Will Starling

by Ian Weir

“Will he pay?”

  “He will.”

  “How much?”

  “Five pound.”

  “That’s all? For the breaking of Jemmy’s head? For six months, rotting in gaol?”

  “The man is cold, Meg. There is vinter at the wery heart of Mr Dionysus Atherton. But the five pound is yours, whole and entire. Ipso facto, Meg, and totus tuus — I make no claim.”

  He fished from his weskit pocket a tattered note, and slipped it into her hand. Discreetly, of course — you didn’t flash five-pound notes in a place like this. Their fingers brushed together, skin against naked skin.

  He discovered it pleased him to have given her so much; it brought on a feeling of varmth and wirtue. Whatever else was said about Edward Cheshire, he was a man who stood by his family. He would be happier still to stand Meg against the wall outside, and hike her skirts, cos he had often imagined Meg Nancarrow dancing naked in the moonlight, and imagined as well a devil dancing with her, who looked most remarkable like Nedward Cheshire. But this of course was another proposition entirely, and must needs be negotiated with care.

  “Five pounds,” she repeated, incredulous. “And nothing more?”

  “Upon my davy.”

  “Go back to the bastard. Threaten him.”

  “I have done, Meg, what there is to be done. Five pounds is all he vill give us.”

  He raised his narrow shoulders in an eloquent shrug, expressive of the essential futility of being human. As befitted a man with Latin, Uncle Cheese was capable of great Stoicism, especially in the face of others’ misfortune. You could imagine him in a toga, masticating grapes.

  Meg’s eyes narrowed like a cat’s.

  “You wouldn’t be lying to me, Cheese?”

  “No, Meg.”

  “You wouldn’t be chousing me, and holding back?”

  The very notion cut him to the quick; he said so. He was her true friend — truer than ever, now that she was alone in the world, with poor Jemmy sent away, and scant odds besides that he would ever be his old self again.

  “And what if he isn’t?” Meg cried. “I’ll have to look after him somehow. I’ll need money for that.”

  For a moment there was the catch of despair in her voice. Behind them, by the door, the blind man lifted his head. The mongrel dog at his feet had drifted into a doze and made tiny whiffling sounds, expressive of the pursuit of rabbits.

  Uncle Cheese grew more Roman than ever. “These are the facts of the matter,” he said, “as ve must face up to. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. Sunt lacrimae, Meg, sunt lacrimae — there are tears for such things. But I make a pledge to you.”

  His heart brimmed with earnest intention. He placed his hand on her knee.

  “Vhatever you need, Meg, in this time of desolation. Turn to Nedward, and Nedward is there.”

  “You will do three things for me,” she said.

  “Name them, my girl.”

  “Remove that hand, before I mistake it for a spider. Stand up. And fuck off into the night.”

  Ned Cheshire’s solicitude curdled.

  “You vant to think, my girl,” he said. “Think on how you make your living, vhen you’re not serving ale. Vith men, Meg — and don’t think Edward Cheshire doesn’t know it. Men far less presentable than Edward C. himself. Think on that — then think some more. Poor Jemmy in his current plight, and Nedward offering friendship. Brother Ned, as owns a shop, and changes his linen by the week. Edward Cheshire, as is nigh upon the estate of dentistry. And you think yourself too fine? The likes of you, Meg? Miss Nobuddy from Nowhere — the draggle-tail descendant of common sluts and criminals — a father hung for house-breaking and two brothers both transported, and you yourself upon your knees for any man with a silver coin. You might vell think again.”

  Meg regarded him with the bitter juniper clarity of gin. “You’ll have your weasand slit,” she said. “That is how it ends for you, Cheese. It comes to me — I can see it.”

  Despite himself, he felt a chill. “Don’t you threaten me.”

  “No threat. Just a certainty I’m having.”

  “Nemo me impune, my girl. Nobody.”

  “Slit from ear to ear. Lying like a dead cat in a ditch. Pray God it’s many good years off.”

  11

  This had taken place on a Wednesday — so I firmly believe. Edward Cheshire’s visit to Crutched Friars, and his subsequent meeting with Meg at the Three Jolly Cocks. I hadn’t gone outside on Wednesday myself, having experienced a day of the Black Dog’s visitation, when the world was very bleak and rising did not seem possible. On such days I quite often thought of my friend Danny Littlejohn.

  Danny Littlejohn was a Londoner, like myself. He had taken the shilling and sailed to join the fighting in the Spring of ’13, not long before the Battle of Vitoria. In due course he arrived at a field hospital to seek attention for a shrapnel wound — deep enough to need sewing up, but too shallow to send him safely home — and we hit it off most remarkable. Long Will, he would call me.

  He was two years older, with a loose-limbed swagger and a larking exuberance. He’d get letters from home in a girl’s looping hand, full of the latest news from the Metropolis — news now two or three months old, of course — which he’d call out while sprawling by the cook-fire of an evening, or leaning on a shovel while someone else dug a latrine pit. “A whale seen swimming in the Thames,” he would announce, “as far upriver as Richmond.” Or: “An entire estate at Hertfordshire changes hands at Old Crocky’s gaming house — two hunnert acres, with great house and outbuildings, and a grotto in a garden complete with hermit.” He gave us to understand that these letters were sent by a sweetheart who pined away for him in Bethnal Green, or possibly Shoreditch. Her name seemed variable as well, being sometimes Sal and sometimes Bess and occasionally Dorcas, thus raising the possibility that he had several different sweethearts all pining in separate districts. Personally I suspected the letters came from his sister, and thought him a fearful liar on the subject of sweethearts. I also thought what a fine thing it was to have a sister — or anyone else — who would care enough to write so often.

  If the two of us were together, this performance might become a comic turn, such as you might see between songs at the Coal Hole back home.

  “A mermaid has been offered for sale,” Danny might announce, “at Billingsgate fish market.”

  “A mermaid?” I would exclaim. “But surely not!”

  “Which on closer investigation revealed itself to be a species of seahorse.”

  “Oh! How disappointing for the fishmonger, Daniel, whose price was surely knocked down something cruel.”

  “But more disappointing still for the seahorse, Long Will.”

  “For the seahorse?”

  “To have been so very nearly a mermaid.”

  Then we’d fall about in helpless hilarity, while old campaigners eyed us sourly and someone ended in chucking a clod of dirt. But we amused ourselves most wonderfully, and often would speculate about the times that lay ahead when we’d return home to London together. “The likes of us, Long Will,” Danny would say, “we don’t accept our future as it comes. We pluck it, like an apple from a tree.”

  *

  On Thursday the world grew lighter again, a little. So I rose and went round to the room in Holborn to look in upon Miss Smollet. I found her quite solitary — the Badger had left town.

  “Mr Starling,” she exclaimed, seeming genuinely glad to see me — or leastways to see someone.

  She had hardly gone out since the events at Fountain Court, or such was the impression I formed. She smiled gaily, but it was stretched and thin, and I had the notion she had not slept well. “Come in,” she said. “Here, would you like to sit? Sit down, if you like.” She cleared a tangle of clothing from a wooden chair, looked vaguely round for somewhere to put it, and added it to the tangle on the bed.

  Birdsong floated from below. The room was above a bird-fancier’s shop, which was strung like a Yuletide tree with birds in cages,
hanging side-by-side from the rafters and lined up along the shelves. In daylight hours the whole house rang with them — and smelled, of course — and Annie Smollet in her attic perch might have been the topmost item on display.

  “Look at me,” she said suddenly, reaching a hand to her hair. “I must look a fright.”

  She did not. She was tousled and unpainted in a plain cotton dress, which inspired in me notions of shepherdesses, and sylvan glades. Not that a glade ever looked like the room in its present condition, though this was neither here nor there; clothes strewn with even more abandon than before, and the sour linen waft competing vigorously against the birdstink. Apparently the Badger had been the tidy one.

  “She went to Chatham,” Miss Smollet said.

  The Badger had met a gentleman of means, and been offered a position. I didn’t ask for details, though presumably the position was horizontal, with two or three rooms and an allowance to go with it — generous or otherwise, depending on the gentleman. It would continue ’til the gentleman grew to find her tedious, or else his wife smoked out the arrangement, at which point the Badger would be home again, such being the way these things normally ended.

  “So here I been,” Miss Smollet said. “All Alone.”

  She had a habit of speaking in Capital Letters, as if stepping from her own life and onto the stage, where Everything was Much More Dramatic. But she meant it too.

  I’d brought another sleeping draught: my pretext for coming. “In case you still need it,” I said, offering it up.

  But she shook her head tightly, and said something odd. “I don’t want to sleep here. Not in this room — not alone.” Then she shuddered away a shadow that had fallen. “Take me out,” she said suddenly. “Take me walking.”

  The day was soft with the promise of summer yet to come; by afternoon it would be genuinely warm. You could imagine a blue sky beyond the brown haze, and the breeze would surely have been fragrant with blossoms if it hadn’t been wafting through London. Miss Smollet took my arm, and we set off amidst the hurly-burly. She wore a pale green dress and a shawl to match, and her cheeks were abloom with rouge.

  I couldn’t tell you exactly what we said, that morning. Mainly I recollect a sense of happiness. At one point she asked me to tell her about my adventures in the War, and I said this was not something I spoke of very much. When she asked why this should be, I pointed to a man on the corner juggling plates, and grew quite eager to watch. A while after that we came across a Punch and Judy man, a crowd clustering round, so I paid his boy a penny for each one of us, and angled us round to a better vantage.

  “Who doesn’t like a Punch and Judy show?” I asked Miss Smollet cheerfully.

  In fact, I did know someone who didn’t care for Punch. Mr Comrie took a jaundiced view, wanting to know what was so frolicsome about a big-nosed homicidal puppet who would cudgel his wife and baby to death, exclaiming: “That’s the way to do it!” But Mr Comrie for all his virtues did not have much sense of humour.

  Danny Littlejohn had actually worked for a Punch and Judy man — he’d been the boy who worked up the crowd and took the coins — and could talk about it at considerable length. Punch and Judy was actually a very moral play, he would explain, for it demonstrates to wives that they should try to live in peace with their husbands. That claim may be open to debate, but it is undeniable that the play proceeds with Mr Punch tricking Jack Ketch the hangman into hanging himself — which may not be moral exactly, but is Wery Ironical Indeed, and counts as the next closest thing. And of course the play ends with Mr Punch cudgelling the Devil to death, which is the morallest act ever performed by man, or puppet.

  I knew I should not be thinking about my friend, here in the bright brawling clamour of spring sunshine, with gales of laughter rising up and Mr Punch laying energetically about him. It was the sort of reminiscence that could bring the Black Dog skulking back round the corner, so I looked to Miss Smollet instead, and that’s when I saw the expression on her face, tight with visceral recollection.

  I was an oaf. Worse than an oaf, I was a villain — cos this was exactly what she’d enjoy best, wasn’t it? Scarcely a week after her experience at Fountain Court: a crowd hooting and braying as Mr Punch walloped his wife.

  “Christ,” I muttered, instantly ashamed.

  “It’s fine,” Miss Smollet said. “It’s quite good.”

  “Let’s go.”

  “I think — all right. Yes.”

  She gripped my arm tightly as I steered us away, past a clutch of apprentices who whistled appreciatively at her passing and a legless old beggar who sat scowling in a wooden box with wheels. The crowd thinned a little as we angled onto one of the side-streets leading east, and Miss Smollet was almost vivacious again by the time we stopped to buy a bag of ginger nuts from a street-seller.

  “Tell me more news,” she said.

  As we’d walked I’d been babbling of titbits I’d read about, or earwigged in coffee houses. Now I dredged up an anecdote about something Beau Brummell had said, so memorable that it has since gone out of my head completely. Then I worked up my nerve.

  “Oh — and the most wonderful artefack was found near the London docks, by a young man walking.”

  I drew it out: a small silver locket on a chain. “It put me in mind of you,” I said, with my best attempt at a casual air.

  “The way it’s been dented up, you mean?”

  “No!” Though it was tarnished and battered worse than I remembered. “Look inside,” I said.

  Inside was a miniature portrait of Miss Annie Smollet herself.

  It wasn’t, of course. And now that I looked again, I saw that the resemblance wasn’t as strong as I’d fancied. But she had fair hair too, this girl in the locket, and an openness in her smile: a look of fresh hope dawning that was the very pith and essence of Annie Smollet.

  “You found this on the riverbank?”

  “I did. Washed in with the tide.”

  A lie, though hardly the worst that was ever told since Satan came sidling slantways through the Garden. In fact I had spied it at a coster-stall on the Embankment, kept by a wicked old extortionist who demanded three shillings. Subsequently he turned his back to extort another customer, which was an error on his part.

  “You are Very Sweet,” said Miss Smollet, bending for me to slip it round her neck.

  We had stopped at a corner of Newgate Street, not far from the foot of Snow Hill, down which a multitude would pour on Monday mornings when there were hangings — not that this was in my thoughts at the moment. There was a movement towards me then, and a scent of oranges. Lips brushed whisper-soft against my cheek, and I swear to the God who waits to damn me: Wm Starling could have dropped down dead right there and then, and in that instant counted his life well-lived. This may help to explain why I didn’t hear clearly at first what she was saying to me, her voice gone suddenly quite low.

  “He come to see me last night.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Outside my window. Bob Eldritch.”

  Of all the names she might have uttered, she’d come up with the very one. The one that could snap my head round and leave me staring, flummoxed.

  “Miss Smollet — Bob Eldritch is dead.”

  She summoned a small, strained laugh. “’Course he is,” she said. “I know that.”

  “So it was just a dream.”

  “I suppose.”

  The colour had crept up into her cheeks. She didn’t meet my gaze.

  “What did he do?” I found myself asking. “In the dream.”

  “He scratched to be let in,” she said. “Scrabbling with his fingers at the glass, with such a look on his face — as if he’d break your heart, just looking. Then he opened his mouth, and screamed.”

  “Screamed? How do you mean?”

  Miss Smollet summoned another small laugh.

  “Have you ever heard a peacock?”

  A Curious Incident in Whitefriars Lane

  The London Record
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  2nd May, 1816

  Reports are circulating of several strange encounters with a Staring Man in the vicinity of St Mary-le-Bow Churchyard, all of them taking place in the hours of darkness. Most recently, a young woman was accosted by the man while returning to her lodgings after midnight. The woman, identifying herself as Summut Sal — “cos I’m known to take a glass of summut, sir, if a gen’lman should be offering” — shared her story with The Record at a public house in the district. In her own words:

  “I was on my way from Never-You-Mind when ’ee comes up saying, ‘Would I take ’im in?’ I sez exackly what you’d imagine, which I won’t repeat, but ’ee starts to follow and ’oo can say what would of ’appened except some mates of mine come by and that drove ’im off. What’s that? Well, of course they saw ’im too; they ent blind. Eyes big as eggs, starting right out of ’is phizog — that’s the first thing you noticed. A mate of mine, she sez, ‘that’s ’im, all right, that’s the Boggle-Eyed Man.’ She said there was another girl as seen him two nights earlier. ’Ee said to this other girl something very queer indeed. ’Ee said ’ee didn’t have a nome to go to, though ’ee should of done. ‘A nome as snug and quiet as could be,’ ’ee said, ‘with fine strong walls and a roof above that should last ’til the end of the world, except they stole it from ’im.’”

  We would not normally have offered up this information for public consumption, being uncertain as to the reliability thereof. But here the tale grows stranger still, for we subsequently encountered a Sexton who had noticed the same man on an earlier occasion. The man was standing outside the gate, the Sexton said, gazing through the railings with great round eyes, as if longing for someone to let him in. Afterwards he recollected something singular about the man’s appearance. It was pouring with rain, he said, and yet the man’s hair was sticking straight up from his head, like quills upon a porcupine.

  12

  The item was buried on the back page, at the bottom of a column. I stumbled across it at a coffee house that I’d sometimes visit of a morning, while Mr Comrie waited for patients to manifest. I glanced through it once, not paying full attention. Then I read it again, more slowly.