Read Online Will Starling by Ian Weir - Free Book Online

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.
    â€œNo!” 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.
    â€œBack, 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.
    â€œLord Byron himself,” exclaimed Bob Eldritch, now. “Two