by Ian Weir
William would want you to hear that. He never bore a grudge towards Miss Smollet. And he went to the scaffold as game as they come, shuddering as he reached the top step, but that was the cold cutting through him. Wind whipped the Hangman’s coat, and poor William wore nothing more than a shirt. But he held his head high as they positioned him, and found our faces gazing up at him from the very front of the crowd. Saw his friends at the last, just before the white hood went on. And God bless him, he actually smiled.
Janet cried out as he dropped. The customary six inches, was all — not nearly enough to break the neck of such a wisp of a lad. I had expected that, of course. I knew the neck would never break.
Atherton was at the churchyard three days later, when we put the coffin in the ground. Muted and lugubrious in black.
“By God, that you would dare to show your face,” I said.
Janet would have clouted him then and there. She balled her fists and turned bright red.
“I have lost a son,” he said, with the air of a man much wounded.
I very nearly clouted him myself. Instead I told him of the papers I was editing. William’s account of what had happened, step by step.
His expression grew dark. “Take care what you publish, Comrie. Take very great care indeed.”
“Oh, I shall. I’ll be meticulous and thorough.”
“I warn you again, for old friendship’s sake. I will ruin you.”
But it never came to ruination — not on either side. Because that same afternoon, Flitty Deakins died in Bedlam Hospital, which led to a singular consequence.
Pneumonia took her. Her lungs had never recovered from the fire, and the end came quickly. It came kindly too, as pneumonia does, which was a blessing — assuming you feel she deserved any manner of blessing. Poor mad Phyllida, chained to a shit-smeared wall and raving of a Reckoning to come.
Atherton acquired the corpse. It was easily done, there being no friends to care about a funeral; just slip four pounds to the Porter. If I had to suppose, I’d say it simply amused him — Flitty Deakins, with her horror of dissection, stretched naked beneath his scalpel in the Death House. Rats and sparrows brawling for bits as her Nemesis carved her up.
Except there had been delays. The corpse had been stowed for a time in a cellar at Bedlam Hospital — not long, just two or three days. But that’s long enough for putrefaction to set in, and the anatomist must of course take special care, with a putrid corpse.
Atherton did not. Perhaps it was just careless showmanship — a cavalier swipe of the scalpel. Perhaps stiffness in the shoulder as well, scar tissue from the wound William had given him. But I think it was more than that. He hadn’t been the same since William’s arrest, and in the week since the hanging he had not been sober at all. He’d been unsteady on his feet at the funeral; he’d passed a hand over his face, and I noted then how it shook. “That is no hand,” I thought at the time, “for a surgeon to possess. He will need to pull himself together.”
However it was, he nicked his finger during the dissection. The merest nick — a flake of jagged bone. Flitty Deakins gaped up at him, her mouth stretched wide in a rictus. In the reeking gloom of the Death House, by the guttering light of candles fashioned from human fat, it could very nearly be taken for unholy glee.
The headache began within the hour, and that’s when he knew.
“You mad, pathetic bitch,” he said. “You have murdered me.”
It is a dismal way to die. By noon, the pain in his head was intense, and as night fell delirium set in; he moaned and thrashed and cried out most piteously to be left alone, evidently believing that devils were gathering in the corners of the room. They were twisted and desiccated, he seemed to think, like bats. His organs began to haemorrhage, the blood unable to clot. An hour before dawn it was over, and the most gifted man I have ever known was dead.
*
William’s struggles had ceased at the end of twenty minutes, his body hanging limp. At 8.21, death was pronounced by the attending surgeon, a man named Inverarity. A good man; I’d known him at school. I had been to his house, in fact, a day or two previous. He lived very near Newgate, behind St Bart’s Hospital. At twenty-three minutes past the hour, the body was cut down.
It was the crowd that had thwarted John Hunter those decades previous, in his bid to save the poor Revd Dodd. There was the irony of it. A mighty throng had come out to witness Dodd’s hanging, so great was public sympathy for him. A hundred thousand clogged the streets around Tyburn, blocking the passage of the cart. Hunter had made arrangements with a nearby undertaker — a table was prepared, the equipment laid out — but they couldn’t get Dodd’s body through for nearly two hours. Otherwise, Hunter might have carried it off. The greatest Scientific Surgeon of his age — if anyone had the skill, it was Hunter. His plan was to warm the body in front of a fire and then to inflate the lungs while administering stimulants: hartshorn and hot balsam, forced up through the rectum. After this, electrical shocks were to be administered from a Leyden Jar, which could have been useful if the heart had arrested, though not strictly necessary, assuming that the body had been cut down soon enough, before death was absolute. Owing to a premature pronouncement by the attending surgeon, through error or prior agreement. I had myself revived a drowned girl, nearly twenty minutes after respiration had ceased. And if you could revive after twenty minutes, then why not thirty, or even more? It helps if the body is very cold.
There were no more than five thousand gathered for William’s hanging, owing to the filthy weather. They filled only half the square, and directly afterwards they dispersed. When a knot of them impeded the cart, Janet lowered her head and charged, roaring like a bull and battering right through. By God, I might have exclaimed to myself, if I’d not had so much else upon my mind. By the Lord and his mighty swinging bollocks, that was magnificently done.
*
If Hunter had succeeded, he would presumably have spirited the Revd Dodd out of London — out of England entirely, if possible. Dodd might conceivably have settled in a town in France. Married an actress, even, if he was the sort of man who fell in love with actresses. And who knows? Perhaps he was. I know very little about poor Dodd. He might have corresponded regularly with old friends from London, who were reassured to know that he was well and contented, with an Apothecary’s shop behind the high street where we might imagine him at this moment: perched upon a stool, measuring and mixing, grown pot-bellied in middle age. All this might indeed have been possible, had the great man succeeded.
But of course John Hunter failed.
THE END.
Acknowledgements
The early years of the nineteenth century were fraught with controversy over scientific explorations into the essence of life itself — much like the early years of a certain other century that springs to mind. Particularly contentious were attempts to resurrect the dead; and in the summer of 1816, the year in which the fictional events of Will Starling take place, Mary Shelley sat down at a villa in Switzerland to tell ghost stories with a group of friends and conceived the idea for Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. Her novel galvanized into existence an entire genre, and my own tale unfolds in the long shadow that Victor Frankenstein and his Creature continue to cast.
Although Will Starling is a work of fiction, it rests on a foundation of research, and I owe a debt of gratitude to sources too numerous and varied to be listed here in full. A marvellous overview of science in the Romantic Era is to be found in Richard Holmes’s The Age of Wonder. To those interested in the history of medicine and surgery, I heartily recommend Wendy Moore’s biography of John Hunter, The Knife Man. Also splendid is Digging Up the Dead, Druin Burch’s biography of the Regency surgeon Astley Cooper. A treasure trove of information about early surgeons and surgical practice, it includes a harrowing account of an operation to repair an aortic aneurism in 1817, which suggested the dark anecdote that Will tells about Dionysus Atherton’s fictional attempt to do the same. Will’s knowled
ge of potions and remedies, including his advice to John Keats concerning cholera in its premonitory phase, owes much to the 1835 edition of Every Man His Own Doctor. Readers are strongly cautioned not to try these remedies at home. If you suspect you have cholera in the premonitory phase, please consult a physician.
The craft of surgery made great sanguinary leaps on Peninsular battlefields, and I learned much from Robert Richardson’s biography of Dominique Jean Larrey, Larrey, Surgeon to Napoleon’s Imperial Guard. There are many memorable eyewitness accounts of Napoleonic warfare; Soldiers at War, edited by Jon E. Lewis, includes that of Captain Alexander Cavilie Mercer, an artilleryman who fought at Waterloo and saw there a horse that remained upright and alive despite having had the bottom portion of its head swept away by a cannonball. The image haunted my dreams, and proceeded to haunt the dreams of my Umble Narrator.
Sarah Wise, in The Italian Boy: Murder and Grave-Robbery in 1830s London, offers a comprehensive study of the Resurrection trade, focusing in particular on the infamous “London Burkers” murder case. The Diary of a Resurrectionist 1811 - 1812, available in a facsimile edition, is the actual diary of an anonymous grave-robber. Victorian CSI, by William A. Guy, David Ferrier, and William R. Smith, opens a fascinating window onto early Victorian forensic medical knowledge, including a physiological analysis of death by judicial hanging. As for what came after death — or at least what Regency anatomists actually attempted — I am indebted to Andy Dougan’s highly readable Raising the Dead: The Men Who Created Frankenstein. Other valuable companions included Donald A. Low’s The Regency Underworld, Kellow Chesney’s The Victorian Underworld, Judith Flanders’s The Invention of Murder: How the Victorians Revelled in Death and Detection and Created Modern Crime, Kelly Grovier’s The Gaol: the Story of Newgate, London’s Most Notorious Prison, and Catharine Arnold’s Necropolis: London and Its Dead. Although Henry Mayhew commenced his monumental chronicling of the London underclass some years after the fictional events of Will Starling, his influence is felt throughout. Peter Ackroyd is the author of many wonderful books, and his London: The Biography is extraordinary. All inaccuracies are of course entirely my own.
While all of the primary characters in Will Starling are fictional, there are cameo appearances by historical figures. Edmund Kean was the greatest actor of the era, and Raymund FitzSimons conjures a vivid portrait in his biography Edmund Kean: Fire from Heaven. The young John Keats was indeed a surgical student at Guy’s Hospital in 1816; John Abernethy and his quondam pupil William Lawrence were leading surgeons and bitter rivals; and Isaac Bliss’s name appears on a list of foundlings at Coram’s Hospital, though he is otherwise lost to history. The pioneering surgeon John Hunter is repeatedly referenced in the novel, and his astonishing collection of anatomical specimens — which provided the inspiration for Atherton’s Collection Room — may be seen at the Royal Hunterian Museum in London. Oh, and the Real Learned French Dog Tim actually danced for coins in 1816, though he went by the name of Bob instead.
I am forever grateful for the encouragement of Chris Labonte and Scott McIntyre. I owe a deep debt of thanks to those who read and suggested improvements to the manuscript as it evolved, including Susin Nielsen, Amy Weir, and Jude Weir. Mary Sandys provided much indispensable advice on matters historical and linguistic; her close attention led to many improvements, as did Peter Norman’s perceptive copy-edit. My editor, Bethany Gibson, was unfailingly wise and wonderful. Heartfelt gratitude as well to Susanne Alexander and the rest of the team at Goose Lane, and to Chip Fleischer and Roland Pease at Steerforth. And heartfelt thanks to my friends at Transatlantic, including David Bennett, Barbara Miller, and Stephanie Sinclair, and especially Samantha Haywood, agent extraordinaire and notable keeper of promises.
Throughout the lengthy process of researching and writing the novel, I was wistfully aware of the shade of Dr. O.A. Weir — the first surgeon I ever knew — smiling over my shoulder. Dad, I just wish you’d had the chance to read it.
Author Bio
IAN WEIR is a playwright, screenwriter, and novelist. His debut novel, Daniel O’Thunder, was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book, as well as the Canadian Authors Association Award for fiction, the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, and the amazon.ca First Novel Award.
His extensive television credits include creator and executive producer of the CBC adventure/drama series Arctic Air and writer and executive producer of the critically acclaimed crime thriller Dragon Boys. His stage plays have been produced across Canada and in the U.S. and England, and his awards include two Geminis, four Leos, a Jessie, and a Writers Guild of Canada Screenwriting Award.
Ian Weir lives in Langley, BC, with his wife and daughter.