Will Starling (18 page)

A cynic might suggest that those early years shaped certain assumptions about myself, and left me with lifelong misconceptions about what I might accomplish, and how much I might aspire to, like one of those Northern terriers that won't stop strutting long enough to realize he stands shoulder-high to a rat. But I was for several glorious years a regular bruiser, and at Lamb's Conduit Fields I was able to blacken a few ogles and bash selected smellers in order to encourage a spirit of love and solicitude towards foundling-kind in general, and poor Isaac Bliss in particular. And indeed he was never “poor Isaac” at all, even at his most beleaguered, cos Isaac had a wonderful spirit, resilient past all reason.

I'd like to think he was fond of me in return, even as I lost my value in the smeller-bashing line. And in fact he lit right up with pleasure as he turned achingly from his work-bench in the cellar of Bowell the Undertaker, and saw me coming in.

“Will Starling!” he exclaimed. He'd been sitting on a three-legged stool, and now he creaked himself onto his feet. “It's grand to see you, Will — just grand.”

“And you, young Isaac,” I said. “You're looking well.”

He held his smile. “Am I? Well, it's kind of you to say. Though I wonder, Will, if p'raps you're not quite right.”

In truth, it hurt just to look at him. Isaac had declined quite shockingly from the last time I had been here, scarcely a month ago. His eyes had grown too big for his face, and his breath rattled audibly in his narrow chest. Worse yet, his skin had taken on that blue translucence that I knew too well from a hundred field hospitals. It's the look you see when Old Bones is standing just outside the door.

Old Bones never truly left Bowell's at all, of course, being present in every shadow. He was here in the stillness of the cellar, with its dancing dust-motes and its smell of fresh-cut wood and lingering putrefaction. But he'd never before stood quite so close to Isaac Bliss. Right there, looking over his shoulder, as Isaac bowed in his eternal question-mark, sanding a length of pine.

“'Ave you come on business, Will? Cos Mister Bowell's gone out.”

“I ent here for him, young Isaac. I'm here to see a friend.”

I don't know if he believed me, quite. Isaac was not a lad with friends who'd drop by to visit of a morning — or friends who'd drop by at all. But he beamed to hear it anyways.

“Well, that's grand, Will,” he said, employing a favourite word. He creaked down onto the stool again, finding standing up a strain. “I seen another friend too, just t'other day. You recollect Janet Friendly, from Lamb's Conduit Fields?”

I recollected vividly. A long plain face with an ominous scowl and two large red hands, one of them frequently wrapped in a fist that was waving under Your Wery Umble's cork-snorter. Though I concede she often had just cause.

“How is she?”

“Oh, she's just grand. It seems she lives by St Clement Danes, with her Ma.”

There was a surprise.

“Her Ma come back to fetch her?”

“She did, Will. Fetched her out, and took her home, not long after you left. They have a shop, the two of 'em together.”

I beamed right back at that, though I couldn't help but feel a wistful pang. Cos that's what we'd all dreamt of, after all — each morning and each night, every foundling in the place.

“Janet's Ma,” I said. “Well, ent that something.”

“It is, Will. It's just the grandest thing.”

But in fact I hadn't come just to visit. There was a question I needed to ask him — and I needed to ask it directly, before Mr Bowell should come down the stairs, or that viperous son.

“There was a funeral several days ago, on Monday. A man named Eldritch. You remember the one?”

Isaac blinked, and nodded. Yes, of course he did. “Mr Atherton brung the party in.”

“Did you help prepare the body?”

“No, Mr Bowell done that himself.”

“But it was here — the body. You're sure of that?”

Isaac gave a painful shrug, and looked perplexed. “I seen
a
body, Will. It was brung here under a blanket. Whether it was your Eldritch or no, I couldn't say. I never saw the man in life. And why would you need to know that, can I ask?”

He was about to grow perplexeder still, cos the question I needed to ask had been brooding in my mind since Annie Smollet had turned up in the night. Skulking on rat's paws somewhere deep, with all the other thoughts that are too shadowy and queer for the light of day. Now it had brought me here to the undertaker's cellar, where coffins stood against the walls and poor Isaac Bliss on a three-legged stool sat dying before my eyes.

“The body that come in, Isaac — this body that Bowell prepared himself. When the coffin left this place on the morning of the funeral . . . was the body inside it?”

Isaac blinked, and began to answer. Then he stopped, with a furrowed expression.

“It's an odd thing, Will,” he said. “Odd that you should ask that partic'lar question.”

“Why?”

*

Isaac's reply was to give me a great deal to ponder, in the days that followed. But the conversation had also suggested a solution to an immediate dilemma, one that waited for me outside on the street, pacing in muted agitation. Miss Smollet turned as I emerged from the Undertaker's.

“What did your friend say?” she asked.

I had shaken her awake in the first light of morning, before Mr Comrie had emerged snorting from his slumbers — and before Missus Maggs in the gin-shop downstairs had arisen to mind her kews and peeze. But that left the question of where poor Miss Smollet should go instead, for she couldn't bring herself to return to the house in Holborn.

“Your friend,” she repeated anxiously. “What did he tell you?”

I decided to restrict myself to one small part of the answer. Leastways for the present, until I'd worked out what best to do next.

“He says,” I replied, “that he knows someone who may have a room to let.”

 

Janet Friendly's house stood amongst a cluster of ramshackle structures wedged along a down-at-heels patch of Milford Lane, south of St Clement Danes. There were street arabs staring, and washing on poles stuck out of windows, and on warm days the stench from the churchyard would waft its way across the Strand. The yard at St Clement Danes was known as the Green Ground; it was notoriously overcrowded, being also the graveyard for the workhouse in Portugal Street. And paupers will putrefy, especially when they're stacked four or five on top of one another, with a few inches of soil to cover the topmost. In summer the body bugs — mayflies, is what they were — buzzed like bumblebees.

Janet's house leaned forwards, its second storey looming partway across the narrow lane, as if intending belligerence to the house on the other side. The opposing structure leaned towards it with equivalent intent, and thus the two of them faced one another like two muskoxen bent on settling the issue of dominance over the herd. In this regard, Janet Friendly's house was much like Janet herself, and if Your Wery Umble were a betting man — which he was — he'd lay ten to one that hers would triumph, lunging suddenly with a mighty blow that would shiver the antagonist's timbers and reduce it to a pile of planks. I put this to her once on a subsequent visit, to see how she'd respond. She eyed me narrowly, as if deciding whether I was laughing at her, and would in consequence need clouting about the earhole — cos Janet Friendly wasn't, particularly. Friendly, I mean. The surname had been wishful thinking on the part of the Governors at the Foundling Hospital, or possibly just irony, after one look at the set of her infant jaw. But she had other qualities to compensate.

There was a sign in the window when Miss Smollet and I arrived, just as Isaac Bliss had speculated that there might be. A bit of cardboard and a charcoal scrawl: “Room to let.” So we went in.

Sunlight slanted onto benches piled with old clothes and fabric. Standing amidst them were racks of outlandish outfits: jackets and doublets and capes and gowns, in rainbows of colour. Manikins stood like guests at a masquerade ball, and heads with wigs lined up in a row. It was all remarkably splendid, though of course it wasn't, not really — the wigs were horse-hair and the fabrics were coarse, and the ravishing dresses were patched and flimsy — but they still had their enchantment, for all that. There was a work-bench off to the side for mending and altering items that came in, and a low doorway led to a sitting room at the back.

At the counter was a customer, harbouring illusions about the price he might get for the bundle of old clothes he was offering. A large man, shrinking by the moment as his aspirations were cudgelled down to size by a horse-faced young woman of some twenty years; at length he slunk out with a meagre handful of coins, sadly diminished by the transaction. The young woman commenced sorting through the bundle he'd left, and turned an equine glower upon Miss Smollet and myself.

“H'lo,” I said, the sight of her kindling a grin despite best efforts.

A vague recognition stirred in return, and she squinted Your Wery Umble into clearer perspective.

“Will Starling,” she exclaimed. “Well, Christ on a biscuit.”

I had always liked Janet Friendly, though God knew she could grind upon a man. We'd been good friends, in our way, at the Foundling Hospital — even on the days she was twisting my arm up bechuxt my shoulder blades for whatever transgression I had most lately committed. Usually it involved missing a chance to shut my peck-box.

“Will fucking Starling,” she repeated.

“Janet.” A woman's voice — Janet's mother's, presumably — emanated from the sitting room. “Language.”

“Just look at you. Five years is it — six? And you never grew a fucking inch.”

*

Mrs Sibthorpe, Janet's mother, had been upon the stage. I was to learn all of this in the days that followed my first visit — and I share it with you now, since Janet Friendly's story was quite heart-warming, in its wistful way, and perhaps we should take our warmth where we can find it, you and I, given where our own dark Tale is tending. Janet's mother had not been Mrs Sibthorpe in those days, but rather Lively Loo, who performed comic songs and dances at penny gaffs and free-and-easies — public houses, that is to say, where musical entertainment was on offer — in East London. In one of these she met Janet's father, who wasn't Mr Sibthorpe either, but a twinkling eye and a splendid set of sidewhiskers, last seen legging it down an alleyway in the first fresh promise of dawn. The actual Mr Sibthorpe had first seen her in a free-and-easy as well, a number of years after the child of Twinkling Eye had been left at Lamb's Conduit Fields. He was a quieter man entirely, Mr Sibthorpe; some might even say dull. “As riveting as a mackerel,” as Mrs Sibthorpe was often to remind him, on days when the mantle of abandoned aspirations lay particularly heavy upon her shoulders. But he was a sober man, and a decent one, who ran a shop that sold theatrical costumes; he lived upstairs, and rented out rooms besides, to lodgers.

A few months after the marriage, he learned that his wife had had a child once, out of wedlock, and left it at the Foundling Hospital. As Mrs Sibthorpe wailed and rent her hair, he left the shop without another word, disappearing down the lane as a man with vastly superior sidewhiskers had done with such finality some years before. He was gone for several hours, walking the streets of the Metropolis, and returned with a settled expression and six words for his wife: “Perhaps you'd better fetch it home.”

It turned out that Janet's mother had in the early days gone several times to Lamb's Conduit Fields, peering wistfully through the railings at the girls in their drab black uniforms, and wondering which one of them might be hers. One such afternoon she had glimpsed the child: a waif with golden hair and soulful eyes that would melt the heart of a granite gargoyle, let alone the heart of a mother who knew — instantly and beyond all doubt, by that mysterious instinct that binds the lioness to her cub — that this was the offspring of her very womb. So now with her husband's phlegmatic blessing, Mrs Sibthorpe hurried back all these years later to Lamb's Conduit Fields with her token in trembling hand, and presenting it to the Governors she was reunited at last with her own beloved child, which turned out to be Janet Friendly: fifteen and raw-boned and lank-brown-haired, with big hands and bigger feet and a chary short-sighted squint on her long phizog, three-quarters convinced that some trick was being played. “And in fact it was,” Janet would later say. “The trick was on her. Serves her right, for being such a maudlin twat. Ah, well — credit where it's due — she took me home anyways.”

She did indeed. She showed Janet through the door of the shop in Milford Lane, and the rooms above where they lived. Mr Sibthorpe said “H'lo” to her, and after a day or two said something else. After a month he glanced to her one evening as they closed the shop and said it was a pleasant thing to have a daughter, which she took very kindly indeed, and would quite possibly have flung her arms about his neck right there and then if she had been of the arms-flinging inclination. Being the opposite sort, she mumbled that a father was no bad thing either, and left it at that. But they understood one another, and often of an evening they would go out walking. Sometimes they would walk up to Drury Lane, to see a play with the great clown Joseph Grimaldi, the finest Harlequin of the age. Or else they would just sit together by the fire in companionable silence, for Mr Sibthorpe was an older gentleman, much older than his wife, and was finding himself less vigorous than once he'd been. Thus they lived for several years, all three of them together, until one evening Mr Sibthorpe went an exceptionally long time without speaking, even by his own standards, and was discovered to be stone dead in his favourite chair. At the funeral, Janet found to her confusion that she was sobbing inconsolably. But she had a mother, and they still had the shop, and a little bit extra that Mr Sibthorpe had put by. So between them they did what you do, and carried on.