Free Will Starling by Ian Weir Page B

through a haze of smoke and a raised platform where several nights a week entertainments were offered up. There was also a private room upstairs, where a number of the Wolves had assembled already, for this was where their feast was to be held. Lupine voices rose in raucous laughter.
    I found myself a perch against the wall downstairs, not far from the door, where I sat with a jar of the Genuine Stunning. A trio of rough flash-talking men in a nook nearby spoke in dark mutters of a mate who’d done the out-and-out upon a lagger by the docks, and who now awaited crapping in the Start. They broke off briefly as the entertainment resumed, in the form of a florid tenor in a battered hat who warbled most piteously of a Ratcatcher’s Daughter who yearned to wed her sweetheart and — as these things go — drowned in the Thames on the morning of the nuptials. There was no sign of Miss Smollet or the Badger — and now that I was here, what precisely had I been thinking? They’d go upstairs to the private room, if they came at all. And imagine the likes of Your Wery Umble, with sinking heart and wilted rose in buttonhole, being asked to join them.
    As the Ratcatcher’s Daughter was being fished out of the river, I toyed with proposing a game of chance to my flash-talking neighbours — the ones whose friend had murdered a sailor, and now waited in Newgate Prison to be hanged. But on the whole, I thought not. I had all but decided to give it up and leave, when a commotion began outside. Shouts in the passageway, and a squawk of protest, then billowing shrieks of laughter. The door burst open and a knot of revellers spilled in — rudely interrupting the heartbroken beau of the poor drowned Ratcatcher’s Daughter, who was just about to cut his throat for grief.
    In their midst was a dark puny man, dishevelled by drink, with a cawing Cyprian on either arm. He gave a lurch and steadied. Heads swivelled, and as they did he gained a foot in height. I do not make this up. He grew before our very eyes. His own were black and — I swear to God — they flashed. The molecules about him began to dance.
    â€œ Humani nihil a me alienum puto ,” he exclaimed, quoting Terence — yes, I looked it up. “Nothing human is alien to me!”
    He lurched again, and grew pale. Turned regally towards me. Bent over, with an acrobat’s grace. And shot the cat upon my boots.
    Mr Edmund Kean, in the flesh.
    Upon the great man’s either arm were the Badger and her friend; Tom Sheldrake and Bob Eldritch trailed. Tom was in conniptions of laughter, as Bob clung to the rictus of a smile and contemplated one urine-soggy leg.
    It seemed they had stopped at several public houses en route from Drury Lane, and Kean had just finished pissing in the passageway outside. In this he’d been assisted by the Badger, who held the pizzle. She had in fact been practising penmanship by writing her name on the wall, when her hand had inexplicably slipped, directing the stream at Bob Eldritch instead. Now here stood Bob on his good leg, shaking the other like a cat that has stepped in something. And now the final member of this merry band came through the door.
    Mr Dionysus Atherton. And on his arm was Annie Smollet, laughing most prettily at something he’d said, and remembering an instant too late to cover her mouth. She didn’t even see me as they swept past — stooped down as I was, even shorter than usual, wiping the vomit from my boots with straw from the floor. Hessian boots, they were, quite stylish. I was singularly proud of those boots.
    Atherton saw me, though, and recognized me at once. A swift spasming of visceral disgust, the look that crossed his face whenever he saw Your Wery Umble. Ever since the first shock of seeing me on his doorstep, one autumn evening more than half a year previous. Then he continued on his way, mounting the stairs with Miss Annie Smollet clinging to his