Will Starling

by Ian Weir

  As it turned out, I needn’t have worried. I found him much closer to the Fortune of War — no more than a quarter-mile from the tavern, in a patch of weeds at the side of Long Lane. He lay flat on his back, staring up into the night, as many a man has found himself doing while wobbling homewards along that very stretch of road — or along any other road in London, or the world. A small knot of men clustered round him, including a doddering old Charley with a bull’s-eye, amidst a general babble of consternation.

  But Little Hollis wasn’t lying on his back, as it had first appeared. In the lantern light he lay on his stomach, arms and legs splayed and arse elevated at the moon. And his eyes were staring in the same direction as his arse cos someone had turned his head right round on his narrow shoulders, as slick and clean as you’d twist the stem from a cherry.

  8

  Isaac Bliss is fading. He grows gaunt and elvish, with the pale translucence that is seen in the excessively old. He is becoming before your eyes his own great-grandfather, the man he will be at ninety. But of course Isaac will not live that long, or anything remotely close to it. He has lived a full life-span already — excepting only the last few grains in the glass — from birth to decrepitude. And here he is, not yet thirteen years old.

  “Is the pain very bad?” the surgeon is asking him, gently.

  “No,” says Isaac. “Yes.”

  He is lying on a pile of old rags in the corner of Mr Bowell’s workshop, where he has lain since yesterday morning, when he found himself too weak to rise. His breath comes in shallow rattles. The undertaker stands gravely looking on, and Young Thos his son and heir hovers atop the stairs, counterfeiting as best he can the sort of boy who would have gone every hour to sit by poor stricken Isaac, with a murmured solicitude and the offer of a cup of broth.

  Mr Atherton kneels, stooping his golden head to listen to Isaac’s lungs. There is concern on his kind face. “Are you well enough to ride in a coach, do you think?”

  “If someone will carry me, sir.”

  “I cannot deceive you, Isaac. You are gravely ill.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “But I believe I may help you still. I want to take you with me.”

  “To the ’ospital, sir?”

  “To my house.”

  Naked fear flickers in Isaac’s eyes. But the surgeon’s own are blue with earnest reassurance, and his face is very kind.

  “There is a bedroom that could be yours, Young Isaac. With a feather bed, and a fire, and a window overlooking the street. Will you allow me to take you?”

  No one has ever asked Isaac that question — whether he will allow, or not — in all his long, brief life. In truth, Isaac is not completely sure he is being asked that question now, or whether his reply would make a difference. But the surgeon is so very grave and kind, and Isaac is weary beyond endurance.

  “There,” says the Undertaker, from the doorway. “What do you say to your benefactor, Bliss?”

  “Thank you,” whispers Isaac.

  *

  This had been some days earlier. A Sunday, in fact — the day before Meg Nancarrow’s hanging, and a single day after I had visited Isaac myself. He had not seemed nearly so bad on the Saturday. But he’d declined quite shockingly that night, and on Sunday morning the surgeon was summoned.

  I wasn’t there myself, of course. But I am sure now that this scene took place — I can watch it unfolding in my mind — even though I had no inkling at the time. I weep to think that I had not the slightest inkling.

  Look at them.

  The surgeon lifts Isaac with infinite care, knowing how much pain this causes. Isaac weighs no more than a bundle of reeds; you can almost hear the rattle of dry bones as he is carried outside, and gentled into the carriage. Each jolt of the wheels causes fresh distress, but Mr Atherton has arranged cushions and a blanket to wrap him, and Isaac is able to sit up, at least a little, and look out at London passing. When they arrive at Crutched Friars, he finds that Mr Atherton is as good as his word.

  He carries Isaac upstairs in his arms. The room is vast and lovely, with books in a bookcase and a thick Turkey rug upon the floor. There is a chair in the corner by the grate where Isaac might curl up, once he’s feeling stronger. The bed itself is clean and canopied and impossibly soft, with pillows and bolsters. Isaac has never imagined lying in such a bed, all by himself. A boy could lie down in such luxury and never rise again.

  “Now rest,” says Atherton.

  He has positioned Isaac to lie on his side, looking out of the window. It is the only way Isaac can settle, with his back grown so bowed that he nearly folds on top of himself. Outside is a tree, with birds singing. It is a jolly thing to see — and to hear, for the day is warm, a fine spring day, and the window has been opened — although it means that Isaac is unable to see the room behind him. He cannot see the bookcase or the door, or kind Mr Atherton standing there. This leaves him not quite easy in his mind.

  “You see, Young Isaac?” the surgeon is saying. “There is no shelf in my house.”

  There is a room, though, behind a closed door partway along the entrance hall. Isaac had seen it as they came in.

  “There’s skeletings,” says Isaac.

  “The tiger — yes, of course — and the stoat.” The one standing inside the door, the other on the stair-post. “I study anatomy. I have animal skeletons, as curiosities.”

  “Other ones too.”

  “Other skeletons?”

  “Down the hallway.”

  The upstairs hallway, Isaac means. He had caught a glimpse, as they reached the top of the stairs. A small skeleton, articulated with wires, standing in a vestibule. Unmistakably human.

  “A lad, it looked like,” says Isaac.

  Outside, the birds continue to sing with the sheer exuberance of being alive. In the room, there is the slightest of silences.

  “Where’d he come from, Mr Atherton? That skeleting?”

  “From a shop, Young Isaac. A dusty shop in the Gray’s Inn Road, full of antique bits of this and that. The bones are very old — did you not notice? The skeleton is brown with age.”

  The surgeon’s voice is warm with reassurance.

  “Rest now, Isaac. There is nothing to fear. And I’ll come back in just a very little while, to see you.”

  Curious Tale of a Fleeing Woman

  The London Record

  22nd May, 1816

  Readers are familiar with the “Boggle-Eyed Bob” sensation that lately gripped the Metropolis, and has been duly chronicled in these pages; though what this episode has revealed about the propensity of Ghouls to emanate from the churchyards of London, and what it has said instead about the capacity of Myth to seize the mass imagination with such force as to achieve the aspect of Actuality, we do not propose to judge, as lying outside our narrow sphere of competence. But yesterday evening we stumbled upon a new instance of the phenomenon, in the person of a Crossing-Sweeper who has been telling passers-by of a singular encounter with a mysterious Fleeing Woman.

  The Sweeper, a ragged young party in an immense battered hat, who identified himself as “Nathaniel, Your Honour, Nathaniel Jugs, after my ears,” has as his stand a crossing near St Helen’s Church, Bishopsgate. This he sweeps clean for such coins as kind souls will give him, “at all hours, Your Honour, from cock-crow ’til the midnight bell, assuming you could ’ear a cock in this wicinity, which of course you can’t, but you take my meaning in any case, as speaking in a figurative way.” Last Thursday night he was startled from a standing slumber — “it being wery late, Your Honour, with scarcely no one on the street at all, and Nathaniel leaning on his broom” — by the spectre of a young woman, barefoot and wrapped in a cloak, running towards him. He could see clearly, he says, despite the darkness and a gathering fog, by the spill of light from a street lamp opposite.

  He would have spoken, to ask if she required assistance, but at that moment a carriage clattered out of the night behind her, cutting off her avenue of flight, and a man leapt
down to seize her. The woman uttered a croaking cry, and struggled mightily; but her assailant — or her keeper, for Nathaniel Jugs could not speculate which — overpowered her, and dragged her with him back into the coach, “kicking like a poor scragged wretch at the end of a Newgate neckerchee.” The rattler tore off again at a terrific pace, “as if the Fiend himself was galloping in pursuit.”

  A small crowd had gathered about us, drawn by this singular oration. Encouraged by their interest, young Jugs now offered up the further detail: the Fleeing Woman’s eyes had been red. “And not red with weeping, Your Honours; no, but red as blood.” Just exactly, he continued, like the eyes of a gigantic mastiff that had run a mad a year ago — “Here along this wery street, Your Honours, the exact same corner we’re standing on this minnit.”

  There were exclamations at this, and we felt each one of us a prickle of uncanny thrill, recollecting the episode to which young Nathaniel Jugs had so breathlessly alluded. It was in truth a delicious sensation, relishing as we do a lurid Tale that wraps itself in the cloak of Factuality. And now our Crossing-Sweeper was recounting how the Fleeing Woman had bitten the man on the wrist as he manhandled her — a long grey man, said young Jugs, like a wolf — and how he had responded with a backhand blow and a fearful oath, exclaiming as he wrenched open the carriage door: “He should of left you in H——, where you belong!”

  9

  My uncle once operated to repair an aortic aneurism. The patient was a Thames lighterman, a man of five-and-forty with a wife and four little ones at home, who had been brought to Guy’s Hospital in desperate straits. Both his legs were cold and the cause was quite apparent: a pulsing and a swelling in the abdomen. The prognosis was bleak and certain-sure: no hope of survival past another few nights, at best — or worst, depending on how you see these things. The pain was terrible, with no means of relieving it.

  So my uncle decided to cut. This caused a considerable stir at Guy’s, the procedure having never been attempted on a living patient. Other arteries had been successfully tied, but not the aorta, the great vessel leading from the heart. And abdominal surgery of any kind was all but hopeless, corruption of the wound being certain. But my uncle said, very gravely: “This poor man is dead if I do not proceed. It is the only way.” He stopped short of adding: “And the Truth, and the Light.”

  He spent that night in the Death House, practising on cadavers, and the following afternoon they carried the poor lighterman into the operating theatre. A packed audience of colleagues and students — as breathless a throng as ever watched Kean at Drury Lane — stood craning to see as he sliced the man open from groin to breastbone and reached inside. There was shrieking, of course — pain past all imagining — but block that from your mind. Marvel instead at the dexterity of the surgeon, locating the aorta blind, by feel alone.

  He was suddenly still. He raised his head. “Gentlemen,” he cried, “it is my honour to tell you that I have it in my grasp!”

  Applause, and cries of “Bravo!” They were thrilled, each man in that room — excepting one, of course. The lighterman was wishing he could die upon the instant.

  But he didn’t. My uncle succeeded in tying off the aorta, and the lighterman was borne from the theatre alive, amidst loud hosannas for the surgeon. By the following morning, the patient’s legs were growing warm, proof that the blood had found another path to circulate. But then they grew cold again; the lighterman became feverish, and at midnight he expired — as my uncle must surely have expected, from the second he reached for his scalpel. But the man was dying in any event, and he was after all just a lighterman. The following afternoon, it was my uncle’s honour to announce to his adoring students that the operation itself must be considered a complete success, notwithstanding the death of the patient. “It is,” he proclaimed, “a great day for Science.”

  I wasn’t present that day, all of this having taken place some months before my return to London in the summer of the year ’15. But it was subsequently described to me by several witnesses. And I mention it to you now, as something that crossed my mind as I made my way across London Bridge to Guy’s Hospital, the same day I read the account of the Fleeing Woman in The London Record.

  *

  The corpses of four felons hanged for murder. These are owed by law each year to the College of Surgeons, four cadavers in all the year and not one more — the merest mouthful to the feast that must be annually offered upon the dissecting tables of London. But Meg’s body was to have been one of them. This had been agreed, before the hanging. It would be cut down and carted direct to Surgeons’ Hall, two hundred paces north of the prison. But it never arrived.

  So I learned from Keats. I had come to Guy’s on an errand from Mr Comrie, feeling unsettled in ways I could hardly begin to describe and possessing a whole new store of images to haunt my nights: Little Hollis on his stomach, staring upwards at the moon, and a mastiff with Meg Nancarrow’s face and eyes as red as blood. It was the first time I had been to Guy’s since the hanging, and I discovered that my abortive exploit was now the stuff of gleeful legend. Amongst the surgical students I was Mad Starling, who attempted to take Newgate Prison by force, as a Revolutionary Mob of One. Another Will Starling entirely — the Will Starling who had existed before all this business began — might have revelled. He might very well have strutted and winked, and touched one finger to the side of the cork-snorter when pinned down for an answer — “What the Devil, Starling, were you about?” — and flashed the dice in a smile that hinted at sly volumes. But I had no stomach for any of that now, and limped away with muttered evasions. In the course of this I fell in with Keats, and we took ourselves to a public house in the maze of streets west of St Saviour’s, one little frequented by students.

  Keats shifted uncomfortably on his stool, and debated the wisdom of oysters. It seemed he was uneasy in his bowels.

  “The strain of operating,” I suggested. Keats had apparently performed a minor procedure on his own that day, cutting a growth from the side of a man’s face.

  But no, he said, the carving had gone tolerably well; he had been surprised to find his nerve so steady. “I wasn’t sure whether to be pleased with myself, or horrified.” The bowel-wise unease had come on subsequently.

  “Three pennyworth of isinglass, then,” I told him, “dissolved in a gill of water. Highly efficacious for bowel complaint.”

  “If bowel complaint is what it is,” he said, looking vaguely hunted, “and not cholera in the premonitory phase.”

  “Keats,” I told him, “it ent cholera.”

  Keats was a good fellow, but a fretter about his health.

  He grimaced, and changed the topic. It seemed he’d written a poem, which had been accepted for publication in The Examiner. He offered to recite it for me, and I said why not, feeling grateful at the prospect of distraction. Besides, I’m partial to a good poem, especially if it has a highwayman in it, or a cavalry charge, and a rhythm that gallops you along. This one turned out to be a sonnet, much concerned with solitude and trees, and I didn’t listen much after the first few lines. When he’d finished, I assured him it was very fine indeed, just the sort of poem a fellow warmed to best, and he ended in asking me about the hanging. “Why had I done it?” he wanted to know, for naturally he was as curious as the others.

  Cos I had known Meg Nancarrow, I said, and did not believe her guilty.

  “She was a friend?”

  “Yes. No. Not really. She didn’t want friendship, leastwise not from the likes of me. But I wanted to help her.”

  “Enough to get yourself beaten half to death?”

  I looked away, discovering I hardly knew where to begin. Or where to end, if once I started to tell Keats what was on my mind.

  “The mastiff’s eyes were red,” I found myself saying.

  Keats looked at me blankly. “Mastiff?”

  “He did something to it — Atherton. Don’t you remember? It was in the broadsheets, last autumn. Some terrible experiment — the mas
tiff ran mad and attacked two horses. Its eyes were red as blood.”

  Keats had begun to laugh, incredulous. Evidently his cholera was better.

  “That nonsense in the newspaper this morning — is that what’s bothering you?”

  “Never mind,” I muttered, wishing I’d never opened my gob.

  “You’re thinking that woman was — what — Meg Nancarrow? Risen from the tomb? Surrexit Meg de sepulchro?”

  “’Course not.”

  “It’s purest fiction, Starling.”

  “I know that, Keats! Go nurse your cholera and leave off.”

  He looked wounded at that, and after a moment I wished I hadn’t said it. We both fell silent and sullen.

  “If it is cholera,” I said at length, “you should take calomel pills and castor oil. Keep to a diet of arrowroot and rice, with thin broth.”

  “It ain’t cholera,” Keats muttered.

  But after another moment, he spoke again. And what he said surprised me very much.

  “He came to the hospital today. Atherton.”

  Apparently Atherton had not been seen at Guy’s for more than a week. But this morning there he was again, arriving in his customary manner — “as if there were banners streaming,” said Keats — but even more so than usual. He dazzled down the corridors and left again soon after, without staying to deliver his anatomy lecture. The story spread that he was too busy, preparing some manner of anatomical presentation that he was to make two evenings hence, to all the leading men in London. It was rumoured to concern some great scientific discovery, arising from the dissection of Meg Nancarrow’s body.

  The thought of it was somehow grotesque. “Atherton?” I demanded. “He dissected her?”

  “And I’m sure he did it beautifully. Mr Atherton is a poet, in his way. But his materials are flesh and blood, and that’s what’s so unsettling about the man — for the flesh is real, and the blood is someone else’s.” But seeing the look on my face, Keats began to laugh again. “A dissection, Starling — it wasn’t a drawing and quartering. So you needn’t look so horrified. But whether he did or no, it was never done at Surgeons’ Hall — for the body never arrived.”