Will Starling (26 page)

And something very much like this must surely have happened.

There is certainly fog, on the night I am conceiving. Oh, we must have fog, for such a meeting — a true London Partic'lar, slithering up from the Thames like the ominous creep of a cello. The murky glow of a bull's-eye lantern, and the gleam of Dionysus Atherton.

“You're Meg, aren't you? Meg Nancarrow.”

She continues walking, up Ludgate Hill. The coach has slowed to match her pace.

“Do you know me, Meg?”

She stops, reluctantly. Peers warily into the darkness of the coach.

“You're him,” she says, recognizing. “That surgeon.”

“I am.”

He had seen her once or twice before. He must have done, cos this would begin to make sense of it. Possibly he had met with Uncle Cheese on some previous occasion, at the Three Jolly Cocks. He had noticed her there, or someone had pointed her out. He had made enquiries.

A grave-robber's woman, and a whore. He likes rough trade. And there is something in this one — a feral essence — that stirs the blood.

He opens the door to her. “Get in.”

She takes a step back instead.“I heard of you,” she says.

“What have you heard?”

“I heard of things you've done.”

Or would she actually say this out loud? Possibly not — almost certainly not. She'd be too canny. But she'd step back nonetheless. He'd read the flicker across her face.

“Get in,” he would repeat. “A night like this — the fog. It isn't safe.”

The driver has stepped down from the box, and sidles round behind her. Meg discovers this as she starts to turn. A long grey man with a smile slashed across his face.

“The gen'lman,” he says, “has extended a hinvitation.”

But now there is someone else in the darkness too, looming very large in the haze of a lamp. One fist is beginning to clench, as is his face, with the suspicion that someone here may require some setting straight.

“H'lo, Meg,” he says. “I come to walk you home.”

“Jemmy,” she says, relieved.

“These gen'lmen ent causing you no trouble, I hope?”

Meg lets the moment hang, just enough for the long grey man to mislike the odds, and for Atherton himself to draw reflexively back. The barest inch or two, but Meg has seen it. Her dark eyes take the measurement of him.

“No trouble,” she says. “Nor no gen'lmen, neither.”

Her smile renders Atherton risible, and puny.

“G'night,” she says carelessly. She turns away then, one shoulder rounding as she clasps her shawl tighter, hunching at a keener slice of the cold. Jemmy awaits, putting one massive arm around her.

“A'right, Meg?” he says with a last suspicious scowl.

“A'right, Jem,” she says to him, smiling in reply.

The swirling fog enfolds them, and they're gone.

As the surgeon watches after them, it would be possible to imagine an expression of pure malevolence. Fog will do that; it will distort.

*

Or possibly none of this happened at all. Perhaps this is nothing but vapours from an over-heated brainpan.

But I think it did, you know. It happened, or something very like it. That was the first time they ever came face to face — March, or February — and there, right there, he began to dwell upon her. He began to think what he would like to do to Meg Nancarrow — and what he would like to do with her after that.

Or else — and I have pondered this too, pacing forwards and back again, forwards and back — could it have been a different look entirely on his face? A stab of recollection so sudden and cruel that made him gasp aloud. A shock of similarity as Meg turned from him — the rounding of the shoulder, the hunching against the cold — exactly as another girl had turned, on a filthy night two decades previous. A night in November that had been — the most savage November night in all his life. Standing in his father's doorway, willing his heart to stone as she turned away from him and stumbled into the lash of the storm.

The spatter of footsteps and the tatter of a cloak, wrenched by the wind as she receded. And there had been an instant when he very nearly called to her — shouted her name against the night and plunged into the blackness to fetch her back. But then the moment was gone and so was she, swallowed by darkness as deep as ever claimed Eurydice.

5

Atherton actually kept his promise — kept it partways, at least. The vow he'd made to Meg at Newgate before the hanging. He'd called in a favour or leaned on some connection, and the upshot was that Jemmy Cheese had been moved out of the Prison Ship
Retribution
to serve out his sentence at a hospital. Except it wasn't a hospital, not quite: a private asylum. I learned this from Mr Comrie, who'd heard someone talking at Guy's.

A house in Camden Town, owned by a physician named Paxton who “boarded the mad,” in the parlance of the trade — cos of course it was a trade, like any other. All the world was built on trade, and this was the Trade in Lunacy. There were dozens of such asylums, in London and across the land, and more of them springing up each year like toadstools. What is this world's true calling, after all, save the driving of its denizens mad? Your Wery Umble could say a very personal word or two in that regard, as you've begun to understand already — curled up days and nights with the Black Dog, stalked by lurid imaginings. But I'd made my own promise to Meg Nancarrow, and here I was on a fair day in May, hirpling northwards towards Camden Town and dreading with each step what awaited me there.

The private asylums varied wildly. I'd heard of a house in St Alban's where no more than six inmates were kept at a time, each of them paying five guineas a week, with a policy that discouraged physical restraint and even recommended kind words as a therapeutic strategy. At the other extreme were Pits of Hell — I'd been to one or two of those, attending Mr Comrie on chirurgical business. Here the Damned were bound in strait-waistcoats, and the strategies for cure were old and tried and true: immersion in ice-cold water, rapid spinning in the Revolving Chair, and of course blistering with cups and candles to draw out the infected Humours. Dr Paxton's asylum lay somewhere in between.

It was halfway down a row of houses, hunching dour and sullen between better-favoured structures like a middle child totting up grievances. A Keeper answered my knock, heard my errand, and bid me wait outside the door while he fetched the mad doctor.

“I've come to see Jemmy Cheese,” I told Dr Paxton when at length he arrived.

A brisk man in early middle age, with a cool appraising stare. His eyes had widened despite himself at his first glimpse of Your Wery Umble — which I took as an achievement, in its way, considering the lunatick sights a mad doctor must ogle daily. My jaw had unswole back towards its normal size, but still I was all lumps and scrapes and blooms of purple souring into yellow.

“On what business?” he asked.

“My own.”

“Then I'd advise you to tend to it,” he said, beginning to close the door upon me. “And I shall tend to my business, and my patients.'”

“My uncle is Mr Dionysus Atherton.”

I expected that might stop him, and it did.

“I am his sister's child. She died.”

He wasn't sure whether to believe me — and who could blame him, after all? The golden glory that was Dionysus Atherton, and the battered scrap of Rainbow on his doorstep. But clearly enough he owed Atherton some favour, or was being paid good coin by him, or both; and besides, a man such as Atherton might very well have several bits of flotsam bobbing in his wake — encounters with actresses and dolly-mops, and servant girls from student days — one or two of whom he might drolly acknowledge as a “nephew.” I watched this possibility cross Dr Paxton's phizog, bringing with it a small dry chuckle.

He glanced over his shoulder to the Keeper. “Show Mr . . . What is the name?”

“Starling.” I did my best to shine the sunrise smile.

“Show Mr Starling downstairs,” he said. “And my compliments to his ‘uncle.'”

 

It was dim inside the house, with bars on the windows and bolts on the doors, and a general waft of decrepitude and faeces. But it could have been worse. There were fifteen or twenty kept here — so the Keeper said when I asked — most of them elderly. They were kept two and three to a room, like derelict linnets. An old woman somewhere squawked out monotonously, every ten seconds; another shuffled with infinitesimal steps, looking in her ragged nightdress so thin that she might have been two great eyes on a broomstick.

A door at the end with a heavy bar opened onto a stairway descending, and the Keeper gestured that I should precede him. “Mr Atherton's nephew will watch his step,” he added. He was a twitchy man with the air of a stoat standing upright to take the temperature of the day. Just now he had taken on a smirking solicitude, having decided — so I gathered — to amuse himself by pretending Your Wery Umble was a gentleman.

The stairs led down into deepening gloom, and a heavy ursine musk. They were keeping Jemmy in the cellar.

He was alone, sitting cross-legged on a pile of straw, rocking slowly forwards and back again. I made him out by the soiled light filtering through one small window. It was barred, like all the others in this house, though it was scarcely big enough to admit a cat, let alone a man as large as Jemmy Cheese. Forwards and then back again, with a faint rattling at each commencement. They had him in a strait-waistcoat, the villains; he was chained as well, by an iron band round his neck to an iron ring bolted to the floor. There was a harsh metallic
chink
each time he leaned back, the chain pulling taut to stop him. I thought of a sad old lunatick bear, awaiting one final baiting.

“Alas,” agreed the Keeper with his solicitous smirk, reading my own expression. “But it is for his own protection, sir, entirely, our guest being prone to Agitation.”

Wallis was the name of this particular Keeper. So I would learn some days later, when it was cited in the newspaper accounts of what took place.

“H'lo, Jemmy,” I said, and tried to smile. “It's Will. Remember me? I'm afraid I've come with very doleful news.”

The dolefullest news I'd ever delivered — so it felt to me, standing in that cellar. This is quite a statement from a surgeon's assistant who'd told men every day for five long years that a leg was coming off, or that an arm was coming with it, or — dolefuller yet — that all remaining limbs were staying attached cos there was just no point in trying.

“It's your Meg,” I told him. “It's worse than terrible, Jemmy — it's the worst thing there is — cos they've gone and hung her. They said she murdered your brother — did you know?” It came to me then, with an awful lurch, that he might not even realize that Brother Ned had been killed. “That's what they're claiming — but it's a lie, cos she never done it, Jemmy. She was innocent, but they hung her anyways.”

He just kept rocking. Forwards and back again, forwards and back, rattle and
chink
. Christ, had he understood a single word I'd said? His face gaunt and slack and his eyes so dull that you'd swear there was no one behind them at all. I began to think it was better that way, lamentable as it was — better that Jemmy was gone far away, gone wherever men go when their heads are smashed in like eggshells, and would never need to live in this world again. But as he rocked backwards once again, there were tears streaming down his cheeks.

I could have wept then with him. I would have done, I think, in one more second. But that's when a small commotion broke out, above us. A bellow of protest, loud enough to filter down to the cellar. More bellowing, and a thin gibbering chorus rising up about it — one of the inmates was creating a to-do, and setting the others off. The thumple of hurried footsteps over our heads, and a shaft of light as the door opened up at the top of the stairs, and a voice — Dr Paxton's — calling impatiently for Mr Wallis to come up and assist.

Wallis hesitated, dithering between the need to dash and reluctance to leave a visitor alone.

“Mr Wallis! Directly!”

He shot a hasty look to me — “Just keep back from him,” he commanded — and then a darker look to Jemmy. An instant's flash of unmistakable malice, like the glint of a serpent's tooth. “And you — remember the blistering, eh? Remember how much you enjoyed that experience.”

Then he was gone. His boots thumped up the stairs, and Jemmy and I were alone.

I moved closer, as close as I could, and knelt down in the straw.

“Jemmy, listen to me. Just — please, listen.”

He stopped rocking at last. The chain hung slack.

“I don't know how much you understand — or how much you could tell me, even if you did. But I need to find out, Jemmy. Did Atherton have a reason to want your brother dead? Was it something Ned knew — some secret?”

He didn't make a sound. But he didn't move, either. Poised between forwards and back again, head hanging low.

“What was it, Jemmy? What did your brother know, that was such a threat? And did Meg know it too?”

Cos that would explain everything, wouldn't it? Atherton's desire to see her dangling and dead. And the promise he made — to get Jemmy out of the Prison Ship — in return for Meg's confession. Yes, that would tie it up with a bow for Dionysus Atherton. Uncle Cheese in the grave and his secret with him, whatever that secret was. Meg Nancarrow now silenced forever as well — having confessed to the murder that Atherton committed, or leastways had Odenkirk commit on his behalf.

That must have been what happened. Kneeling on the cellar straw, in the ursine reek of poor Jemmy Cheese, I felt all but certain-sure. Right then Jemmy lifted his head and I swear I saw a flash — a flicker of something —
someone
— present behind those eyes. It was gone again in half a second and Jemmy began once more to rock: forwards and back again, forwards and back.