by Ian Weir
“Now,” she said, “you must tell me everything that has happened, from the Very Beginning right up to This Moment.”
“How much has Janet — ?”
“Janet don’t tell me much of anything, Will, on the grounds that she considers me a twat. No, you don’t need to deny it, cos it’s the Truth — that is Exackly what Janet considers — and the Truth is what we must live with. And I say nothing against Janet Friendly, neither, except she can be a towering twat herself.”
So I told her. Leastways told her more or less, leaving out some of the more lurid details, and those elements as risked provoking Miss Smollet into such flights of capitalization that she might never return to me again, but rise in ascending spirals like an escaping songbird, through the window and into the night sky beyond, where somewhere far above the choke of London the stars must shine in a sweet clear sky just exactly as they had shone on the first night of Creation. But I told her of my certainty that Atherton had fitted Meg up for the murder of Uncle Cheese — though why he should revive her afterwards remained a mystery that tormented and perplexed. I hinted at dark Rumours of other killings as well, for motives that remained unclear, describing my clandestine conference with Mr Nuttall the Spavined Clerk. I spoke of Flitty Deakins and the Wreck of Sheldrake and Jemmy Cheese; and last of all I told of my midnight encounter with Master Buttons, when I drew my knife to frighten him and it all went horribly wrong.
When at last I finished, the candle had burned halfway down. Somehow two hours had passed. Miss Smollet sat saucer-eyed, like a child transfixed.
“Oh, Will.”
I had bungled the ending of the other tale I’d told her — the tale of my journey to the Midlands. But apparently I had gotten this one right.
“There is one thing I still cannot understand,” she said. “Why hate him so much?”
I began to say that I didn’t hate Master Buttons — not as you can hate an enemy, cos I never knew the man. I hated what he’d done, that was all.
She shook her head. “Not him — the surgeon. Why do you hate Dionysus Atherton?”
There was confusion in those green eyes, but a kind of penetration too. Miss Annie Smollet was never a fool, no matter what Janet Friendly thought.
So I told her the simplest part of the truth.
“The man is my uncle,” I said.
Her eyes saucered again, more spectacularly than ever. “Your uncle? The one you told me of? Who won’t even admit you exist?”
I was regretting the confession already, and braced myself for escalation into opera. But Miss Smollet surprised me. She just shook her head slowly, side to side, in bitter wonderment.
“What he done to me, Will — that was bad enough. To sit there laughing, that night with the Wolves, when he should of been protecting me instead. But this . . .”
She shook her head again. “There are Villains in this world, Will. There are Contemptible Hounds — and then there is Mr Dionysus Atherton. And one of these days, p’raps, I shall Say So To His Face.”
“Just stay away from him,” I said quickly. An unsettling thought — what Annie Smollet might be capable of doing in a moment of Dramatic Impulse. “I have no actual proof — not yet. But I believe that he is dangerous.”
“Oh, yes,” she exclaimed. “If just one quarter of what you suspect is true — one thirty-second of one twelfth, Will — then Mr Dionysus Atherton is the most Perilous man in London!”
She had risen and moved to the window, where she stood in an actorly way. But when she turned back, both feet remained rooted in the world. “And now you’ll forget all about him,” she said firmly. “No, listen to me, Will Starling — cos you’ll do what I say. You’ll put that Villain from your mind, and you’ll go away tomorrow. You’ll go away, and stay away, ’til you’ve Cleared Your Name.”
Leastways I’d thought we had both feet in the world. Evidently one of them had lifted, just a little, and was tending in the direction of Drury Lane. She had already decided how this story would play itself out.
“You will clear your name, Will, and then Come Back.”
Cos of course that’s what would happen, if we were upon the stage. A Young Hero might very well expect to be in such a plight as currently faced Wm Starling, by the climax of Act One — indeed, it would not be much of a play if he weren’t. And matters would no doubt seem graver still by the end of Act Two, with our hero shackled in Durance Vile, awaiting execution in the morning. But Act Three could be relied upon to produce an Unexpected Witness and a Stunning Revelation, which would almost certainly concern the Hero’s ancestry, and never mind being the bastard nephew of a surgeon. He would be revealed as the heir to a title and a vast estate, shipwrecked at birth and given up for lost, now miraculously restored to the bosom of his et cetera.
There is a danger in going too often to the theatre. And Janet Friendly had been right about my Annie, to a point. She did not necessarily see life as it was — she saw potential roles for herself to play, and she was working herself up into one of them this moment: poised by the window in the tiny room in Holborn, illuminated by a single candle, treading on a discarded item of Badger wrapping. She was working up The Girl Who Would Wait, However Long It Took — which of course had more to do with the splendour of the role than with her actual feelings for Wm Starling. I know that for a certainty, looking back; I suspect I knew it on that evening too.
Yet there was something lovely, underneath. Annie Smollet might not go deep, but the shallows were genuinely sweet. I actually knew a good deal about her by now — more than I’m sure she realized. Things she’d hinted at, or tossed off without thinking. The only child of a pretty, fading mother; a succession of rooms and a succession of stepfathers, some of them less kind than others. One of them, at least, who would loom in a doorway in the night, reeking of brandy. A child, once trusting, shrinking back — and here she was at one-and-twenty. Open-hearted and lovely — never you mind the teeth — and against all odds, still prodigiously gifted with Hope.
“You will sail to France,” she was saying. “You will make your way to Paris, Will, and take a room there. And you will write to me — letters, Will, that I will Cherish Always. You will describe your life in Paris in these letters, and I will keep them tied with a ribbon.”
She spoke with such shining conviction that I could see it. Here in the little room in Holborn, I could almost for a space of time believe it.
“It will be a garret room, Will — a stone room, very cold in winter, and I fear there will be rats. But Will, it will be Paris. And you will become a pothecary. This comes to me, Will — I see it just as clearly as I see your own dear face. You’re so clever about potions, and will win renown as a healer.”
Returning from the window, she sat beside me on the bed.
“I will think of you Very Often,” she vowed.
We were sitting quite close now, a foot apart. My hand, on the blanket between us, brushed hers. Her face in the candlelight was half turned away.
“Perhaps you will think of me too,” said Miss Smollet.
A wisp of her hair had worked loose, and hung over her forehead; I took the liberty of brushing it away. There was colour in her cheek, and her lips were slightly parted.
“I expect it would be all right, you know,” she said. “If you wanted to very much.”
I’d been with girls before. I mention this now, in case it crosses your mind to wonder. Various of them, and no more than half requiring payment — cos how could a young man be alive in London, and not? A city with vitality burbling right up through the loins, with bosoms burgeoning and rakes a-roister everywhere you looked. But never like that night in Holborn.
Arching over me in the candlelight, her breasts swaying as she leaned. The first cascading moment, and a look on her face of pure beatitude. Somewhere in the midst of it all, someone whispered: “I love you.” She laughed happily to hear it, low in her throat. “He says it right out loud,” she said. Then folding herself down over me, her hair tu
mbling across my face and her breasts pressing, soft and firm.
Afterwards we lay curled beneath the blanket. “You’ll take the mail-coach in the morning,” she said, “to Plymouth. Then you’ll set sail on the very first tide.”
At length I slept a little, even though you don’t want to sleep on the best night of your life — cos that’s what it was, you know. The joyfullest night I ever had, before or since. The joyfullest I ever will have too, this side of Judgement — considering as I’m down to the very last few, and none of them looking better than graveyard-grim. I knew it too, that nothing could ever be better than this night, even as I was living it.
When I woke up, she was sitting at the window. The candle had gone out long since, but I could make out the shape of her in the first hint of dawn. Wrapped in a blanket, her hair hanging round her shoulders.
“Annie?”
“Your uncle.” Her voice was rich with indignation. “And to think I ever imagined having Feelings for that man!”
“Come back into bed.”
She did, and after a time I must have drifted into sleep again with Annie in my arms, cos in the darkness there was someone else in the room. On the escritoire by the window sat my friend Danny Littlejohn, legs dangling.
“Have you told her the truth, Long Will?” he said, looking down on the two of us together. “Go ahead — tell her what you done. And then watch her hike her skirts and run from you, boyo, just as fast as them slim white trotters will flash.”
He winked then, and grinned, in that sly larking way of his.
“Family tendencies — that’s what it is. Taking after that uncle of yours.”
When I woke again it was mid-morning. Sunlight flooding through the window, and birdsong rising from below.
I was alone in the room. My Annie was gone.
16
That very night Dionysus Atherton burst into a night-house in the Seven Dials with Odenkirk sloping at his heels, acting upon information that Meg Nancarrow was within. But the woman turned out to be a castaway Irish draggle-tail, her glims no more shot with blood than any other nymph’s might be who was reeking and bloated with blue ruin. Shoving her away from him, Atherton flung a fistful of coins at the other whores, crying: “There are a hundred guineas more — mark me! — one hundred gold guineas for information that leads me to her!”
Leaving the night-house he went to a low tavern by the river, where he sat brooding with a bottle of pale until the light of dawn crept upon him. He had the look of a Crusoe, shipwrecked into obsession.
*
In the light of the same morning a woman sits by the fountain in Trafalgar Square. The square is already teeming, despite the early hour, with crowds and street-hawkers and mendicants. An old man sells wooden toy rattles, and beyond him a shabby black sailor walks with an actual scale model of Lord Nelson’s ship Victory on top of his head, which seems with each loose-limbed step to dip and then rise again upon a turbulent sea of shoulders and hats.
The woman by the fountain wears a drab grey dress and a shawl pulled over her head like a cowl. She sits hunched with weariness, as if she were a Pilgrim on a journey grown far too onerous already. A man is with her, a great shambling man in rags, who has fetched food and drink — a meat pie from a stall, and a bowl of saloop — but no, she says, she thinks she is not hungry today. Her voice is like something dragged behind a cart.
She tilts her head to smile up at him, but as the shawl falls back she winces against the sunlight.
“Too bright,” she whispers.
Her neck is cricked a little to one side, like the stem of a flower that has been bent. The great shambling man draws her closer, in order that his bulk may block the glare.
At that exact moment another woman is crossing Trafalgar Square, towards them. This fact is asserted in certain strange Epistles that were shortly to appear, published in the Correspondence columns of newspapers, to the growing astonishment of the Metropolis. Flitty Deakins had been to a pothecary’s shop in a lane behind St Martin’s Street, from which she is now returning with a small brown bottle. Hurrying past the fountain, she sees the woman in grey lift her head, two eyes like red coals burning out from the folds of the shawl.
Miss Deakins has seen the face of Belial, leering in at her through the window of her chamber. But the face of Belial is as nothing at all, to this. Miss Deakins recoils with a cry, cos she once saw this face in life, when the woman came to Crutched Friars in the company of Doomsday Men. And now here is the face again in death — oh, surely it is Death itself, staring out of those terrible red eyes? — cos Meg Nancarrow was hanged outside Newgate two weeks ago.
Miss Deakins gives another cry, of terror and wonderment commingled, and drops in holy dread upon her knees.
*
This is where the tale grows wild. We will need dark nights and thunderstorms as we proceed; howling winds, and hearts afire with unspeakable yearnings. But upon my oath and upon my soul: what I am telling you is true. Even when I am left clutching after the facts, like poor Jemmy Cheese flailing blindly as Thoughts in darkness bat-wing past, I am sure beyond all certainty that the Tale itself is true, in the way that tales both great and tattered may point towards a distant Truth that the light of a thousand facts cannot illuminate — and never mind the frailty of the teller.
Besides, what reason would I have to lie? What could I hope to gain, in my position?
It is late on a Saturday night as I write these words, the 16th of November. Today dawned blustery and raw, and the night is bitter, even here cocooned in stone walls three feet thick. There will be a service for the Condemned tomorrow in Newgate Chapel, and the coffin for company, to aid in banishing trivial thoughts and fostering a spirit of true contrition. Appeals are still in process, though I have no reason to hope, Time being measured now in quarter-inches of the candle stub and the muffled tolling of St Paul’s bell.
It concentrates the mind most wonderfully — so Sam Johnson famously said — when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight. From this I conclude that even the great Sam Johnson could be a twat. In my own experience, the prospect does very little to concentrate the mind, and does much instead to panic it into wild chaotic flight, like a school of minnows beneath the long black sliding shadow of a pike. It brings on night-terrors that extend right through the light of day and on into a worse night still, as a fortnight shrivels to a week and the last remaining hours drop one by one like dying petals.
But there are blessings that remain to me, and I must count them. I have gloves and paper and ink that has not yet frozen. I am wearing two coats at this very minute, and a blanket round my shoulders for good measure, and there is no icicle at all at the end of my nose, leastways not yet. And I have a task. I write as swiftly as I can, and have asked my friends to see this narrative through if I am unable to finish. They are good friends — God knows, they are better than I deserve — and have given their word.
Yes, I’m afraid it has become that sort of tale.
Onward.
*
The Wreck of Tom Sheldrake had not yet sunk, but the icy waters were rising. He would appear from time to time at his chambers, but with each manifestation he grew thinner and less substantial. This I was able to ascertain through young Barnaby’s nosing and prying, since naturally I could no longer risk going to the Inns of Court myself, or even trying again to contact his Spavined Clerk.
Hollow-eyed and unshaven, the Wreck would drift into the outer chamber where Mr Nuttall still laboured at his desk, the pile of papers — now sadly dwindled — at either elbow. With a rictus of greeting, Sheldrake would flinch into his inner room, where he would be heard pacing and muttering. Sometimes he gave out a spectral wail, as if he were become the ghost of his own still-living self, here to haunt Tom Sheldrake down into the grave. Then suddenly he would burst out again, looking wildly round and demanding to know if anyone had come looking for him. Once he had a razor in his hand, and a thin ruby line beading his throat. This alarmed Mr
Nuttall considerably; no shaver misses his chin by several inches, however much he is distracted.
He had tried then to ask after Sheldrake’s health, but it was no use; the Wreck retreated into his chamber, slamming the door. There came dolorous mussitations and the telltale sounds of furniture scraping, from which the Clerk deduced that the entrance was being barricaded. This caused him much disquiet, as he had seen such a change before: an aged relation, his mother, who had grown convinced that the neighbours were massing in secret for an assault upon the house. The family had in the end been forced to lock her in an attic, from which she had periodically escaped, with high determination and shouts of wrath, to do battle.
Abruptly Sheldrake disappeared. For several days he was not seen at all, and Mr Nuttall began to entertain dire visions: Sheldrake hanging pear-shaped from a rafter, or bobbing blue and ghastly to the surface of the Thames. Then just as suddenly he was back. It was evening, just at twilight, and the Clerk — down to the last three papers in his pile — looked up to see his employer in the doorway. Tom Sheldrake was paste-white and reeking of gin, and so wasted by lack of eating that he seemed scarcely more than sticks and twine. But he wore a new frock coat with a bright canary weskit, and a gay sprig of flowers in his lapel.
“Mr Sheldrake,” exclaimed Mr Nuttall. “Has something happened?”
“Happened?” Tom exclaimed. “Everything has happened, Nuttall — life, death. All of London is happening, at this instant. The world is happening — look out the window! We are spinning at this minute, sir, upon our axis. We are hurtling through Infinity. And you ask, has something happened?”
“I meant, are you quite well?”
“I am very well indeed,” said the Wreck of Tom.
This seemed unlikely to be true, and Mr Nuttall hesitated. “I was about to close up for the night, sir,” he said. “Would you have me stay instead?”