Will Starling (10 page)

Something was clearly amiss, even by Miss Deakins's customarily agitated standards, so I lingered. Besides, a question had been gnawing ever since that terrible night above the Coal Hole, and after a moment of fragmented this-and-that, I asked it.

“A man was taken to Crutched Friars the other night. I don't suppose you heard what happened?”

She went rigid. “Man?”

“Two nights ago, a man called Eldritch. Atherton brought him in a coach, sometime after midnight. He died — leastways he must have done, cos his funeral's set for Saturday. But I couldn't help wondering . . . Miss Deakins? Are you quite well?”

She had begun to quiver uncontrollably. “Oh, Mr Starling,” she said in a whisper. “Oh, that dreadful night!”

 

She had heard the coach arrive outside, she said, in a clattering of hooves. Odenkirk had hurried to meet it. Miss Deakins recognized his voice, and moments later she glimpsed him through the window, holding up a lantern and gesturing as he led the way across the stableyard behind the house. In the shaft of light there were three men, lugging something limp and heavy. Mr Atherton was with them; Miss Deakins heard his voice, exhorting them to be quick. It had been close to forty minutes, she heard him saying.

“Forty minutes?” Odenkirk's voice, uncertain what Atherton meant.

“Since the man has been dead. So there may yet be time.”

“Time for . . . ?”

“Hurry!”

The stable bulked in the darkness beyond.

Flitty Deakins lived in mortal trembling of that stable. No doubt it had once been used as Nature intended, for the keeping of horses. But Mr Atherton kept other creatures instead, outlandish beasts: peacocks and sloths and cassowaries, and some whose identities she could not even guess at. She could hear them, at all hours. They haunted her nightmares, and once in the creeping light of dawn she had awakened in her bed to see the face of Belial staring at her through the window. Her screams had petrified Cook, and brought Mr Atherton himself at a half-run. He had barked at her until she was able to stammer a description, at which he left again in a choler, calling to Odenkirk that the baboon had escaped. It was a serious matter, Odenkirk had later told her with a chuckle; the creature was dangerous.

“
Dangerous
? I told him, Mr Starling, I said to him: ‘The creature is not
dangerous
. The creature is one of the four princes of Hell itself, Mr Odenkirk, drawn here by the wickedness of this house!' Oh, Mr Starling — dear young Mr Starling — you can have no idea what that house is like.”

In fact I knew very well what went on in surgeons' houses, living as I did in one myself. Mr Comrie had no stable to fill with creatures for anatomical study, and he was never as active as was Atherton in transactions with the Resurrectionists. But from time to time there were the same night-time doings in Cripplegate as haunted Miss Deakins. Thumps and muffled curses on the stair; rough men in moleskins arriving in darkness, with burdens tied up in sacks, to be hidden 'til the donkey-cart should arrive to transport them to the Death House for dissection. Miss Deakins must surely have known this, but perhaps her need for a friend was so very great — any friend at all, even if it be a surgeon's boy she'd seen no more than five times in her life — that she invented in her head quite a different Will Starling, and poured out to him her poor heart.

She wasn't old. Not yet thirty, was my guess, though her hair was streaked with silver and her face was already gaunt with the habit of laudanum. But there at the Duck and Dolphin, in the writhing shadows cast by firelight, she might have been a beldame in a cave.

“The stable,” she whispered. “I saw them take him — it — the corpse, for that's what it was. I knew this at once, Mr Starling, as surely as I'm sitting here before you. They carried the mortal remains of a human creature.”

There was a loft in the stable, at the top of a wooden ladder, accessible by a trapdoor that was kept padlocked and bolted. Flitty Deakins had not seen this with her eyes, as she would not set foot in that stable. But others had; there were whispers. And there was a small cracked window in the loft, behind which Miss Deakins had from time to time glimpsed movement. Now she saw dark figures moving in the light of Odenkirk's lantern; they were laying something out upon a table.

“I stood as one astonished, Mr Starling.
A-stonied
— turned to stone — in the true original meaning of that word.” She knew such things, for she had been a governess, with two bright angels in her care.

“And where were you, Miss Deakins?”

The question took her off balance. “In Devonshire, Mr Starling, as I have said before.”

“I meant, where were you standing? Two nights ago, as you watched?”

Cos I wanted to be clear in my head. Even there at the Duck and Dolphin, so near the start of it all, I had the sense that I must be clear in my head.

“I was standing in my bedchamber, of course. I'd been wakened by the voices, and went to the window.”

But I had a notion that the servants' quarters at Crutched Friars faced south and east — such was my quick calculation, based on the very few times I'd been inside — and not north, towards the stable. Atherton's surgery was at the back of the house, however, on the second floor. His surgery, where laudanum would be kept.

I looked at her closely. She didn't seem opium-addled just now, though of course you could never tell for certain with those long sunk in the habit. She clutched her glass of pale in both hands, gazing down in such fixed distress that you'd think she could see the events of that night, reflected in the surface like the portents in a Gypsy's crystal.

So: she'd crept down the corridor, to prig a stoppered brown bottle from Atherton's surgery. I pictured her reaching towards the cabinet, in the twisting light of her candle. Then the sound of the carriage — Miss Deakins freezes — voices from outside draw her in fearful fascination to the window.

“And what did you see?”

Miss Deakins closed her eyes. She drew a quavering breath, to steady herself.

“Miss Deakins?”

“I saw an arm.”

“An arm?”

“Rising up.”

“I don't understand what you mean.”

But I had begun to guess. The first cold intimations commenced to spider up my spine.

They'd been busy about the body, she said. The corpse in the loft, upon the table. They'd been doing . . . things. Odenkirk, and Mr Atherton.

“What things?”

She could not say; she did not choose to imagine. Then they stepped back. There was a sudden flash of light; it lit the loft for a flickering instant, and she saw them revealed like players upon a stage. Then the arm rose up.

“The dead man's arm?”

“Yes.”

“They raised the dead man's arm?”

“Oh, no. The dead man raised it himself.”

It should have been midnight as she told me this. We should have been wreathed in yellow fog. She leaned closer, her eyes fever-bright.

“He lifted his arm, Mr Starling. He reached out. Like a lost soul reaching from the grave.”

“And then?”

“It fell.”

The arm fell back down. But there was another flash, and it rose again. The fingers moving this time, clenching. Miss Deakins saw commotion from the others, in that flash. Dark figures herk-a-jerk.

“And then?”

“There was another flash.”

“The arm rose up again?”

“No, Mr Starling. Oh, no. Poor dear Mr Starling.” If that were all, an arm, then Miss Deakins might yet hope to sleep again. “The third time,
he
rose up.”

The man who was lying on the table: he lurched perpendicular. Sat there in the flash of light, and then turned his head. With hair on end and eyes like eggs, he stared across the night at Phyllida Deakins.

“And then he shrieked. Oh, Mr Starling. Oh, that cry . . . !”

Such a shriek of desolation as would haunt her the rest of her life, through all the nights that lay ahead; it would pursue her through all the winding byways of this world, and hound her gibbering at last — she swore it would — through the gates of Bedlam Hospital. Such a shriek as would not be heard again until the dead rose up at the end of days to face the Awful Reckoning. As she clutched my wrist with both her hands, it grew clear enough to me now, if ever I'd doubted it to begin with: Flitty Deakins was mad. Deranged, and an opium addict into the bargain — a woman beset by green-eyed Hindoos on the landing.

But what if what she said was true? The question whispered itself with a scrotum-tightening intensity.

“What happened afterwards? The man sat up, you say — the corpse. You say he looked at you. But then . . . ?

I trailed away. Miss Deakins was shrinking as she gazed past my shoulder.

I turned to see a man lounging against a wooden post behind us. A long grey man with a smile slashed across his face. “Why, ent this just the prettiest pair?” drawled Odenkirk.

 

Mr Comrie was in his surgery that night, jotting in his case-book. He stopped as he realized what I was telling him, and closed the book slowly.

“And you are — what —
amused
by this?” he demanded.

I suppose I'd been chuckling a bit as I related the tale. The way you do when you're not at all certain about what you've heard, and even less about how it will be received.

“No,” I said lamely.

“Then extinguish that smirk, and say what you came to say.”

So I did. He stared at me fixedly 'til I'd finished. A clock ticked louder than any clock had done before, since the invention of Time.

They'd lodged together as chirurgical students at Edinburgh University years previous — the two of them, Atherton and Mr Comrie. They'd been friends of a sort, even good friends, difficult as it was to imagine, and friends of a sort they remained to this day, though I don't suppose that ever made them equals, certainly not in Atherton's eyes.

There was silence when I finished. Hammer blows from the clock.

“An attempt to revive a corpse,” he said at last.

“Yes.”

“According to the Deakins woman.”

“Assuming we can believe . . .”

“Exactly. Laudanum, and green-eyed Hindoos.”

“True.”

“And one of the rising surgeons of London.” His mouth pursed sourly. “Anything else to tell me, William?”

I felt a fool, by now. But in fact there
was
more.

“Threats were implied,” I told him.

“Excuse me?”

“His man came in on us — Odenkirk. Warnings were intimated.”

“Threats upon yourself?”

“And Miss Deakins.”

“In so many words?”

Not exactly. Odenkirk had in fact waited 'til Flitty Deakins had fled the Duck and Dolphin, then pulled up a stool beside me. “What's she been telling you — eh, friend Starling?” he had asked. “The Deakins, with the red rag flapping in her gob.” His head cocked in a just-between-us way, his smile a slash of comradeship. “Well, here's a word to the wise, as between two friends. Whatever she thinks she seen and heard — she didn't. She's an opium-fiend. A slave to it and a thief, poor soul, and a lying bitch besides, though it grieves me to say so. So whatever it was she said to you just now, you'll keep it to yourself. Yes? You'll forget you heard it in the first place, friend. Cos I have a fondness for the filthy lying slut, just as I have an amiable regard for you, and how distressed I would be to see you come to harm.”

I gave Mr Comrie the gist. His eyes narrowed like clamshells as he listened, and when I was done he grunted.

“One would see his point, consairning the source of your information.”

“So . . . we do nothing?”

“Of course we do something, William. You will fetch my bollocking supper, if you'd be so good — a meat pie from the Black Swan, and a half-pint of brandy. And I in my turn will consume it.”

Reopening his case-book, he turned his back and sat as he had done when I came in: straddling his stool, scritching with his quill and scratching with his free hand at an armpit, as elegant as a stone shed in a knacker's yard. And there behind him stood Wm Starling, Esq., squelched and smarting.

*

The first question is simply: what is life?

This was currently the subject of much debate amongst medical men, and broadly speaking there were two camps. In the first were the Hunterians. John Hunter had over his long and illustrious career come to believe in a Life-Force, carried in the blood, which was the source and spark of existence. It was not clearly defined, but very obviously this Life-Force must be something akin to a Soul. Hunter had advanced the theory late in his own life, when even the most rigorous men of Science may develop Mystical Leanings. But it continued to exert great influence, this theory, and over the past winter the surgeon John Abernethy — a disciple of Hunter's, and a fellow Scot — had delivered an acclaimed series of public lectures upon the topic, at the Royal College of Surgeons at Lincoln's Inn Fields.

In the other camp were the Materialists, disciples of a Frenchman named Bichat, who held that the Life-Force is just as actual as the faeries in the wood, and that life itself is neither less nor more than the sum of the physiological functions by which death is resisted, full stop. The Materialist view had most recently been trumpeted by William Lawrence, a former student of Abernethy's now risen to the post of Demonstrator in Anatomy at St Bart's. This spring he had delivered his own series of public lectures, gibbeting Mysticism and his old teacher with it.

This leads to the second question: when is a man actually dead? It is a question far more vexed than you might suppose.

Oh, there are signs that anyone may observe. A man is dead when he commences stinking, and his widow puts on her weeds. He is dead when his friends exaggerate his virtues, and the maggots go about their business. But what constitutes the very moment in time when a man passes from one side to the other?