Will Starling (7 page)

Apparently it wasn't. “Knife,” Mr Comrie barked to me, again. “No, the other — with the curving blade.”

The Arabian pirate's knife. It was used — I was about to discover — to slice through skin and muscle. Many surgeons still employed a technique known as the Master's Round: one sweeping circular cut. Mr Comrie insisted on carving a “V” instead, leaving longer skin flaps to suture together afterwards, over the stump. Much less pain, and a better chance of healing without rot.

“Hold him fast,” he said to the four strapping sodgers, who now looked as chalky as Sidewhiskers.

“No!” wailed the stricken man.

“Two minutes, that's all. Two minutes out of a lifetime.”

So it was. He sliced through to the bone, clean as carving the Sunday joint, and barked for the largest bonesaw. Two minutes later was calling for needle and thread. And Your Wery Umble, who had spewed all the way from Southampton, held his stomach down quite remarkable, handing over each instrument as it was barked for, and watching with fascination and something very close to awe. Truth told, I was a bit appalled with myself. You'd like to think you'd be more distressed by the suffering. But I was mainly exhilarated instead — by Mr Comrie's dreadful skill, and the notion that I had acquitted myself admirably. Afterwards, I groped for some words of reassurance to offer to poor Sidewhiskers, who groaned horribly as they carried him off.

“Well done,” was the best I could come up with. “You'll see — right as rain. Back on your feet before you know it.” I winced. “That is, back on your
foot
. . .”

Mr Comrie was wiping blood from his hands with a rag. It had soaked his shirt as well, though he didn't seem to notice. I cleared my throat, and waited for him to offer some gruff compliment.

“You can clean the instruments,” he muttered. Forgetting, apparently, that I was not his servant.

“And what if he dies anyway?” I asked after a moment. “Holding him down like that, while he's screaming for you to stop.”

“Then I'll have given him a chance. That's all a man can ask for, up against Old Bones.”

Old Bones?

“The rattling fellow. With the scythe. When they're clean, you wrap them in cloth,” he added, “before putting them back in the box.”

I hesitated, and couldn't resist asking the question: “So what are these worth?”

A wintry look. “The skin right off your back.”

“Right you are,” I said, and commenced wiping the blood from the tools.

Mr Comrie continued to eye me. “I saw you on the ship,” he said. “Running away from home? Or just haven't got one?”

“I expect that would be my business.”

I said it with a careless shrug, the sort that marks out a London lad, tough as nails — and not at all the other sort of lad. The sort who'd find himself sobbing on the road to Southampton, with a sense that the world was much too large, with no one in it who'd care if he expired in the nearest ditch.

“I'm here for a sodger,” I said to him.

He honked one abrupt syllable. Apparently this was a laugh. “Sodger, eh? You'd do better to tag after me.”

“Not likely,” I snorted, deciding to take against him strongly.

“How old are you?”

“Eighteen.”

“And I'm the King of Portugal.”

“Sixteen, then.”

“Fourteen. At the outside.”

He reached for his jacket, which he'd draped over a chair. Two wide-eyed Spanish pot-boys had arrived with sawdust, to sop up the blood on the floor. They were going to need more sawdust.

“I was fourteen when my father died,” he said then, unexpectedly. “My mother died years airlier.”

He said it like that:
airlier
. I shrugged.

“Bring the leg,” he said.

“The what?”

He pointed. Sidewhiskers's severed trotter was lying on a bench nearby, attracting flies.

“We bury those.”

“I don't take orders from you.”

But it seems I did — and it turns out a leg is heavier than you might expect. I picked it up and followed him out the door.

And I followed Alec Comrie for the next five years, through the field hospitals of the Peninsula. Just a dogsbody at first, but by and by I was helping during procedures, even learning to tie off the arteries after an amputation, since it turned out I have a knack for this sort of thing — keen eyes and nimble fingers. Then I followed him back across the Channel, spewing every nautical foot of the way. Followed him to London, where I discovered a city a-swagger with the Spirit of the Age, and did my best to swagger along with it. And so we might have continued for many years, Your Wery Umble prancing in his show-pony way while Alec Comrie lanced boils in Cripplegate. Jemmy Cheese might have died — or lived — and faded from our memories, and Meg Nancarrow with him. Dionysus Atherton might have continued on his long and dark descent, with no further consequence for Wm Starling, and the great globe itself gone on turning, turning, turning through the heavens, just exactly as old Copernicus had predicted.

Then came the night of Bob Eldritch and the Wolves.

6

Bob Eldritch had fallen in with Dionysus Atherton and a dozen other members of the Wolves Club at a chop-house in Russell Street. I have this on the authority of witnesses. A barrister named Tom Sheldrake was with him, along with two or three cronies from the Inns of Court and several theatre men. The names of these others are not important, although I have them in my notes. They were given to me by one of the serving girls when I went to the chop-house some days later, intent on puzzling together the steps that Atherton had taken en route to the catastrophe that awaited at the culmination of the night.

Atherton had arrived at six o'clock. Seeing him, Tom Sheldrake exclaimed in dread.

“No!” he cried. “No, not yet — for Bob Eldritch is still alive!”

Bob summoned a pained smile, and a small obliging chuckle. He was a solicitor, a round mild man of two- or three-and-thirty, with a widow's peak and a twisted leg that caused him to walk with an awkward hirple.

“Back, thou implacable Nemesis!” cried Tom Sheldrake to Atherton.

He had flung himself dramatically in front of his friend, as a hero might do upon the stage, being convinced — or so he affected to be — that the surgeon stalked Bob relentlessly, covetous of studying his deformity. Tom was a witty fellow. “Back, I say, for Bob Eldritch ain't for pickling yet!”

Bob supplied another pained chuckle. By and large he accepted the terms of his friendship with Sheldrake, which involved a willingness to roll over at regular intervals with his tail wagging feebly and his legs in the air, and the tacit concession that Tom's life was writ in dramatic letters whilst his was confined to parentheses. “Hullo, Atherton,” he added, his game smile not quite masking a secret concern that he was indeed being eyed with professional interest.

The surgeon returned the greeting, with a wink that stopped just short of reassurance. “Is there wine in London?” he asked, turning to the others. “Then fetch it forth!”

A cheer went up. Cheers often did when Atherton was present. His smile gleamed through the pall of smoke.

The chop-house was low-ceilinged and dingy, with dark stalls along one wall and greasy tabletops, and the composition of the meat pies was a subject of fierce debate. Tom Sheldrake held that the absence of rats would be an optimistic sign, except that there were no cats either. But Tom was ever the drollest of fellows — a sad dog, as his friends would put it. Besides, the dinginess suited the Wolves, for they were all rough dangerous fellows when gathered together, as wild as a band of highwaymen, however meek most of them might seem in everyday life. And the chop-house was just round the corner from Drury Lane, where Mr Edmund Kean was first tragedian. This evening he was to perform Sir Giles Overreach in Massinger's play
A New Way to Pay Old Debts
. It was the role he had been performing two nights earlier, when he had come within a whisker of killing Lord Byron dead.

Just as Atherton arrived, one of the Wolves had been re-enacting the poet's collapse.

“Lord Byron himself,” exclaimed Bob Eldritch, now. “Two nights ago, Atherton — you've heard?”

Atherton had, along with half of London.

“A convulsive fit,” said Bob, “and it was Kean's performance did it to him. The final act, as Overreach goes mad and rages . . .”

“Women dissolve into hysterics,” interrupted Tom Sheldrake, to make sure the story was properly told. “They shriek aloud, Atherton, and swoon. The other players upon the stage turn pale; Mrs Glover must support herself upon a chair; and then suddenly down goes Byron. Drops in his private box — down, sir, like a poleaxed ox — clutching his throat and foaming.”

“Perhaps not technically foaming,” ventured Bob Eldritch, stung into a small display of independent spirit, “as a medical man might understand the term . . .”

“Foaming, sir, at the mouth.”

“And whether strictly speaking a poleaxed ox could clutch its throat . . .”

“Go and find an anatomist's shelf, Bob, and perch yourself upon it.”

“Yes, all right, but — ”

“A peer of the realm, precipitated into convulsions by the player's art. By the greatest display of passion, sir, ever seen upon an English stage. Upon any stage, to state my personal opinion, in the world —
that
is what we observed, those of us who were privileged to be at Drury Lane two nights ago.”

“Although in strictest factuality” — a quiver of actual mutiny in Bob's mutter — “I don't recall your being there at all.”

“Gentlemen — and I include my friend Bob Eldritch in this category, despite any quibbles that he himself might advance, upon technical grounds . . .”

“Indeed, Tom, I am the one who described to you how — ”

“Gentlemen, and ladies too, for I note a few of the fair sex here present amongst us — and despite whether ‘ladies' is the term that my friend Bob Eldritch would use, in his customary insistence upon strict speaking — for God's sake shut your cake-hole, Bob, and raise your glass — ladies and gentlemen, luminaries and Bob, I salute Mr Edmund Kean!”

A howl of approval shook the rafters. Atherton howled along with the others, for this was of course the very
raison d'être
of the Wolves Club. It had been formed at the instigation of Mr Edmund Kean, and existed to howl approval of him, as the greatest actor of his generation. On nights when Kean was not performing, it went to howl opprobrium at rival tragedians, many of whom as arrogant upstart pretenders deserved to be howled right off the stage. There were thirty or forty Wolves in total — men of the theatre, in one capacity or another, along with professional men — including those such as Atherton whose participation was occasional. When fully assembled, they howled very loudly indeed.

More Wolves had drifted in after Atherton's arrival, though they still numbered fewer than a score. But more would be waiting at the theatre, and the whole pack would descend upon Fountain Court afterwards, for tonight was to be one of
those
nights, on which wine would flow like the rivers of Babylon and maidens would bolt their doors in holy dread — or not, depending upon the maiden. In the meantime, those assembled throats howled so lustily that you could imagine the sound reaching the ears of Edmund Kean himself, who was currently in his dressing room, girding his loins for the evening's performance. This would involve quantities of wine and a second set of loins, belonging to a Cyprian. A third and even a fourth set of loins might be later called into play, at the intervals between the acts. Edmund Kean was the very Avatar of the Age.

He would certainly be at Fountain Court afterwards, along with Tom Sheldrake and Bob Eldritch and Dionysus Atherton. As fate would have it, Your Wery Umble would be there too.

*

I'd been to the Giltspur Street Compter that afternoon. It had been three days since the operation, and Jemmy was still alive. He was even awake, or partly so, lying in some twilight Limbo with his eyes half open. But he was ominously warm to the touch, and his breath came in shallow rasps.

“Fever's coming on,” said Meg.

“I'll tell Mr Comrie.”

“Fuck all he can do.”

She was right, of course.

She had pinned her hair up and wore a different dress, a drab wool skirt of penitential grey, so presumably she had gone home at some point. But she was sitting where I had left her, at Jemmy's side. She had dipped a bit of rag in cool water and was dabbing at his face and neck, crooning as she did something soft and tuneless and unutterably sad. She seemed to me in that moment not a lover at all, but a haggard young mother, tending to a monstrous child.

I had come to change the dressing on Jemmy's wound. Meg stood to let me do so, and after a moment I felt the touch of a hand on my shoulder.

“You have a good heart,” she said awkwardly. “I didn't like the looks of you one bit. But you been kind to us.”

Hardly older than I was — and younger than my own mother had been, the last time she'd laid eyes on me. That was the notion that occurred to me, looking up at her, and what a curious one it was. I'd never seen my mother beyond my infancy, nor seen a likeness of her neither, though a Warder at the Founding Hospital told me once that she'd been slim and dark. “Like you,” he confided, “except normal. Small and quite pretty, as I recollect, instead of pointy and stunted.” I wondered now what expression had been on my Ma's face as she looked down one last time on her Changeling — a frail unlovely thing, staring back — and whether she'd looked as Meg Nancarrow did at this moment, a curtain of dark hair falling across pure desolation.

“I'll be back tomorrow morning,” I said, and found that my voice was husky.