Will Starling (17 page)

“The Man Himself sent me to find you,” he said. Meaning Atherton. “We're wondering if you've heard from the Deakins.”

“Flitty Deakins? No.”

“You're sure of this?”

“I just said it, didn't I?”

“Cos she's gone missing, you see. She's up and disappeared. And now we worry.”

This was news to Your Wery Umble.

“Why would you think she'd come to me?”

“She done it before. Straight to friend Starling with a tale to tell.”

“I ent seen her since that night.”

He eyed me for a moment, weighing whether to believe it. Weighing Your Wery Umble too, perhaps, as a man might do who had the proper pig-sticking expertise. Seven stone and a half, he might have calculated — and somewhat less than that once hung by the hind legs to drain with all the other little piggies.

“Well,” he said at length. “If you hear anything — where she is, p'raps, or where she's bound — you'll let us know.”

“And why would I do that?”

“Cos poor Miss Deakins ent well. She sees wild sights, poor addled bitch, and is attacked by green-eyed Hindoos. God knows what might find her on the streets of London, unless her friends find her first. And of course we'd make it worth your trouble. Here.”

His left hand was extended, a gold guinea glinting in the palm.

“A token of goodwill,” he said.

“I don't want your money.”

“'Course you do.”

He exposed long yellow ivories again, to indicate that we were friends, despite occasional misunderstandings. Nothing but the very best of friends, united in Christian concern for Phyllida Deakins.

I took the coin. After all, why not? And if I ever caught wind of Miss Deakins's whereabouts, I would advise her to run as far and as fast as her trotters would take her, as if all the green-eyed Hindoos in creation were howling like djinns on her heels.

“You heard what happened to Uncle Cheese?” I said.

Odenkirk had. He shook his head, at the sadness of it. “Sorrowful news, friend Starling — and a caution to us all. Cos any one of us might be struck down, as poor Ned Cheshire was. Is that not a fact? Cruelly struck from out of nowhere, in the prime of life. Something for us all to think upon.”

He leaned down closer, his champers as yellow and long and sharp as the teeth of the wolf in the tale.

“Lying in a ditch full of shit — eh, friend Starling? Down there with the poor dead moggies, and the dogs that bit. And if you hear from the Deakins, you'll be sure to tell us. You'll be very sure indeed — I know you will.”

The skies opened up again as Odenkirk sloped off, and that smile of his followed me home. All the way to Cripplegate, hunched against the rain, flinching at every noise in the London night. At last I turned at the head of the street. There was a lamp on the corner, and light just ahead from the gin-shop.

And as I arrived, my heart stopped all over again. An apparition slid from the darkness to block my way: a young woman, soaked to the skin and shuddering with the chill, like a wandering ghost bereft of shelter.

“Miss Smollet!” I exclaimed.

 

The gin-shop was unprepossessing even by the standards of the district,
unprepossessing
being a word that you may take to mean small and dirty and redolent of ancient odours, the most prominent of these being juniper and vomit. There was a wooden counter with bottles behind, and a handful of tables and wooden stools. There were unadorned walls to lean against, and — and after a time — to slide down from, and a floor beneath to lie sprawled upon if necessary, though this was not encouraged by the proprietress. Missus Maggs preferred a better class of patron, meaning them as would leave on their own two trotters — or one trotter and a crutch, as might be, in the case of Tom Lobster returned from the Wars, or patients of Mr Comrie up the stairs. But a gin-shop was a gin-shop, and you took what staggered in.

Miss Smollet had been outside in the rain for hours. For Literally Hours, she said tearfully, although Missus Maggs would tell me the next day that it had been closer to twenty minutes. Miss Smollet had come into the gin-shop first, said Missus Maggs, but then sat without purchasing a single glass, since apparently she lacked the requisite jingle. This had caused Missus Maggs in due course to invite her to leave again; and another sort of proprietress — though not Missus Maggs — might have wondered at the motives of such a young woman in coming penniless into a gin-shop in the first place. “Hattired in such a manner, Mister Starling, as no Modest Person would be, in a skirt that riz above the ankles, and wares right there up front, on display in the shop window. But I forms no judgements, which you well know, being as I am a woman as sees little and 'ears less, sitting upon my stool behind the counter, Mister Starling, minding of my kews, sir, and my peeze.”

“I didn't know Where Else to Turn,” Miss Smollet was saying now.

Sitting cold and drenched and wretched, with my own jacket wrapped around her shoulders. But at least we were inside again, and at a table nearest the fire, since Your Wery Umble possessed jingle where Miss Smollet did not. A golden guinea, in fact, courtesy of friend Odenkirk. She cupped her hands round a glass of hot punch, avoiding the slantways eye of Missus Maggs.

“What's wrong?” I asked her.

“Everything.”

“Has something happened?”

“Yes!”

She drew a breath to steady herself, and slurped a mouthful of punch.

“Bob Eldritch,” she said. “In a newspaper, this morning. Did you see it? So it ent just me. There's others has seen him too.”

I started to remind her that the newspapers would print almost anything, and that some simple explanation surely lay behind it. But Miss Smollet was shivering again, with something that went much deeper than the chill. “You don't understand,” she said. “He came again, a second time. He was at my window.”

“When?”

“Tonight. Earlier — just after dark.”

She swore it was no dream. She had been wide awake, sitting at the wooden box by the window that served as an
escritoire
, writing a letter to her friend the Badger. The candle had suddenly fluttered, she said, though the window and the door were both closed and no way for the wind to get in. Then there came a scratching sound that was not her quill against the paper, and when she looked up he was staring at her.

“He was outside the window — Right There — closer than I am to you! His hair standing up on end, and Great Staring Eyes, bulging out of his head. Oh, them Eyes — they were never like that in life, Mr Starling. Whatever could have happened to his eyes?”

Her distress was genuine. That was piercingly clear — never mind her tendency towards capitalization, nor her skills as an actress. Miss Smollet had been terrified.

And I confess that a certain sensation had begun creeping up Your Wery Umble's spine, as clammy and cold as a hand reaching up from a grave.

“Oh, Mr Starling — Will — what am I to do?”

Behind the counter, Missus Maggs while minding her peeze and kews had been leaning ever more precariously in our direction. She now leaned at forty-five degrees, like the mainmast on a crippled frigate. In another moment she would reach the tipping point, and crash to the deck in a tangle of sheets and rigging.

“I'll walk you home, Miss Smollet,” I said.

“Home? Haven't you heard a word I just been saying?”

“I'll wait outside the house, and make sure no one comes. All night, if I have to.”

I would have done it too. But her distress just grew keener than ever.

“Don't you see? That room's no good. I can't go back there — cos he knows where to find me!”

She sat huddled in such woebegone loveliness as would melt a heart of granite, let alone the poor organ of Your Wery Umble, which had commenced melting the second I saw Miss Smollet upon the stage three weeks previous, and had by the present moment achieved such a perfect state of liquefaction that it pooled about my soggy boots like rainwater. And of all the doors in London, she had come in her hour of distress to mine.

“What am I to do?” she said again, as helpless as a child.

“You will stay here, Miss Smollet,” I said, decisively. “You will stay with me.”

 

My crib was on the topmost floor, underneath the eaves. It was little more than a closet, with a pallet on the floor and a slantingdicular ceiling to thump your nob against, getting up, all of it smelling of mould and unwashed Will. It had been used as a storage room, and still was. Odds and ends of broken furniture were piled against the walls, and a threadbare rug rolled up, the way you'd roll up a rug with a body in it. There was not a cadaver so concealed at this particular moment — although there had been bodies here on other occasions. Mr Comrie never did dissections on the premises, but sometimes a Thing would arrive in the night, requiring to be stored 'til morning. I never minded them much — cadavers sleep quiet, though they're gassier than you might suppose. And of course they grow nose-ish after a day or two, especially in warm weather.

Still, it was my own room — the first I'd ever had. My books were stored on a shelf, all eight of them, including the adventures of Gil Blas, and
Tales of the Genii
and
Robinson Crusoe
. Sam Johnson's dictionary as well, Your Wery Umble having always been the tiniest bit of a scholard himself, in a haphazard way. In a battered trunk were my particular personal treasures. These included a barker that I'd had from a poor dead Lobster after the Battle of Albuera — a bone-handled pistol, exactly like one that might have been used by Claude Duvall the highwayman — and one half of a small brass locket that my mother had left with me at the Foundling Hospital. There was always a keepsake left with a foundling. My mother had the other half; we'd have matched them up if she'd ever come to take me back again.

Miss Smollet followed me up three flights of stairs, past Mr Comrie rumbling in slumber behind his own door. Stepping into my room, she stood wet and shivering.

“You must take off them things, Miss Smollet,” I said. She'd catch her death, is what I meant. “We'll hang them up to dry.”

“I'm very grateful to you,” she said. “I'd be gratefuller if you'd turn round.”

Behind my back, Miss Smollet's sodden garments whispered from her skin. And there stood a statue of Your Wery Umble with his glims squinched shut, scarce daring to breathe, like some blind acolyte outside the Holy of Holies itself — whatever that may be, for I confess I don't precisely know. But you'll take the reference nonetheless, and understand how I was feeling in that moment.

“Here,” she said.

I took them as they were handed from behind, and bore them down the stairs to the surgery, where I poked a fire to life in the grate and hung the garments with reverence and awe. The shawl and the frock, draped over the backs of chairs, to scandalize Missus Maggs when she came in the morning to straighten. Then I fetched a rug back upstairs and found Miss Smollet sitting on the trunk, a candle guttering on the window ledge behind her. She was wrapped in a blanket, her wet hair hanging free about her shoulders, like a desolate mermaid on a rock.

“It weren't a dream,” she said, somehow seeming forlorn and fierce both at once. “Tonight, and that other time. He was truly there, Will, at my window. Do you believe me?”

Her eyes were wide and searching, and I hesitated.

“I believe you saw something that gave you a terrible fright,” I said. “But you're safe now. Not a soul in London knows you're here — not a single one, alive or dead — excepting my sole self. And I'll be on the landing until morning comes — right here, Miss Smollet, standing watch outside the door.”

She smiled then, brave and tremulous. She might have been a heroine upon the stage — lorn and bereft and hunted by foes, but resolved to carry on. The waters of William's melted heart rose up above his knees.

“I hardly deserve such kindness, Will. You are Such a Good Friend to me.”

“Right here, Miss Smollet,” I repeated. “And I ent moving, neither.”

You will imagine the welter of thoughts and feelings as I bowed myself out of my bedroom, and closed the door upon Miss Smollet, and sat myself cross-legged against it. Prepared to face down the Legions of Hell itself, should they come howling through the darkness up those stairs — but feeling at the same time more unsettled than I'd ever admit, and drawing some reassurance from the snores that rumbled through Mr Comrie's door below.

Cos of course I'd never told Miss Smollet about what Flitty Deakins had claimed to see — a corpse rising up in the stable loft at Crutched Friars, the night Bob Eldritch choked to death amongst the Wolves. But Miss Deakins saw green-eyed Hindoos as well — so I reminded myself, over and again. Flitty Deakins was addicted to laudanum, and no one could resurrect the dead, not even if they employed electrical means and swore that it was Science.

The light from Miss Smollet's candle showed in a thin line underneath the door. Twice she called out softly, anxious to know that I was still there at my post. I whispered back reassurance, and at length I heard her breathing grow regular and deep.

I drifted off to sleep myself, some while before dawn. Or so I must have done, cos I dreamed I glimpsed a shape at the foot of the stair, hunched and peering up at me. A white face and two bulging eyes like eggs, and hair standing straight on end.

I found myself lurching to my feet. But when I looked again there was nothing there.

13

That morning, I went to pay a call upon Isaac Bliss.

Isaac had been one of the smallest boys at the Foundling Hospital, and was thus one of the most beleaguered, on the universal principle that the weak must be baited and badgered, especially if they're crippled. I took the opposite position, and did so robustly, being one of the biggest. You'll arch an eyebrow, now, and regard Your Wery Umble askance, but I tell the truth. I got off to a rousing start in life, thanks no doubt to that vast blue-veined breast in Kent, and 'til the age of nine or ten was a strapping fellow. My problem was I petered out, and accomplished almost nothing at all thereafter, growth-wise.