Will Starling (22 page)

“Did you ever see him with Meg?”

“What, 'ere?”

“Or anywheres else.”

Alf shook his head. No, he'd never laid eyes upon the gentleman. Why did I ask?

I didn't quite know how to answer that question. But something was very wrong, in all of this. Something was as wrong as it could be.

 

The belling of his coat as he'd stood across from her in Newgate, like the wings of a bird of prey. The arch of his posture, against her shrinking stillness.

“I mean what I say, Miss Nancarrow. Hold fast to that. Even to the uttermost extremity.”

More Horrid Sightings

 

 

From a Broadsheet Account

11th May, 1816

New developments are reported in the phenomenon of the Boggle-Eyed Man, who first appeared some while ago in the vicinity of St Mary-le-Bow Churchyard, lamenting to passers-by that he had been denied his rightful lodging within the gates, and accordingly must linger homeless until the End of the World. It now grows evident that the Entity has begun to venture further afield into the Metropolis, either through some rising sense of desperation, or else in an increasing Boldness that can only bode ill for those who cross its path. It was sighted three nights ago near a churchyard in Whitechapel, standing like a phantom in the fog, and on the same night was glimpsed slipping down an alleyway near Haymarket. There is now a report, confirmed by several sources, of an uncanny encounter during daylight hours. A sweep, lowered by the ankles down a chimney in Gower Street, grew suddenly frantic. Deaf to encouragement from his master to be manful and cease his shrieking, the boy was at length pulled out, weeping most piteously and convulsing. After much exhortation and prodding, he was able to provide an account of his ordeal, and gave his interlocutors to understand that, halfway down the chimney, he had encountered the Boggle-Eyed Man, staring up at him from below.

There is a further incident reported of a female child, yesterday evening. Not long after nightfall, the child — six years old — passed by the vicinity of St Bartholomew the Great, Smithfield, bearing home to her father a meat pie and a pot of ale, purchased from a public house in Charterhouse Street. Hurrying past the churchyard, she heard a voice entreating her, and discerned a Figure standing in the darkness by the gate.

“Help me,” said the Figure.

When the child asked who it was that spoke, the Figure in the darkness gave its name as “Bob” and solicited once again her immediate assistance. Caution contending with innocent Christian concern, the child stepped closer to ask what was the matter, to which “Bob” replied that he was lost and lorn, but might yet find his place if the child would but take his hand and lead him.

She might indeed have done so, being touched to her innocent heart, excepting that she saw just in time that “Bob” was possessed of two great bulging eyes, “with hair stood straight on end, most horrible,” which revealed to her that this was no mere vagabond but the Boggle-Eyed Man himself, about whom she had been amply warned. Dropping the meat pie and the pot of ale, the child fled in terror, never stopping until she reached the haven of her home, where her father asked to know what had frightened her so, and “what the D
—
—
had become of his supper.”

“He has it, Papa,” the child replied in high distress. “
He
has your supper — Boggle-Eyed Bob!”

17

Miss Smollet saw the report on the Saturday, just as I did. It was the name that bothered her most of all.

“He gave his name as
Bob
,” she kept saying. Circling back to that one detail, each time I tried to object that a child's wild claims were hardly proof of anything, and neither was a broadsheet report. “But it's more than one report, and more than one child,” she insisted. “People keep seeing him — I seen him twice. And the name! He called himself Bob, out of all the names in London.”

That's when I finally told her what Isaac Bliss had said to me, two days earlier.

“He said it seemed strangely light — Bob Eldritch's coffin. When they took it out of the Undertaker's. He didn't help lift it himself, but he watched as two other men did. He said, ‘They picked it up like it was practic'ly nothing at all. P'raps it was just that they was strong, and the man inside quite small — but it struck me as curious, Will, at the time.'”

And then I told her the rest of it, despite knowing full well where this must lead.

“Atherton tried to bring him back,” I said.

We were outside the house in Holborn, just at twilight. I had accompanied Miss Smollet here to fetch a few belongings she wanted to have with her at her new lodgings with Janet Friendly in Milford Lane. The traffic rolled past into the gathering gloom, and the songbirds warbled faintly in the bird-fancier's shop.

“Bob Eldritch,” I said. “The night he died. Atherton tried to revive him.”

Miss Smollet didn't understand what I meant, not at first.

“I know that, Will. I was there.”

“No, not at Fountain Court. An hour afterwards, in the stable behind Atherton's house.”

She still didn't understand — not quite. But I watched the realization gather like a shadow across her face.

“There is a woman,” I said. “A domestic. She drinks laudanum and tells wild tales. I could hardly believe her myself.”

“What did she say?”

So I told her. There was a terrible silence from Miss Smollet when I finished.

“You're saying he — what —
Resurrected
him?”

“Or leastways made the attempt.”

Behind us in the shop, the songbird chorus was dwindling as the voices fell silent one by one. Evidently the bird-fancier was draping the cages with the onset of night — or so I chose to presume. Here in the gathering darkness, with Miss Smollet's face greying with horror and the spectre of Bob Eldritch rising up between us, I could almost imagine a different scene instead: a scowling bird-fancier, grown sick to death of song, shuffling and muttering and throttling his lovelies each one in turn.

“You're right, Miss Smollet. It ent possible.” I heard myself arguing against my own dark imaginings. “I know that, as a man of Science. A Surgeon's Assistant . . .”

But even as I spoke, I knew what I was going to do next. Cos I'd already made the preparations.

“Miss Smollet, I'm going to take you back to Milford Lane, where you'll be safe tonight. And I'm going to find out the answer to this, one way or the other.”

“
How?
” she exclaimed, in rising distress.

But I believe she'd already begun to guess. After all, there was only one way to know for a fact whether Bob Eldritch had ever been buried.

“Will! Surely not — you wouldn't!”

But I would.

And I have wondered ever since, looking back: was this the night? The wild, black night when I stepped outside the sweet light of Reason, like a traveller leaving the last lamp-lit house on a forest road, and crossed once and for all into a Darkness so profound that I would never quite emerge from it again?

Or had that crossing come already? I have asked myself this question too. Perhaps the crossing had come a full year earlier, on the battlefield after Quatre Bras. And every step I had taken since had been nothing but one step deeper into Night.

*

The Fortune of War stands at the junction of Giltspur Street and Cock Lane, just across from St Bart's Hospital. The name had been chosen by an owner from the previous century, who retired from a naval career missing both legs and one arm — or so the story went. Myself, I could never quite see how a man might tend a bar while down to his last limb, but perhaps this is just Your Wery Umble being literal-minded.

The Fortune of War was much like any other low tavern in London, except for the little room in the back where on any given night there might be as many as a dozen corpses laid out — Things, to use the parlance of the trade; Stiff 'uns, in varying states of decomposition, each with a tag naming the man who brought it in — cos the Fortune of War was the favoured haunt of the Doomsday Men, north of the river. Several of them could at any time be found in the taproom, drinking. They wore rough jackets and slouch caps, and moleskins on digging nights. They had about them the air of wicked Sextons. From time to time one of the surgeons from St Bart's would hurry over to inspect the Things on display, as if they were so many codfish laid out on a plank, and if a price were agreed upon, a hospital Porter would slope over and lug the purchase to the Death House for dissection. If a Thing were beginning to putrefy, the owner might fail to find a buyer at St Bart's, in which case he would load it into a hamper and lug it round to another hospital, or to one of the private anatomy schools.

Just after midnight I pushed through the door, looking round through the fug of smoke 'til I spotted Little Hollis. There he was, as he'd promised to be when we'd reached our agreement earlier that evening: sitting with two or three others, and nodding as I caught his eye. Draining his jar, he made some excuse to his companions — you didn't discuss such Business as ours with them as were not partners in the enterprise — and then rose and high-arsed past me, out the door. I followed.

“Have you got the tools?” I asked him, as we stood together in darkness on Cock Lane.

He squinted upwards at the sliver of moon, a reek about him of old cellars and recent urine.

“'S been a change of plan,” he said. “'S eighty-twenty, now. The proceeds.”

“We agreed on fifty-fifty,” I protested. “Equal terms.”

“'S 'Ollis as supplies the himplements. 'S 'Ollis as contributes the hexpertise. So 's eighty per cent to 'Ollis — take or leave.”

He eyed me slantingdicular, and spat. And he was bluffing, of course. Little Hollis had depended on Uncle Cheese to acquire information about corpses and make the arrangements with Sextons — and he had depended as well on poor Jemmy to protect him from rival gangs. The Resurrection trade was highly competitive, and a man in the way of being self-employed could find himself set upon most grievously. I guessed he hadn't been on a job since that dreadful night in St George-in-the-East churchyard, which explained why he'd been desperate enough to take up my offer in the first place.

But Your Wery Umble was hardly doing this for the jingle. Fifty-fifty or eighty-twenty, it made little difference to me — especially since I strongly suspected it would end up in nothing at all. But I let him believe I was mightily aggrieved, and made a feint at battling for sixty-forty before giving in and letting him have three quarters.

He allowed himself a grunt of sly satisfaction, before muttering that Your Wery Umble should be grateful for anything at all. “The likes of you, and the likes of 'Ollis. 'S a perfessional, is 'Ollis, a top perfessional, haccustomed to the likes of Jemmy Cheese, and Nedward Cheshire. 'S a terrible coming-down for the likes of 'Ollis. 'S a terrible loss he's suffered.” He shook his head lugubriously. “And Meg Nancarrow too, on top of all the rest. 'S lost now too, is Meg. 'S no hope for the bitch.”

“Do you believe she did it? Murdered Uncle Cheese?”

There was the barest hint of a pause.

“'S what they say, innit?”

“I think she's innocent.”

“'S not for us to decide.”

“Christ, I wish I knew what happened.”

Cos on that night — as you'll recollect — I didn't
know
. Standing there in the darkness outside the Fortune of War, I had none of the pieces that I would subsequently jigsaw together; had no inkling, not as yet, of the visit that had been paid by Uncle Cheese to Crutched Friars, with Little Hollis waiting for him outside in the night, primed to dash for a Constable if Cheese should fail to emerge. Looking back upon it now — reliving that night outside the Fortune of War, all these months later — I can imagine a furtive look flickering across the sharp phizog of Little Hollis. I can picture the barest hunching of narrow shoulders.

But in that moment I saw nothing, preoccupied as I was with the ordeal that lay ahead. And then suddenly there was a scraping of boots against cobblestones, and Hollis flinched as a figure stepped out from the darkness behind us.

A slim form in a man's baggy jacket, far too large, and a cap such as low rough fellows wear, raising a bull's-eye lantern in one not-quite-steady hand.

“Let us Do This Deed,” said Annie Smollet.

I had told her earlier that she was not coming with us. I had stated it in no uncertain terms, but Miss Smollet had paid no heed — she was coming, she insisted, and that was that. Now here she stood, in togs she had borrowed — or so I could only suppose — from a friend in the Wardrobe Room at one of the theatres, tucking a stray ringlet back under the cap and eyeing me with an air of desperate resolve.

Little Hollis peered in disbelief. “Aw, bugger me blind,” he said.

“My Mind is Set,” said Miss Smollet. “And when my Mind is Set, there is no budging it, not with Gunpowder nor Cannonballs.”

I had the sense that she'd been rehearsing this all the while she'd been standing here, waiting for me to come back out of the tavern. And it was a rousing enough declamation, I suppose, in its way — assuming your notion of what we were about was drawn from the pages of a penny-blood.

“Lead,” said Miss Smollet, “on.”

Little Hollis looked back to me. “'S ninety-ten, now,” he said bitterly.

 

St Mary-le-Bow lay half a mile to the south and east. We veered a little distance northwards first, stopping at a crib where Hollis had stashed his implements, and then we were on our way, Little Hollis high-arsing ahead of us and Miss Smollet keeping close to my side, talking in a low quick voice all the while.

“I know What Lies Ahead,” she insisted, repeating it several times, as if saying it often enough would make it so. “And more than that, I know how the Job Is To Be Done.”

It seems she'd been in a play once, with grave-robbing in it.

“I was the Girl who got Exhumed. It was a wonderful role, and highly dramatickal, for I'd been stabbed through the heart, and my wound commenced to bleed when the murderer looked upon my poor corpse. Fatal wounds will do this, Will, as everyone knows, to identify the guilty and bring justice from beyond the grave. This is a Medical Fact, documented by Learned Persons. And it was very thrilling. I rose up slowly, eyes wide with woe and holy vengeance, and lifted a trembling arm to point the villain out. It weren't a proper theatre, really — more like a penny gaff, stuffed with castaway apprentices baked on gin. But O! they gasped and cheered, Will, when I sat up, and I swear they would have done so anyways, even if my burial clothes was covering a bit more of me up top.”