Will Starling

by Ian Weir

  I’d have read it a third time, had I not been jolted from my uneasy reverie by an animated discussion in the stall behind me. It seemed a Discovery had just this morning been made in the Death House at St Thomas’s Hospital.

  The Death House is where cadavers are kept, and dissected. As sister hospitals, St Thomas’s and Guy’s had always shared one between them.

  Go on, then. Go down a creaking flight of stairs, and then proceed along a narrow corridor, hung with sconces. There is a heavy wooden door at the end. Brace yourself, and step through.

  Imagine a room constructed especially for Old Bones, according to his own meticulous specifications, and where — of all the rooms in the world — he should be most completely at his ease. A long low cellar with a square lantern hanging from a central beam, and sunlight cringing in through narrow windows, set high up, at ground level. Sunlight itself is sullied here, and lingers wretched and reeking. There are specimens along one wall, and a fireplace opposite with a pot for boiling the bones — a great copper cauldron, such as trolls might gather round at some unspeakable feast — although these are not the elements you notice first. First you are assailed by the stench, which is staggering, even by London standards. A cock-tail of rot and pickling alcohol and human putrefaction that worms into the very pores of those who labour in this place and never quite leaves them, ever again, though they should spend a lifetime scrubbing with lye soap and steel bristles.

  Next through watering twinklers you see the dead: cloven heads and ghastly grinning visages, stretched out on wooden tables. As many as a dozen, some mornings, with students and surgeons crowded round each one. They stand in pools of congealing blood, like crows around a fallen nestling, and as your gorge begins to rise in earnest you will notice limbs and bits strewn about the floor. Arms and legs and fingers, and morsels of skin and fat that will be discovered later on the bottom of boots, or in folds of clothing. There is something about the candles too, that gutter at the heads of the tables. They are squat and misshapen, these glims, and exude a sick-sweet musk that is not like any tallow you’ve ever nosed. It is not from a cow or a pig, you think, and the thought occurs — ye gods, yes you are, you are absolutely correct — they’ve gone and used the fat that came most convenient to hand.

  And the sparrows. Somehow these seem most horrible of all. Excited little birds, flitting and brawling over human scraps, while rats the size of badgers gnaw at bones in the corners. Here’s one bold fellow glaring red-eyed at a surgical student, who laughs and tosses him a bit of vertebra. Across the floor a severed hand seems to scuttle like a crab, until you realize that a small grey rat is dragging it by the thumb, and here you may lose whatever breakfast you had hazarded. I did, my first time in that place. Five years in field hospitals across the Peninsula, and Your Wery Umble seized a bucket and shot the cat.

  The cadavers arrived surreptitiously, being for the most part delivered in sacks to the Death House Porter at a private entrance in the dead of night. The majority of these had been freshly exhumed, although Doomsday Men were always sharp-eyed for ways to avoid the intermediate stage in the resurrection process: to wit, the digging. I once knew a Resurrectionist who was strolling along the Borough High Street when a man took a convulsive fit and dropped down dead, twenty paces ahead of him. With wonderful presence of mind he rushed forward, crying aloud that this was his own dear brother. Sobbing and lamenting, he took possession of the body, availed himself of a donkey-cart, trundled the remains to St Thomas’s and sold it to the surgeons, who had the poor fellow carved and dissected before his family had missed him for supper.

  The cadaver that concerns us now was brought to the back door in the darkness before dawn by two apprentices. The usual Porter had taken sick and gone home; the man who replaced him was new to the hospital, which explains how the corpse went unrecognized. Normally dissections commenced as soon as the sun rose, natural light being required for such close work, but several other cadavers had been delivered earlier. These were laid out already, with the consequence that this late arrival was left for several hours under a sack.

  So it was afternoon before it was at last stretched naked upon a table. Students gathered round, as eager as those ghastly sparrows. The gaping wound in the throat caused a stir, though it was far from the first time that a fresh cadaver bearing marks of deadly violence had appeared on a dissecting table. The genuine excitement began a moment later, when one of the students — a lad named Keats — plucked away a rag that had been carelessly tossed over the face.

  “God on a gibbet,” he exclaimed. “It’s Uncle Cheese!”

  Keats was a friend of mine. He’d been apprenticed to a pothecary in Edmonton before commencing surgical studies at Guy’s, which gave us an interest in common. I encountered him on that particular evening at the King’s Head in Tooley Street, a regular haunt of the students, who were still buzzing with the afternoon’s events.

  “Half of them reckoned we should just proceed,” he said.

  This would have been the customary course of action — cut him up and then boil him down, all traces gone before anyone was the wiser. But there was the dilemma, cos half the students at the Borough Hospitals owed money to Uncle Cheese, including Keats himself. “One pound, three shillings and sixpence,” he confessed wryly, “repayable at twenty per cent compounding. And how would that look, if anyone ever did catch wind?” So after some debate, the Porter was sent to notify the Magistrate, who arrived an hour later to claim the corpse and take down statements. The two apprentices were in consequence being sought on suspicion of murder.

  “Though whether anyone’s seeking them very hard, I wouldn’t presume to say. This was Edward Cheshire, after all.”

  Keats chuckled drily, and coughed. Keats had an habitual cough, which he fretted about. He was an amiable bantam, a year or two my senior and scarcely taller than Your Wery Umble, which endeared him to me on sheer principle. He was a capable student who had shown some surgical skill, but he confided that he didn’t like it much. Sure enough he was gone at the end of the term, and subsequent-wise was to scribble poetry of a strange dream-like intensity. I read a bit of it myself, and liked it in its way — though my own taste ran more to tales that galloped through a thunderstorm, with corpses piling up in the ditches on either side.

  “Blanched almonds,” I said to him, as I stood to go.

  “What’s that?”

  “Your cough. Mix almonds with syrup of tolu, and a few drops of opium tincture. Two spoonsful, twice a day.”

  “Yes,” Keats said. “Good idea.”

  His mother had died of consumption. You’d see him coughing in his handkerchief, then anxiously eyeing it for spots of blood.

  *

  It had made me uneasy, this news of the murder, though I couldn’t exactly tell you why. I’d had occasional dealings with Uncle Cheese, on Mr Comrie’s behalf — my employer was never eyeball-deep with the Resurrectionists, in the way that Atherton was, though you could hardly be a surgeon in London without crossing paths, and you’d hardly say I held a fondness for Ned Cheshire. But somehow there was a vague sense of connectedness; the sense of a pattern that was not entirely random, if only you could see it from the proper angle.

  I was also being followed.

  I knew it as soon as I left the King’s Head. As I started along Tooley Street, there was someone behind me in the darkness. I looked round quickly. A knot of medical students lurched out of an ale-house across the road; light spilled after them for a suspended moment ’til the door swung shut again. On the next corner a sailor swayed against two nymphs, underneath an oil lamp. But six paces beyond the darkness closed round again, and the next lamp was no more than a candle-point in a void — which was the problem with a London night. A London night was as dark as a night in a forest, but it had more feral creatures in it. A man could get his throat cut for any of a hundred reasons, on any street in the Metropolis, without even being Uncle Cheese.

  But the darkness can work in your favour
, if you’ve a bit of the feral in yourself. Shadow-footing forwards, I turned right onto Hayes Street, just short of the Borough High Street, before veering abruptly right again into a narrow passage, where I waited. A moment passed, and then another. Then I heard them clear enough: the tramp, tramp, tramp of heavy boots. A thin shaft of light from a bull’s-eye lantern slid past the mouth of the passageway, and a long grey form slid with it. I stepped out behind.

  “Looking for me, then?”

  He turned cat-quick, which I didn’t much like at all — a man that size, so nimble on his stampers. Cos of course I was counting on myself to be much quicker, else I’d never have shown myself in the first place.

  “You might have hallooed,” I said to him. “Called out my name, if you’d wanted to talk. ’Stead of following after a fellow in the blackness of the night, which could give him wrong notions about your intent.”

  In the lantern’s light his teeth showed long and yellow. I expect it was intended as a smile. “Friend Starling,” he drawled. “The very man. We need to have a private word, we two.”

  “Then go ahead and have one.”

  I held my knife in my hand, having slipped it from inside my boot a moment earlier. A six-inch stiletto, scalpel-sharp, won in a game of hazard at a tavern in Spain. Odenkirk saw the glint and just smiled the more, as if to suggest that it might go very ill for Wm Starling if matters between us should come to pig-sticking. I suspected he was right.

  Odenkirk had begun his days in a Workhouse: St Saviour’s, in Newington Causeway. It was hard to credit — a man that size, suckled on Work’us gruel — but apparently it was true. This hadn’t come from Flitty Deakins, neither; I’d made enquiries of my own. He’d managed to get himself apprenticed to an Irish butcher and spent several happy years at a slaughter yard in Smithfield, killing pigs, before moving on to less sanguineous work shifting cargo at the docks. It appeared he gravitated as well to a loose confederation of house-breakers and head-breakers — cracksmen and rampsmen, in the parlance of the trade — amongst whom he continued to find considerable scope for his old pig-sticking skills. He may indeed have found occasion to employ these upon his old master the butcher, who was discovered bleeding his life out in an alley behind a public house not long after young Odenkirk had given in his notice. The butcher was a terrible man for drinking, and prone to improving his apprentices with his fists. He’d been stuck, as fate would have it, like a pig.

  By the time Atherton met him, Odenkirk was working as a bully at a night-house in Curzon Street. This was none of your reeking stews, but an establishment catering to gentlemen. It auctioned off twelve-year-old virgins for as much as fifty guineas — some of them being auctioned as virgins seven nights running. Next door was an even more exclusive establishment, where ancient creaking baronets who required correction might for a suitable sum present their shrivelled shanks to Mistress Riding-Crop for striping. At any rate, Odenkirk and Atherton had hit it off, or had at least each seen how the other might be useful.

  Now here we were, just we two, alone in a London night. Hayes Street was otherwise dark as a shroud, and beyond us the river slid silent through the blackness. Above us was London Bridge, where hundreds clustered in shanties that choked the traffic, and hundreds more slept rough, clustered round fires in barrels.

  “The Man Himself sent me to find you,” he said. Meaning Atherton. “We’re wondering if you’ve heard from the Deakins.”

  “Flitty Deakins? No.”

  “You’re sure of this?”

  “I just said it, didn’t I?”

  “Cos she’s gone missing, you see. She’s up and disappeared. And now we worry.”

  This was news to Your Wery Umble.

  “Why would you think she’d come to me?”

  “She done it before. Straight to friend Starling with a tale to tell.”

  “I ent seen her since that night.”

  He eyed me for a moment, weighing whether to believe it. Weighing Your Wery Umble too, perhaps, as a man might do who had the proper pig-sticking expertise. Seven stone and a half, he might have calculated — and somewhat less than that once hung by the hind legs to drain with all the other little piggies.

  “Well,” he said at length. “If you hear anything — where she is, p’raps, or where she’s bound — you’ll let us know.”

  “And why would I do that?”

  “Cos poor Miss Deakins ent well. She sees wild sights, poor addled bitch, and is attacked by green-eyed Hindoos. God knows what might find her on the streets of London, unless her friends find her first. And of course we’d make it worth your trouble. Here.”

  His left hand was extended, a gold guinea glinting in the palm.

  “A token of goodwill,” he said.

  “I don’t want your money.”

  “’Course you do.”

  He exposed long yellow ivories again, to indicate that we were friends, despite occasional misunderstandings. Nothing but the very best of friends, united in Christian concern for Phyllida Deakins.

  I took the coin. After all, why not? And if I ever caught wind of Miss Deakins’s whereabouts, I would advise her to run as far and as fast as her trotters would take her, as if all the green-eyed Hindoos in creation were howling like djinns on her heels.

  “You heard what happened to Uncle Cheese?” I said.

  Odenkirk had. He shook his head, at the sadness of it. “Sorrowful news, friend Starling — and a caution to us all. Cos any one of us might be struck down, as poor Ned Cheshire was. Is that not a fact? Cruelly struck from out of nowhere, in the prime of life. Something for us all to think upon.”

  He leaned down closer, his champers as yellow and long and sharp as the teeth of the wolf in the tale.

  “Lying in a ditch full of shit — eh, friend Starling? Down there with the poor dead moggies, and the dogs that bit. And if you hear from the Deakins, you’ll be sure to tell us. You’ll be very sure indeed — I know you will.”

  The skies opened up again as Odenkirk sloped off, and that smile of his followed me home. All the way to Cripplegate, hunched against the rain, flinching at every noise in the London night. At last I turned at the head of the street. There was a lamp on the corner, and light just ahead from the gin-shop.

  And as I arrived, my heart stopped all over again. An apparition slid from the darkness to block my way: a young woman, soaked to the skin and shuddering with the chill, like a wandering ghost bereft of shelter.

  “Miss Smollet!” I exclaimed.

  The gin-shop was unprepossessing even by the standards of the district, unprepossessing being a word that you may take to mean small and dirty and redolent of ancient odours, the most prominent of these being juniper and vomit. There was a wooden counter with bottles behind, and a handful of tables and wooden stools. There were unadorned walls to lean against, and — and after a time — to slide down from, and a floor beneath to lie sprawled upon if necessary, though this was not encouraged by the proprietress. Missus Maggs preferred a better class of patron, meaning them as would leave on their own two trotters — or one trotter and a crutch, as might be, in the case of Tom Lobster returned from the Wars, or patients of Mr Comrie up the stairs. But a gin-shop was a gin-shop, and you took what staggered in.

  Miss Smollet had been outside in the rain for hours. For Literally Hours, she said tearfully, although Missus Maggs would tell me the next day that it had been closer to twenty minutes. Miss Smollet had come into the gin-shop first, said Missus Maggs, but then sat without purchasing a single glass, since apparently she lacked the requisite jingle. This had caused Missus Maggs in due course to invite her to leave again; and another sort of proprietress — though not Missus Maggs — might have wondered at the motives of such a young woman in coming penniless into a gin-shop in the first place. “Hattired in such a manner, Mister Starling, as no Modest Person would be, in a skirt that riz above the ankles, and wares right there up front, on display in the shop window. But I forms no judgements, which you well know, being as
I am a woman as sees little and ’ears less, sitting upon my stool behind the counter, Mister Starling, minding of my kews, sir, and my peeze.”

  “I didn’t know Where Else to Turn,” Miss Smollet was saying now.

  Sitting cold and drenched and wretched, with my own jacket wrapped around her shoulders. But at least we were inside again, and at a table nearest the fire, since Your Wery Umble possessed jingle where Miss Smollet did not. A golden guinea, in fact, courtesy of friend Odenkirk. She cupped her hands round a glass of hot punch, avoiding the slantways eye of Missus Maggs.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked her.

  “Everything.”

  “Has something happened?”

  “Yes!”

  She drew a breath to steady herself, and slurped a mouthful of punch.

  “Bob Eldritch,” she said. “In a newspaper, this morning. Did you see it? So it ent just me. There’s others has seen him too.”

  I started to remind her that the newspapers would print almost anything, and that some simple explanation surely lay behind it. But Miss Smollet was shivering again, with something that went much deeper than the chill. “You don’t understand,” she said. “He came again, a second time. He was at my window.”

  “When?”

  “Tonight. Earlier — just after dark.”

  She swore it was no dream. She had been wide awake, sitting at the wooden box by the window that served as an escritoire, writing a letter to her friend the Badger. The candle had suddenly fluttered, she said, though the window and the door were both closed and no way for the wind to get in. Then there came a scratching sound that was not her quill against the paper, and when she looked up he was staring at her.

  “He was outside the window — Right There — closer than I am to you! His hair standing up on end, and Great Staring Eyes, bulging out of his head. Oh, them Eyes — they were never like that in life, Mr Starling. Whatever could have happened to his eyes?”