, or else been ripped up for firewood. Houses in the Holy Land were all consumed by fire in the end, but this mainly happened piece by piece. The winters here were the worst in London, with January knifing through broken windows patched with paper and rags. Twice I missed my step and nearly fell headlong, until we reached a level passageway. It was dank and strait, with puddles of water — I prefer to think it was water — gathering underfoot. Rats scuttled in the blackness behind us, and the Wreck of Sheldrake sloped on. There was a branching passageway, and another doorway.
Sheldrake stopped.
“Through there,” he said, pointing. “Down.”
I waited for him to lead the way. But Sheldrake was shying back now, like a horse that has balked with white rolling eyes at a gate and will not be driven one foot farther, not if you were to beat him ’til he bled.
“No,” he said. “Not Tom.” His voice had broken, with his nerve. “I’ve done what was demanded of me. No more. She wants to see you.”
He bolted, taking his light.
More steps led down, at my feet — but the blackness below was not quite complete. A faint garish glow seeped upwards from the depths. I took one very deep breath indeed, and started down into the void. Six impossible steps descending to a half-landing, and the seep of light grew more discernible with each one, as if it would rise like Stygian waters to my ankles, and then my knees. A turn to the left at the landing, and then six more steps, down into a space that surely squatted just atop Signor Dante’s First Circle. Or beneath it.
A cellar room, stinking of smoke and human creatures, with a ceiling so low that even Your Wery Umble could scarce stand upright. A table with candles burning, and three or four ragged forms crouched round it, at a meal. White faces stared up at me, and then a tatter of black shifted out of the shadows in the furthest corner of the room. An ancient woman, as angular and sharp as Atropos the Third Sister snipping thread.
Except she wasn’t old at all. I saw that now, as my eyes began to adjust to the stinging gloom. Her face was pinched but scarcely lined, and her own eyes were bright with laudanum and zeal.
“Mr Starling is here. A friend is come. We rejoice,” said Flitty Deakins.
She had been staying until very recently at a Servants’ Lurk — a low lodging-house inhabited by domestic servants who had lost their place. There were such dosses throughout London, full of wretches who had been dismissed for thievery and bad character, and who now devoted their waking hours to plotting robberies — and worse — in retribution. This particular Lurk was near Charing Cross; Miss Deakins had returned there after I had left her on the morning of the hanging.
This much I would piece together afterwards. But in that first moment, as you’ll understand, Miss Phyllida Deakins’s domestic arrangements were not foremost in my mind.
“Where is she?” I cried. “Is she alive? Can I see her?”
Miss Deakins cocked her head. “I don’t know, Mr Starling. Can you?”
I looked round urgenttly. But it was just Miss Deakins and I in this reeking cellar, and the ragged shapes round the table, and not one of them was Meg Nancarrow.
“I fear I am being mischievous with our friend,” said Flitty, addressing herself to the others. “Poor Mr Starling.” Her face had crinkled itself into amusement. “I fear I have always been mischievous. My father would say this, Mr Starling. ‘Phyllida is my own dear darling girl,’ he would say, ‘but I fear there is mischief in her.’ My father was a man of the cloth, a clergyman in Devon. Did you know that?”
“I want to see Meg.”
“I was the youngest, Mr Starling, and the apple of his eye. I would walk with him across the fields to visit his parishioners, and I was a good girl, good as gold. They would all tell you so; they were unanimous in this opinion. ‘But I fear my Phyllida is mischievous,’ my father would say, ‘and I pray this will not bring her to a Reckoning.’ This was a great preoccupation of my father’s, Mr Starling — the Reckoning that awaits each one of us, at the appointed hour.”
“I want to see Meg!”
It came out of me as a shout, shatteringly loud in the cellar room. Miss Deakins flinched back a little, her mad eyes squinting like a cat’s recoiling in distaste.
I turned at the sound of creaking on the stairs. More ragged shapes had come down behind me — two or three of them, blocking the way. It occurred to me then that I couldn’t get out, unless they should allow it. I expect the same thought occurred to Flitty Deakins; she smiled just a little.
“Who are these people?” I asked her.
“Friends,” she said.
“Of yours?”
“Of hers. We’re all friends of hers. That’s why we’re here.”
“Is Meg alive?” I asked again.
“Unlike the children who went into the surgeon’s stable at Crutched Friars.”
“You know this for a fact?”
“I saw them go in. I have no doubt what was done.”
And here she stood: the eye-witness I had been seeking. Black tatters and poppy-bright glims.
“Experimentation, Mr Starling. Taking them to the brink of death, and beyond. Seeing how far they could go, and still come back. Animals first, and then children. Beggars and waifs, whom no one would miss. An old man went in once, and a girl — some dolly-mop who’d been fished from the Thames. She’d flung herself in, I believe, for some such reason as dolly-mops have when they do these things. Odenkirk had her over his shoulder — she’d drowned herself, but she wasn’t quite dead. I saw that, because she opened her eyes — right at the very end, before the stable door closed behind them.”
She had grown so thin that I wondered if she was eating still at all, or whether all her sustenance now was opium and milk. And in dwindling she had somehow hardened, as if some alchemical process had begun, distilling her down to the purest essence of herself. She was more Flitty Deakins than she had ever been before — and more purely, profoundly mad.
That’s when the first true doubt began to lodge.
“I was to be next, Mr Starling. They’d have done for me next, if I hadn’t escaped. My father’s own dear darling girl, on that table of theirs . . .”
“I need to see her, Miss Deakins. I need to see Meg Nancarrow.”
The ravings trailed into silence. The hooding of mad eyes.
“You need proof that she’s alive. Is that what you’re saying?”
“I’m saying I want to see her.”
“And she wants to see you too, Mr Starling — that’s why we brought you here. She’s grateful for what you tried to do, and she hopes you might do more. But first we need proof from you.”
“Proof of what?”
“Proof that you are with us, Mr Starling. To the uttermost extremity.”