Read Online Will Starling by Ian Weir - Free Book Online Page B

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.
    â€œFever’s coming on,” said Meg.
    â€œI’ll tell Mr Comrie.”
    â€œFuck 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.
    â€œYou 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.
    â€œI’ll be back tomorrow morning,” I said, and found that my voice was husky.
    *
    I returned to Cripplegate to find Mr Comrie sitting alone in his surgery, climbing down into a bottle of pale. He received the news about Jemmy as I’d expected. “The Devil am I expected to do?” he demanded. “If he’s going to live, he’ll do it. But he won’t.” Then he stood and reached scowling for his jacket.
    â€œWill you want me to come with you?” I asked.
    â€œGah,” he said, swatting one hand as if dispersing flies.
    So while Mr Comrie stumped towards Giltspur Street, I hurried west to Drury Lane. I had it in mind to attend the play, but mainly I was hoping to see Miss Annie Smollet.
    Miss Smollet was the most bewitching actress in London. This was my personal view, and in truth it was a minority opinion, which helped explain why she currently sold flowers on the street outside the theatre. But I had been intensely in love with her for several weeks, since seeing her upon the stage at the Thespis, a ramshackle gaff in Whitechapel.
    I did this, from time to time: fell in love with an actress. But this was different.
    She aspired to act at one of the patent theatres — that is to say, at Drury Lane or Covent Garden. This led to her current station outside the great playhouse; she was hoping to meet someone — a leading actor, or a theatre manager — who might be stopped in his tracks by the loveliness of the flower girl and exclaim: “There stands my Desdemona!” No luck yet, but she remained hopeful. This, I was coming to understand, was her particular gift. Some actors have a gift for tragedy, others for comedy; Annie Smollet’s great talent was for hopefulness. Often she would pay three pennies to go in and watch the play, since much may be learned by studying. Once or twice she may also have accompanied a gentleman into a private box for twenty minutes, as young women of a certain sort were notorious for doing at the theatre, cos I