Will Starling

by Ian Weir

  A few months after the marriage, he learned that his wife had had a child once, out of wedlock, and left it at the Foundling Hospital. As Mrs Sibthorpe wailed and rent her hair, he left the shop without another word, disappearing down the lane as a man with vastly superior sidewhiskers had done with such finality some years before. He was gone for several hours, walking the streets of the Metropolis, and returned with a settled expression and six words for his wife: “Perhaps you’d better fetch it home.”

  It turned out that Janet’s mother had in the early days gone several times to Lamb’s Conduit Fields, peering wistfully through the railings at the girls in their drab black uniforms, and wondering which one of them might be hers. One such afternoon she had glimpsed the child: a waif with golden hair and soulful eyes that would melt the heart of a granite gargoyle, let alone the heart of a mother who knew — instantly and beyond all doubt, by that mysterious instinct that binds the lioness to her cub — that this was the offspring of her very womb. So now with her husband’s phlegmatic blessing, Mrs Sibthorpe hurried back all these years later to Lamb’s Conduit Fields with her token in trembling hand, and presenting it to the Governors she was reunited at last with her own beloved child, which turned out to be Janet Friendly: fifteen and raw-boned and lank-brown-haired, with big hands and bigger feet and a chary short-sighted squint on her long phizog, three-quarters convinced that some trick was being played. “And in fact it was,” Janet would later say. “The trick was on her. Serves her right, for being such a maudlin twat. Ah, well — credit where it’s due — she took me home anyways.”

  She did indeed. She showed Janet through the door of the shop in Milford Lane, and the rooms above where they lived. Mr Sibthorpe said “H’lo” to her, and after a day or two said something else. After a month he glanced to her one evening as they closed the shop and said it was a pleasant thing to have a daughter, which she took very kindly indeed, and would quite possibly have flung her arms about his neck right there and then if she had been of the arms-flinging inclination. Being the opposite sort, she mumbled that a father was no bad thing either, and left it at that. But they understood one another, and often of an evening they would go out walking. Sometimes they would walk up to Drury Lane, to see a play with the great clown Joseph Grimaldi, the finest Harlequin of the age. Or else they would just sit together by the fire in companionable silence, for Mr Sibthorpe was an older gentleman, much older than his wife, and was finding himself less vigorous than once he’d been. Thus they lived for several years, all three of them together, until one evening Mr Sibthorpe went an exceptionally long time without speaking, even by his own standards, and was discovered to be stone dead in his favourite chair. At the funeral, Janet found to her confusion that she was sobbing inconsolably. But she had a mother, and they still had the shop, and a little bit extra that Mr Sibthorpe had put by. So between them they did what you do, and carried on.

  And now here was Janet on a morning in May, with Your Wery Umble standing before her and Miss Smollet shrinking fetchingly at my side. I explained the situation, presenting a carefully abridged version: Miss Smollet was an actress, had been through some unspecified Tribulation not at all of her own making, and accordingly needed a room to lodge in. Janet listened, while Miss Smollet stood beside me looking enervated. A fine word, enervated, recently magpied by Your Wery Umble from Sam Johnson’s dictionary, signifying one who is sadly wrung out by sleepless nights and uncanny encounters, but remains a vision of loveliness.

  “Hum,” grunted Janet when I’d finished.

  “Is the room still to let, then?”

  “Of course it is,” exclaimed Mrs Sibthorpe, who had come in.

  The room was on the second floor, overlooking the street. This was slightly worrisome, as it would put Miss Smollet directly at the point of impact should Janet’s house decide at last to settle its issue with the building opposite. But the house was close enough to Cripplegate for Your Wery Umble to drop by when the mood took hold, such as mornings and evenings — and Janet Friendly was on hand, in case of emergency. Janet was no longer quite the amazon she’d been at Lamb’s Conduit Fields, but on the whole I’d still back her against any boggle-eyed revenant in London.

  “Yes,” said Miss Smollet, looking in through the door. “Yes, I believe I could stay here.”

  “Of course you could,” exclaimed Mrs Sibthorpe. Having been upon the stage herself, she was tickled to have an actress as a lodger.

  “Four shillings a week,” said Janet, who remained un-tickled.

  “Three,” said Mrs Sibthorpe.

  “Mother, fucksake . . .”

  “Language.”

  “Three shillings, then,” Janet muttered, looking to Miss Smollet. “Payable in advance.”

  Miss Smollet hesitated, and looked to Your Wery Umble.

  “I will see to the payments,” I said, growing taller by the syllable.

  Miss Smollet’s eyes misted in gratitude. Janet’s rolled.

  “You are such a friend to me, Will Starling,” said Miss Smollet.

  Mr Starling was six-foot-four, and rising.

  Afterwards Mrs Sibthorpe helped Miss Smollet settle, while Janet and I went back downstairs.

  “Will fucking Starling,” said Janet yet again. But this time I’d swear she was stifling a grin of actual fondness — though for Christ’s sake don’t tell her I made any such claim, lest there be clouting round the earhole in consequence. “What have you been up to, all these years?” So I told her a bit about this and that, and she told me a bit in return, and we even reminisced about the days at Lamb’s Conduit Fields. It turned out Janet knew the whereabouts of two or three of the old foundlings, though several others were dead, and of course there was Isaac Bliss at the Undertaker’s. We both grew a little sad at the thought of poor Isaac, and there was silence for a moment. Above us Mrs Sibthorpe’s laughter tinkled.

  “And you never heard from your own Ma?” asked Janet.

  “Only that she’s long dead.”

  Janet’s long phizog softened. “I’m sorry to hear that, Will.”

  I gave a casual chuckle, as you do. “It’s what happens in the end, when you’re alive.”

  “And no other family at all?”

  I changed the topic.

  “You’ll keep an eye peeled for her, will you?” Meaning Miss Smollet, whose voice came silvering down the stairs.

  “Is someone after her, then?”

  Janet eyed me shrewdly, clearly guessing more than I’d told her. But how was I to answer a question like that?

  “Not in the way you prob’ly think,” I said after a hesitation. “But she could do with another friend.”

  Janet gave a small dry chuckle.

  “She ent for you, Will. I hope you know that.”

  “What?”

  “Get your eejit heart broke.”

  I spluttered for a bit. “Miss Smollet and myself? I never said any such — ”

  “’Course you didn’t. Not out loud. But it’s the girl with the golden hair and the great dark eyes, all over again — from Lamb’s Conduit Fields, remember? You fall for them headlong, Will. You always have, and it’s always hopeless. And as soon as some gen’lman comes along — and one will, soon enough — someone standing on the sunny side of five foot, with a good deal more coin in his pocket — then she’ll be off. I think you probably know it, but I’m telling you anyways, as an old friend. Assuming that’s what we call ourselves.”

  I spluttered a bit more at that point, and suspect I may have been bright red in the phizog. Then I did what you normally do, when you feel an utter flat: invited Janet to mind her own business and left, trundling back towards Cripplegate. And reaching the bustle of Fleet Street, I passed by a broadsheet seller who was hawking for a penny the news: a woman had been taken up late last night for the murder of the money-lender, Edward Cheshire.

  14

  Meg had gone to see Jemmy the previous day, all the way to Woolwich Harbour. They told her to go away, but she paid
them money and finally they brought him up from below, where they kept him in a cell with half a dozen others. He stood there gaunt and shackled, the stench of the cells coming off of him, his filthy clothes hanging slack from his wide shoulders. Blinking his eyes against the daylight, like a poor mangy bear that had stumbled out of a cave. He never said a word, but she knew he recognized her.

  “You fool,” she said, meaning how much she loved him. She had an idea he tried to summon a smile, the hangdog one he’d get when she berated him, bowing his shaggy head and shrugging feebly. She felt a stinging in her eyes. This would have been from the wind that had come up, a raw wind from off of the water, cos Meg Nancarrow never cried.

  The marshes stretched out on one side, sodden and flat. On the other, the river reached towards the sea. A tall ship inched along the horizon, sails billowing, and the whole world lay beyond.

  “I’ll bring you home, Jemmy,” Meg said. “I’ll look after you, no matter what. Don’t you fear.”

  “Time’s up,” said the Keeper.

  “Fucksake,” said Meg. “That ent been so much as a minute.”

  “You’re lucky it was anythink at all.”

  Jemmy made a sound in the back of his throat as they took him away. A tiny sound, coming out of a man so large.

  Meg made her way back to London, then. All the way back, arriving near midnight at the house near Fleet Ditch where she and Jemmy had their room, weary and aching at heart. They were waiting for her there, three Constables and a Magistrate from Bow Street. They came at her out of the darkness.

  “Oho,” said the Beak, as the Constables clamped hold. “We have you now, my girl. You are under arrest for murder, in the death of Edward Cheshire.”

  “What?” cried Meg. “The bastard’s dead? I never!”

  “Oho-ho,” said the Beak.

  He was a fat sleek man, shining in the lamplight with grease and self-satisfaction, and he knew very well what a vicious bitch he was dealing with. There was a dwelling not two streets away, known as the Old House in West Street, where unwitting victims — drunken sailors and the like — were lured by draggle-tails just like the one who stood before him now, struggling and spitting like a cat. They’d enter by the front door, those men, but they’d come out another way, through a trap-door that opened directly onto the Fleet, where they’d be discovered downstream in the morning half submerged in ooze.

  “I never done it,” Meg repeated. “I done lots in my life to answer for, but I never murdered Ned Cheshire!”

  Gawkers were gathering despite the hour, drawn by the commotion. Candles in the windows opposite, and faces peering out.

  The Beak took a rolled-up cloth from underneath his arm. “Then what,” he said, unwrapping it, “is this?”

  An ivory handled razor, stained with blood.

  “That ent mine. I never seen it before. Who’s saying that’s mine?”

  “We found it in that room of yours, my girl. Acting upon Information.”

  “Then someone put it there!”

  The Magistrate chuckled.

  “Oho.”

  *

  Newgate squats like a vast brown toad at the very heart of London, just north of St Paul’s Cathedral. The prison walls rise up, and up; great brick walls with no windows at all, to prevent any wretch within from getting out, and to block any ray of hope that might otherwise slip in, on the back of a shard of sunlight. It clutches the heart, just the sight of it. It brings to mind every transgression you ever committed, or might ever commit in future, inspiring a sudden mad urge to fall there upon your knees, crying: “Guilty! Guilty as sin itself!” It must clutch such an honest heart as Your Honour’s, so you’ll imagine what it always did to mine, cos God knows I walked a razor-thin line at the best of times, from which the slightest stumble could precipitate a man straight through the door which now stood before me: an iron door with its four sliding gratings for the Keeper to peer out of.

  One of them slid open now, and an Eye peered down. I explained my errand to it, and after a moment there was the sound of iron bolts being drawn within. The door swung open with a grinding creak, to reveal that the Eye was paired with a second one, both of them sunk in the skull of the Keeper, who took the shilling I handed to him, and beckoned me inside. The door boomed shut again behind me, with an appalling finality. “This way,” said the Keeper, and led me through more iron doors, with more iron bolts, down dank stone corridors where the stench was unbearable and the cries of woe were worse.

  Meg was in the Female Quadrangle: a deeper circle of this Perdition. Three hundred women crammed into a space hardly big enough for fifty. Shrieking amazons, wailing madwomen, infants crawling through piles of shit — the Keepers were reluctant to go in there themselves. There was a lady trying to bring about reforms, a merchant banker’s wife named Elizabeth Fry, who’d been petitioning the Governors to let her start up a Women’s Curriculum. I thought: good luck to her.

  We came at last to a door that led to the women’s exercise yard. Leaving the worst of the stench and the din behind, we stepped out into a small cobbled enclosure with a desultory patch of sky far above. To one side was a sort of cage, with a roof and iron bars in front, for visitors to step into. Female prisoners would be brought to the other side.

  “Gen’lman here already,” the Keeper observed.

  A man in a fine frock coat bent low beneath the roof of the visiting cage. Across from him, behind the bars, Meg Nancarrow stood in shadow. There was something in the juxtaposition of the two — the arch of his posture, the belling of his coat like wings against her shrinking stillness — that made me think of a bird of prey, stooping for the kill. A tumble of golden hair, and I stopped in recognition.

  Dionysus Atherton.

  He was saying something to her, low and intense, and leaning still closer as he did. And upon her face was a spasm of naked fear.

  He broke off quickly then, cos that’s when he heard the Keeper stepping forward. He turned — saw the man — then saw me, not six paces away. He went still, and the handsome phizog turned to stone.

  “Pleasure to see you too,” I said.

  He looked back to Meg, and this time I heard the words.

  “I mean what I say, Miss Nancarrow. Hold fast to that. Even to the uttermost extremity.”

  And then he was on his way, shouldering past me without another glance. Across the courtyard and through a heavy iron door and gone, his footfalls swallowed in the din of Newgate. I let the door boom shut behind him before I turned back to Meg. She waited at the iron bars, with a Wardswoman keeping scowling vigil a few paces farther off.

  “I’m very sorry,” I said, “to find you here.” Cos where else might a man begin?

  “Bully for you.”

  The look of terror was gone, replaced by a wan defiance. And had it truly been terror in the first place, or something else entirely — some trick of the shadow? Standing there I was no longer sure. Her face was battered, a purple flower blooming round one eye. Clearly she’d fought them fiercely when they’d seized her.

  “They’re saying you cut his throat.”

  “I know what they’re saying.”

  “Is it true?”

  “And what would I tell you if it was?”

  “Whatever you liked. It wouldn’t go no further.”

  “How many times do I have to say it? No. I didn’t. I never killed him. Thank you very much, and fuck you all.”

  That cold sardonic clarity; Meg was on the blue ruin. I nosed the sick-sweet waft of it through the bars, and was glad for her, cos Newgate was less horrible for those as had coins to jingle — as Meg must have done, when she come in. With coins you could purchase victuals fit for human consumption. They’d sell you a quiet place to lie down, if you had enough; and if not you could still secure sufficient daffy to take the edge off burning on the fiery lake. You could do halfways tolerable in Newgate Gaol, so long as your coin endured — right up ’til the moment they crapped you on the New Drop outside, with half of
London howling. Money helped you very little then.

  I gave her coins, through the bars. “From Mr Comrie.”

  She actually looked startled. “Why?”

  “To help you through the next few days.”

  Mr Comrie had heard about Meg’s arrest by the time I came stray-catting up the Cripplegate stairs towards noon, having installed Miss Smollet at Milford Lane. “Your friend get safely home?” he had asked with sour nonchalance, having learned — so I suppose — about Miss Smollet from Missus Maggs. But this was hardly uppermost in his mind, not with Meg Nancarrow taken up for murder. “You’ve heard?” he had demanded. “Bad business. Here,” he added, handing me two guineas — I’d wager they were the only ones he had, or very near to it — and bidding me take them to her.

  Now here she stood in shadow behind the bars.

  “Tell him thank you,” she muttered.

  There were times when the anger would slip away, and you’d glimpse the girl there had been, once upon a time. The child who’d existed before the world got in the way, and wrecked all childish hope and aspiration.

  “Half the surgeons in London, anxious for my welfare.” The contempt crept back. “Such good, kind men.”

  “What did he say to you? Atherton.”

  She went still again, shrinking back into herself. As if the shadows had somehow deepened at the mere mention of the name.

  “He said he would help me.”

  “Help you? Why?”

  “What business is it of yours? It’s nothing to you, what he said or didn’t say.”