by Ian Weir
He was a Privateer, Will’s father, which did not make him a pirate but something altogether superior, for a Privateer sails under a Letter of Marque, signed by the King himself, authorizing him to plunder His Majesty’s enemies. Will’s father was doing so this very instant — so Will would confide to us in stolen moments in the corridor, or at the railings when we was outside taking air. He was attacking French merchantmen and sinking them as would not yield, all in the cause of confounding Bonaparte. He was sailing out of Gibraltar, in command of the French ship Hercule, which had been captured at Trafalgar and re-named the Eleonora. It was a sloop, small but wonderful swift, with twenty-eight guns and two long-nines in the stern that Will’s father in a whimsical way had named “Claude” and “Duvall,” after the celebrated gentleman highwayman who once marauded upon Hampstead Heath with a barker in either daddle. Will’s father was famous for his gallantry as well, though also for ferocity, which earned him the nickname of “Bloody Bill” Starling. If Will’s father and Thomas Coram had met upon the bounding main, Will confided, Bloody Bill would most assuredly have sunk him.
“Bill — short for William,” exclaims one of the smallest boys in the cluster on that particular day. “The same as you!” This being Isaac Bliss, who’d been listening with his twinklers round as dinner plates. Isaac wasn’t near so badly bent in them days — no worse than a question mark.
“Aye,” says Will, and swore us to secrecy. He’d of been nine or ten years old at the time.
“A remarkable coincidence, then,” says I. “Considering as your name weren’t Starling at all, nor William neither, ’til the Governors sat down to choose one for you, and one of them heard a bird sing outside the window. I wonder, if it had been a pigeon, would your Pa be Bloody Bill Squab instead?”
“Shut your cake-hole, Janet Friendly,” says Will hotly, “cos you only shows how ignorant you are.”
I told him to take his own advice, before someone earned himself a peg on the smeller — which someone duly did. But he bore it like a good ’un, and didn’t peach, even when they whipped him for having blood on his jacket, claiming that his nose had bled on its own accord, out of pure contrariness.
So how much of the Tale of Bloody Bill was true? Well, I have my own opinion on that, Mister Comrie, as I do on many topics. But Will did possess a brass chronometer. He kept it wrapped in a bit of flannel, at the bottom of the little tin box he had for his personal treasures. He showed it to me once, so hushed and solemn you’d of thought he was unwrapping the pocket-watch of Moses himself, retrieved from Egyptian bulrushes. I’ve no idea where he got it from — and if I had to take a guess, I’d hazard that Will was no longer sure himself. He’d been claiming for so long that it come from his own father’s hand, I suspect he’d come three quarters to believe it. And there actually was a ship named Eleonora, a 28-gun sloop. It was sunk the following year, by a 36-gun frigate off the Spanish Coast, with all hands aboard feared lost. There was an item in the shipping column of the newspapers. Will turned ashen when he learned of it, though afterwards he claimed to believe that some of the crew at least had escaped, and were even now scheming a triumphant return to England, with Bloody Bill to lead them.
So what am I telling you? I’m saying: Will Starling as a boy was far from a fool — the very opposite, in fact. He weren’t exactly what you’d call a liar neither, leastways not in the customary way. But he’d make up tales in his head, and repeat them so often — to the rest of us, but most of all to himself — that he’d actually start to believe they might be true.
I believe he’s begun telling himself another tale. A tale concerning a man called Dionysus Atherton, and I begin to suspect it’s as dark a tale as you could ever dream.
I made a discovery this morning, Mister Comrie. La Smollet began to babble. That’s the second reason I’m writing you this letter.
Were you aware that they dug up a body? The two of them — Will Starling and La Smollet, on Saturday night. A man called Aldridge, or Elditch — I didn’t quite catch it, for La Smollet was in Full Flight — who’d been killed and then brought back to life.
Or some such.
God only knows.
If Will survives, I expect you’ll want to ask him.
3
Sunlight trickled through the window, puddling round the bed where I lay propped against a bolster. Mr Comrie’s own bed, as strait and hard as the Way to Salvation.
It was Wednesday afternoon. Apparently I’d been lying here, delirious and moaning, since Mr Comrie carried me back to Cripplegate on Monday. I’d been raving about Meg Nancarrow and Christ knows what else — Boggle-Eyed Bob and a bloated blue corpse, and a shrieking peacock with brilliant plumage who turned into Master Buttons on the stand, and a golden-haired Fiend who was not the Fiend at all but Dionysus Atherton. Miss Smollet had come by twice, I was to discover; once to deliver a sprig of flowers, which now wilted in a shaving-mug on the window sill, and once just to sit beside me. Janet Friendly came once as well, and Mr Comrie himself had kept vigil through the whole first night, fearing to let me fall asleep with an injured head.
He now sat beside me on a stool, spread-legged in his shirt, spooning broth into the invalid. As ungainly a nursemaid as ever clucked a tongue.
“God’s mighty swinging danglers. Look at you.”
He chuckled sourly. Mr Comrie was never a man to grow soggy at your pain.
“Half a dozen Under-Sheriffs. What were you thinking? Thrash them all, leap onto the scaffold and save the poor woman’s life?”
I gave a small shrug, which brought on a spasm of agony. It began in my shoulders and neck and then worked itself down the entire length of me, such as it was. Mr Comrie waited while it passed.
“I went to Crutched Friars yesterday,” he said then. “Asking after the Deakins woman.”
That had my full attention, agony or no.
“The housekeeper told me the woman had disappeared. Gave me an address where she thought the Deakins woman might have gone — a doss-house north of Smithfield. So I went.”
“And?”
“They recognized the description. Said she’d stayed for a night or two, last week. Then she moved on — said she was going to her people in Devonshire.”
“No,” I said. “That’s not possible — cos I seen her, just outside, on Monday morning.”
“Did you?”
“Yes!”
“Are you sairtain of that?”
Eyeing me keenly now.
“’Course I am.”
But in the puddling Wednesday sunlight, was it possible that I had this all wrong? Perhaps Flitty Deakins had lied to me — or had never been here at Cripplegate at all. Perhaps she’d been some wisp of hallucination, produced by running myself ragged. Something I’d made up in my head, just as I’d made up that Gibraltar Charley was not quite blind at all, like half the other blind beggars in London.
“I ent completely mad,” I said.
I confess the notion had crept into my own head, somewhere between the breaking of the fever and the first blessed light of dawn. Perhaps I had lost my way somehow, and would end as such poor wretches did, chained and wailing in Bedlam Hospital, for the entertainment of Sunday visitors. There was a notion to buoy the heart through the coal-black solitude of night.
I was waiting for Mr Comrie to give another sour chuckle, and wave the notion away. But he continued to gaze, keen and troubled.
“There’s different kinds of madness, William. Hatred can be one of them.”
“You can think what you want . . .”
“Digging up the Eldritch bugger’s grave? God’s bollocks!”
It burst out of him, more violent than he’d intended. Broth slopped over the lip of the bowl, and he set it down.
“There’s no excusing what Atherton did. Not to Eldritch — I’m meaning what he did to you, William. Turning you from his door like that. Renouncing his obligation.”
“He has no — ”
“Aye, he damned well doe
s. He has every obligation, William. He was my friend — he is my friend. But Christ I think the less of him, for the way he’s treated you.”
He remained flushed, but had succeeded in stamping the emotions back down into their hole, where they wouldn’t humiliate us both by flapping about naked. Then he hitched the stool closer. We had never had this Talk before; it seemed we were about to have it now. He cleared his throat.
“I can understand how you’d hate him, William. The only kin you have, and he won’t own you.”
“I don’t care.”
“You’re a liar.”
Under other circumstances, I’d have turned my back. But I managed at least to avert my eyes, and stare past his shoulder.
His bedchamber was as Spartan as a barracks. The narrow bed, and a table with a basin and a pitcher. On one wall hung a bad watercolour of a Highland glen, and across from it was Sir Charles Bell’s appalling scrotum. I fixed my squint upon it, as a vista well suited to my present state of mind.
Mr Comrie cleared his throat.
“He blames himself, in some wise — I expect that’s what it is. For what happened to your Ma. I’ve a notion they’d been close. But he sided with the family when they cast her out. The disgrace of it, and all. Still — his own sister. And then she died. And then the sight of you, all these years later . . .”
“It’s lucky he has you to excuse him.”
“There’s no excuse. But hatred can twist a man. That’s what I’m wanting to say. A man can destroy himself, with hatred.”
There was silence then. A hand upon my shoulder. Astonishingly gentle, for a man so ham-fisted with sensibilities.
“Meg’s dead, William. So’s your Ma, for the matter of that. Let them both rest.”
I remained in bed for two more days with the pain, and for two days beyond with the Black Dog curled about me. At night the horse with half a head stalked through my dreams, with Danny Littlejohn on its back. But finally I got up.
Missus Maggs herself was observed to wince as I creaked myself down the stairs, and Mr Comrie asked where I was going. But I just kept on creaking, out the door and down the street, and all the way south to the foot of Ludgate Hill, where Tim the Learned French Dog danced and Gibraltar Charley played the organ. Just now he was playing an air that may have been an Irish reel, or possibly “Abide with Me” — blindness being his talent, more than virtuosity. Tim stopped for a moment as he saw me, as if he would exclaim: “You look a right piece of merde.” Gibraltar Charley lifted milky eyes, sensing someone beside him.
“I’ve come alone,” I said, “whether you can see that or not. I need to know the truth. Did Buttons meet with Atherton’s man, that night?”
Amidst the din of London, the blind man sat in silence.
“If ’ee did, then it’s too late for Meg,” he said at length. “There’s nothing for a blind man to say that could ’elp ’er now.”
The milky eyes slid towards me.
“Christ,” said Gibraltar Charley. “They done you up proper, didn’t they?”
4
This is how it must have taken place:
It is well past midnight as she emerges from the boozing-ken. She has not gone many paces when she hears the coach coming up behind; rattle of hooves and creaking of wheels, slowing as it overtakes her. The blind slides down, and the smile of the gentleman within gleams out.
“It is very late for a young woman to be on the streets of London, all alone.”
This is happening in March, I think. It must be March, or February — a month or two prior to the events I’ve been describing. I wasn’t there and so I can’t say precisely how it was. But such a great deal of time I’ve had lately to speculate and ponder — nothing at all but Time on my hands, and shackles. Time to sift through all the pieces I’ve scavenged, arranging them first in this way, and then in that, ’til slowly a pattern has emerged, and the shadow of a Truth has taken shape like a ghostly ship at sea.
And something very much like this must surely have happened.
There is certainly fog, on the night I am conceiving. Oh, we must have fog, for such a meeting — a true London Partic’lar, slithering up from the Thames like the ominous creep of a cello. The murky glow of a bull’s-eye lantern, and the gleam of Dionysus Atherton.
“You’re Meg, aren’t you? Meg Nancarrow.”
She continues walking, up Ludgate Hill. The coach has slowed to match her pace.
“Do you know me, Meg?”
She stops, reluctantly. Peers warily into the darkness of the coach.
“You’re him,” she says, recognizing. “That surgeon.”
“I am.”
He had seen her once or twice before. He must have done, cos this would begin to make sense of it. Possibly he had met with Uncle Cheese on some previous occasion, at the Three Jolly Cocks. He had noticed her there, or someone had pointed her out. He had made enquiries.
A grave-robber’s woman, and a whore. He likes rough trade. And there is something in this one — a feral essence — that stirs the blood.
He opens the door to her. “Get in.”
She takes a step back instead.“I heard of you,” she says.
“What have you heard?”
“I heard of things you’ve done.”
Or would she actually say this out loud? Possibly not — almost certainly not. She’d be too canny. But she’d step back nonetheless. He’d read the flicker across her face.
“Get in,” he would repeat. “A night like this — the fog. It isn’t safe.”
The driver has stepped down from the box, and sidles round behind her. Meg discovers this as she starts to turn. A long grey man with a smile slashed across his face.
“The gen’lman,” he says, “has extended a hinvitation.”
But now there is someone else in the darkness too, looming very large in the haze of a lamp. One fist is beginning to clench, as is his face, with the suspicion that someone here may require some setting straight.
“H’lo, Meg,” he says. “I come to walk you home.”
“Jemmy,” she says, relieved.
“These gen’lmen ent causing you no trouble, I hope?”
Meg lets the moment hang, just enough for the long grey man to mislike the odds, and for Atherton himself to draw reflexively back. The barest inch or two, but Meg has seen it. Her dark eyes take the measurement of him.
“No trouble,” she says. “Nor no gen’lmen, neither.”
Her smile renders Atherton risible, and puny.
“G’night,” she says carelessly. She turns away then, one shoulder rounding as she clasps her shawl tighter, hunching at a keener slice of the cold. Jemmy awaits, putting one massive arm around her.
“A’right, Meg?” he says with a last suspicious scowl.
“A’right, Jem,” she says to him, smiling in reply.
The swirling fog enfolds them, and they’re gone.
As the surgeon watches after them, it would be possible to imagine an expression of pure malevolence. Fog will do that; it will distort.
*
Or possibly none of this happened at all. Perhaps this is nothing but vapours from an over-heated brainpan.
But I think it did, you know. It happened, or something very like it. That was the first time they ever came face to face — March, or February — and there, right there, he began to dwell upon her. He began to think what he would like to do to Meg Nancarrow — and what he would like to do with her after that.
Or else — and I have pondered this too, pacing forwards and back again, forwards and back — could it have been a different look entirely on his face? A stab of recollection so sudden and cruel that made him gasp aloud. A shock of similarity as Meg turned from him — the rounding of the shoulder, the hunching against the cold — exactly as another girl had turned, on a filthy night two decades previous. A night in November that had been — the most savage November night in all his life. Standing in his father’s doorway, willing his heart to stone as she turne
d away from him and stumbled into the lash of the storm.
The spatter of footsteps and the tatter of a cloak, wrenched by the wind as she receded. And there had been an instant when he very nearly called to her — shouted her name against the night and plunged into the blackness to fetch her back. But then the moment was gone and so was she, swallowed by darkness as deep as ever claimed Eurydice.
5
Atherton actually kept his promise — kept it partways, at least. The vow he’d made to Meg at Newgate before the hanging. He’d called in a favour or leaned on some connection, and the upshot was that Jemmy Cheese had been moved out of the Prison Ship Retribution to serve out his sentence at a hospital. Except it wasn’t a hospital, not quite: a private asylum. I learned this from Mr Comrie, who’d heard someone talking at Guy’s.
A house in Camden Town, owned by a physician named Paxton who “boarded the mad,” in the parlance of the trade — cos of course it was a trade, like any other. All the world was built on trade, and this was the Trade in Lunacy. There were dozens of such asylums, in London and across the land, and more of them springing up each year like toadstools. What is this world’s true calling, after all, save the driving of its denizens mad? Your Wery Umble could say a very personal word or two in that regard, as you’ve begun to understand already — curled up days and nights with the Black Dog, stalked by lurid imaginings. But I’d made my own promise to Meg Nancarrow, and here I was on a fair day in May, hirpling northwards towards Camden Town and dreading with each step what awaited me there.
The private asylums varied wildly. I’d heard of a house in St Alban’s where no more than six inmates were kept at a time, each of them paying five guineas a week, with a policy that discouraged physical restraint and even recommended kind words as a therapeutic strategy. At the other extreme were Pits of Hell — I’d been to one or two of those, attending Mr Comrie on chirurgical business. Here the Damned were bound in strait-waistcoats, and the strategies for cure were old and tried and true: immersion in ice-cold water, rapid spinning in the Revolving Chair, and of course blistering with cups and candles to draw out the infected Humours. Dr Paxton’s asylum lay somewhere in between.