by Ian Weir
“To defend her, obviously.”
“That was a defence? She’d have done better with no one at all.”
“Was I to know how badly he’d bungle?”
“The witness was bought. Master Buttons.”
He had been about to shoulder past me, but this claim brought him up short. Meanwhile Odenkirk had emerged from the house behind us, and now stood slouching ominously on the step. “See this one off, Mr Atherton?” Atherton ignored him, training those blue eyes like pistols.
“You know this for a fact?” he demanded. “You make a serious allegation — and a woman’s life is at stake. If you have evidence, state it now.”
But of course I had no evidence. Nothing beyond the obvious, which all the world had seen — or as much of the world as had crammed into the courtroom while Buttons sent Meg to the gallows.
“You saw him,” I said, “same as I did. He was an actor, performing — and wearing new clothes. A man who owes money to half the pawn-shops in London.” Cos I knew a bit about Linwood Buttons, by now. I’d asked at the King of Denmark tavern across the road from the Old Bailey, where they knew him as a drunkard and a beggar. “Where would such a man come by a brand new set of togs, unless someone bought it for him?”
“Do you know where he is?”
I did not. Buttons had disappeared, immediately after delivering his damnable performance. Melted away into the million mingling souls of London.
“Do you know how to find him?” Atherton demanded.
But of course I didn’t know that either.
“Well, then . . .” Atherton shrugged eloquently, and started to turn away again.
“What did you say to her?” I asked.
“Who?”
“Meg Nancarrow. When you went to see her in Newgate. What did you say to her?”
He regarded me as if I were some freakish Specimen upon his table: a stunted tatterdemalion Rainbow, presuming to hold one of London’s Rising Men of Science to account. But he answered my question, as Odenkirk lounged lupine beyond.
“I said that I would help her, if I could.”
“And what did you say when you went back there this afternoon?”
“What?”
“To Newgate. A few hours ago — not long after they brought her back from the trial. You went to see her again.”
“You mean to say you have been following me?”
In fact it had been an accidental discovery. I’d gone back to Newgate to see Meg myself, less than an hour earlier, but they wouldn’t let me in. She was being moved this evening, out of the Female Quadrangle and into one of the Death Cells on the other side. But someone had been to see her already, I had learned: Mr Dionysus Atherton, who at this moment seemed undecided whether to strike me down or laugh aloud.
He did the latter, barking out one mirthless syllable and shaking his head at my behaviour.
“I told her to steel her resolve. And that I would continue to do what I could for her.”
“Which is?”
“At this point? There isn’t much, Christ knows. I’ll make a submission to the Judges.”
There is no appeal of a court decision under the Majesty of British Justice, but the three Judges could indeed be approached. They would meet again on the Saturday following a capital conviction, to consider new information. They might in some cases be swayed, and make a recommendation to the Home Secretary, who could commute a death sentence to transportation for life. Sometimes it happened.
“Why do you care in the first place?” I asked him then.
Cos that was the question that nagged me most of all. Why would a man like Atherton care?
“For a whore like Meg Nancarrow, you mean? I don’t care — not personally. But I have an obligation to the family. Jemmy Cheese was acting in my employ on the night he was arrested. I need to preserve my reputation with the Doomsday fraternity at large. I’m a surgeon — I have to do business with them.”
The twilight was deepening about us. A dray trundled along the street, against the vast rumble of London.
“And perhaps she reminds me of someone, long ago. Someone I happened to care about.”
It was an extraordinary thing for him to say. I’ve wondered at it ever since — why he would say it at all, and to Wm Starling of all people. Some instinct in him to reach out, despite his loathing?
“Not in her look, so much. But there is something in her spirit, a defiance. My sister had it too.”
He was looking past my shoulder as he spoke, into the distance. There was a boy in a green weskit on the corner of the street, with a monkey on a leather strap, begging. But I’m not sure Atherton even saw him; he was looking much farther away than that.
“You have her smile,” he said then. “I don’t suppose there’s ever been anyone to tell you that. Your mother’s smile.”
Well.
In another tale entirely, this would be the moment for tears. Misty brimmings in two men’s glims; sheepish swipings with jacket sleeves and gruff masculine murmurings, giving way to the clasping of hands and mutual embraces, with halting ejaculations about the damnable obstinacy of proud hearts and the brevity of life. As it was, we just looked at one another, across two paces and a chasm.
“Tell me something else,” I said then, “Uncle.”
I watched the word affect him. Stiffening the shoulders and ramrodding the spine: a word as welcome as a surgical probe up a sphincter. There was a small bleak relish in seeing that.
“What had you done,” I asked him, “to the dog?”
“Dog? What dog?”
“The mastiff.”
I am not even sure why I asked this now, all these long months later. But I did. Atherton stared down at Your Wery Umble. And then, for the second time in as many minutes, he laughed at me.
“What do you expect me to say? That I used the creature in some abominable experiment, motivated by unholy ambition and urged on by Beelzebub himself? Go ahead, then — believe what you want.”
He turned on his heel and strode into the house.
The mastiff’s eyes had been crimson — thus various witnesses had reported, or leastways so the broadsheets had claimed. Crimson and burning like coals. Subsequent reports had a tall man with golden hair appearing out of fogbanks in the night, with the beast slouching alongside. They were seen striding with fell purpose along Ratcliffe Highway, and on two separate occasions down Fleet Street.
I trust your judgement. You will take such reports for what they’re worth.
The boy on the corner was ten years old, perhaps. I passed by him as I started away. He was Spanish, or else Italian; waifs and strays from the Continent had been washing up in London ever since Waterloo. A bottle-green weskit and a sweet olive face, and a small dejected monkey, displayed to passers-by for ha’pennies.
Odenkirk’s eyes bored holes in my back all this while. He had remained outside the door after Atherton had gone inside.
“I wouldn’t stay here,” I said to the boy, on a sudden impulse.
He blinked. I wasn’t sure whether he’d understood, so I sifted through my paltry Spanish word-hoard. Now he began to frown.
“Por qué?”
He might easily have been an orphan; many of them were. There were men who’d oversee a string of orphan beggars, taking half of the proceeds. The animals were rented by the day; monkeys were popular, as were white mice.
This was not a good street for him, I said, stringing my few words together. There was a man, outside that house — yes, that man there. He worked for another man, the one I’d just been speaking with. Cirujano was the Spanish word for surgeon. Dangerous was peligroso.
“D’you understand what I’m saying? You should go somewheres else. This ent a good place for you to be.”
But when I looked back from the end of the road, he was still there.
I was already overdue at home that evening, in Cripplegate. But instead I hurried south and west, across Smithfield and then down to the bottom of Ludgate Hil
l, where I dropped a penny for the stone-blind beggar as he worked his customary pitch at the corner of Fleet Street. It was a busy corner even now, at the onset of night; traffic jostled and snarled. The blind beggar’s name was Gibraltar Charley, as it happens. He played upon a little organ, and he had a dog that danced — a London mongrel shaved to look like a poodle. “Pray encourage him now, my tender-hearted Christians,” Charley would call, sitting in his eternal darkness; “pray show encouragement to Tim, the Real Learned French Dog.” A coin would clink to the cobbles, and Tim would dance on his hind legs. Tim was a trooper; if poodles were required, then Tim was equal to the task. Besides, this was not so bad, as a living. There were dogs in the sewers this moment, catching gigantic rats.
I continued past them, turning into Black Friars Lane and thence into the Three Jolly Cocks.
There were thirty-six men there drinking. I spoke to them — each one in turn — and discovered that six had been here the night of the murder, four of whom remembered that Meg had sat with a man whose round spectacles flashed in the firelight. Two of these had recognized him as the money-lender, Cheese. All of them knew Meg Nancarrow well enough; she had worked here, after all. Sharp words had been spoken; a threat had been uttered; oh yes, they had heard it too, just as Alf the Ale-Draper had said at the trial. Alf had been saying it ever since, behind the bar — all afternoon and well into the evening, since returning from the Old Bailey. Customers came in and stood him drinks, and clustered round to hear it all over again. Alf had been shaken to his very boots when he’d heard of the murder; he’d been shocked to the core — and yet, perhaps not quite so shocked at all, cos he’d always suspected what sort of a woman Meg was; he’d known it in his waters.
Grave murmurings. Alf Pertwee, bald and bloated, nodded sagely. In Alf’s own considered opinion, hanging was too good for the likes of Meg Nancarrow. In bygone days they hadn’t hung female felons at all — they’d burned the bitches at Smithfield.
But had he seen Master Buttons, that night?
Alf looked round for the source of the question. Looked down. Found with heavy-lidded ogles Your Wery Umble.
No, he had not. Was he certain? ’Course he was certain. He had seen the man Buttons before, but not that night. With Meg Nancarrow? No, he had never seen Master Buttons with Meg Nancarrow. Nor did he know where the man might be found.
“Then what about Dionysus Atherton?”
Cos a very dark feeling had started to gnaw. It was hardly a suspicion — it wasn’t as tangible as that. Not even a question, really, that I could put into words.
“’Oo?” said Alf.
He had been at the trial, I told him. In the public gallery. A tall gentleman with golden hair, in fawn trousers and a sky-blue coat.
Alf frowned in recollection. “What about ’im?”
“Did you ever see him with Meg?”
“What, ’ere?”
“Or anywheres else.”
Alf shook his head. No, he’d never laid eyes upon the gentleman. Why did I ask?
I didn’t quite know how to answer that question. But something was very wrong, in all of this. Something was as wrong as it could be.
The belling of his coat as he’d stood across from her in Newgate, like the wings of a bird of prey. The arch of his posture, against her shrinking stillness.
“I mean what I say, Miss Nancarrow. Hold fast to that. Even to the uttermost extremity.”
More Horrid Sightings
From a Broadsheet Account
11th May, 1816
New developments are reported in the phenomenon of the Boggle-Eyed Man, who first appeared some while ago in the vicinity of St Mary-le-Bow Churchyard, lamenting to passers-by that he had been denied his rightful lodging within the gates, and accordingly must linger homeless until the End of the World. It now grows evident that the Entity has begun to venture further afield into the Metropolis, either through some rising sense of desperation, or else in an increasing Boldness that can only bode ill for those who cross its path. It was sighted three nights ago near a churchyard in Whitechapel, standing like a phantom in the fog, and on the same night was glimpsed slipping down an alleyway near Haymarket. There is now a report, confirmed by several sources, of an uncanny encounter during daylight hours. A sweep, lowered by the ankles down a chimney in Gower Street, grew suddenly frantic. Deaf to encouragement from his master to be manful and cease his shrieking, the boy was at length pulled out, weeping most piteously and convulsing. After much exhortation and prodding, he was able to provide an account of his ordeal, and gave his interlocutors to understand that, halfway down the chimney, he had encountered the Boggle-Eyed Man, staring up at him from below.
There is a further incident reported of a female child, yesterday evening. Not long after nightfall, the child — six years old — passed by the vicinity of St Bartholomew the Great, Smithfield, bearing home to her father a meat pie and a pot of ale, purchased from a public house in Charterhouse Street. Hurrying past the churchyard, she heard a voice entreating her, and discerned a Figure standing in the darkness by the gate.
“Help me,” said the Figure.
When the child asked who it was that spoke, the Figure in the darkness gave its name as “Bob” and solicited once again her immediate assistance. Caution contending with innocent Christian concern, the child stepped closer to ask what was the matter, to which “Bob” replied that he was lost and lorn, but might yet find his place if the child would but take his hand and lead him.
She might indeed have done so, being touched to her innocent heart, excepting that she saw just in time that “Bob” was possessed of two great bulging eyes, “with hair stood straight on end, most horrible,” which revealed to her that this was no mere vagabond but the Boggle-Eyed Man himself, about whom she had been amply warned. Dropping the meat pie and the pot of ale, the child fled in terror, never stopping until she reached the haven of her home, where her father asked to know what had frightened her so, and “what the D—— had become of his supper.”
“He has it, Papa,” the child replied in high distress. “He has your supper — Boggle-Eyed Bob!”
17
Miss Smollet saw the report on the Saturday, just as I did. It was the name that bothered her most of all.
“He gave his name as Bob,” she kept saying. Circling back to that one detail, each time I tried to object that a child’s wild claims were hardly proof of anything, and neither was a broadsheet report. “But it’s more than one report, and more than one child,” she insisted. “People keep seeing him — I seen him twice. And the name! He called himself Bob, out of all the names in London.”
That’s when I finally told her what Isaac Bliss had said to me, two days earlier.
“He said it seemed strangely light — Bob Eldritch’s coffin. When they took it out of the Undertaker’s. He didn’t help lift it himself, but he watched as two other men did. He said, ‘They picked it up like it was practic’ly nothing at all. P’raps it was just that they was strong, and the man inside quite small — but it struck me as curious, Will, at the time.’”
And then I told her the rest of it, despite knowing full well where this must lead.
“Atherton tried to bring him back,” I said.
We were outside the house in Holborn, just at twilight. I had accompanied Miss Smollet here to fetch a few belongings she wanted to have with her at her new lodgings with Janet Friendly in Milford Lane. The traffic rolled past into the gathering gloom, and the songbirds warbled faintly in the bird-fancier’s shop.
“Bob Eldritch,” I said. “The night he died. Atherton tried to revive him.”
Miss Smollet didn’t understand what I meant, not at first.
“I know that, Will. I was there.”
“No, not at Fountain Court. An hour afterwards, in the stable behind Atherton’s house.”
She still didn’t understand — not quite. But I watched the realization gather like a shadow across her face.
“There is a woman,”
I said. “A domestic. She drinks laudanum and tells wild tales. I could hardly believe her myself.”
“What did she say?”
So I told her. There was a terrible silence from Miss Smollet when I finished.
“You’re saying he — what — Resurrected him?”
“Or leastways made the attempt.”
Behind us in the shop, the songbird chorus was dwindling as the voices fell silent one by one. Evidently the bird-fancier was draping the cages with the onset of night — or so I chose to presume. Here in the gathering darkness, with Miss Smollet’s face greying with horror and the spectre of Bob Eldritch rising up between us, I could almost imagine a different scene instead: a scowling bird-fancier, grown sick to death of song, shuffling and muttering and throttling his lovelies each one in turn.
“You’re right, Miss Smollet. It ent possible.” I heard myself arguing against my own dark imaginings. “I know that, as a man of Science. A Surgeon’s Assistant . . .”
But even as I spoke, I knew what I was going to do next. Cos I’d already made the preparations.
“Miss Smollet, I’m going to take you back to Milford Lane, where you’ll be safe tonight. And I’m going to find out the answer to this, one way or the other.”
“How?” she exclaimed, in rising distress.
But I believe she’d already begun to guess. After all, there was only one way to know for a fact whether Bob Eldritch had ever been buried.
“Will! Surely not — you wouldn’t!”
But I would.
And I have wondered ever since, looking back: was this the night? The wild, black night when I stepped outside the sweet light of Reason, like a traveller leaving the last lamp-lit house on a forest road, and crossed once and for all into a Darkness so profound that I would never quite emerge from it again?
Or had that crossing come already? I have asked myself this question too. Perhaps the crossing had come a full year earlier, on the battlefield after Quatre Bras. And every step I had taken since had been nothing but one step deeper into Night.