Will Starling Read Online Free PDF

home to Meg.”
    â€œKill the bastard!”
    He drops the corpse and raises his fists. But they’re on top of him now, and they cudgel him down.
    3
    Let me tell you about surgeons.
    It was different in the high Georgian days, when the great John Hunter was setting out on his career. Half a century ago, physicians might stake some claim to respectability, with their gold-topped canes and formal education. But surgeons? Jumped-up barbers, who couldn’t aspire beyond a shop in an alleyway, and a red rag wrapped around a pole. Hackers and dolts who had never been near a university. They learned by apprenticing themselves to older hackers and longer-established dolts; advanced the cause of doltishness by learning nothing new; were good for little but pulling teeth and setting bones, and oftentimes not even that.
    But by the time John Hunter’s heart failed him in 1793, and the great man discovered the Great Secret, much had changed. Surgery was becoming a Science, with all that follows from such a transformation: social standing, and coin of the realm, and patients — God bless ’em — who survived. Hunter was renowned across Europe for his anatomical learning; he owned a fine house in Earls Court and leased another in Leicester Square. Now, just a few years later, a surgeon might set his sights higher still, Mr Astley Cooper being the pole-star by which all brilliant and ambitious young men — such as Dionysus Atherton — set their course. Astley Cooper, who was rumoured to be verging upon a peerage, with an income exceeding twenty thousand pounds a year, and a country estate in Gadebridge, and a large house in Conduit Street, and a servant who earned six hundred a year in bribes alone, from patients seeking an appointment.
    Alec Comrie was better than all of them.
    Comrie lived over a gin-shop in Cripplegate. He had two rooms, a sitting room and a surgery, let from a woman named Missus Maggs who kept the gin-shop and attended as well to housekeeping necessities, when the spirit moved. He also had a boy who assisted him. This boy slept in an attic storage room and never made a sixpence in bribes, as he would tell you quite cheerfully. “Not a sixpence, your worship, nor threepence neither. Not so much in fact as a single fucking ha’penny, if you’ll pardon my plain speaking. But I’m thankful, cos I’d sooner be an honest man. Now, are you a gen’lman as fancies from time to time a friendly game of hazard, to while away an afternoon?”
    You’d do best to decline the offer.
    He cut a fine little figure, the surgeon’s boy, particularly if you saw him at a distance. A Rainbow, in fact, togged out in the latest fashion, or nearabouts. But the togs grew more threadbare the closer you came, and he himself drew nearer without ever growing much taller, the whole of him topping out two inches shy of five foot. He had a curious dark face, all triangles, and a silk snotter swiped from a stall just this morning, and a winning smile that he shone at you like sunrise. He also had three cups, and a pea that was assuredly in one of them, and you only had to watch his nimble fingers keenly to be sure — “ oh, bad luck, sir! ” — which one.
    His name was Will Starling, and he is Your Wery Umble Narrator.
    So here we are at last, you and I: face to face. Honoured to make your acquaintance, I am sure. You will picture my bow, and accept my heartfelt hope that I do not disappoint.
    Mr Comrie had taken the rooms when he and I returned from Europe. He’d been a military surgeon — seven years on the Peninsula with Wellington, who esteemed him greatly. There was a story, indeed, that the Duke had a nickname for him — the Scotch Dreadnought — bestowed after Comrie had performed with brilliant competence a highly delicate operation upon the ducal tackle, which (just between the two of us) was mighty in dimension.
    You’d want to take that