Will Starling (40 page)

“Pay up!” he was crying. “Pay up, you fuckers — fifty guineas on 'is nob, and every one of them is mine!”

A Further Epistle to the Londoners

 

 

As Printed in The London Record

11th June, 1816

He thinks to himself:
I have outrun the Reckoning
. He is deluded. A Reckoning waits like a green-eyed man in a turban, its teeth filed to pencil-points. It will come at him out of the darkness, shrieking like fifty gibbons. And it will come upon others of his kind, for he is worst, but not unique. London is lousy with such men; it wriggles and it crawls.

I say to you: such men are an abomination.

Suffer them not to live.

22

It was Flitty in those last wild days, driving them on to disaster. I can't say that for a certainty, cos I wasn't there present in the flesh. I was locked up instead in Newgate Prison, where I'd been dragged straight from Islington by my two friends the Bow Street Runners, and now awaited trial for the murder of Master Buttons. But it only stands to reason.

Flitty had been Bedlam-mad from the start, and in Meg she'd found a pole-star for her delusion. That's how it was, I think, more or less — cos who can say for a certainty what takes place in any mind, least of all the mind of one as deranged as poor Phyllida Deakins, with grief and laudanum and self-loathing. She'd invented in the Risen Meg someone who could grant her absolution — I'm convinced that was the nub of it. Someone to tell her: “Be free henceforward, and do exactly as you will.” Meg herself never had a plan, beyond settling scores with those as had wronged her worst; it was never more than personal with Meg. But Flitty's rage was of the more exalted kind, that species of Holy Rage that howls out against sinners and sinning, and kindles great purifying bonfires.

So now Flitty Deakins had taken up the torch — and they were bound to follow someone, the rabble that had gathered round Meg in St Giles Rookery. Half-mad paupers and muttering vagrants — petty criminals with towering grievances — all that tag, rag, and bobtail of the lunatick and lost, drawn by a licence to smash and a mob to do it with. And as Meg began to dwindle and fail, it was Flitty who exhorted them onward.

It began with a surgeon from St Bart's, set upon and drubbed half to death in Smithfield. Another surgeon was chased down the Borough High Street in broad light of day, and then came attacks upon private schools of anatomy, three in a single night. Two in Southwark, and a third in St James Street: doors kicked in, a Porter maimed, the premises set ablaze. The fire in St James Street spread to houses on either side — good London burghers, fleeing in their nightshirts — and that's what did it. Attacks on surgeons might be winked at; they might even be enjoyed, if the surgeon were sufficiently soprano as he shrieked himself down the High Street. And one maimed Porter more or less does not signify very much, in the vast clockwork of the universe. But the destruction of property — the burning of homes in a respectable district of London, where values were substantial, and rising — that was different. That was Anarchy.

Two dozen Constables led the way into the Holy Land, backed by Infantry. They marched left-right with bayonets fixed, as the denizens scuttled and stones and bottles rained down. They had with them an informer who knew the Rookery maze, and knew moreover which house Meg's people were hiding in. When they failed to come out at the first shout, two volleys were fired, tearing through rotted walls and the bits of rag that were stuffed in the windows. Their Captain ordered the charge, and they kicked through the front door, where Jemmy Cheese awaited.

Meg had been hit in the second volley — so it appears, from all reports. She was down, and Jemmy was stooping to lift her as the Lobsters thundered in. With a roar he rose at them. Seizing the first man, he broke him — just like that. Cracked his spine and slung him aside, then turned upon the others, fists like cannonballs. Cos this was not that long-ago night in the churchyard, where Jemmy had gone down meek and guilty. This was Meg lying crumpled in a widening pool of red, and Jemmy was going to kill the whole British Army.

He might have done it too. He would surely have killed another several, since they could only come at him one by one, through the single doorway. Others were blazing through the windows now, musket-fire like muslin fabric ripping, pop-pop-pop. There was a ball in his shoulder, and another in his thigh, which only made him rage more fiercely.

Except now the building was on fire.

It could have been an accident — a candle knocked over in the confusion. A blue tongue licking the edge of a tattered curtain, and then — before anyone had time to think — a surge of flame and a belch of smoke and dry rotted wood going up with a whoosh. But I think Flitty Deakins set the fire deliberately. No one knows this for a fact, and no one ever will, not with poor Flitty as she is now, chained to a wall in Bedlam Hospital and spitting out curses on Dionysus Atherton. But I'm sure of it, based on what she was seen to do as the flames rose up, and what she was heard to moan as they dragged her out of the wreckage afterwards, charred and raving like a witch only half burnt at Smithfield. I'd practically stake my life — assuming that I had a life worth staking.

Flitty had seen Meg fall, looking down from a landing. She'd seen Jemmy rush to her, and heard the shouted orders from outside, so she snatched up a coal-oil lamp and dashed it against a pile of rags in the corner. She snatched up another and set fire to a room on the second floor, splashing the oil like a priestess gone wild as ragged shapes scrambled out the door. They saw her then from below, the Sodgers and Constables in the street — saw her leaning out of the window above them, with smoke billowing about her and the crackle and shimmer of flames rising, shrieking at them like the lunatick she was and calling upon Michael Archangelus to swoop down with his sword. But there was method in it too, cos she'd sown confusion. She'd caused a distraction and bought time for the others — for Meg and Jemmy, most of all.

Jemmy had picked Meg up in his arms — “cradling her like a injured kitten,” one of the Lobsters would say afterwards. Several of them saw this, though the house was already filling with smoke, and two or three of them glimpsed him lunging up the stairs. But they were forced back by the heat and smoke, and stumbled choking into the street, where there was shouting and milling and bellows for buckets of water. That was the fear, all of a sudden — those tinderbox houses all jumbled together. A fire could rip through the Holy Land and rage out right across London. And that's when Jemmy was seen on the roof, with the smoke rising about him and Meg still cradled in his arms. A shout went up, and one of the Lobsters fired off a shot, which took Jemmy clean in the throat and killed him.

The Lobster was afterwards certain of that. A man named Davies, a coal miner's son from Carmarthen. He had bad feelings, he said, about killing a man in such a manner — shooting him down on a rooftop, and not on a battlefield. But he was sure that the ball brought Jemmy down; he saw Jemmy stagger, and topple. There was another man who later claimed something different — that Jemmy had not gone down at all, but had stumbled and then recovered. Through the smoke, he claimed, he had seen Jemmy leaping onto the next rooftop, still clutching Meg in his arms. If this was true, then Jemmy might very well have leapt to a farther rooftop still, so close were all the buildings together, and clambered in through a window to hide somewhere 'til darkness fell.

But of course that's not what happened. Jemmy was shot down by Infantryman Davies, and died on that rooftop with Meg in his arms, even if their bodies could not be identified the next day when Constables dug through the rubble. There was nothing so surprising in that, considering the intensity of the blaze, though naturally the most fanciful rumours were soon spreading. Someone claimed to have seen two figures rising straight up into the haze of the London sky, which opened to swallow them. There were sightings afterwards in Glasgow and Liverpool, and a curious story about a farmer's wife in Essex who found two vagrants: a hulking man who never spoke and a strange dark-haired woman with blood-shot eyes, hiding in a shepherd's hut. They were both considerably injured, though alive, and the farmer's wife offered to fetch them a bit of food. When she returned, the hut was empty. They were gone.

23

That same night, there is someone else in Tom Sheldrake's bedchamber. He knows it the instant he gasps himself awake, bolting upright.

“Roger?” he whispers, hoping against hope.

It is not the cat.

In filtering moonlight the curtain shivers. The window has been opened. Clutching the bedsheets tightly to his throat, Tom Sheldrake discerns the pungent waft of wood smoke. A dark shape smoulders at the foot of the bed.

“Roger!”

This time it is not a question. It is a desperate cry to his feline companion, who might yet against all odds come screeching through the chamber door, fang and claw and fury, to the defence of his best friend in life.

No such luck. Roger is at this moment in the parlour, balled and quivering under a sofa.

Tom Sheldrake sits rigid.

The shape at the foot of the bed is a man, burned almost beyond recognition. Charred black, his white eyes bulging like eggs.

“A candied plum,” he says, bitterly.

“Bob!” cries Sheldrake. “Poor Bob — dear Bob — my friend!”

And so it has come at last. Through the fog of panic and last evening's brandy fumes, Sheldrake understands that the Reckoning has arrived. It sits on a wooden chair, reeking like a smoke-house and sparking at the extremities. Bob's left foot sputters back into flame; with a muttered curse he stamps it out.

“A candied plum,” he repeats.

“An accident!”

“Down my gullet.”

Tom Sheldrake moans.

“Dear Bob —
dead
Bob. Oh, tell me how it is, to be dead?”

“It is grand, Tom,” says Bob, still stamping. “We gather in moonlit churchyards, and marvel that we waited so long to die.”

“Do you truly?” cries Sheldrake, clutching at this straw.

Bob boggle-eyes him sidelong with infinite contempt, and Tom shrivels.

“Oh, Bob,” he says, and moans again. “I am hateful, old friend. I am foul.”

“Yes,” Bob agrees. “You are.”

“But tell me there is some hope of redemption. Say there is always hope, old friend. As long as we live, there is always hope, and some sliver of light in the Darkness beyond.”

Bob Eldritch does not reply. There is the faintest hiss of dissipating smoke as his left foot is finally extinguished. He straightens.

Something icy is clutching round Sheldrake's heart.“Bob?” he whispers. “Old friend? What do you propose to do?”

The chair scrapes as Bob rises. There is the sense of a greater shadow rising with him, as deep and voracious as the Past itself. Tom Sheldrake would shriek, if he could.

 

When he regains his senses, the chamber is crepuscular with dawn. No trace of Bob Eldritch, save a lingering waft of woodsmoke. But there is something on the seat of the chair.

A length of rope, coiling like a serpent.

24

Annie Smollet came one afternoon to visit me in Newgate. This was in early August, some while before the trial took place, there having been delays. I wasn't sure she'd come at all, considering the way things had ended between us — but here she was. She had broken with Atherton, by this point. “I Hate Him,” she assured me, in fine flashing spirit. “I hated him from the beginning, Will. Except I forgot for a few weeks, on account of my Tender Heart.”

As far as I could ever determine, she had gone to Crutched Friars on that fateful day in June with half-formed intentions of berating Atherton for his treatment of his nephew, with an eye to brokering a tearful reconciliation between the surgeon and Your Wery Umble Narrator, which would have been a fine accomplishment indeed and worthy of celebration upon the stage. But Dionysus Atherton was a devilish handsome man — she'd thought so from that very first night, when she'd floated on his arm into the Coal Hole — and furthermore a man who might still be seen as Rising, despite recent backslidings of a lamentable nature. And one thing — as things do — led to another.

Now she was back in London again, living once more above the bird-fancier's shop with the Badger, who had endured a run of rum luck with gentlemen. Annie herself had met a man who might offer a leading role in a play, about which she was Exceedingly Hopeful. I couldn't help but feel happy for her, after a fashion.

She was also the one who told me the sad tale of how Tom Sheldrake had come to the end of his earthly career. She had learned about it from Mrs Sibthorpe, who as it turned out knew poor Sheldrake's housekeeper, who had found him hanging from a rafter in his bedchamber, stone dead with his eyes staring horridly. There was a note in his weskit pocket, imploring forgiveness from the family of Bob Eldritch and requesting someone to look after his cat. It was all Most Doleful Indeed, but Annie drew comfort from knowing that the poor gentleman was now At Peace. She drew even greater comfort from thinking that Bob Eldritch had Found Peace Also — as most clearly he must have done, since there had been no further sightings of him anywhere in London, which was a Great Relief to All Concerned.

She described all of this to me through the double grille in the Press Yard. Your Wery Umble stood shackled on the wrong side, the din of Newgate howling at his back. My Annie was more lovely than ever, in a blue summer frock and bonnet. Like an emissary from a magic realm that lay far beyond the prison walls, which cast long shadows even in mid-afternoon.

My Annie
, I just wrote. Well, she had been, hadn't she? She had indeed been mine, leastways for a sweet infinitesimal blink of Eternity. I have lately tallied up my nights in this world and have determined that Your Wery Umble will have existed for 7,387 of them in total, once all is said and done — counting the present night, right now, as I'm scribbling these words. The present night, and the last of them. And Miss Annie Smollet was entirely mine for one. So: 0.0135 per cent My Annie, rounded off.