Will Starling (33 page)

Clambering out from between them, I skirted past the kitchen, where some of the lodgers were already gathering. There was a yard outside with coster-carts scattered round, and several lumps of rags, still a-slumber. I washed myself as best I could at the stand-pipe, and then reached a decision.

It seemed that I was not leaving London at all. I made my way towards Smithfield instead, where I found young Barnaby watching a cock fight. The combatants were disputing against the wall of a slaughter yard, hemmed in by a ragamuffin crowd. Barnaby clocked my approach with one slantways eye, as if he were a species of rooster himself.

“Been 'earing about you,” he said cryptically.

“I need to send a message.”

“Sent one to that actor, didn't you? Fuck me. I 'eard — oi!” He broke off to shout encouragement to the smaller of the combatants, a scrawny bantam which made up in poultricidal fervour what it lacked in stature. “Now peck 'is 'ead off!”

“A message,” I repeated. “I'll pay you sixpence.”

“Sixpence now, and sixpence after.”

“Twelve pennies, for a message?”

He cock-eyed me again.

“Danger pay. You're a desperado, you. Worth my neck to be seen with yez, and — oi! Yes! Now fecking finish 'im!”

I'd have sent young Barnaby to Mr Comrie, except they'd be keeping an eye for certain on Cripplegate. So I sent him to Milford Lane instead. He was back an hour later, extending a grimy palm. “She'll be at the place you said. Eight o'clock tonight.”

 

I arrived at the churchyard just as the clock was striking the hour. Darkness had fallen and a chill wind had arisen, agitating the trees. A knot of vagrants idled by the east wall, passing a jar and casting glances in my direction, as I waited ten minutes and then another quarter-hour. Still there was no sign of Janet, which began to make me uneasy.

I was repenting as well my choice of a meeting place. St Sepulchre's, I had said — of all the churchyards in London — directly across the street from Newgate Prison, squatting mute and malevolent in the night. I found myself staring towards Debtor's Door itself, outside which Meg Nancarrow had kicked and choked just two weeks previous — and where Your Wery Umble would take his own last bow on a Monday morning yet to be specified, if the Majesty of British Justice had its way.

At half past the hour, I was beginning to wonder if young Barnaby had simply pocketed my twelve pence and lied. But that's when a familiar figure came hurrying at last along the street outside the railings, and turned in at the gate.

“You fucking eejit,” Janet hissed by way of greeting, and cast a worried look over her shoulder. “I think I may of been followed.”

A prospect to make the blood run just that little bit colder. I looked swiftly round.

“Have you lost them?”

“I ent sure. I done my best. Jesus, Will. Christ on a biscuit. I expect you been reading about yourself?”

Yes, I'd read all the newspapers at a coffee-stall. And this afternoon I had paid a penny for a broadsheet account of the murder, in which I learned that I had done it to avenge the death of the Fleet Ditch Fury, with whom I had some sinister connection.

“There'll be ballads soon,” I said, essaying negligence. “By next week there'll be a play.”

“They've been to the shop. A Magistrate, and two Constables. First thing yesterday morning.”

News to make the blood run colder still. But it was something I should have been expecting — if they'd been to Cripplegate, then they'd assuredly have spoken to Missus Maggs, who'd have smoked out my connection with Janet and Milford Lane. Missus Maggs had doubtless smoked out a great deal about me, whilst minding her kews and peeze.

“What did you tell them?” I demanded, forcing calm.

“What would you think? I said I hadn't seen you.”

“Did they believe you?”

“Christ knows. What matters is, they know who your friends are — they know where to look. And they're looking everywhere.”

We had retreated deeper into the darkness by the church wall. A snatch of rough laughter from the vagrants, and as the wind shifted a waft from the burial ground on the other side.

“Will, what the Devil are you still doing here, in London?” Then, presuming to read the answer on my clock: “Aw, Christ — don't tell me. Don't even say it. La Smollet?”

She was right, or partly so. The thought of never seeing my Annie at all, for months or even years — that was bleak. So was the thought of leaving London itself: the Metropolis no more than a smudge on the horizon through the window of a mail coach, and then the green of England receding, along with every friend I had in this world, and Your Wery Umble greener still, hanging over the railing of a ship.

But above it all, I had to know.

“I need to find Meg Nancarrow,” I said. “I have to know what he did. To her — and to the others.”

“Who — Atherton?”

“Yes.”

“What others?”

“That's what I need to find out.”

“Fuck 'im, Will. Fuck all of it. It's none of your concern!”

“But it is. That's where you're so wrong. It is all of it my concern.”

“You must be mad,” said Janet.

She was right about that too, I think. Looking back, I suspect I was indeed halfways mad, that night in St Sepulchre's churchyard. We go through times in our lives when we're none of us quite sane. The sight of a man's blood pooling about your boots — there's a sight that will leave you feeling cold and sick and horribly unmoored, as I'm very sure you do not know yourself, and I congratulate you on your innocence. It sent Lady Macbeth running Bedlam-mad, that feeling, and she was forged of stronger steel than William Starling.

Besides, Lady Mac had just one murder on her soul, and my killing of Master Buttons was all mixed up in so much else. In the hanging of Meg, and the whispered words of Nuttall the Spavined Clerk, and the gnawing conviction that Dionysus Atherton had committed such deeds as banish us beyond the warmth and the light of the great communal fire that we cluster round together, all of us who are human in this world. My uncle: bone of my bone, and blood of my blood. And all of it reflected back in the dying light in Danny Littlejohn's eyes.

Yes, I believe I may well have been mad, that night in St Sepulchre's churchyard.

“No more of this,” Janet was saying. “You have to leave
now
. And here — I been to Cripplegate — the Scotchman gave me these.”

She'd pulled a handful of coins out of her pocket. Five gold guineas.

“His life's fucking savings, I expect. Or else he sold some tools. There's prob'ly some poor bastard on his table right this minute, about to have his leg cut off with the wrong-sized saw, and all so Will Starling could pay for passage to the Continent. And here he is, still in London, the eejit!” She forced the coins into my hand. “No, just take the money. He wanted you to have it, so it's yours. Take it —
go
. Before someone else comes looking for you, Will, cos next time they may find you!”

And there was something about the way she'd said it. Something that struck my ear askew, and made me wonder if the Constables hadn't been the only ones to come knocking at Janet's door.

“Someone else?”

“Never mind,” she said instantly.

“Janet?”

She turned away, pulling her shawl more tightly round her shoulders. “Just — it don't matter. It's nothing you need to know.”

“Tell me.”

“There was a man,” she said at last. Grudging the words, as if each one of them must be extracted like a molar. “Come to the shop this afternoon, looking for you. Not one of the Constables — he was nothing to do with them. But he'd found out, somehow, that we knew you. Someone told him to come to us.”

“What man?”

“He said his name was Sheldrake. He said he had a message. ‘Tell Starling, she wants to see him.' That's all he'd say. ‘Tell Starling, he is summoned.'”

She
.

All of London, stopping with that syllable.

“But forget about him, Will.” Janet was pleading now. “Forget about all of it — just go. Send us word when you're safe. Cos God knows you're not safe here — not in London, and especially not in this churchyard, if there really was someone following me. Just —
please
.”

I'd never seen that look on her face before. She gave me another of her rib-splintering embraces, and then she was gone, hurrying away into the darkness of London.

And I saw then that Janet's intuition had been correct. She had indeed been followed, all the way from Milford Lane. Someone was standing in the gloom, just inside the churchyard gate.

“Oh, Will,” said Annie Smollet.

 

She wore a dark green cloak, borrowed from the shop. Snatched in desperate haste, no doubt, as she hurried after Janet out the door, and it was purest coincidence that its coloration suited her so perfectly.

“Janet wouldn't say where she was going, Will. But I knew. I just knew she was going to meet you. So I followed.”

And Christ knows I was glad she did. Gladder than anything I could ever recall, standing there in St Sepulchre's churchyard with a sweet slow ache of joy.

“I was so afraid I wouldn't see you again,” I said.

“Can I be so very much worth seeing? I don't think so, Will. I think I ent worth seeing so very much at all, not when it's Worth Your Life.”

“I might, Miss Smollet, beg to differ.”

I actually said that. And I've a notion I accompanied it with a little bow, as another man might have done — such as Claude Duvall the highwayman, perhaps. In a corner of my mind I winced, imagining how Janet might have eyed me if she'd been here at the present moment, and hearing in the night wind a whisper of her judgement:
Oh, you twat
. But Janet was a quarter-mile distant by now, hurrying south and west towards Milford Lane, and here in the darkness of St Sepulchre's churchyard it was just Wm Starling and Miss Annie Smollet.

She wore the hood of the cloak up, obscuring her face, as if she'd forgotten that she wasn't a fugitive herself. But her eyes gazing out from the folds were bright with genuine emotion.

“Tomorrow morning,” she said. “You'll go away from London. I want you to promise me. If not for your own sake, then for your friends'. For my sake, Will. I want your Solemnest Oath.”

And to this day, I am not sure what I would have said in reply, had we been allowed the span of just five more seconds. I might very well have melted in those green eyes, and relented, and done what the secret part of me already longed to do: climb down from the lonely steeple of my avenging zeal — Christ knows the wind cuts like a sabre when you're up so high, and so very much alone — climb down to safety, and scurry like a sleekit for the tall, tall grass. But that's when two bull's-eyes winked at the churchyard gate, and two Watchmen peered in.

They weren't looking for Your Wery Umble, in particular. Just a pair of Charleys making their rounds. But Miss Smollet gripped my arm.

“We can't be standing here,” she whispered. “You need to be in Hiding.”

I did not dispute the point. Her grip tightened.

“I know a place you can stay tonight. Come with me, Will — quickly.”

“I can't go to Milford Lane.”

“Not there. Holborn.”

The bird-fancier's shop was dark when we arrived, the windows shuttered and the birds silent within, asleep in the scores of cages. It seemed the Badger had recently moved back into the room upstairs, having parted with her gentleman. “It Broke her Poor Heart, Will,” Annie had told me as we hurried along Holborn. He turned out to be a fraud, this gentleman, his two thousand a year pure ephemera, and two other Badgers on the go into the bargain. But through a stroke of good fortune, the Badger would not be using the room on this particular night. Apparently she had already scooped up the shattered fragments of her poor heart and gone off for a few days with a new gentleman, which Annie considered very plucky in her, and evidence of a Shining Spirit.

Annie still had a key of her own. She led me up two narrow flights of stairs, feeling our way in the dark. Arriving upon the topmost landing, she fumbled with her key in the lock, and then fumbled within for a match and a candle, and then finally the room glowed into existence, as if she'd conjured it herself. It was much as I had seen it last, strewn with clothes — evidently the Badger and her Shining Spirit had left in haste. Annie opened the window to dispel the must, admitting the waft from the privy in back and the rumble of Holborn Street beyond.

“Are you hungry?” she asked. “Wait here.”

She came back in twenty minutes with some bread and cheese and a meat pie, fetched from a public house, along with a pot of strong ale. We made a picnic of it sitting on the bed, and once we'd finished she brushed crumbs from her lap and raised her eyes to search my face, composing herself into gravity.

“Now,” she said, “you must tell me everything that has happened, from the Very Beginning right up to This Moment.”

“How much has Janet — ?”

“Janet don't tell me much of anything, Will, on the grounds that she considers me a twat. No, you don't need to deny it, cos it's the Truth — that is Exackly what Janet considers — and the Truth is what we must live with. And I say nothing against Janet Friendly, neither, except she can be a towering twat herself.”

So I told her. Leastways told her more or less, leaving out some of the more lurid details, and those elements as risked provoking Miss Smollet into such flights of capitalization that she might never return to me again, but rise in ascending spirals like an escaping songbird, through the window and into the night sky beyond, where somewhere far above the choke of London the stars must shine in a sweet clear sky just exactly as they had shone on the first night of Creation. But I told her of my certainty that Atherton had fitted Meg up for the murder of Uncle Cheese — though why he should revive her afterwards remained a mystery that tormented and perplexed. I hinted at dark Rumours of other killings as well, for motives that remained unclear, describing my clandestine conference with Mr Nuttall the Spavined Clerk. I spoke of Flitty Deakins and the Wreck of Sheldrake and Jemmy Cheese; and last of all I told of my midnight encounter with Master Buttons, when I drew my knife to frighten him and it all went horribly wrong.