Will Starling (15 page)

“I am a man, Mr Atherton, as hears tales.”

“And what tales are those?”

Ned Cheshire cocked his head. Lamplight flashed on his spectacles.

“Ah,” he said.

Atherton began to laugh. “That skeleton cost me a guinea. I found it in a curiosity shop in the Gray's Inn Road, where it had been standing since God knows when, collecting dust. It's decades old, man — look at it. The bones are brown with age.”

“Vith boiling, Mr Atherton. Boiling causes that discoloration, as any man of Science knows. That fellow might have been alive just yesterday.”

Atherton's laughter had trailed away. A smile remained, but it was brittle as glass.

“What are you implying, Cheshire?”

“I, sir? Nothing at all.”

“Then perhaps you should take care.”

Odenkirk by the door commenced quietly flexing his hands.

If Uncle Cheese were to be truthful — as he would be on occasion, when there was no other option — he would admit to feeling a certain icy liquefaction in the bowels. A creeping sense that he might have overplayed his hand. But there was nothing for it now but to carry on.

“I propose,” said Uncle Cheese, “that Mr Odenkirk should step to the casement, and look out, so as to see the man standing by the lamppost on the corner, getting rained on. The little fellow with the werminous air — yes, there he is, right there — and the elewated arse. He's soaked and shivering and cursing under his breath, no doubt. But he's holding fast to his instruction, vhich is to run directly for the Vatch if Nedward C don't emerge from this house in five more minutes. So what you'll do, Mr Atherton, you'll give me another ten-pound note to keep the first one company, and fifty guineas besides for the keeping of my brother's poor Meg, and her babbies yet unborn. And then Nedward's lips are sealed, Mr Atherton. It is done. All is resolved. Fast friends hereafter,
absit inwidia
.”

*

And there I've done it, haven't I? Your Wery Umble has performed wonders of his own, entering the heart of another man and intuiting his innermost thoughts and secrets — down to the hunger he was feeling, and the conversation he had shared with his late sister three years before I was born.

But it is the truth. I am certain of that.

And now I'll tell you something else. I'll tell you about Flitty Deakins.

Her room overlooked the street. She often knelt at the window late at night in prayer, with the house in slumber below and Cook snoring in the bed they shared. Her shawl wrapped tightly against the chill, leaning her forehead against the cold glass.

She had been kneeling there that night, but found she could not compose her thoughts to pray. The agitation was too great — the mortal trembling and the green-eyed Hindoo on the landing, and the secret conviction that her own wickedness had placed her beyond all hope of forgiveness, in this world or the next. For her wickedness was grievous. She knew it, as did God, who Judges. He Judges each one of us, and he Judged the Revd Deakins's own dear darling girl, weighing her in the balance and finding her horribly wanting.

Raising her head, she found herself staring wretchedly down as a man emerged from the house: Uncle Cheese. Despite her dolour, Flitty Deakins recognized him in the spill of light from within. He was swallowed by the darkness, to reappear a moment later in the lamplight on the corner, where another man awaited. They exchanged brief words and then disappeared into the night, Uncle Cheese leading and his companion scuttling after, arse upwards.

Flitty Deakins could hardly have heard what they said, of course — no more than she could hear the voices in the Collection Room, two floors below. She couldn't tell you what Atherton and Odenkirk were discussing at that minute.

But I can guess — Your Wery Umble Narrator, who is telling you this story, from evidence puzzled together and long pondered. If you or I were at the door of the Collection Room, scarce daring to breathe with ear pressed against the keyhole, I wager we would hear Dionysus Atherton's voice, suffused with fury: “Who the Devil has been telling tales?” And Odenkirk's ominous reply: “P'raps I should speak with the Deakins, sir. P'raps I should do so directly.”

I can tell you for a certainty what poor Flitty heard next — because she told me. In the darkness thereafter, as rain lashed down and wind shook the house until its timbers groaned, she heard heavy boots coming up the stairs. One flight, and then the second, as inexorable as Old Bones himself, ascending with his summons. The measured
tramp-tramp
of Odenkirk, sticker of pigs.

10

Uncle Cheese found Meg at the Three Jolly Cocks. She had come in storm-drenched some while previous and now sat barefoot on a stool by the fire, her shawl and her woollen stockings draped on the hearth, giving off a waft of drowned mutton that mingled with the blue haze of smoke and the familiar reek of malt and humanity.

The ceiling sloped lower here at the back of the room; Edward Cheshire was required to stoop as he drew near. “I feared I might have missed you,” he said, “it being so late.”

He had told her to meet him at midnight, which had come and gone an hour ago. But it was good for Meg to wait for him; it would encourage her to recollect where favours were owed. Pulling off his sodden coat he rubbed his hands, blinking through misted spectacles and flinching to see that Meg was drinking gin. Meg Nancarrow on the blue ruin could be a dickey proposition; it had a queer effect on her. Instead of reeling with it, she'd grow steadily more intense, each drink adding to a cold unnerving clarity. Just now she was staring round at the men in the room, as if measuring each one in turn. These were such riff-raff as you would expect to find at such a time of night: swindlers and rogues and petty villains; a trio of house-breakers huddled in terse conference; some watermen who had wandered up from the Thames. Just inside the door a blind beggar sat with a mongrel that someone had shaved to look like a poodle. One of them had growled as Uncle Cheese passed by. The dog, presumably.

“Looking for an honest man?” he asked Meg, hoping to jolly her.

“I'm deciding how they'll die.”

He tilted back his head, to peer underneath fogged lenses. This was dark, even for Meg.

“
Stipendium peccati
— eh, my girl? The vages of sin. But surely, Meg, you won't be killing all of 'em.”

“Oh, no. I won't need to do it myself.”

She lifted her chin, pointing with it to a red-faced rogue with bulging eyes. That one, she had decided, would die of a choking apoplexy. The one next to him would have his guts spilled out by his best friend's knife. Over there was a man marked out for gaol-fever, and there was one destined to die at the end of a rope.

“But not at Newgate. By his own hand, drunk and despairing. Fouling his breeches, underneath a bridge.”She spoke with cool satisfaction, which gave Uncle Cheese the willies, truth be told. It put him in mind of a witch. Not the sort that lurked in the privy, to the torment of younger brothers — the other sort. A witch that dances naked with the Devil.

“Stand us a drink, Cheese.”

Ned complied, being in an expansive mood. He was in fact halfways giddy with sheer pleasure at himself: two of Atherton's ten-pound notes folded carefully into his hat, and the prospect of fifty guineas still to come. A dangerous game, but Ned was a bold and clever fellow, and had played it to perfection.

There had been a stab of qualm a few minutes ago, when he and Little Hollis had gone their separate ways just north of St Paul's Cathedral. Hurrying on through the squall, he'd had a sudden sense of someone following: heavy footsteps —
tramp, tramp, tramp
— that went silent when he stopped. The feeling had crept upon him again as he reached the head of Black Friars Lane, but when he turned round quick and sudden there was no one behind him — or no one that he could see. Ahead, the light from the Three Jolly Cocks glowed with the promise of warmth, and banishing his misgivings he had hurried towards it.

“Have you seen him?” Meg demanded.

“Atherton? Oh, yes.”

“Will he pay?”

“He will.”

“How much?”

“Five pound.”

“That's
all
? For the breaking of Jemmy's head? For six months, rotting in gaol?”

“The man is cold, Meg. There is vinter at the wery heart of Mr Dionysus Atherton. But the five pound is yours, whole and entire.
Ipso facto
, Meg, and
totus tuus
— I make no claim.”

He fished from his weskit pocket a tattered note, and slipped it into her hand. Discreetly, of course — you didn't flash five-pound notes in a place like this. Their fingers brushed together, skin against naked skin.

He discovered it pleased him to have given her so much; it brought on a feeling of varmth and wirtue. Whatever else was said about Edward Cheshire, he was a man who stood by his family. He would be happier still to stand Meg against the wall outside, and hike her skirts, cos he had often imagined Meg Nancarrow dancing naked in the moonlight, and imagined as well a devil dancing with her, who looked most remarkable like Nedward Cheshire. But this of course was another proposition entirely, and must needs be negotiated with care.

“Five pounds,” she repeated, incredulous. “And nothing more?”

“Upon my davy.”

“Go back to the bastard.
Threaten
him.”

“I have done, Meg, what there is to be done. Five pounds is all he vill give us.”

He raised his narrow shoulders in an eloquent shrug, expressive of the essential futility of being human. As befitted a man with Latin, Uncle Cheese was capable of great Stoicism, especially in the face of others' misfortune. You could imagine him in a toga, masticating grapes.

Meg's eyes narrowed like a cat's.

“You wouldn't be lying to me, Cheese?”

“No, Meg.”

“You wouldn't be chousing me, and holding back?”

The very notion cut him to the quick; he said so. He was her true friend — truer than ever, now that she was alone in the world, with poor Jemmy sent away, and scant odds besides that he would ever be his old self again.

“And what if he isn't?” Meg cried. “I'll have to look after him somehow. I'll need money for that.”

For a moment there was the catch of despair in her voice. Behind them, by the door, the blind man lifted his head. The mongrel dog at his feet had drifted into a doze and made tiny whiffling sounds, expressive of the pursuit of rabbits.

Uncle Cheese grew more Roman than ever. “These are the facts of the matter,” he said, “as ve must face up to. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.
Sunt lacrimae
, Meg,
sunt lacrimae
— there are tears for such things. But I make a pledge to you.”

His heart brimmed with earnest intention. He placed his hand on her knee.

“Vhatever you need, Meg, in this time of desolation. Turn to Nedward, and Nedward is there.”

“You will do three things for me,” she said.

“Name them, my girl.”

“Remove that hand, before I mistake it for a spider. Stand up. And fuck off into the night.”

Ned Cheshire's solicitude curdled.

“You vant to think, my girl,” he said. “Think on how you make your living, vhen you're not serving ale. Vith men, Meg — and don't think Edward Cheshire doesn't know it. Men far less presentable than Edward C. himself. Think on that — then think some more. Poor Jemmy in his current plight, and Nedward offering friendship. Brother Ned, as owns a shop, and changes his linen by the week. Edward Cheshire, as is nigh upon the estate of dentistry. And you think yourself too fine? The likes of you, Meg? Miss Nobuddy from Nowhere — the draggle-tail descendant of common sluts and criminals — a father hung for house-breaking and two brothers both transported, and you yourself upon your knees for any man with a silver coin. You might vell think again.”

Meg regarded him with the bitter juniper clarity of gin. “You'll have your weasand slit,” she said. “That is how it ends for you, Cheese. It comes to me — I can see it.”

Despite himself, he felt a chill. “Don't you threaten me.”

“No threat. Just a certainty I'm having.”

“
Nemo me impune
, my girl. Nobody.”

“Slit from ear to ear. Lying like a dead cat in a ditch. Pray God it's many good years off.”

11

This had taken place on a Wednesday — so I firmly believe. Edward Cheshire's visit to Crutched Friars, and his subsequent meeting with Meg at the Three Jolly Cocks. I hadn't gone outside on Wednesday myself, having experienced a day of the Black Dog's visitation, when the world was very bleak and rising did not seem possible. On such days I quite often thought of my friend Danny Littlejohn.

Danny Littlejohn was a Londoner, like myself. He had taken the shilling and sailed to join the fighting in the Spring of '13, not long before the Battle of Vitoria. In due course he arrived at a field hospital to seek attention for a shrapnel wound — deep enough to need sewing up, but too shallow to send him safely home — and we hit it off most remarkable. Long Will, he would call me.

He was two years older, with a loose-limbed swagger and a larking exuberance. He'd get letters from home in a girl's looping hand, full of the latest news from the Metropolis — news now two or three months old, of course — which he'd call out while sprawling by the cook-fire of an evening, or leaning on a shovel while someone else dug a latrine pit. “A whale seen swimming in the Thames,” he would announce, “as far upriver as Richmond.” Or: “An entire estate at Hertfordshire changes hands at Old Crocky's gaming house — two hunnert acres, with great house and outbuildings, and a grotto in a garden complete with hermit.” He gave us to understand that these letters were sent by a sweetheart who pined away for him in Bethnal Green, or possibly Shoreditch. Her name seemed variable as well, being sometimes Sal and sometimes Bess and occasionally Dorcas, thus raising the possibility that he had several different sweethearts all pining in separate districts. Personally I suspected the letters came from his sister, and thought him a fearful liar on the subject of sweethearts. I also thought what a fine thing it was to have a sister — or anyone else — who would care enough to write so often.