Will Starling (41 page)

“And I believe something else as well,” she was saying to me, earnestly. “I believe that at the last there is a White Light shining, and into this White Light we are Gathered. Becos that is how it happens, Will, for the likes of poor Mr Sheldrake and for Bob Eldritch and for all of us — for me and for you and for every soul now living. I believe it, Will, becos it is True. And you must Hold Fast to that Truth, no matter what Lies Ahead in the Days to Come.”

She spoke with wonderful conviction — though you can never be really sure, with an actress. And she stretched her hand out most yearningly through the bars, before letting it fall tragically short, which was a most affecting thing for her to have done.

“Such larks we had, didn't we, Will? Such lovely larks, the two of us.”

My Annie left soon afterwards, in a glimmer of brave tears, promising she would come again.

She didn't.

*

The deep bell of St Paul's has just struck three. Five hours remain — but I am almost done telling you this tale. My candle stub has two inches left, and will last until light filters in. I have ink enough, and paper.

On we go.

The trial when it came was a foregone conclusion. Mr Comrie had somehow retained an excellent barrister, a man with a measured stride and a voice like a church organ, which played entire arpeggios on my behalf — but there was never any point. The black cap was out before you knew it, and there was Your Wery Umble, condemned.

Mr Comrie has come nearly every day since to visit, and Janet Friendly too. There have been long delays, due to wrangling and appeals for mercy, but the two of them have never flagged. Often they've come together, Janet holding his arm as they cross the Press Yard. Taller than he is, with her red face ruddier than ever now that November is here — as ungainly a pair as ever warmed a cockle. I said so yesterday, which caused Mr Comrie to grow quite pink, and inspired Janet to offer me such a clout, if I would oblige her by stepping closer to the bars, that my teeth would rattle like peas in a metal bucket. But when they left she took his arm again.

This afternoon, when they left for the final time, she was blubbering openly. Gobbets of snot and great gulping sobs, which was very hard to bear. Mr Comrie lingered. I gave the pages I had already written to the Keeper, who stood in the space between the two grilles that separated us. He eyed them suspiciously, but passed them on; I don't think Mr Comrie had been expecting quite so many.

“There'll be more,” I told him. “I'll finish tonight. The Ordinary says he'll give them to you.”

He nodded.

“I'm setting it down,” I said. “All of it, from the beginning. I want it to be known, what he did.”

Mr Comrie nodded again, his mouth clamped clam-shell tight. He was blinking furiously; the cold wind was in his face, which evidently made his eyes water, and caused him to mistrust his voice.

My own voice was set on betraying me now, and came out queer and breaking. “Mr Comrie? I don't know if I can do this, tomorrow morning.”

“Yes, you can,” he said huskily. “I'll be thaire. Look at me, as long as you can. We'll see this through, the two of us, together.”

*

The Revd Dr Cotton came to see me afterwards. A florid man in late middle age, much concerned for the state of my soul. He asked was I prepared now to confess, and I told him yes I was. He murmured lugubrious relief to hear it, and quickly set out paper and quill, urging me to speak my confession aloud while he transcribed.

“I killed Danny Littlejohn,” I said.

He stopped in his scratching. “Who?”

“My best friend. He was fuller of life than anyone I ever knew, and I took it away. I thought I was doing it for the best, but Christ only knows if that's true, and Danny died hating me — that's what matters, and surely I deserve whatever is to come. That is my Last Dying Confession, before God. Get what you can for it, from the broadsheets.”

*

My father came to see me last of all.

He'd returned to London after the fire, there being no danger now to keep him away, though Flitty Deakins was still shrieking her threats. She was — she remains — chained to a wall in Bedlam Hospital, vowing to emanate from that dreadful tomb and bring Judgement upon Dionysus Atherton. She will rise, she says, at the hour he least expects, and at this hour such a Reckoning will come as will make the devils themselves cry out in consternation. But my father was hardly disconcerted by poor Flitty. He had returned to his work at Guy's Hospital, and was hinting that he would soon publish the true account of his experiment. He was still more infamous than celebrated — but then infamy is accounted no mean achievement, in this Age of ours. Infamy has a cachet of its own. And there exists no actual proof that would convict him — cos who would believe Flitty Deakins? Or William Starling, either?

He came to Newgate just at twilight. The last rays of the sun were dying, and a gnawing cold had settled.

“I regret to see it come to this,” he said. “I would not have wished it.”

He had been drinking, but was himself again: such was my first impression, looking through the double grille. He stood slouched, hands in pockets, looking about him like a man who had a thousand better places to be, and would proceed to one of them directly. He had that gleam about him, as of old.

“Will you come tomorrow morning?” I asked.

“No.”

“No timepiece?”

“Do not be grotesque.”

“No last blessing upon your departing child?”

“This was not my doing. You brought this upon yourself.”

“It was
all
your doing.”

Silence between us, and the scrape of dried leaves across paving stones. The wind was rising; a storm was coming on. The Turnkey stood nearby, hunched against it.

When you saw my father more closely, you realized: there had been a change, after all. He seemed coarser, and somehow diminished, as if you'd surprised an actor backstage after the performance, and saw that the splendid costume was tawdry and cheap, and the actor himself beneath the paint much older than you'd supposed. The blue eyes would not quite settle and there was a hint of scarlet spiderwebbing on his cheeks.

I felt a terrible weariness, and a desperation.

“Tell me the truth,” I said. “I just want to hear you admit it.”

“Meg Nancarrow was dead, beyond all doubt. She was dead, and I brought her back. I succeeded. That is the truth — whether anyone else will believe it, or no.”

“No. The truth about the others.”

“Others?”

“The others you killed. Say it out loud. A last request from a dying son.”

The sky behind him was darkening into black. His face was dark as well as he leaned in closer to the bars, and his voice was low and hard.

“Edward Cheshire is dead. So is Meg, and Little Hollis, and Odenkirk. There are no witnesses — no blood-drenched hands — no bodies. So I cannot guess what ‘others' you might mean.”

The shadow of a thin cold smile. He straightened, as if to leave.

“Father.”

The word hung between us like a corpse from a gibbet.

“At least say you lied about that one thing,” I said.

He stood in silence for a considerable moment. The cold wind continued to rise.

“You are your mother's child,” he said at last, “entirely. I see her in you — she is there in every lineament and gesture. I see nothing of myself at all.”

The final words he ever spoke to me. I watched as he moved away, into the gathering night. Despite everything, I felt a lifting, then.

I called out to him, one last time.

“Atherton.”

He stopped, but did not look back.

“Tell them I smiled.”

Epilogue

London, 1841

Comrie here.

A quarter-century has passed since the events described above. I am an old man now, or nearly so, though my Janet would doubtless put it differently. She would assure you that I was an old man to begin with, at least in my thinking of myself, and have finally acquired the aches and the rheums and the white hairs to suit. I have occasional pains as well, in my chest and arm, and scant breath remaining after walking up a flight of stairs. This exasperates the grandson, who does not stop running until he drops in a heap, and I confess to finding it an exasperation myself. As a surgeon, I also understand what it means.

Let me be clear: I do not complain. But it has seemed to me that I should begin to tie up loose ends, at the end of a long and untidy career, and one of these has been to put in order the pile of papers that William left me. I'd promised him I would do so, but somehow I kept setting it aside for another day. You know how it is; life intervenes, and there hasn't seemed an urgency 'til now. You know how that is too. Time seems all but limitless, until it isn't.

But I've done it, finally — as you'll know already, having read this far. It remains for me to add the last few pages.

I will be brief. I was never a man for the syllables, as William has told you, and besides I am tired. It is late, past ten o'clock, and I am writing these words by lamplight in my surgery, at our house in Tavistock Street. An entire house these days, with a son and his burgeoning brood living with us. It has turned out so much better than I would ever have expected, on the whole. My Janet professes herself astounded. And having promised brevity, here I am: wittering.

 

The proof emerged in 1822, six years after William was hanged. That's when a Doomsday Man named Semmens came to his own lamentable end. It seems he and a partner, a man called Pilchard, had been pursuing the logic which dictates that corpses are most easily acquired while still upright and whistling. Semmens would befriend them at a public house, and invite them back to his lodging for continued conviviality, during which proceedings Pilchard would come up behind and smother them with a pillow. The corpses could then be sold to anatomists who didn't look too closely into cause of death. By this I mean half the anatomists in London.

Semmens had taken a certain urchin to a Surgeon early in 1816. This came out in the Confession he gave the night before they hanged him. He'd been shrilly proclaiming his innocence 'til this point, but now he broke down and began babbling out every dirty deed he'd done since the day when as a villainous tyke he first threw stones at the cat.

The urchin had expired from cold and privation, or so Semmens supposed when he came across the body lying slumped against a churchyard wall. And so he did what any Doomsday Man would do: loaded it into a sack and lugged it straight to a Surgeon he knew of, in Crutched Friars. His knock on the side door was answered by the Surgeon's Man, who led him round back to the stable and demanded to be shown the Thing, upon which Semmens dumped it from the sack and they both realized: a flutter of respiration remained.

“Leave him,” said the Surgeon.

He had come in silently behind them, and now his voice made Semmens jump.

“Ent dead, though,” said Semmens. “Look — he's still alive.”

“He'll be useful to me, that way,” replied the Surgeon. “I can use a lad, not quite dead.”

“Ent my affair,” Semmens said then. “But what do you propose to do?”

“I propose,” said the Surgeon, “to pay you four pounds, and send you on your way. And you won't mention that you were ever here tonight.”

And Semmens never said a word, until his Last Dying Confession in Newgate Prison. The confession caused a considerable stir, convincing a Magistrate to dig up the grounds behind the house at Crutched Friars, and then tear up the floor of the stable, where they found the remains of a dozen corpses buried, and odds and ends of personal effects. Amongst these was the mouldy scrap of a bottle-green weskit such as once had been worn by a Spanish Boy, and a leather collar on a thin leather lead, such as might go round the neck of a monkey.

So it was true, beyond all doubt. The truth was all along as poor William had insisted.

*

They hanged William on a filthy November morning. Lashing rain, and wind howling from the north. God's bollocks, I thought, they'll be stringing him sideways. He'll flutter like a flag. Janet came with me, though I urged her to stay away.

“You'll need me,” she said.

“I don't want you to see this.”

“Fuck what you don't want.”

Atherton wasn't there. Nor was Annie Smollet.

You may be interested to learn that Miss Smollet subsequently landed on her feet. By that Christmas she was on the stage, playing the leading role in
The Double Death of Lady Lazarus; or, Meg, the Fleet Ditch Fury
. The script was a ridiculous thing, tied together with twine, with an ending in which the Fury sailed to the New World and opened an ale-house in Boston with her silent hulking beau, which was one of the enduring Rumours. But it ran for 173 performances, and Annie Smollet was a great success. She went on to enjoy a lengthy career, finally retiring to marry a chinless imbecile with a title and three thousand a year. So there you are: a happy ending.

William would want you to hear that. He never bore a grudge towards Miss Smollet. And he went to the scaffold as game as they come, shuddering as he reached the top step, but that was the cold cutting through him. Wind whipped the Hangman's coat, and poor William wore nothing more than a shirt. But he held his head high as they positioned him, and found our faces gazing up at him from the very front of the crowd. Saw his friends at the last, just before the white hood went on. And God bless him, he actually smiled.

Janet cried out as he dropped. The customary six inches, was all — not nearly enough to break the neck of such a wisp of a lad. I had expected that, of course. I knew the neck would never break.

Atherton was at the churchyard three days later, when we put the coffin in the ground. Muted and lugubrious in black.

“By God, that you would dare to show your face,” I said.

Janet would have clouted him then and there. She balled her fists and turned bright red.

“I have lost a son,” he said, with the air of a man much wounded.

I very nearly clouted him myself. Instead I told him of the papers I was editing. William's account of what had happened, step by step.

His expression grew dark. “Take care what you publish, Comrie. Take very great care indeed.”

“Oh, I shall. I'll be meticulous and thorough.”

“I warn you again, for old friendship's sake. I will ruin you.”

But it never came to ruination — not on either side. Because that same afternoon, Flitty Deakins died in Bedlam Hospital, which led to a singular consequence.

Pneumonia took her. Her lungs had never recovered from the fire, and the end came quickly. It came kindly too, as pneumonia does, which was a blessing — assuming you feel she deserved any manner of blessing. Poor mad Phyllida, chained to a shit-smeared wall and raving of a Reckoning to come.

Atherton acquired the corpse. It was easily done, there being no friends to care about a funeral; just slip four pounds to the Porter. If I had to suppose, I'd say it simply amused him — Flitty Deakins, with her horror of dissection, stretched naked beneath his scalpel in the Death House. Rats and sparrows brawling for bits as her Nemesis carved her up.

Except there had been delays. The corpse had been stowed for a time in a cellar at Bedlam Hospital — not long, just two or three days. But that's long enough for putrefaction to set in, and the anatomist must of course take special care, with a putrid corpse.

Atherton did not. Perhaps it was just careless showmanship — a cavalier swipe of the scalpel. Perhaps stiffness in the shoulder as well, scar tissue from the wound William had given him. But I think it was more than that. He hadn't been the same since William's arrest, and in the week since the hanging he had not been sober at all. He'd been unsteady on his feet at the funeral; he'd passed a hand over his face, and I noted then how it shook. “That is no hand,” I thought at the time, “for a surgeon to possess. He will need to pull himself together.”

However it was, he nicked his finger during the dissection. The merest nick — a flake of jagged bone. Flitty Deakins gaped up at him, her mouth stretched wide in a rictus. In the reeking gloom of the Death House, by the guttering light of candles fashioned from human fat, it could very nearly be taken for unholy glee.

The headache began within the hour, and that's when he knew.

“You mad, pathetic bitch,” he said. “You have murdered me.”

It is a dismal way to die. By noon, the pain in his head was intense, and as night fell delirium set in; he moaned and thrashed and cried out most piteously to be left alone, evidently believing that devils were gathering in the corners of the room. They were twisted and desiccated, he seemed to think, like bats. His organs began to haemorrhage, the blood unable to clot. An hour before dawn it was over, and the most gifted man I have ever known was dead.

*

William's struggles had ceased at the end of twenty minutes, his body hanging limp. At 8.21, death was pronounced by the attending surgeon, a man named Inverarity. A good man; I'd known him at school. I had been to his house, in fact, a day or two previous. He lived very near Newgate, behind St Bart's Hospital. At twenty-three minutes past the hour, the body was cut down.

It was the crowd that had thwarted John Hunter those decades previous, in his bid to save the poor Revd Dodd. There was the irony of it. A mighty throng had come out to witness Dodd's hanging, so great was public sympathy for him. A hundred thousand clogged the streets around Tyburn, blocking the passage of the cart. Hunter had made arrangements with a nearby undertaker — a table was prepared, the equipment laid out — but they couldn't get Dodd's body through for nearly two hours. Otherwise, Hunter might have carried it off. The greatest Scientific Surgeon of his age — if anyone had the skill, it was Hunter. His plan was to warm the body in front of a fire and then to inflate the lungs while administering stimulants: hartshorn and hot balsam, forced up through the rectum. After this, electrical shocks were to be administered from a Leyden Jar, which could have been useful if the heart had arrested, though not strictly necessary, assuming that the body had been cut down soon enough, before death was absolute. Owing to a premature pronouncement by the attending surgeon, through error or prior agreement. I had myself revived a drowned girl, nearly twenty minutes after respiration had ceased. And if you could revive after twenty minutes, then why not thirty, or even more? It helps if the body is very cold.

There were no more than five thousand gathered for William's hanging, owing to the filthy weather. They filled only half the square, and directly afterwards they dispersed. When a knot of them impeded the cart, Janet lowered her head and charged, roaring like a bull and battering right through.
By God
, I might have exclaimed to myself, if I'd not had so much else upon my mind.
By the Lord and his mighty swinging bollocks, that was magnificently done
.

*

If Hunter had succeeded, he would presumably have spirited the Revd Dodd out of London — out of England entirely, if possible. Dodd might conceivably have settled in a town in France. Married an actress, even, if he was the sort of man who fell in love with actresses. And who knows? Perhaps he was. I know very little about poor Dodd. He might have corresponded regularly with old friends from London, who were reassured to know that he was well and contented, with an Apothecary's shop behind the high street where we might imagine him at this moment: perched upon a stool, measuring and mixing, grown pot-bellied in middle age. All this might indeed have been possible, had the great man succeeded.

But of course John Hunter failed.

THE END.