Will Starling (28 page)

“Oh, Will.”

And she could see it now. It was clear in the moist distraction on her lovely phizog, she was picturing the scene. The solitary foundling, trudging through slanting rain along a rutted country lane at twilight — a lengthy twilight, lasting the best part of three weeks, and rain unrivalled since Noah built a boat — all the way to Lichfield.

“All the Weary Way,” Miss Smollet repeated. She was very much taken by my tale. In fact, she seemed to consider being a foundling as highly romantickal, as I suppose you might if you'd never been one yourself.

“And you found them there, your family?”

“I found the house where they used to live.”

My grandfather had been a cloth merchant, as it turned out. Dead now, as was his wife; none of the family remained. But there were people who remembered them, and knew the story — how my mother had gotten herself in the family way, and been turned out. Her father thundering vermilion wrath, and her brother — she'd only had the one, a beloved older brother, and no sisters — clenched beside him. And there
had
been rain on that particular night — so I was told, and I didn't doubt it for one second. A foul heart-sickening night in November, and a solitary figure hunching through it, clasping her shawl. She'd ended up in London after that. No one in Lichfield knew the particulars.

“And then?” Miss Smollet had begun to look worried, still hoping there might be a happy ending.

“She died, a year or two after I was born. A fever. I tracked her brother down, but he wouldn't tell me much about it. He didn't want to tell me much of anything.”

“You found your uncle?” she exclaimed. “And he's here, in London?”

I felt the scowl closing over my phizog.

“We are nothing to each another.”

“But — your uncle! Will, you need to go and see him.”

I need to see him hang
.

I didn't say this. Not out loud, with Miss Annie Smollet gazing raptly, imploring a happy resolution with her glims.

“It's late,” I said.

And it was. Somehow it was evening already. I creaked myself to my feet.

“I'll see you home to Milford Lane.”

“Milford Lane is no home to me,” she protested. “And that is no ending to your tale!”

But it was all she would have from me. Cos it seemed there was something at least I could bring myself to deny Miss Annie Smollet, and that was one more syllable concerning my uncle. At length she resigned herself to this — or seemed to do, at least for the moment — and for a time we walked in silence.

But only for a time. Silence was not Miss Smollet's natural register, and soon enough she had set aside her exasperation, in the interest of waxing hopeful about the future.

“I'll be speaking to him again next week,” she was saying as we crossed the Strand. “The man I told you about, who needs an actress for his tour.”

And if the tour went well, Miss Smollet was continuing, she must surely find work on the London stage. Did I not think? And not just playing handmaidens at minor theatres, but genuine roles at Drury Lane and Covent Garden.

“And then, before I'm ancient and decrepit — p'raps when I'm five-and-thirty — I'll announce my retirement from the stage, and my engagement to be wed. He'll have a house on a fashionable street and five thousand a year, and he will be Quite Besotted.” Then she caught herself, as if she'd seen a flinch — something game, but utterly gutted — in the Starling phizognomie. “But of course that wouldn't happen for Ages yet,” she added quickly. “Not for Literally Years.”

We had arrived outside Janet's shop. Candles glowed within, but the lane was still and quiet, the buildings muffling the night-time clatter from the Strand.

“Oh, Will,” she said then, growing earnest. “You have become Such a Good Friend to me.”

I searched for a smile to shine in return. Cos weren't those precisely the words I most wanted to hear? A friend.

“And I'll say something else, Will. I'll say: this must All Work Out for the Best — your uncle, and all of it — becos I have a Great Instinct for these things. I truly do. And I am Very, Very, Very Seldom Wrong.”

As if green eyes and a lovely face could make it so, by sheer dint of earnest conviction. There was a movement towards me, and the scent of oranges. The whisper of lips against my cheek, and then I was standing alone in the moonlight.

 

When I arrived at last back at Cripplegate, Mr Comrie was in his surgery, halfway down a bottle. “The taverns?” he asked sourly. “Or a brothel?” Mr Comrie in moments of disapproval had a way of becoming one of his own Calvinist aunts.

But it seems he had a right to it, cos today my services had actually been missed. An operation had been arranged, which had slipped my mind completely — a cloth merchant in Chiswell Street who was greatly distressed by a bladder stone that had stoppered up his urine like a cork. The procedure would be performed at the man's house, as was standard practise in the case of patients possessing any means at all, and Mr Comrie had set a time of two o'clock — intending all along to arrive in Chiswell Street at noon, this also being standard practise, in order to reduce the duration of mental suffering and also to thwart any attempt at escaping by patients whose nerve broke at the last. Having waited at Cripplegate nearly an hour for Your Wery Umble to present himself, Mr Comrie had given up and hurried to Chiswell Street with a brace of burly Assistants recruited from Guy's Hospital, arriving at quarter past one o'clock — just in time to apprehend his patient hirpling out the back door. As well the poor man might, since removal of a bladder stone involved trussing the patient precisely like a roasting chicken — drumsticks doubled back and arse most pitifully offered up — in order to cut into the bladder from underneath and then fish about with forceps. But alas a large stone would not pass on its own, and if left untreated the agony would just grow steadily worse until terminal rot set in — all of which Mr Comrie explained to the cloth merchant as they dragged him squalling back into his house and had the stone out in seventeen minutes, beginning to end.

This account I heard some weeks later. Tonight, I just muttered that I was sorry to have missed it, and started up the second set of stairs.

“Wait,” growled Mr Comrie.

Apparently a note had been delivered in my absence. A slip of paper, tightly folded, and a message in an elegant spidering hand:

Mr Starling:

You seek information. I do not say that I possess it, nor am I certain I would divulge it, even if I did. I will say, however, that I am a man of regular habits. It is my habit to take my supper late, at ten o'clock. I take it at the Golden Lion in Temple Lane.

Cordially,

P. Nuttall

7

“You have seen him for yourself,” said Mr Nuttall. “He is in a bad way, is poor Mr Sheldrake. It is very, very bad for my employer.”

He shook his head in sorrow, side to side. The Dust of Ages filtered down like powder from a wig — which of course it was. Sheldrake's Spavined Clerk was one of the few men in London who continued to go out bewigged, here in the modern world of the year '16. He wore knee-breeches as well, and buckles on his shoes, like some latter-day Cnut taking his stand against the tide of Fashion — a tide that had long since immersed him and then gone out again, leaving Mr Nuttall stranded like a starfish on the shore.

“I am sorry for Mr Sheldrake,” I lied. “But your note — you said you have information.”

“I know what the note said, Young Starling. I wrote it. My note promised nothing.”

There was a doggedness in the way he said it: stooped over his supper, eyeing me from behind the protective cover of tangled white eyebrows. Mr Nuttall picked up his knife and fork and resumed dissecting his cutlet.

Temple Lane lies just below Fleet Street. Mr Nuttall had been here in the Golden Lion when I arrived, sitting on a small round stool at a small square table in one far corner, sipping his port and cutting his meat into fastidious bites, as if oblivious to the general din about him. The Golden Lion turned out to be a sporting tavern, frequented by the Fancy — the roughs and swells and dandies who follow horse-racing and pugilism, and anything else a man can wager his income on. The walls were festooned with paintings of great nags and millers: Cribb and Mendoza in fistic postures, and the Byerley Turk thundering down the stretch. At a table behind us a bibulous Sprig was delighting his fellows with a description of an Amazonian Mill he had witnessed at Wormwood Scrubs, where two women had recently battled for twenty minutes to settle a family issue. “Nanny Flowers showed herself most impetuous in the early rounds,” he was saying, “but jibbed a bit in the twelfth, and went down for good from a half-arm dig in thirteen.”

In the midst of it sat Tom Sheldrake's Spavined Clerk, with his port and his morsels of cutlet. It cast him in a startling new light, hinting at unimagined dimensions, and conjuring a sudden image of a Young Nuttall — lusty and un-spavined — swilling claret from a pint-pot and with sturdy gnashers wrenching gobbets from the drumstick of a goose.

I tried again. “Mr Nuttall, is there something you can tell me?”

“Tell me first, Young Starling: why do you ask?”

“I believe Meg Nancarrow was innocent. I believe Dionysus Atherton killed the money-lender — or caused it to be done. I want to find out the truth.”

“For what reason?”

“So that justice may be done.”

“And you expect justice, Young Starling? From the Law?”

“Yes!”

Mr Nuttall blinked once, very slowly.

“No,” I conceded, feeling myself flush. “No, I don't expect justice. But I want the world to know what the bastard's done.”

“Why?”

“Why
what
?”

“Are you so determined to expose Mr Atherton?”

“Because I hate him.”

Mr Nuttall's handkerchee was tucked into his collar, for a bib. Removing it, he dabbed carefully at the corners of his mouth, eyeing me all the while from behind those tangled white eyebrows, like a duck-hunter watching from a blind.

“Hatred,” he said at length, “is always a potent motive. And a pure one, in its way. One knows where one stands, with hatred.”

Behind us, a spirited dispute had broken out: whether Cribb could have beaten the great Broughton. Convictions were violently held on either side, as is invariably the case with mills that never took place, and especially when one of the principals was dead long before anyone present was born.

“I know nothing at all,” said Mr Nuttall. “Nothing in the way of a Fact. But I do not care for Mr Dionysus Atherton. I do not like his airs, Young Starling, nor what he has done to my employer, for it is association with Mr Dionysus Atherton that has broken — though I could not say precisely how — poor Mr Sheldrake. I hold him responsible; I blame him. And I have heard Rumours.”

He leaned slowly towards me, lowering his voice. The eyes in their duck-blind fixed upon mine.

“Mark me carefully, Young Starling: I do not believe Mr Sheldrake ever knew of these. I believe Mr Sheldrake to be innocent in this — whatever else Mr Sheldrake may be. But Rumours will waft about the Inns of Court, and Clerks are often the first to hear them. These particular Rumours concern children.”

“What children?”

“Orphans. Strays. Bits of flotsam that no one cares about, or misses. Waifs who enter the house of a certain surgeon, and are not seen again.”

Behind us, a gentleman was asserting with table-pounding passion that Cribb would have fibbed Broughton's ears off, offering to prove his point by laying out the next man who contradicted it. There was a tightening band around my chest. I recollected the Spanish Boy outside Crutched Friars.

“What does he do to them?”

“I could not say.”

“Who could?”

The Spavined Clerk leaned closer still. The eyes in their duck-blind took glittering aim.

“Think, Young Starling. Logick. If Edward Cheshire knew a secret — and his associate Meg Nancarrow knew it too — then who else might also have known?”

And I was a fool. Your Wery Umble was worse than a fool, for never having seen it 'til this instant. Cos there was the answer, right where it had always been: high-arsing through the graveyards of the Metropolis, with a sack slung over its narrow shoulders.

 

I reached the Fortune of War at a run. The door was still open, and the shapes of Wicked Sextons bulked here and there inside, amidst the garish glow from the oil lamps and the haze of tobacco smoke. Here in mid-May the Doomsday Trade had dwindled to a trickle — term had ended at the anatomy schools, and the warmth of the year caused cadavers to putrefy too quickly. But that was hardly cause for a man to give up drinking.

“I'm looking for Little Hollis,” I told the Ale-Draper. Keeping my voice low, as you do in such a place, where there's no call for anyone else to know your business.

“Look round,” the Ale-Draper grunted. “Do y'see the little fucker?”

“No.”

“Then I'll wager the little fucker's elsewhere.”

A sick-sour waft emanated from the room in the back where Things were stored — apparently the trickle of the Trade had not ceased entirely. Even on a good night, the Fortune of War could make you gag.

“Farting in his bed, would be my guess. That's where he was bound — or said he was — when he left.”

“So he was here earlier tonight?”

“Sharp as a pin, this lad. Don't miss a trick.”

I turned to leave.

“Popular man, our Hollis,” the Ale-Draper added then, having evidently decided to wax garrulous now that sneers had run their course. “You're the second one to be asking after 'im tonight. That man of Atherton's was here earlier — Odenkirk.”