Will Starling

by Ian Weir

  Wind agitates the trees. They creak their consternation, as if appalled that such wickedness exists in the world. As the body flops onto the ground, the coachman’s face peeps out of the shroud, a bruised pupa unpeeled in its grim cocoon. It is the faces that haunt Jemmy: blue-veined and slack-jawed and ghastly white. It seems to him there is something he ought to do or say, if only he could think what it is.

  He had confessed this once to Meg. She’d been drinking gin that day, and laughed at him. “Tell them to rise up and walk,” she had said. Meg would get that way on the blue ruin. She is angry, Meg — the angriest person he has ever known. She keeps the anger stoppered up, but down deep she is seething and blue ruin uncorks the bottle.

  Jemmy loads the coachman into the sack, and they shovel the dirt back into the grave. There is something special about this one, it seems. One of the surgeons, Mr Atherton, is particularly keen to have this one upon his dissecting table, and is paying extra for the privilege — six pounds, half again the going rate. Jemmy hasn’t asked why, though he guesses the surgeon once performed some procedure on the subject, and wants to analyze the results. Surgeons are known to keep track of former patients for years, awaiting their chance.

  Four pounds for a Large — that is the normal price. Things come in three other sizes besides: Large Small, Small, and Foetus. By definition a Small is less than three foot long, and such items are priced out by the inch. Jemmy Cheese hates harvesting a Small; these haunt him worst of all. Dead children come to him in the night. Spectral waifs with empty eyes, scrabbling with their fingers at his window. He will wake up in a panic, crying out. Sometimes Meg is angry at this, but other times she is soft. “There’s nothing to fear,” she will say. “It’s all right, Jemmy. You’re safe with Meg.”

  Not long ago she had thought she might be having a child of her own. Jemmy’s heart had soared with this, and he begged her not to go to the Old Woman two streets over, who took care of such matters.

  “How could we have a child, the likes of us?” she had said to him. She said it savage, being on the blue ruin that day.

  “I’d look after you both,” he said.

  “You?” she said. “Look after a child? And what makes you so sure it’s yours to begin with?”

  That had dished him, a little. He’d had to go out for a walk, to consider. But he came back thinking it would be all right.

  “I’d look after it anyways,” he told her. “It might be happier, being someone else’s. Prob’ly be smarter.”

  She swore at him for saying so, but her eyes went soft and afterwards she held him close. A few weeks later, when she bled and lost it, Meg was just as sad as he was. She has been sad ever since.

  Meg is near as clever as Jemmy’s brother Ned. It makes Jemmy marvel, to think how someone so clever would stay with him. She reads books, and from time to time has tried fitfully to teach Jemmy to read too, but she lacks the patience for teaching, and he can never seem to grasp the knack. The letters won’t stay put, the way they do for clever people. Just when he has a few of them pinned down, they’ll slide away and reverse themselves.

  But Jemmy has other qualities. He’s loyal to a fault — that’s what Meg says — and remarkably strong. Meg loves the strength of him. At night she’ll nestle against it, as if she were a child herself.

  There is no bully to protect her, not since she left Mother Peachum’s night-house, where she had lodged ’til taking up with Jemmy, and where the bruisingest bully in the Seven Dials kept watch over the girls. But once when a man treated her badly, Jemmy found out who it was, and went round to set him straight. Jemmy is a gentle soul, and dislikes the other job that he does for his brother, collecting money that Ned has loaned out to shirkers. But he is sixteen stone and a half, and once on a wager he lay on his back while a cart was rolled across his chest. You would need to stand on an apple-crate to look Jemmy in the eye, which you would not want to do when he is roused. He was roused the day he went round to see that man, whom he set exceedingly straight indeed. Word got round, and since then men in general have been very much nicer to Meg.

  “’S go,” hisses Little Hollis. They’ve been here too long already, and cannot afford to be seen.

  A Resurrectionist had been lynched in Dublin, just two months previous. Battered unrecognizable and strung from a lamppost. That’s what a mob will do, if they once lay hands — and it’s all because of Judgement Day. On Judgement Day you will rise up to meet your Maker, and you’re supposed to meet Him intact. But you can’t do that, can you, if you’ve been dug up and dissected? You can’t be resurrected whole. The Trumpet will sound and there you’ll be, stripped down like the leftover carcass of a Christmas goose. That’s why there exists such horror of grave-robbing, and such loathing of the Doomsday Men.

  Jemmy’s premonition has become a knot of dread. Something is amiss — he is sure of it, now — but what? The grave itself? Perhaps the pebbles are not quite right. He hesitates to look, and starts at the sight of his own shadow. The old whore moon is out again, behind him.

  Little Hollis is on his way, scuttling swift and hunched. His arse is hiked high as if raised by frequent kickings, and it is broader than his shoulders. This gives him a frankly verminous air, as Jemmy might remark were he given to making hurtful observations about his friends, which he is not. Hollis is halfway to the gate, now; Noddy Sprockett will be waiting for them just outside, with his cart. Ten minutes earlier they had heard the clip-clop of Old Jeroboam’s hooves arriving.

  There are flowers on a nearby grave, a sprig of them tied with ribbon. On an impulse Jemmy stoops; he will take these home to Meg. She’ll receive them carelessly, but secretly she’ll be pleased.

  In turning, Jemmy sees them. Two spectral figures, rising in the moonlight.

  The dead. He knows it at once, with an icy clutching certainty; he has always known it must come to this. The dead are rising from their graves to take revenge. They will seize him and drag him down, with the Privy Witch and the Chimbley Fiend.

  Little Hollis, hearing his cry, looks back. “Christ!” exclaims Hollis. “’S the Watch!”

  But it isn’t, nor revenants neither, issuing from the tomb. Much worse: these are cousins of the deceased coachman.

  This will come out later, at the trial. They’d been delegated to keep watch in the graveyard, against precisely such depredations. A third had been with them when the grave-robbers arrived, who after a swift exchange of urgent whispers — gripping their cudgels and weighing the odds, but misliking their chances against the big one — had slipped away to alert the coachman’s other friends, who were gathered at a wake just down the road.

  Wrathful shouts beyond the wall. A whinny and a clatter of hooves, receding. Old Jeroboam has stirred himself to desperate exertion, and is bearing Noddy Sprockett off to safety. Little Hollis flees the other way, flinging his shovel aside. He moves at astonishing speed for one so elevated of arse.

  That leaves Jemmy, standing frozen in the moonlight with a corpse upon his shoulder, as the coachman’s friends pour through the gate. Four of them at first, then more, and more.

  He wants to say: “I’ll put your friend back in the ground — I swear, upon my davy. I’ll dig up someone else.”

  “Kill him!”

  He wants to say: “No, wait. Just — please. I need to take these flowers home to Meg.”

  “Kill the bastard!”

  He drops the corpse and raises his fists. But they’re on top of him now, and they cudgel him down.

  3

  Let me tell you about surgeons.

  It was different in the high Georgian days, when the great John Hunter was setting out on his career. Half a century ago, physicians might stake some claim to respectability, with their gold-topped canes and formal education. But surgeons? Jumped-up barbers, who couldn’t aspire beyond a shop in an alleyway, and a red rag wrapped around a pole. Hackers and dolts who had never been near a university. They learned by apprenticing themselves to older hackers and longe
r-established dolts; advanced the cause of doltishness by learning nothing new; were good for little but pulling teeth and setting bones, and oftentimes not even that.

  But by the time John Hunter’s heart failed him in 1793, and the great man discovered the Great Secret, much had changed. Surgery was becoming a Science, with all that follows from such a transformation: social standing, and coin of the realm, and patients — God bless ’em — who survived. Hunter was renowned across Europe for his anatomical learning; he owned a fine house in Earls Court and leased another in Leicester Square. Now, just a few years later, a surgeon might set his sights higher still, Mr Astley Cooper being the pole-star by which all brilliant and ambitious young men — such as Dionysus Atherton — set their course. Astley Cooper, who was rumoured to be verging upon a peerage, with an income exceeding twenty thousand pounds a year, and a country estate in Gadebridge, and a large house in Conduit Street, and a servant who earned six hundred a year in bribes alone, from patients seeking an appointment.

  Alec Comrie was better than all of them.

  Comrie lived over a gin-shop in Cripplegate. He had two rooms, a sitting room and a surgery, let from a woman named Missus Maggs who kept the gin-shop and attended as well to housekeeping necessities, when the spirit moved. He also had a boy who assisted him. This boy slept in an attic storage room and never made a sixpence in bribes, as he would tell you quite cheerfully. “Not a sixpence, your worship, nor threepence neither. Not so much in fact as a single fucking ha’penny, if you’ll pardon my plain speaking. But I’m thankful, cos I’d sooner be an honest man. Now, are you a gen’lman as fancies from time to time a friendly game of hazard, to while away an afternoon?”

  You’d do best to decline the offer.

  He cut a fine little figure, the surgeon’s boy, particularly if you saw him at a distance. A Rainbow, in fact, togged out in the latest fashion, or nearabouts. But the togs grew more threadbare the closer you came, and he himself drew nearer without ever growing much taller, the whole of him topping out two inches shy of five foot. He had a curious dark face, all triangles, and a silk snotter swiped from a stall just this morning, and a winning smile that he shone at you like sunrise. He also had three cups, and a pea that was assuredly in one of them, and you only had to watch his nimble fingers keenly to be sure — “oh, bad luck, sir!” — which one.

  His name was Will Starling, and he is Your Wery Umble Narrator.

  So here we are at last, you and I: face to face. Honoured to make your acquaintance, I am sure. You will picture my bow, and accept my heartfelt hope that I do not disappoint.

  Mr Comrie had taken the rooms when he and I returned from Europe. He’d been a military surgeon — seven years on the Peninsula with Wellington, who esteemed him greatly. There was a story, indeed, that the Duke had a nickname for him — the Scotch Dreadnought — bestowed after Comrie had performed with brilliant competence a highly delicate operation upon the ducal tackle, which (just between the two of us) was mighty in dimension.

  You’d want to take that particular story with a grain of salt, since I was the one who’d made it up. Still, Mr Comrie’s prowess had been the stuff of legend — after the Battle of Salamanca he had performed nearly two hundred amputations in twenty-four hours. That is the truth; I speak upon my davy. One hundred and eighty seven it was, to be exact, and I know this cos I counted. He could have your leg off in two minutes flat, and your arm in half that time, speed being the only mercy with no way to dull the pain. Orderlies would stack the limbs on either side: trotters on one pile, flappers on another. When Mr Comrie needed both hands free he’d clamp the knife bechuxt his teeth.

  I recollect a young Lieutenant on the morning after Badajoz, propped against the wall of a barn that was serving as a field hospital, staring in bleak bemusement at his right leg. It started out well enough, the trotter, before veering off at an extravagant angle. The break was above the knee, which would mean a disarticulation at the hip; Mr Comrie told him so, blunt as a slaughterman knocking mutton on the head.

  “Will I die?” asked the young Lieutenant.

  “Unless I operate directly.”

  There was no other way, with a break as bad as this one. With any break at all, really. You had to take the limb.

  “I am at the Gate,” said the Lieutenant. It seemed he had a poetic cast. “I lie at the Black Gate of Death itself.”

  “But I am on my way,” said Mr Comrie.

  He had gone to university in Edinburgh, although he had been brought up somewhere farther north — I’ve a notion it was Dunfermline, not that I could tell you much about it, having never been north of Lichfield myself. In moments of urgency he grew especially Scotch.

  “Oilskin,” he said to the Orderlies.

  We were outside, and a foul grey rain was pissing down. In such conditions they’d hold an oilskin over the surgeon’s head, and rain would drum paradiddles as he cut.

  “Knife,” he said to Your Wery Umble.

  The young Lieutenant had begun to weep.

  “Here I come,” said Mr Comrie. “I come wi’ steel and shrieking. But I’ll bring you back.”

  He did it, too. Five minutes to take the leg, cos a disarticulation was always more difficult. The Lieutenant swooned halfway through, but woke up afterwards. Two weeks later he was sitting up on a bed of straw, losing money to Wm Starling. Last I heard he was back in London, reciting ballads on street-corners.

  That is the truth. So — in case you wondered — is what I said about the size of Wellington’s tackle. But as it doesn’t concern the story I’m telling you now, you’re free to forget I mentioned it.

  After Waterloo, Mr Comrie resolved to build a civilian practice in London. “A matter of time,” he was saying, on this particular day in April of 1816. “That’s all it is.”

  He wasn’t normally a man for the syllables. But he had a way of repeating things to himself, as if saying them doggedly enough would make them come about.

  “Patients will come.”

  “’Course they will,” I agreed, gamely.

  “Just a question of time.”

  “It is.”

  “And they’ll be walking up those stairs.”

  He was in his surgery, with Your Wery Umble on the landing, looking in. The surgery was Spartan, and clean — he was a stickler for cleanliness, believing that patients did better in such conditions. It was just a notion of his, unsupported by Science, but when Mr Comrie took a conviction it set like mortar. There were two wooden chairs and a wooden examining bench, with a box of sawdust kept underneath to soak up blood, which might otherwise seep through the floorboards and drip onto the head of Missus Maggs in the gin-shop below. Against one wall was a table with surgical instruments, laid out on a green baize cloth. Your Wery Umble would clean these at the end of every day, and frequently after each individual procedure; Alec Comrie was a workman, and a workman respects his tools. Above the table was a cabinet, containing bottles and vials — ointments and liniments, some alcohol, and a small supply of laudanum, though Mr Comrie did not set much stock by it, laudanum being of limited efficacy against substantial pain. He took the view that pain was the patient’s concern, to be coped with on a private basis.

  On the walls were anatomical drawings: a cross-section of the brain, and human figures with skin stripped away to reveal the inner organs. Mr Comrie was in the process of supplementing this collection as I watched from the doorway, hanging a framed drawing in a prominent position: a black-lead sketch by the surgical artist Charles Bell, depicting a gunshot wound of the scrotum sustained at the Battle of Corunna. Mr Comrie had treated several such scrotums himself. The injury was more common than you’d like to think, being normally sustained when Tom Lobster knelt with bits a-dangle to fire. He had found the drawing yesterday at a street stall in Holborn, and had exclaimed with heartfelt admiration.

  It was in truth superb. Bell’s artistry was like Mr Comrie’s own: detailed, meticulous, and appalling. The sketch was a close-up view, just thi
ghs and abdomen, with the horribly swollen scrotum in the middle. Very much, indeed, like an immense fig in a still-life painting, except a fig will not normally have an entry wound on one side and an exit wound on the other, with a tail of fig-guts protruding. It had its own weird beauty; the question was whether it should be hanging on the wall.

  I asked this question gingerly. You were careful when you questioned Alec Comrie.

  He bristled. “What’s wrong with it?”

  Nothing, I assured him. Just — the wall of his surgery. Where patients would come, in a state of trepidation to begin with.

  Other surgeons had skeletons, he objected. Atherton had a skull.

  “Still,” I said. “A scrotum.”

  At length he gave a grudging nod. “Fair enough,” he conceded. “The ladies.”

  I had actually been thinking about the gentlemen. One look at that particular scrotum was enough to send you fleeing down the stairs to the gin-shop. But I didn’t push the point, and after a moment he took the drawing down again, setting it reluctantly on one of the chairs.

  “They will come,” he said again.

  “They will.”

  “A question of time.”

  “That’s all it is.”

  “I will learn the trick of it.”

  He meant the skill that men such as Astley Cooper had. Atherton too. Both of them could radiate such empathy that patients breathed deep and unclenched their sphincters, at least until the instruments came out. When you went to Atherton’s surgery in Crutched Friars, you met with earnest reassurance. Here above the gin-shop was a growling Scotchman with a bonesaw.

  “I know my shortcomings, William,” he muttered. With a shame-faced look towards Your Wery Umble — as if he was letting me down. Which he’d never done, not once, in all the years we’d been together. And never would do, neither, in everything that was to follow.

  “I know my shortcomings, and I can change.”

  But of course he couldn’t. We never can, can we?

  That’s when we heard raised voices, down below. Missus Maggs, demanding the business of some newcomer, and a woman insisting that she must see the surgeon.