Will Starling

by Ian Weir

  Her distress was genuine. That was piercingly clear — never mind her tendency towards capitalization, nor her skills as an actress. Miss Smollet had been terrified.

  And I confess that a certain sensation had begun creeping up Your Wery Umble’s spine, as clammy and cold as a hand reaching up from a grave.

  “Oh, Mr Starling — Will — what am I to do?”

  Behind the counter, Missus Maggs while minding her peeze and kews had been leaning ever more precariously in our direction. She now leaned at forty-five degrees, like the mainmast on a crippled frigate. In another moment she would reach the tipping point, and crash to the deck in a tangle of sheets and rigging.

  “I’ll walk you home, Miss Smollet,” I said.

  “Home? Haven’t you heard a word I just been saying?”

  “I’ll wait outside the house, and make sure no one comes. All night, if I have to.”

  I would have done it too. But her distress just grew keener than ever.

  “Don’t you see? That room’s no good. I can’t go back there — cos he knows where to find me!”

  She sat huddled in such woebegone loveliness as would melt a heart of granite, let alone the poor organ of Your Wery Umble, which had commenced melting the second I saw Miss Smollet upon the stage three weeks previous, and had by the present moment achieved such a perfect state of liquefaction that it pooled about my soggy boots like rainwater. And of all the doors in London, she had come in her hour of distress to mine.

  “What am I to do?” she said again, as helpless as a child.

  “You will stay here, Miss Smollet,” I said, decisively. “You will stay with me.”

  My crib was on the topmost floor, underneath the eaves. It was little more than a closet, with a pallet on the floor and a slantingdicular ceiling to thump your nob against, getting up, all of it smelling of mould and unwashed Will. It had been used as a storage room, and still was. Odds and ends of broken furniture were piled against the walls, and a threadbare rug rolled up, the way you’d roll up a rug with a body in it. There was not a cadaver so concealed at this particular moment — although there had been bodies here on other occasions. Mr Comrie never did dissections on the premises, but sometimes a Thing would arrive in the night, requiring to be stored ’til morning. I never minded them much — cadavers sleep quiet, though they’re gassier than you might suppose. And of course they grow nose-ish after a day or two, especially in warm weather.

  Still, it was my own room — the first I’d ever had. My books were stored on a shelf, all eight of them, including the adventures of Gil Blas, and Tales of the Genii and Robinson Crusoe. Sam Johnson’s dictionary as well, Your Wery Umble having always been the tiniest bit of a scholard himself, in a haphazard way. In a battered trunk were my particular personal treasures. These included a barker that I’d had from a poor dead Lobster after the Battle of Albuera — a bone-handled pistol, exactly like one that might have been used by Claude Duvall the highwayman — and one half of a small brass locket that my mother had left with me at the Foundling Hospital. There was always a keepsake left with a foundling. My mother had the other half; we’d have matched them up if she’d ever come to take me back again.

  Miss Smollet followed me up three flights of stairs, past Mr Comrie rumbling in slumber behind his own door. Stepping into my room, she stood wet and shivering.

  “You must take off them things, Miss Smollet,” I said. She’d catch her death, is what I meant. “We’ll hang them up to dry.”

  “I’m very grateful to you,” she said. “I’d be gratefuller if you’d turn round.”

  Behind my back, Miss Smollet’s sodden garments whispered from her skin. And there stood a statue of Your Wery Umble with his glims squinched shut, scarce daring to breathe, like some blind acolyte outside the Holy of Holies itself — whatever that may be, for I confess I don’t precisely know. But you’ll take the reference nonetheless, and understand how I was feeling in that moment.

  “Here,” she said.

  I took them as they were handed from behind, and bore them down the stairs to the surgery, where I poked a fire to life in the grate and hung the garments with reverence and awe. The shawl and the frock, draped over the backs of chairs, to scandalize Missus Maggs when she came in the morning to straighten. Then I fetched a rug back upstairs and found Miss Smollet sitting on the trunk, a candle guttering on the window ledge behind her. She was wrapped in a blanket, her wet hair hanging free about her shoulders, like a desolate mermaid on a rock.

  “It weren’t a dream,” she said, somehow seeming forlorn and fierce both at once. “Tonight, and that other time. He was truly there, Will, at my window. Do you believe me?”

  Her eyes were wide and searching, and I hesitated.

  “I believe you saw something that gave you a terrible fright,” I said. “But you’re safe now. Not a soul in London knows you’re here — not a single one, alive or dead — excepting my sole self. And I’ll be on the landing until morning comes — right here, Miss Smollet, standing watch outside the door.”

  She smiled then, brave and tremulous. She might have been a heroine upon the stage — lorn and bereft and hunted by foes, but resolved to carry on. The waters of William’s melted heart rose up above his knees.

  “I hardly deserve such kindness, Will. You are Such a Good Friend to me.”

  “Right here, Miss Smollet,” I repeated. “And I ent moving, neither.”

  You will imagine the welter of thoughts and feelings as I bowed myself out of my bedroom, and closed the door upon Miss Smollet, and sat myself cross-legged against it. Prepared to face down the Legions of Hell itself, should they come howling through the darkness up those stairs — but feeling at the same time more unsettled than I’d ever admit, and drawing some reassurance from the snores that rumbled through Mr Comrie’s door below.

  Cos of course I’d never told Miss Smollet about what Flitty Deakins had claimed to see — a corpse rising up in the stable loft at Crutched Friars, the night Bob Eldritch choked to death amongst the Wolves. But Miss Deakins saw green-eyed Hindoos as well — so I reminded myself, over and again. Flitty Deakins was addicted to laudanum, and no one could resurrect the dead, not even if they employed electrical means and swore that it was Science.

  The light from Miss Smollet’s candle showed in a thin line underneath the door. Twice she called out softly, anxious to know that I was still there at my post. I whispered back reassurance, and at length I heard her breathing grow regular and deep.

  I drifted off to sleep myself, some while before dawn. Or so I must have done, cos I dreamed I glimpsed a shape at the foot of the stair, hunched and peering up at me. A white face and two bulging eyes like eggs, and hair standing straight on end.

  I found myself lurching to my feet. But when I looked again there was nothing there.

  13

  That morning, I went to pay a call upon Isaac Bliss.

  Isaac had been one of the smallest boys at the Foundling Hospital, and was thus one of the most beleaguered, on the universal principle that the weak must be baited and badgered, especially if they’re crippled. I took the opposite position, and did so robustly, being one of the biggest. You’ll arch an eyebrow, now, and regard Your Wery Umble askance, but I tell the truth. I got off to a rousing start in life, thanks no doubt to that vast blue-veined breast in Kent, and ’til the age of nine or ten was a strapping fellow. My problem was I petered out, and accomplished almost nothing at all thereafter, growth-wise.

  A cynic might suggest that those early years shaped certain assumptions about myself, and left me with lifelong misconceptions about what I might accomplish, and how much I might aspire to, like one of those Northern terriers that won’t stop strutting long enough to realize he stands shoulder-high to a rat. But I was for several glorious years a regular bruiser, and at Lamb’s Conduit Fields I was able to blacken a few ogles and bash selected smellers in order to encourage a spirit of love and solicitude towards foundling-kind in general, and poor Isaac Bliss i
n particular. And indeed he was never “poor Isaac” at all, even at his most beleaguered, cos Isaac had a wonderful spirit, resilient past all reason.

  I’d like to think he was fond of me in return, even as I lost my value in the smeller-bashing line. And in fact he lit right up with pleasure as he turned achingly from his work-bench in the cellar of Bowell the Undertaker, and saw me coming in.

  “Will Starling!” he exclaimed. He’d been sitting on a three-legged stool, and now he creaked himself onto his feet. “It’s grand to see you, Will — just grand.”

  “And you, young Isaac,” I said. “You’re looking well.”

  He held his smile. “Am I? Well, it’s kind of you to say. Though I wonder, Will, if p’raps you’re not quite right.”

  In truth, it hurt just to look at him. Isaac had declined quite shockingly from the last time I had been here, scarcely a month ago. His eyes had grown too big for his face, and his breath rattled audibly in his narrow chest. Worse yet, his skin had taken on that blue translucence that I knew too well from a hundred field hospitals. It’s the look you see when Old Bones is standing just outside the door.

  Old Bones never truly left Bowell’s at all, of course, being present in every shadow. He was here in the stillness of the cellar, with its dancing dust-motes and its smell of fresh-cut wood and lingering putrefaction. But he’d never before stood quite so close to Isaac Bliss. Right there, looking over his shoulder, as Isaac bowed in his eternal question-mark, sanding a length of pine.

  “’Ave you come on business, Will? Cos Mister Bowell’s gone out.”

  “I ent here for him, young Isaac. I’m here to see a friend.”

  I don’t know if he believed me, quite. Isaac was not a lad with friends who’d drop by to visit of a morning — or friends who’d drop by at all. But he beamed to hear it anyways.

  “Well, that’s grand, Will,” he said, employing a favourite word. He creaked down onto the stool again, finding standing up a strain. “I seen another friend too, just t’other day. You recollect Janet Friendly, from Lamb’s Conduit Fields?”

  I recollected vividly. A long plain face with an ominous scowl and two large red hands, one of them frequently wrapped in a fist that was waving under Your Wery Umble’s cork-snorter. Though I concede she often had just cause.

  “How is she?”

  “Oh, she’s just grand. It seems she lives by St Clement Danes, with her Ma.”

  There was a surprise.

  “Her Ma come back to fetch her?”

  “She did, Will. Fetched her out, and took her home, not long after you left. They have a shop, the two of ’em together.”

  I beamed right back at that, though I couldn’t help but feel a wistful pang. Cos that’s what we’d all dreamt of, after all — each morning and each night, every foundling in the place.

  “Janet’s Ma,” I said. “Well, ent that something.”

  “It is, Will. It’s just the grandest thing.”

  But in fact I hadn’t come just to visit. There was a question I needed to ask him — and I needed to ask it directly, before Mr Bowell should come down the stairs, or that viperous son.

  “There was a funeral several days ago, on Monday. A man named Eldritch. You remember the one?”

  Isaac blinked, and nodded. Yes, of course he did. “Mr Atherton brung the party in.”

  “Did you help prepare the body?”

  “No, Mr Bowell done that himself.”

  “But it was here — the body. You’re sure of that?”

  Isaac gave a painful shrug, and looked perplexed. “I seen a body, Will. It was brung here under a blanket. Whether it was your Eldritch or no, I couldn’t say. I never saw the man in life. And why would you need to know that, can I ask?”

  He was about to grow perplexeder still, cos the question I needed to ask had been brooding in my mind since Annie Smollet had turned up in the night. Skulking on rat’s paws somewhere deep, with all the other thoughts that are too shadowy and queer for the light of day. Now it had brought me here to the undertaker’s cellar, where coffins stood against the walls and poor Isaac Bliss on a three-legged stool sat dying before my eyes.

  “The body that come in, Isaac — this body that Bowell prepared himself. When the coffin left this place on the morning of the funeral . . . was the body inside it?”

  Isaac blinked, and began to answer. Then he stopped, with a furrowed expression.

  “It’s an odd thing, Will,” he said. “Odd that you should ask that partic’lar question.”

  “Why?”

  *

  Isaac’s reply was to give me a great deal to ponder, in the days that followed. But the conversation had also suggested a solution to an immediate dilemma, one that waited for me outside on the street, pacing in muted agitation. Miss Smollet turned as I emerged from the Undertaker’s.

  “What did your friend say?” she asked.

  I had shaken her awake in the first light of morning, before Mr Comrie had emerged snorting from his slumbers — and before Missus Maggs in the gin-shop downstairs had arisen to mind her kews and peeze. But that left the question of where poor Miss Smollet should go instead, for she couldn’t bring herself to return to the house in Holborn.

  “Your friend,” she repeated anxiously. “What did he tell you?”

  I decided to restrict myself to one small part of the answer. Leastways for the present, until I’d worked out what best to do next.

  “He says,” I replied, “that he knows someone who may have a room to let.”

  Janet Friendly’s house stood amongst a cluster of ramshackle structures wedged along a down-at-heels patch of Milford Lane, south of St Clement Danes. There were street arabs staring, and washing on poles stuck out of windows, and on warm days the stench from the churchyard would waft its way across the Strand. The yard at St Clement Danes was known as the Green Ground; it was notoriously overcrowded, being also the graveyard for the workhouse in Portugal Street. And paupers will putrefy, especially when they’re stacked four or five on top of one another, with a few inches of soil to cover the topmost. In summer the body bugs — mayflies, is what they were — buzzed like bumblebees.

  Janet’s house leaned forwards, its second storey looming partway across the narrow lane, as if intending belligerence to the house on the other side. The opposing structure leaned towards it with equivalent intent, and thus the two of them faced one another like two muskoxen bent on settling the issue of dominance over the herd. In this regard, Janet Friendly’s house was much like Janet herself, and if Your Wery Umble were a betting man — which he was — he’d lay ten to one that hers would triumph, lunging suddenly with a mighty blow that would shiver the antagonist’s timbers and reduce it to a pile of planks. I put this to her once on a subsequent visit, to see how she’d respond. She eyed me narrowly, as if deciding whether I was laughing at her, and would in consequence need clouting about the earhole — cos Janet Friendly wasn’t, particularly. Friendly, I mean. The surname had been wishful thinking on the part of the Governors at the Foundling Hospital, or possibly just irony, after one look at the set of her infant jaw. But she had other qualities to compensate.

  There was a sign in the window when Miss Smollet and I arrived, just as Isaac Bliss had speculated that there might be. A bit of cardboard and a charcoal scrawl: “Room to let.” So we went in.

  Sunlight slanted onto benches piled with old clothes and fabric. Standing amidst them were racks of outlandish outfits: jackets and doublets and capes and gowns, in rainbows of colour. Manikins stood like guests at a masquerade ball, and heads with wigs lined up in a row. It was all remarkably splendid, though of course it wasn’t, not really — the wigs were horse-hair and the fabrics were coarse, and the ravishing dresses were patched and flimsy — but they still had their enchantment, for all that. There was a work-bench off to the side for mending and altering items that came in, and a low doorway led to a sitting room at the back.

  At the counter was a customer, harbouring illusions about th
e price he might get for the bundle of old clothes he was offering. A large man, shrinking by the moment as his aspirations were cudgelled down to size by a horse-faced young woman of some twenty years; at length he slunk out with a meagre handful of coins, sadly diminished by the transaction. The young woman commenced sorting through the bundle he’d left, and turned an equine glower upon Miss Smollet and myself.

  “H’lo,” I said, the sight of her kindling a grin despite best efforts.

  A vague recognition stirred in return, and she squinted Your Wery Umble into clearer perspective.

  “Will Starling,” she exclaimed. “Well, Christ on a biscuit.”

  I had always liked Janet Friendly, though God knew she could grind upon a man. We’d been good friends, in our way, at the Foundling Hospital — even on the days she was twisting my arm up bechuxt my shoulder blades for whatever transgression I had most lately committed. Usually it involved missing a chance to shut my peck-box.

  “Will fucking Starling,” she repeated.

  “Janet.” A woman’s voice — Janet’s mother’s, presumably — emanated from the sitting room. “Language.”

  “Just look at you. Five years is it — six? And you never grew a fucking inch.”

  *

  Mrs Sibthorpe, Janet’s mother, had been upon the stage. I was to learn all of this in the days that followed my first visit — and I share it with you now, since Janet Friendly’s story was quite heart-warming, in its wistful way, and perhaps we should take our warmth where we can find it, you and I, given where our own dark Tale is tending. Janet’s mother had not been Mrs Sibthorpe in those days, but rather Lively Loo, who performed comic songs and dances at penny gaffs and free-and-easies — public houses, that is to say, where musical entertainment was on offer — in East London. In one of these she met Janet’s father, who wasn’t Mr Sibthorpe either, but a twinkling eye and a splendid set of sidewhiskers, last seen legging it down an alleyway in the first fresh promise of dawn. The actual Mr Sibthorpe had first seen her in a free-and-easy as well, a number of years after the child of Twinkling Eye had been left at Lamb’s Conduit Fields. He was a quieter man entirely, Mr Sibthorpe; some might even say dull. “As riveting as a mackerel,” as Mrs Sibthorpe was often to remind him, on days when the mantle of abandoned aspirations lay particularly heavy upon her shoulders. But he was a sober man, and a decent one, who ran a shop that sold theatrical costumes; he lived upstairs, and rented out rooms besides, to lodgers.