Will Starling

by Ian Weir

  *

  The following afternoon he was lecturing again at Guy’s, this time on surgical practice. Guy’s is a great teaching hospital, the first in London with a lecture theatre constructed especially for the purpose. A cockpit, horseshoe-shaped, with students — at least seventy of them on this particular day — crammed standing into semicircular tiers. Atherton was ever a great favourite and was today in prime twig, prowling the platform and holding forth with great vivacity. He was an artist of the lecture theatre, as great in his way as was Edmund Kean upon the stage. Above his head an articulated skeleton hung grinning from the ceiling on a chain, illuminated by a glow from the skylight as if this were the bones of some desiccated saint ascending. Possibly the exact same notion had occurred to him, for he stopped, breaking off in the middle of a tangent he’d spun onto, concerning the mysterious process by which the living body passes over into death. “And yet another one,” he said, looking up at the blessed remains, “has slipped beyond our healing grasp. But what might bring him back to us, I wonder?”

  Laughter from the students. Mr Atherton was being droll.

  “An organ or two, for a start,” some wag ventured. “P’raps a heart?”

  “And a brain,” called someone else, “assuming he wasn’t Irish.”

  Except Atherton hadn’t quite been joking.

  “Is death such a cause for laughter? You might seek poor Pocock’s opinion on that.”

  The merriment faltered awkwardly, and died.

  Pocock was a surgical student here at Guy’s, or leastways had been until the early hours of last Thursday morning. He had fallen deathly ill following a dissection the day previous, during which he had carelessly nicked his finger on a jagged sliver of bone. Dissections can be perilous if the corpse has begun to putrefy, as this one had. Within a few hours, terrible headaches began. Delirium followed and then haemorrhage, as the blood lost its capacity to clot. A little after midnight, he rallied sufficiently to ask for an aegrotat upon his forthcoming examinations, but just at dawn on the turn of the tide a silent bark set forth into the west, bearing poor Pocock away to an Examination far more rigorous than any the College of Surgeons could ever set. By nine o’clock that morning his devastated family had arrived to claim the mortal remains, before some swine had a chance to dissect them.

  It was possible I suppose that Atherton had felt a fondness for poor Pocock, or more probably some memory connected to Bob Eldritch still haunted. One way or another, he had grown uncharacteristically pensive as he stood there in the glow of the skylight beneath the desiccated saint, with seventy rapt uncertain faces ringed around him. Seventy-one if you count Your Wery Umble, wedged into a corner in the uppermost row, perched like a raven on the battlements and looking down in beady fixity.

  I came quite frequently to Atherton’s lectures, when my schedule as Mr Comrie’s assistant permitted — as it usually did, the Scotchman’s services being in such little demand. I was never a student at Guy’s, and had no right to be here. And yet I did, in my way — I had every right. I had more claim upon Dionysus Atherton than any man present, much as he would deny it. And I had already commenced my study — had been doing so for some months. Magpieing bits and pieces of the man and puzzling him together, for reasons that were not yet entirely clear even to myself. Had I already intuited something profoundly Wrong, in my heart or in my waters or wherever in the human organism such instinct may reside? I’d like to say this was the case — Oh yes indeed, I was onto him from the start — though in truth I doubt it. More likely it was just my personal sense of grievance, writhing and gnawing as grievance does, and leading to this — what, obsession? — why, yes indeed, let’s call it what it was — that had clutched me so tightly in those days and weeks and months since my return to London.

  “What is death?” he was asking now. “Obviously our friend here” — a glance to the desiccated saint — “is well departed. But what about those who are poised at the point of death? And there’ll be scores of those in London — hundreds — even as I stand here speaking. What about those who have slipped just an inch beyond? Or six inches beyond that — or a foot? What about poor Pocock, as he drifted away? Might Science somehow have reached out to him? For we’re nothing but children, in our understanding. We are infants, groping blind. But what lies beyond, for us to discover? And how far might our reach extend?”

  He was looking round at them, but speaking as if to himself. They’d never seen him quite like this before. Neither had I.

  “I was called once, to attend a dying girl. Or not called, precisely — I’d been seeking her. This was years ago, before I became a surgeon. I was not much more than a boy — the same age as many of you.” The glow from the skylight was dying in late afternoon; with it, a shadow had fallen across his face. “They’d laid her on a bed — a lovely thing, eighteen years old — and her eyes were open as I came through the door. I called her name, but she didn’t stir. She was reed-thin and pale as chalk, but I could swear she would in the very next half-second blink, and turn her head, and light slowly in a smile. But she never did. I’d come half a minute too late, you see. She was already gone. Whilst I was hurrying up the stairs, she’d slipped away.”

  Amongst a multitude he was utterly alone, as solitary as a man may be in this world. And in that instant those infinitely blue eyes sought mine.

  “I have never felt more helpless.”

  He spoke directly to me — I swear, as if it were one heart to another. Cos I alone knew who he meant, the doomed young woman he was mourning.

  “Never more helpless,” he repeated, “in all my life.”

  His face was almost haggard, and in that instant it seemed to me that I could understand exactly how he felt. The ache of his loss was my own as well, bringing with it such soft sorrow that I could weep. Then he turned his eyes away from mine, expanding his gaze to include all the others instead.

  “And if there was an instant,” he said, “a single moment that set me on the life’s course I have followed ever since — then that was assuredly the one.”

  There were muted exclamations, and the rumble of rising applause. Oh, they loved him more than ever for this show of vulnerability. Atherton turned and drew a breath, as if he must steady himself against the welling of unmanly emotion. Then he shook the mood away, and like some splendid beast arising from torpor he resumed his leonine pacing, his voice ringing out in its wonted manner, and upon the hour he concluded the lecture — as he always did — by exhorting his students to tear up all the notes that they had been so diligently scribbling. “For Science marches relentlessly. What I have shared with you represents the summit of anatomical knowledge in this moment. But by tomorrow morning, I shall already have left it behind!” They applauded him thunderously, as they always did, and he gleamed in their adulation. You all but expected him to bow and blow a kiss, while roses rained down from the gallery and women went to liquid in the knees. He hadn’t looked at me again, not once.

  A performance.

  There had been a moment. A moment of grief and loss and actual human connection, and he had offered it to me. Then he had reduced it to an actor’s flourish. That may have been the instant I began to understand: I could come to hate Dionysus Atherton enough to desire him dead.

  9

  Uncle Cheese had been at his shop on the morning of his brother Jemmy’s trial.

  This I know for a fact, although admittedly much else of what I am about to tell you — about that day and the night that followed — remains conjecture. Events that transpired at the shop, and subsequently at Crutched Friars and later still at the Three Jolly Cocks. But I ask you now to trust me — or rather, I ask you again. I have researched these events, drawing wherever possible upon eye-witness reports. I have ferreted out such Facts as may be found, for that’s how you must begin, as any Man of Science knows — marshalling your Facts and then constructing upon them a scaffolding of Theory. Assembling it with exquisite care, timber by timber, joist by joist, until
you have an edifice that will stand — and thus you have Truth, or as close to Truth as we may glimpse through the boiling fog of this world. Thus old Copernicus placed the Sun at the very centre, and arranged all the Planets and their Moons about it; and if Copernicus might by this method puzzle together the whole universe in all its infinite clockwork, then surely Your Wery Umble Narrator may explain the movements of half a dozen Londoners during one single day and night.

  And lately I have had much leisure as well, to think it through ten thousand times again, and view it from every conceivable angle. Oh, the long nights Your Wery Umble has had — you can surely take my word on this, even if you choose to question everything else I say — with nothing else to do but pace and ponder. Three steps forwards, turn, and back again. Given a choice I would study instead how to fly like a bird, straight out that narrow window and over the rooftops of London, darting like a swallow. There’s little chance of that, of course — or of anything else at all, beyond these next few weeks.

  But I have such a mighty deal to tell you yet, beginning with that day in late April when Edward Cheshire heard the news of his brother. Heard it, and made a series of decisions, each more ill-judged than the last.

  *

  The shop was in a lane behind Old Street, wedged between a tavern and a low lodging-house, with the three brass balls of the pawnbroker above the door. It was narrow and dim as a brigand’s cave, smelling of Time and cat’s piss and crammed with the flotsam of London: chronometers and snuff-boxes and silver spoons; boots and handkerchees and jackets; trinkets and books and lamps and children’s toys, and pewter mugs and tea services. There were dresses hanging and Turkey rugs rolled up, and a fine set of plate that had strayed somehow from a house in Mayfair, and made its way through endless winding streets to Edward Cheshire’s door. There were bars on the window and a dusty sill within, on which a vast ginger feline sprawled twitching its tail and contemplating with murderous equanimity the songbirds in cages hanging from the rafters. In the back was a counter, where Uncle Cheese examined the treasures that were brought to him and invariably found — alas — that they were not worth nearly what you’d hoped.

  Just few minutes ago he had completed a very different transaction with a dentist’s apprentice from Marble Arch, who had left with a leather pouch that gave a clicking like miniature dice when it was shook. Ned Cheshire conducted such transactions on a confidential basis in the shadowy reaches of the shop, though there was nothing at all to be ashamed of. He sold quality teeth, fine fresh ivories that might be fashioned into first-class dentures, or else implanted straight into sockets; and never mind the bits of gum still sticking. What else would be sticking to a tooth?

  Once the apprentice was gone, he was able to devote his attention to a second customer, who had brought him a silver bracelet. After brief inspection he offered a shilling.

  “A shilling?”

  The customer laughed out loud. Mister Cheshire was clearly having his little joke.

  “Yes, indeed,” said this customer, chortling. “A shilling, Mister Cheshire says — and with a straight face — very good. A guinea, Mister Cheshire, and we’ll call it square.”

  “A shilling, Master Buttons.”

  Master Buttons was a pear-shaped man of seven- or eight-and-twenty, with thinning golden ringlets and scarlet spiderwebbing on his cheeks. He looked like a derelict cherub, down on his luck, and now he reared up in dismay and indignation. No, he exclaimed, he would not credit it, for this bracelet had belonged to his mother. His voice swooped into a tragic register. “My Sainted Ma, God rest her soul. The only keepsake I possess, and you say to me a shilling?”

  Master Buttons had been upon the London stage. He had in fact been celebrated in his prime, which had been round about the age of twelve. There had been at the time a brief vogue for Infant Prodigies, and Master Buttons had been prominent amongst them. He played one memorable season at Drury Lane, essaying with remarkable success several of the great roles of Shakespeare, being slender and lovely in those days, with a clear treble voice for which he cultivated the hint of a lisp. As Henry V he would bring the house down with his ringing declamation: “Cwy God for Hawwy, England and Thaint George!” There had been prints in shop windows, and a carriage to bear him to the theatre, and nothing in this world that could hold him back from greater glories yet to come — excepting only the fatal blunder of maturing, which against all sensible advice he committed. Two years later he was playing Harlequin for ten shillings a week on a fourth-rate circuit based in Blackpool.

  Now he stood in Edward Cheshire’s pawn-shop, breathing out gusts of gin and grievance. “My mother’s bracelet for a shilling, Mister Cheshire? I should sooner hang myself. I should sooner open a razor and slit my throat!”

  Uncle Cheese tilted his head to consider. The perfect round lenses of his spectacles caught the light and flashed. A razor? Yes, of course he had a razor. “Prime vorkmanship, Master Buttons, wery sharp and clean. Or else — here’s a thought — a bit of twine, which I could trade you for your bracelet, even up. A lovely bit of twine, six foot long. All you’d need’s a rafter and a chair.”

  Master Buttons drew himself up, spluttering. Edward Cheshire was a vampire! He was a monster of unfeeling. Linwood Buttons would not relinquish his mother’s bracelet for anything less than half a crown!

  Uncle Cheese had been musing for some moments about how much he would like to put holes in Master Buttons’s teeth. He possessed a new device for this, acquired from a dentist who had run up ruinous losses at Old Crocky’s gaming house in Piccadilly. It was the most beautiful object Ned Cheshire had ever possessed: a dental engine, adapted from a foot-powered spinning wheel, with a tall thin stand like a fishing-rod and a drill hanging from a cross-arm. It inspired in him a reverence for human aspiration; he caught his breath just to look at it. With such a device he could excavate each tooth in Master Buttons’s head, one by one, after which he could pull them out with his dental key — a device like a wooden-handled corkscrew with a tiger claw on the end, fashioned by a man in Leiden. A much more modest contrivance, but effective.

  Within the year, Uncle Cheese intended to have saved enough money to set up as a dental professional, with a painting of a tooth hanging over his door, after which he would employ both devices on a daily basis for the rest of his life. He would move to a provincial town to do so, possibly Bristol. Grow affluent and sleek and marry a merchant’s fat stupid daughter who would bear him sons. He could practically shiver with anticipation, just thinking of it.

  “Take the shilling,” he said now, “or else go somewheres else, and take that trinket with you. Put it back on the coster-barrow where you prigged it, you sack of wapours. Your mother? Pah! I’ll varrant your mother’s alive to this day — down by the dockside, looking for sailors. A gleam in her eye and three rotten teeth in her head.”

  Master Buttons had gone quite pale. For an instant, there was a wild look on his phizog: the look of a man you might not wish to cross so cavalierly. But at that moment Meg Nancarrow came through the door, with a suddenness that brought the vast ginger feline arching to his feet.

  “They’ve bunged him up, the bastards.”

  “My brother, you mean?”

  “They come for him this morning. Six months!”

  Uncle Cheese exclaimed, for this was dreadful news. His brother, scarce able to stand, condemned to Durance Vile — six months, with no one to care for him, and Edward Cheshire’s half-crown in his head. And what of Nedward C. himself, with money loaned to half the shirkers in London, and no one to collect it? But Meg had come to him, for succour. Dark-eyed Meg, all alone in the world, and of course Uncle Cheese was precisely the man who could help her. He was more than a match for so many of those who held themselves above him. Oh, yes indeed. Edward was much wilier than they realized.

  And Edward knew Secrets.

  He placed his hands upon Meg’s shoulders. She shuddered, putting him in mind of a bird he once found as a child, fallen from it
s nest. A sparrow, its heart frantic between his palms, quivering with the sheer distress of being a tiny bird in such a world.

  “Leave it to Brother Ned,” he said.

  And all this while Master Buttons had stood forgotten — exactly as he had stood for the past fifteen years. Watching Ned Cheshire from the cat’s-piss-scented shadows, his grievance bansheeing inside him. Keep one glim upon Master Buttons; that is my advice to you. Master Buttons had never in his brief half-hour of glory played Iago or Richard III, had never essayed one of the truly malignant villains.

  But he could certainly start now.

  *

  In St Michael’s Chapel at Westminster Abbey there is a monument to Lady Elizabeth Nightingale, who died in childbirth aetat. twenty-seven. In the statue, Lady Elizabeth swoons against Joseph, her husband, as Death slithers from his subterranean cell beneath them, aiming his deadly dart and reaching out his bony claw to seize her by the ankle. The Rattling Fellow is serpentine and stark; frozen in marble he moves with a clatter and a terrible swift coiling, and poor Joseph raises one arm in a desperate bid to ward him off.

  This image rose to Atherton’s mind as the coach bore him back to Crutched Friars. The night was foul. Rain slanted in torrents, lashing the coachman and volleying like musket-fire against the sides, while Atherton sat brooding within. He had been this evening to attend a woman in Mayfair who was afflicted by a painful swelling behind one knee — the wife of a baronet, no less, with extensive holdings in Buckinghamshire and five thousand a year. It was an aneurysm of the popliteal artery; Atherton had no doubt of this as he probed and smiled and radiated blue-eyed reassurance, keeping his thoughts very much to himself. Without surgery the artery would assuredly burst, with fatal consequences. And the surgery was certainly possible. He could tie the artery off, leaving the circulation to reroute itself. The procedure had been known for upwards of three decades; Atherton had performed it a dozen times himself, his successes including a coachman who had recovered and lived on for nearly six years, before expiring just the other day of unrelated causes, upon which he had been duly buried in St George-in-the-East churchyard — the selfsame coachman whose resurrection had been bungled by Little Hollis and Jemmy Cheese. Atherton had been keeping track of his former patient’s whereabouts through a loose network of informers, as surgeons often did. He had intended to cut open the leg and investigate post mortem the results of that operation — to identify exactly how the healing had proceeded, and which veins and arteries had grafted themselves into service — a valuable scientific opportunity now squandered, with the coachman lying deep again and putrefying apace.