by Ian Weir
“Poor dog! He was faithful and kind to be sure,
And he constantly loved me, although I was poor . . .”
The rain is falling more heavily now. Through the darkness, Alf discerns two shapes ahead of him: one massive, the second much smaller. They appear to be waiting for someone.
“When the sour-looking folks sent me heartless away,
I had always a friend in my poor dog Tray.”
They don’t move, whoever they are, remaining just outside the penumbra of light from a street-lamp. Alf squints, rhinoceros-eyed; he does not see well at the best of times, and should have brought his lantern. The first is an immense man, he discerns after a moment, with ragged clothes hanging loose, as if he had once been larger still. Alf has the vague notion that he might recognize the man, if he could see more clearly. With him is a woman, slender and dark-haired, her face muffled in a cloak.
Alf slows a little as he reaches them, but continues singing.
“But he died at my feet on a cold winter day,
And I played a sad lament for my poor —”
He breaks off with a grunt. He has stumbled, one of his size-fifteens catching against a cobblestone. The immense man puts out an arm to brace him, which is considerate, Alf thinks. The arm goes around him; so does the other.
“Set him straight,” he hears the woman say. Her voice is a strange, low rasp.
Alf makes a sound like: “Woof.” It is unrelated to the song, having more to do with the fact that the man has taken him in a bear hug, so powerful that it squeezes the breath from his lungs.
“That’s the way,” says the woman, in her rasping voice.
Alf would dispute this, if he could find the requisite wind. It is not the way at all, he would say, no matter how kindly the hug is intended. He would further explain that he needs to be going now, for his mother lies awake if he is late returning home, and frets herself.
“Argh,” he says instead.
The man picks him up, right off the ground, which might cause Alf under other circumstances to exclaim in admiration, considering that he weighs twenty stone and this man has just hoisted him like an empty barrel. The arms continue to tighten.
Alf’s mouth goes very wide. This is in part because his ribs are cracking, but also because he has had a considerable shock. The hood of the woman’s cloak has fallen back, and in disbelief he has recognized her: a narrow face, pale and gallows-grim, with two eyes burning at him red as blood.
“Set him straight, Jemmy,” he hears her say. “Set this fucker very straight indeed.”
*
Alf will be discovered some while before dawn, when an early rising Crossing-Sweeper espies through the gloom what he takes at first to be a dead horse, lying at the side of Pilgrim Street. Identification will follow, and the newspaper reports will speculate that the victim must have been struck down accidentally by a heavy dray, or cart, and run clear over by the wheels, so cleanly had the back been broken.
15
It is no hard thing to disappear in London. A million souls to mingle with, and tens of thousands of rooms in attics and cellars across the Metropolis, where a penny would buy you a bundle of straw and three pennies an actual bed — with four or five others in it, of course, not counting the vermin, but still — under any name you might care to invent. Even if you had the ill-fortune to be recognized, there were a thousand lanes down which a sharp lad might slip, and if all else failed and the hounds had your scent, there was always the rookeries. The tangled slums of Jacob’s Island and the Old Mint, or the Holy Land itself: the vast appalling rookery of St Giles, where an entire regiment might go to ground.
I stayed for a night at a lodging-house in Aldgate, then moved on to another along the Ratcliffe Highway. I told myself that I was just gathering my thoughts, and deciding where best to flee. But as two nights stretched into three, and I shifted to another ken farther east, I had to admit the possibility that I wasn’t leaving London at all. On the fourth morning, I woke up in a nethersken down by the Docks, wedged on a pallet in the sleeping room between an old man in an ancient shooting jacket with wooden buttons, and a younger one with whom I had shared a tot of gin in the kitchen the night before. My new friend wore a brown shirt that had once been check, and a pair of ladies’ boots with the toes cut out. He had been a partner in a counting house, he said; an educated man, and now here he was, fallen all the way to this. “But once a man falls far enough,” he said with a sort of lugubrious satisfaction, smacking his lips and eyeing me bleakly, “he might as well finish the job. Eh? He might as well go the whole hog. And here we are, boyo. The pig in its entirety, bristles and all.”
Clambering out from between them, I skirted past the kitchen, where some of the lodgers were already gathering. There was a yard outside with coster-carts scattered round, and several lumps of rags, still a-slumber. I washed myself as best I could at the stand-pipe, and then reached a decision.
It seemed that I was not leaving London at all. I made my way towards Smithfield instead, where I found young Barnaby watching a cock fight. The combatants were disputing against the wall of a slaughter yard, hemmed in by a ragamuffin crowd. Barnaby clocked my approach with one slantways eye, as if he were a species of rooster himself.
“Been ’earing about you,” he said cryptically.
“I need to send a message.”
“Sent one to that actor, didn’t you? Fuck me. I ’eard — oi!” He broke off to shout encouragement to the smaller of the combatants, a scrawny bantam which made up in poultricidal fervour what it lacked in stature. “Now peck ’is ’ead off!”
“A message,” I repeated. “I’ll pay you sixpence.”
“Sixpence now, and sixpence after.”
“Twelve pennies, for a message?”
He cock-eyed me again.
“Danger pay. You’re a desperado, you. Worth my neck to be seen with yez, and — oi! Yes! Now fecking finish ’im!”
I’d have sent young Barnaby to Mr Comrie, except they’d be keeping an eye for certain on Cripplegate. So I sent him to Milford Lane instead. He was back an hour later, extending a grimy palm. “She’ll be at the place you said. Eight o’clock tonight.”
I arrived at the churchyard just as the clock was striking the hour. Darkness had fallen and a chill wind had arisen, agitating the trees. A knot of vagrants idled by the east wall, passing a jar and casting glances in my direction, as I waited ten minutes and then another quarter-hour. Still there was no sign of Janet, which began to make me uneasy.
I was repenting as well my choice of a meeting place. St Sepulchre’s, I had said — of all the churchyards in London — directly across the street from Newgate Prison, squatting mute and malevolent in the night. I found myself staring towards Debtor’s Door itself, outside which Meg Nancarrow had kicked and choked just two weeks previous — and where Your Wery Umble would take his own last bow on a Monday morning yet to be specified, if the Majesty of British Justice had its way.
At half past the hour, I was beginning to wonder if young Barnaby had simply pocketed my twelve pence and lied. But that’s when a familiar figure came hurrying at last along the street outside the railings, and turned in at the gate.
“You fucking eejit,” Janet hissed by way of greeting, and cast a worried look over her shoulder. “I think I may of been followed.”
A prospect to make the blood run just that little bit colder. I looked swiftly round.
“Have you lost them?”
“I ent sure. I done my best. Jesus, Will. Christ on a biscuit. I expect you been reading about yourself?”
Yes, I’d read all the newspapers at a coffee-stall. And this afternoon I had paid a penny for a broadsheet account of the murder, in which I learned that I had done it to avenge the death of the Fleet Ditch Fury, with whom I had some sinister connection.
“There’ll be ballads soon,” I said, essaying negligence. “By next week there’ll be a play.”
“They’ve been to the shop. A Magistrate, a
nd two Constables. First thing yesterday morning.”
News to make the blood run colder still. But it was something I should have been expecting — if they’d been to Cripplegate, then they’d assuredly have spoken to Missus Maggs, who’d have smoked out my connection with Janet and Milford Lane. Missus Maggs had doubtless smoked out a great deal about me, whilst minding her kews and peeze.
“What did you tell them?” I demanded, forcing calm.
“What would you think? I said I hadn’t seen you.”
“Did they believe you?”
“Christ knows. What matters is, they know who your friends are — they know where to look. And they’re looking everywhere.”
We had retreated deeper into the darkness by the church wall. A snatch of rough laughter from the vagrants, and as the wind shifted a waft from the burial ground on the other side.
“Will, what the Devil are you still doing here, in London?” Then, presuming to read the answer on my clock: “Aw, Christ — don’t tell me. Don’t even say it. La Smollet?”
She was right, or partly so. The thought of never seeing my Annie at all, for months or even years — that was bleak. So was the thought of leaving London itself: the Metropolis no more than a smudge on the horizon through the window of a mail coach, and then the green of England receding, along with every friend I had in this world, and Your Wery Umble greener still, hanging over the railing of a ship.
But above it all, I had to know.
“I need to find Meg Nancarrow,” I said. “I have to know what he did. To her — and to the others.”
“Who — Atherton?”
“Yes.”
“What others?”
“That’s what I need to find out.”
“Fuck ’im, Will. Fuck all of it. It’s none of your concern!”
“But it is. That’s where you’re so wrong. It is all of it my concern.”
“You must be mad,” said Janet.
She was right about that too, I think. Looking back, I suspect I was indeed halfways mad, that night in St Sepulchre’s churchyard. We go through times in our lives when we’re none of us quite sane. The sight of a man’s blood pooling about your boots — there’s a sight that will leave you feeling cold and sick and horribly unmoored, as I’m very sure you do not know yourself, and I congratulate you on your innocence. It sent Lady Macbeth running Bedlam-mad, that feeling, and she was forged of stronger steel than William Starling.
Besides, Lady Mac had just one murder on her soul, and my killing of Master Buttons was all mixed up in so much else. In the hanging of Meg, and the whispered words of Nuttall the Spavined Clerk, and the gnawing conviction that Dionysus Atherton had committed such deeds as banish us beyond the warmth and the light of the great communal fire that we cluster round together, all of us who are human in this world. My uncle: bone of my bone, and blood of my blood. And all of it reflected back in the dying light in Danny Littlejohn’s eyes.
Yes, I believe I may well have been mad, that night in St Sepulchre’s churchyard.
“No more of this,” Janet was saying. “You have to leave now. And here — I been to Cripplegate — the Scotchman gave me these.”
She’d pulled a handful of coins out of her pocket. Five gold guineas.
“His life’s fucking savings, I expect. Or else he sold some tools. There’s prob’ly some poor bastard on his table right this minute, about to have his leg cut off with the wrong-sized saw, and all so Will Starling could pay for passage to the Continent. And here he is, still in London, the eejit!” She forced the coins into my hand. “No, just take the money. He wanted you to have it, so it’s yours. Take it — go. Before someone else comes looking for you, Will, cos next time they may find you!”
And there was something about the way she’d said it. Something that struck my ear askew, and made me wonder if the Constables hadn’t been the only ones to come knocking at Janet’s door.
“Someone else?”
“Never mind,” she said instantly.
“Janet?”
She turned away, pulling her shawl more tightly round her shoulders. “Just — it don’t matter. It’s nothing you need to know.”
“Tell me.”
“There was a man,” she said at last. Grudging the words, as if each one of them must be extracted like a molar. “Come to the shop this afternoon, looking for you. Not one of the Constables — he was nothing to do with them. But he’d found out, somehow, that we knew you. Someone told him to come to us.”
“What man?”
“He said his name was Sheldrake. He said he had a message. ‘Tell Starling, she wants to see him.’ That’s all he’d say. ‘Tell Starling, he is summoned.’”
She.
All of London, stopping with that syllable.
“But forget about him, Will.” Janet was pleading now. “Forget about all of it — just go. Send us word when you’re safe. Cos God knows you’re not safe here — not in London, and especially not in this churchyard, if there really was someone following me. Just — please.”
I’d never seen that look on her face before. She gave me another of her rib-splintering embraces, and then she was gone, hurrying away into the darkness of London.
And I saw then that Janet’s intuition had been correct. She had indeed been followed, all the way from Milford Lane. Someone was standing in the gloom, just inside the churchyard gate.
“Oh, Will,” said Annie Smollet.
She wore a dark green cloak, borrowed from the shop. Snatched in desperate haste, no doubt, as she hurried after Janet out the door, and it was purest coincidence that its coloration suited her so perfectly.
“Janet wouldn’t say where she was going, Will. But I knew. I just knew she was going to meet you. So I followed.”
And Christ knows I was glad she did. Gladder than anything I could ever recall, standing there in St Sepulchre’s churchyard with a sweet slow ache of joy.
“I was so afraid I wouldn’t see you again,” I said.
“Can I be so very much worth seeing? I don’t think so, Will. I think I ent worth seeing so very much at all, not when it’s Worth Your Life.”
“I might, Miss Smollet, beg to differ.”
I actually said that. And I’ve a notion I accompanied it with a little bow, as another man might have done — such as Claude Duvall the highwayman, perhaps. In a corner of my mind I winced, imagining how Janet might have eyed me if she’d been here at the present moment, and hearing in the night wind a whisper of her judgement: Oh, you twat. But Janet was a quarter-mile distant by now, hurrying south and west towards Milford Lane, and here in the darkness of St Sepulchre’s churchyard it was just Wm Starling and Miss Annie Smollet.
She wore the hood of the cloak up, obscuring her face, as if she’d forgotten that she wasn’t a fugitive herself. But her eyes gazing out from the folds were bright with genuine emotion.
“Tomorrow morning,” she said. “You’ll go away from London. I want you to promise me. If not for your own sake, then for your friends’. For my sake, Will. I want your Solemnest Oath.”
And to this day, I am not sure what I would have said in reply, had we been allowed the span of just five more seconds. I might very well have melted in those green eyes, and relented, and done what the secret part of me already longed to do: climb down from the lonely steeple of my avenging zeal — Christ knows the wind cuts like a sabre when you’re up so high, and so very much alone — climb down to safety, and scurry like a sleekit for the tall, tall grass. But that’s when two bull’s-eyes winked at the churchyard gate, and two Watchmen peered in.
They weren’t looking for Your Wery Umble, in particular. Just a pair of Charleys making their rounds. But Miss Smollet gripped my arm.
“We can’t be standing here,” she whispered. “You need to be in Hiding.”
I did not dispute the point. Her grip tightened.
“I know a place you can stay tonight. Come with me, Will — quickly.”
“I can’t go to Milford L
ane.”
“Not there. Holborn.”
The bird-fancier’s shop was dark when we arrived, the windows shuttered and the birds silent within, asleep in the scores of cages. It seemed the Badger had recently moved back into the room upstairs, having parted with her gentleman. “It Broke her Poor Heart, Will,” Annie had told me as we hurried along Holborn. He turned out to be a fraud, this gentleman, his two thousand a year pure ephemera, and two other Badgers on the go into the bargain. But through a stroke of good fortune, the Badger would not be using the room on this particular night. Apparently she had already scooped up the shattered fragments of her poor heart and gone off for a few days with a new gentleman, which Annie considered very plucky in her, and evidence of a Shining Spirit.
Annie still had a key of her own. She led me up two narrow flights of stairs, feeling our way in the dark. Arriving upon the topmost landing, she fumbled with her key in the lock, and then fumbled within for a match and a candle, and then finally the room glowed into existence, as if she’d conjured it herself. It was much as I had seen it last, strewn with clothes — evidently the Badger and her Shining Spirit had left in haste. Annie opened the window to dispel the must, admitting the waft from the privy in back and the rumble of Holborn Street beyond.
“Are you hungry?” she asked. “Wait here.”
She came back in twenty minutes with some bread and cheese and a meat pie, fetched from a public house, along with a pot of strong ale. We made a picnic of it sitting on the bed, and once we’d finished she brushed crumbs from her lap and raised her eyes to search my face, composing herself into gravity.