Will Starling (21 page)

“What do you want?” he demanded after a moment. The flat hint of Lancashire in his voice — just the barest residue, but it would creep out more distinctly with each bumper of claret. You can never quite hide where you come from, or who you've been. “Money — is that what you're after?”

“I don't want money.”

“What, then?”

“So we are nothing to each other?” Hearing my own voice very small, and feeling my stomach knot with the realization: I had been a fool to come.

He produced a billfold, then, and took out a banknote. “Here,” he said, and thrust it at me. Ten pounds.

“I don't want your money,” I said again.

“Take it.”

“My mother . . .”

“. . . Is dead these eighteen years. But of course you knew that. Didn't you?”

But I had not known, right up 'til that moment. Not for a certainty, although of course I'd suspected. I suppose the shock of it, the dead weight of finality, showed plainly in my face.

“Christ,” he said again. “Well, so now you do know.”

“How did she . . . ?”

“What could it possibly matter now?”

Someone called from inside the house — a woman's voice, laughing and thickened with drink, asking to know what was keeping him.

“Nothing,” he called over his shoulder. “Nobody.”

He looked back to me.

“A fever,” he said. “It was a fever that took her.”

“Were you with her?”

“My sister was nothing to me when she died. As you are nothing to me now. Take what I offer you, and don't come here again.”

I left him standing with the banknote in his hand, and went back to Cripplegate. We were already living there, Mr Comrie and I.

“Whaire've you been?” he called as I came up the stairs that night.

“Nowhere,” I said. “It doesn't matter.”

I stayed in my attic closet for three whole days, that time, just Wm Starling and his companion the Black Dog. When I emerged I discovered that life was going on, as life does. So I rejoined it.

*

Now here I stood outside his house at Crutched Friars once again, on the evening of the day of Meg Nancarrow's trial. His coach turned into the street just as the bell of St Andrew Undershaft was striking seven. A mild May evening, leaves rustling on the trees and the sun declining into the western horizon. Its last rays haloed Atherton as he stepped down. You might in that moment have fancied him Phoebus, alighting from his chariot.

I stepped out from beside the house, where I'd been waiting. The sun was behind me now; there was an instant before he made me out. Eyes slitting, hand rising to shield, then the souring of recognition.

“I saw you at the trial,” I said. “You hired the lawyer.”

Cos I'd made that discovery, asking about at the courtroom. One of the Clerks had told me.

Atherton shrugged, making no attempt to deny.

“Why?” I asked him.

“To defend her, obviously.”

“That was a
defence
? She'd have done better with no one at all.”

“Was I to know how badly he'd bungle?”

“The witness was bought. Master Buttons.”

He had been about to shoulder past me, but this claim brought him up short. Meanwhile Odenkirk had emerged from the house behind us, and now stood slouching ominously on the step. “See this one off, Mr Atherton?” Atherton ignored him, training those blue eyes like pistols.

“You know this for a fact?” he demanded. “You make a serious allegation — and a woman's life is at stake. If you have evidence, state it now.”

But of course I had no evidence. Nothing beyond the obvious, which all the world had seen — or as much of the world as had crammed into the courtroom while Buttons sent Meg to the gallows.

“You saw him,” I said, “same as I did. He was an actor, performing — and wearing new clothes. A man who owes money to half the pawn-shops in London.” Cos I knew a bit about Linwood Buttons, by now. I'd asked at the King of Denmark tavern across the road from the Old Bailey, where they knew him as a drunkard and a beggar. “Where would such a man come by a brand new set of togs, unless someone bought it for him?”

“Do you know where he is?”

I did not. Buttons had disappeared, immediately after delivering his damnable performance. Melted away into the million mingling souls of London.

“Do you know how to find him?” Atherton demanded.

But of course I didn't know that either.

“Well, then . . .” Atherton shrugged eloquently, and started to turn away again.

“What did you say to her?” I asked.

“Who?”

“Meg Nancarrow. When you went to see her in Newgate. What did you say to her?”

He regarded me as if I were some freakish Specimen upon his table: a stunted tatterdemalion Rainbow, presuming to hold one of London's Rising Men of Science to account. But he answered my question, as Odenkirk lounged lupine beyond.

“I said that I would help her, if I could.”

“And what did you say when you went back there this afternoon?”

“What?”

“To Newgate. A few hours ago — not long after they brought her back from the trial. You went to see her again.”

“You mean to say you have been
following
me?”

In fact it had been an accidental discovery. I'd gone back to Newgate to see Meg myself, less than an hour earlier, but they wouldn't let me in. She was being moved this evening, out of the Female Quadrangle and into one of the Death Cells on the other side. But someone had been to see her already, I had learned: Mr Dionysus Atherton, who at this moment seemed undecided whether to strike me down or laugh aloud.

He did the latter, barking out one mirthless syllable and shaking his head at my behaviour.

“I told her to steel her resolve. And that I would continue to do what I could for her.”

“Which is?”

“At this point? There isn't much, Christ knows. I'll make a submission to the Judges.”

There is no appeal of a court decision under the Majesty of British Justice, but the three Judges could indeed be approached. They would meet again on the Saturday following a capital conviction, to consider new information. They might in some cases be swayed, and make a recommendation to the Home Secretary, who could commute a death sentence to transportation for life. Sometimes it happened.

“Why do you care in the first place?” I asked him then.

Cos that was the question that nagged me most of all. Why would a man like Atherton care?

“For a whore like Meg Nancarrow, you mean? I don't care — not personally. But I have an obligation to the family. Jemmy Cheese was acting in my employ on the night he was arrested. I need to preserve my reputation with the Doomsday fraternity at large. I'm a surgeon — I have to do business with them.”

The twilight was deepening about us. A dray trundled along the street, against the vast rumble of London.

“And perhaps she reminds me of someone, long ago. Someone I happened to care about.”

It was an extraordinary thing for him to say. I've wondered at it ever since — why he would say it at all, and to Wm Starling of all people. Some instinct in him to reach out, despite his loathing?

“Not in her look, so much. But there is something in her spirit, a defiance. My sister had it too.”

He was looking past my shoulder as he spoke, into the distance. There was a boy in a green weskit on the corner of the street, with a monkey on a leather strap, begging. But I'm not sure Atherton even saw him; he was looking much farther away than that.

“You have her smile,” he said then. “I don't suppose there's ever been anyone to tell you that. Your mother's smile.”

Well.

In another tale entirely, this would be the moment for tears. Misty brimmings in two men's glims; sheepish swipings with jacket sleeves and gruff masculine murmurings, giving way to the clasping of hands and mutual embraces, with halting ejaculations about the damnable obstinacy of proud hearts and the brevity of life. As it was, we just looked at one another, across two paces and a chasm.

“Tell me something else,” I said then, “Uncle.”

I watched the word affect him. Stiffening the shoulders and ramrodding the spine: a word as welcome as a surgical probe up a sphincter. There was a small bleak relish in seeing that.

“What had you done,” I asked him, “to the dog?”

“Dog? What dog?”

“The mastiff.”

I am not even sure why I asked this now, all these long months later. But I did. Atherton stared down at Your Wery Umble. And then, for the second time in as many minutes, he laughed at me.

“What do you expect me to say? That I used the creature in some abominable experiment, motivated by unholy ambition and urged on by Beelzebub himself? Go ahead, then — believe what you want.”

He turned on his heel and strode into the house.

The mastiff's eyes had been crimson — thus various witnesses had reported, or leastways so the broadsheets had claimed. Crimson and burning like coals. Subsequent reports had a tall man with golden hair appearing out of fogbanks in the night, with the beast slouching alongside. They were seen striding with fell purpose along Ratcliffe Highway, and on two separate occasions down Fleet Street.

I trust your judgement. You will take such reports for what they're worth.

 

The boy on the corner was ten years old, perhaps. I passed by him as I started away. He was Spanish, or else Italian; waifs and strays from the Continent had been washing up in London ever since Waterloo. A bottle-green weskit and a sweet olive face, and a small dejected monkey, displayed to passers-by for ha'pennies.

Odenkirk's eyes bored holes in my back all this while. He had remained outside the door after Atherton had gone inside.

“I wouldn't stay here,” I said to the boy, on a sudden impulse.

He blinked. I wasn't sure whether he'd understood, so I sifted through my paltry Spanish word-hoard. Now he began to frown.

“
Por qu
é
?
”

He might easily have been an orphan; many of them were. There were men who'd oversee a string of orphan beggars, taking half of the proceeds. The animals were rented by the day; monkeys were popular, as were white mice.

This was not a good street for him, I said, stringing my few words together. There was a man, outside that house — yes, that man there. He worked for another man, the one I'd just been speaking with.
Cirujano
was the Spanish word for surgeon. Dangerous was
peligroso
.

“D'you understand what I'm saying? You should go somewheres else. This ent a good place for you to be.”

But when I looked back from the end of the road, he was still there.

 

I was already overdue at home that evening, in Cripplegate. But instead I hurried south and west, across Smithfield and then down to the bottom of Ludgate Hill, where I dropped a penny for the stone-blind beggar as he worked his customary pitch at the corner of Fleet Street. It was a busy corner even now, at the onset of night; traffic jostled and snarled. The blind beggar's name was Gibraltar Charley, as it happens. He played upon a little organ, and he had a dog that danced — a London mongrel shaved to look like a poodle. “Pray encourage him now, my tender-hearted Christians,” Charley would call, sitting in his eternal darkness; “pray show encouragement to Tim, the Real Learned French Dog.” A coin would clink to the cobbles, and Tim would dance on his hind legs. Tim was a trooper; if poodles were required, then Tim was equal to the task. Besides, this was not so bad, as a living. There were dogs in the sewers this moment, catching gigantic rats.

I continued past them, turning into Black Friars Lane and thence into the Three Jolly Cocks.

There were thirty-six men there drinking. I spoke to them — each one in turn — and discovered that six had been here the night of the murder, four of whom remembered that Meg had sat with a man whose round spectacles flashed in the firelight. Two of these had recognized him as the money-lender, Cheese. All of them knew Meg Nancarrow well enough; she had worked here, after all. Sharp words had been spoken; a threat had been uttered; oh yes, they had heard it too, just as Alf the Ale-Draper had said at the trial. Alf had been saying it ever since, behind the bar — all afternoon and well into the evening, since returning from the Old Bailey. Customers came in and stood him drinks, and clustered round to hear it all over again. Alf had been shaken to his very boots when he'd heard of the murder; he'd been shocked to the core — and yet, perhaps not quite so shocked at all, cos he'd always suspected what sort of a woman Meg was; he'd known it in his waters.

Grave murmurings. Alf Pertwee, bald and bloated, nodded sagely. In Alf's own considered opinion, hanging was too good for the likes of Meg Nancarrow. In bygone days they hadn't hung female felons at all — they'd burned the bitches at Smithfield.

But had he seen Master Buttons, that night?

Alf looked round for the source of the question. Looked down. Found with heavy-lidded ogles Your Wery Umble.

No, he had not. Was he certain? 'Course he was certain. He had seen the man Buttons before, but not that night. With Meg Nancarrow? No, he had never seen Master Buttons with Meg Nancarrow. Nor did he know where the man might be found.

“Then what about Dionysus Atherton?”

Cos a very dark feeling had started to gnaw. It was hardly a suspicion — it wasn't as tangible as that. Not even a question, really, that I could put into words.

“'Oo?” said Alf.

He had been at the trial, I told him. In the public gallery. A tall gentleman with golden hair, in fawn trousers and a sky-blue coat.

Alf frowned in recollection. “What about 'im?”