Read Will Starling for Free Online Page B

Long Lane, with cows bawling in Smithfield Market beyond, and passers-by slowing to snicker and stare at the picture we made. A soiled dove shouting at a discomfited Scotch surgeon, and young Wm Starling, Esq., standing by, wishing he’d put a stocking in it.
    â€œHere and now? On my knees in a pile of horse-shit? Then let’s be getting on with it!”
    Another man would have reacted differently. Dionysus Atherton would have pointed out which pile. But Mr Comrie just turned beetroot-red.
    â€œHere, now,” he said. “Your fellow needs me.”
    He hurried on, and I fell in behind him. Meg Nancarrow followed after, with a last look round at the faces snickering back at her. Defying them to find her filthy and ridiculous. As if she’d commit them to memory, every one, and come back at her leisure to slit each throat.
    â€œGod’s swinging bollocks,” Mr Comrie said to me, under his breath. He had the expression that soldiers in battle will wear, when they see a leg cartwheeling past six foot above the ground. “This one’s a going consairn.”
    *
    They were holding Jemmy Cheese in a small stone cell, with a cot and a wooden bucket. It was the anteroom to a larger chamber, where half a dozen others were lodged. Jemmy lay on his back, bloated with bruising and caked in blood; one side of his head was swollen grotesquely and his eyes were sightless slits. Some tragic troll, I thought, fallen headlong from a mountaintop.
    â€œIs there hope?” asked Meg Nancarrow.
    She hovered in the doorway, clutching her shawl. Her voice was low and husky, when she wasn’t using it to hit you with.
    Mr Comrie did not reply. Having scanned the long bones for obvious breaks, he probed the skull beneath the matted hair. His fingers were long and dextrous — remarkable fingers to serve at the extremity of such stubby arms, for the surgeon was otherwise a man of bulges and bandy legs. A man for the wrestling competition at a country fair, or just for digging stones out of fields.
    â€œNo broken limbs,” he said at length. “But. Depressed fracture of the skull.”
    â€œWhat will you do?” Meg asked.
    â€œCome back tomorrow. See if he survives the night.”
    â€œAnd then?”
    â€œSee what may be done.”
    â€œWhat can I do for him?”
    â€œWash him.”
    â€œLike a corpse?”
    â€œHe’s breathing. Keep him warm.”
    â€œIs there hope?” she asked again.
    He looked at her squarely. “A little. How much do you need?”
    She looked back at him for the longest moment. Then she nodded.
    Â 
    In the morning, Jemmy Cheese lay pale as death. But he was breathing.
    â€œHe’s strong,” said Meg. She’d sat at his side all night; so the Turnkey told us as we arrived. “He’s stronger than you could believe.”
    Someone else was here as well. A spindly man of one- or two-and-thirty, bespectacled and balding, with pursed little lips and womanly hands, scarce taller than Your Wery Umble himself. Filthy and fastidious in an old brown coat and a bright red weskit.
    â€œ Ecce homo ,” said Edward Cheshire, also known as Uncle Cheese. “Behold my brother, Mr Comrie. Brought low, and sinking steadily. Oh dear, oh dear, and vhat am I to do?”
    He shook his head and looked away, like a sorrowful species of robin. The perfect round lenses of his spectacles caught the light from the one small window, and flashed.
    â€œGo dig your own cadavers, Ned,” said Meg. “Collect your own outstanding debts, from them you bleeds white.”
    He pretended he hadn’t heard. “ Media vita in mortus sumus ,” he said. “In the midst of our lives we die.”
    So it meant indeed, as I was later to discover when I looked it up. Or so at least it almost meant, allowing for certain imperfections in the syntax. And who would twist a man upon the rack of his declensions, at such a time?
    I knew of Uncle