The Giant, O'Brien: A Novel

six

Alone in his work room, John Hunter broods. Around him are the tools of his trade, his blades and saws, and his hand steals towards them, as if he cannot help himself. Why think? Why not experiment? And see where experiment leads? Don’t conjecture. Don’t waste time on it. Observe.

Swiss peasants told Mr. Linnaeus that the worm Gordius, if it be cut into a number of pieces, each piece can yet twitch; and if the pieces be put into water, each will grow the head and tail it lacks. Men of learning had scoffed at this as superstition, when they could have found it to be true, if only they had experimented and spent a little of their time cutting up worms. In our day, it is not the Oxford man, or the scientific dandy, who is the hero of observation, it is the peasant, the Hunter, the man with his snout in the soil—he who does not say, “This is contrary to nature,” because he allows himself to be endlessly astonished by nature’s variety and perversity. He has no prejudices, no expectations. He bears no ill-will to any life-form. He has often cut up worms, for when you live in a place like Long Calderwood you learn to make your own entertainment.

Besides these habits of mind, what skill does an experimenter need? He needs patience, deftness, and the ability to think of doing what other people would deem completely pointless.

Take M. Trembley. He was admittedly a gentleman, or at least tutor to a gentleman; but he had a humble cast of mind. M. Trembley crept about in ditches, dredging up vegetation and thick brown slime. With delight, and through his magnifying glass, he observed the hydra, a freshwater polyp with arms shaped like horns.

M. Trembley kept his retrieved polyps in glass jars. He cut them up with a small pair of scissors, lengthways, crossways, every-which-ways. There was no killing them. He minced them and he grafted them, he made three of one. He watched them regenerate. Some grew eight heads. One day he sneaked up on a polyp with a hog’s bristle and turned it inside out, forcing its posterior through its mouth. M. Trembley was awarded a medal. For a while, polyps were the top fashion. Even great ladies were seen pursuing them, draggling in ditches. Then the fashion changed, and the virtuosi moved on to electrical experiments.

What lessons do we pluck from M. Trembley’s work—a model of its type? Disbelieve everybody, even Aristotle. Write down your methods. Experiment. Do it over and over. Cut finer. Distrust general rules. Cut finer still.

They’d been thinking about a triumphal procession, but the trouble is, Joe Vance said, you can’t have a triumph without horses, and your ordinary horse set beside your giant looks like a low dog, a spaniel. So you’ve got to hire Percherons, and they don’t come cheap.

“They have to be caparisoned with cloth of gold,” the Giant said.

“Yes, the caparisons, that’s another expense,” Joe said. “What do you say we just walk around? It’s only a short step.”

So they set out on foot along Piccadilly. Crowds in the street gaped and jostled and craned their necks. Joe shouted satirically, “Look your fill, cheapskates, pop your eyes,” and produced a box, which he rattled in front of them.

They came to Spring Gardens. “Nice high ceilings, I thought,” Joe said. “Claffey, don’t spit on the floor, if you want to spit go out in the street.”

“Out in the street, is it?” Claffey glared.

“Now, now,” Joe said. “No cross words on our first day in our new house.”

Their exhibition room, above the cane shop, was airy and lofty. Their own quarters, at the back, were meaner, and yet ostentatious. “Bedding is ordered up from the landlord,” Vance said. “He has a woman sees to it, but we must provide our own linen. I know a supplier, as it happens …”

“Fine linen,” the Giant stipulated.

“Fine, to be sure.”

“A pair of sheets you can draw—swish—through a woman’s bangle.”

“If you will,” said Vance.

Jankin said, “Have we to sleep up in the air on platforms?”

“They are called beds, Jankin,” said the Giant. “You have come across them in stories.”

“Will I not roll off, when I am dreaming, and injure myself?”

“Very likely,” said the Giant.

Jankin pulled at his sleeve. “Mester, have you ever, you know, slept in a bed?”

“No,” the Giant said. “I never have, Jankin. There’s no point, really, when your legs from the knees have to dangle elsewhere, and if you turn in the night you crack your knuckles on the floor. Better stay level, ground level.”

“Still,” Jankin said, “it’s a great thing to be a giant. I wish I were one.”

“But as you’re not, you can relish the thought of an easy night.”

They heard a door bang, and a female step, and an exclamation. “Gentlemen all!”

“But we know you, Miss,” Pybus said.

It was the girl from the cellar, with the shining face and the silver hair. “I am employed here by your landlord, since he has forgotten how to speak our language, just to see that the night-soil man hauls your shit away, and that you are not setting fire to his premises, or painting on the walls. I hope you will not do that.”

Joe Vance grinned. “You’ll take a drink?”

“I will not. I work for the landlord, he gives me a meal a day and a penny for straw.”

“Straw? Straw be damned. You can share with us,” Joe offered.

“Or I can cut my throat,” the girl said calmly. “Either will do, I suppose?”

Joe scowled. “That red-head, the one with the kerchief. From the cellar. What’s her name?”

“Bitch.”

“What?”

“That is what we are all named, here in England. Shift my shit, bitch. Scrub my floor, bitch. Lift your skirt, bitch, shut your eyes, soon you’ll come by a nasty surprise.”

“This isn’t right,” the Giant said.

“Not pleasant, but highly reasonable,” the girl said. “Suppose one of ours is taken up and questioned: What is the name of the woman who cut that man, what is the name of the woman who took his purse? Bitch, he says. Yes, I know, says the magistrate, but what is her name? Then our boy rolls his eyes and says, Bitch: or at least she has no other name I ever heard.”

“I see it,” Claffey said. “I understand. It’s a grand scheme. But from day to day can we not …?”

“You can call me Mary,” the girl said.

The Giant said, “That’s all-purpose, too.”

That was a happy week. They had a sea-coal fire, and a handy pump nearby. Bitch Mary found them a hedgehog, to keep down beetles. She also showed them what they could eat: oysters and Yarmouth herring, and hot gingerbread from a stall, fat pork and dumplings from the cookshop, bread and cheese. The vegetables tasted of smoke and the milk tasted of water, but they never minded. Joe Vance was in high spirits. He bought Bitch Mary a blue ribbon, which she put away for Sunday. To drink, they had gin and beer.

I have ordered a white bear from Greenland.

Opportunities for the dissection of whales too seldom occur; I wish I could get a whale. I wish I could get a tame lion, not very old, or the foal of a camel sent to me in a tub of spirits.

Jankin came in, wailing from the street. What’s the matter? they asked him.

“A woman asked me if I wanted to buy a song. I said yes, and she took my penny and she gave me this.” Jankin held out a piece of paper, which he had screwed up in his fist. “I said, ‘That’s not a song, miss,’ and she got in a lather, and she said, ‘Bog off, bog-head,’ and everybody laughed.”

“He ought not be let out alone,” Bitch Mary said.

Joe Vance took the sheet and straightened it out. “‘The Debtor’s Lament,’” he said in disgust. “’Tis forty years old to my knowledge. You’ve been had, piss-wit. Next time you want a song, sing it yourself.”

“What age are you, Charlie?” Joe Vance said.

The Giant stared. “What age? I’d never considered.”

“I need it for the press. We are going to have an insertion in the newspaper. To draw the notice of the best class of person to the fine spectacle you present.”

“Let’s say one-and-twenty. It’s nobody’s business, is it?”

“One-and-twenty it is. The Tallest Man in the World, at home at Spring Gardens for a limited period only, having recently returned from continental triumphs, exhibiting in Cologne, Paris, Strasbourg, and Amsterdam, where Mr. Byrne has been received by the finest and most genteel society and made a conquest of the ladies’ hearts.”

“But that’s a lie!” Claffey said.

“It is usual to lie in advertisements, Claffey. Allow me to know my trade.”

I would like to get a nest, an old cuckoo, and a young cuckoo.

“And then you’ll be meeting the press,” Joe Vance said. He looked around, at their quarters. “It’s a bit bare, do y’know? We could do with fancifying it a bit.”

“All costs money,” Claffey said.

Said Joe, “I’ll lash out a bit. In anticipation of large returns.”

By this time, John Hunter is a great man, with his house at Jermyn Street and another out in the country at Earl’s Court. It is there he keeps his collection of specimens, now growing huge, and his caged animals, who roar and paw and bellow through the night. He has first refusal of all the beasts who die in the menagerie at the Tower of London, and amongst animal sellers deals with Mr. Gough, with Mr. Bailey of Piccadilly, whose trade is chiefly in birds, who will get you anything from a linnet to an eagle, and who is so obliging as to extend credit: with Mr. Brookes, who had crossed a dog with a wolf, and who gave him one of the puppies. (She was a nervous bitch, who habitually ran out into the road and would not come back when she was called. She was given to trembling and starts of terror, which caused some citizens to mistake her for a mad dog and murder her.)

As for Earl’s Court, who knows what comes in and what goes out—everything from leopards to gnats in a jar. There are the bees, silently industrious in their many hives, the seagull to be fed for a year on barley, the vat of live eels sent every month from the fishmonger, and the single swallow tamed by Mr. Granger, condemned forever to get its food dead instead of live and on the wing, and never again to see the African coast. As for the opossums, he must have had a dozen over the years, but breed? They cannot or they will not. Perhaps they propagate by a method as yet unknown?

On their second day in their new home Pybus brought an orange and a lemon, and they all examined them. They cut up the orange and sucked its juice, smacking their lips, and then they cut up the lemon and attempted the same. Bitch Mary exploded in laughter at them, holding it back until she saw their puckered faces and stinging lips.

“Laughing like a country girl,” Claffey said fondly.

Mary ate everything they ate, and was already fuller in the face. Her hair was paler than the lemon’s flesh.

Oxford Street was the problem: Claffey and Pybus and Jankin gawping its length, wanting things. Even by night, when the whale-oil lamps shone, they would promenade, their toes turned out, imagining themselves with a two-shilling tart on one arm, and in the other hand a cane with an ivory knob. The Giant was kept close until his prepared debut, but Joe was out and about, making his excuses for an hour off here and there and coming back with a smirk and his pocket lighter.

“Course, we’ll have to borrow a little bit,” he said. “It’s the usual thing. I’m an agent and I know about it.”

So it came to the day when they were making a wish-list:

A tea-caddy and a spoon.

A tilting tea-table, mahogany: very convenient for restricted space: space being usually restricted, when giant on premises.

A teapot and the correct bowls for tea.

A toothbrush and some toothpowder in a jar.

A salt cellar.

Some glass candlesticks, which are all the go.

A clock.

A trumpet.

Two siskins in a gilt cage.

A warming pan.

A mousetrap.

A writing set.

Some sheets of wallpaper with views on them: with an Indian prince riding on a pony, and a slave holding a parasol over his head. And hunting dogs. And cranes. And flowers.

“Gentlemen of the press,” said Joe. He held his arms up, as if he were brandishing flaming torches. The gentlemen sat on chairs that Joe had hired, ferreting in their wigs and picking their noses. The Giant was behind a green curtain, crouching. “But lately from our continental triumphs,” Joe said. He looked about the room, smiling, side to side; trying to stimulate a round of applause.

“Yerg-h-h,” said one of the pressmen, yawning in his face.

That set them off all over the room, “Yerg-h-h,” in a broken chorus.

Behind the curtain, the Giant cleared his throat. His intention was only to warn Joe to cut it short; there was a crushing pain in his thighs and calves, and his kneecaps were fighting out through the skin. But the sound produced a sudden sharpening, a sobering, in the room. “By God’s balls!” one man exclaimed; all sat up straighter.

Joe was taken aback. He looked down, and saw the Giant’s toe peeping from under the screening. “Without further delay,” he announced, in the voice of a hero, while simultaneously scooping at the curtain. It stuck-the rail being Claffey’s carpentry—and Joe found himself dragging on it, wrapped in it, fighting a bout with it, until the Giant simply unhooked it from its moorings and stepped forth into plain view.

There was a moment’s silence; then a low whistle of admiration ran around the room. As it subsided, a ragged clapping began, and was taken up by one pressman after another; each uttered his own obscenity as he clapped, and each stared, and one said, “Dammit, he has snapped the curtain rail,” and the Giant looked down at his own hand and saw that oh yes, so he had.

He smiled. It was an uncalculated, accidental effect, but they had taken it like bait. Joe Vance was pink with pleasure; error had turned to triumph. “Please, Mr. Byrne!” He gestured towards the capacious wooden chair, a throne in type, that Pybus and Claffey had been working on for three days. Its construction was rough, naturally, but they had been out shopping and got a length of red plush, which Bitch Mary had draped in a most artistic fashion across the seat and arms—careless, but classical.

The Giant leaned down and tested the chair seat with his hand. Testing was his necessary habit with all chairs, stools, benches, and stone walls. He lowered himself, crossed his legs suavely, and saw and heard the pressmen gasp in amazement. “What a tableau he makes,” Joe whispered to Claffey. “What a tableau indeed!”

For what had they expected, the press corps? They’d looked for some rumblethump, some tattery freak with his head on backwards and a cyclops eye. Instead they’ve an aristocrat of height. Said Joe Vance loudly, for the benefit of the scribes, “There’s enough lace on his cuff to deck every altar in the Vatican.”

There was a pause, a hiatus. The Giant looked around the room, half-smiling. After a moment passed, he raised one eyebrow. Ah, St. Silan, he thought. St. Silan could cause death just by raising an eyebrow; suicides used to wait up, hoping to catch him at dawn in a quizzical mood.

One pressman, nodding nervously, quivered to his feet: “Sir Giant, how do you account for your parentage?”

By a piece of business pre-arranged with Joe, the Giant drew out a length of muslin, three feet or so, from his sleeve, and dabbed the corners of his mouth genteelly. Only then did he begin to speak.

“I was conceived on the slopes of a green hill, known as a sacred place by the men and women of my nation. My mother was a green girl entirely, and my father came out of Scotland, possessed of a raw and tartan heart.”

It was not the answer he had practiced with Joe. Joe’s was tedious, tortuous, something to do with Noah and his Ark: who went in and came out, and a large number of stowaways, undetected by the great man and his tribe of relatives.

“Sir Giant,” said a second man, “are there any more at home like you?”

“Alas, my upbringing was solitary. There were some few paltry fellows—two in particular, the brothers Knife, conceived on top of a haystack in our parish—who had a conceit they were tall, and who used to extort money from the credulous; but I know nothing of their lineage, and look upon them rather as sports of nature than as what I am myself, a descendent of the ancient native lords. And there is a lad named Patrick, Patrick O’Brien, who has sometimes claimed kinship with me—who has indeed, I hear, sometimes claimed to be me—but he is no more high, sir, than you are a Chinaman.”

“So accept no substitutes,” Joe said brightly. “Charles Byrne, Tallest Man in the World.”

Claffey said to Pybus, under his breath, “I wondered when they’d mention Pat O’Brien.”

A languid fellow rose, at the back of the room. He ah-hemmed before he spoke, and fluttered his hand to draw attention to himself. “You have lately been at Cologne, your publicist states. Tell me, what wonders did you see there?”

“Oh, Smartarse,” Joe breathed. “There’s always one.”

“Why, they have a little church,” the Giant said equably. “They call it a Dom. I’d take up residence in that fair stadt, only to avoid a boff on the head every time I want to say a prayer. The place wants finishing, mind, but the three kings have a golden house there.” He leaned back on his throne. “Among the French églises there are some pretty little chapels, one they call Notre Dame in Paris I remember. Amsterdam is most picturesque, with rivulets running between the houses.”

“All right?” Joe called out to the gentleman. “Happy, are you?”

The Giant reached over to calm him, but with the tip of his middle finger he accidentally caught Joe under the chin. There was laughter, scattered applause.

“Picture his snuff box,” one fellow said. “It would be like a soup-plate.”

“Picture his linen bill! It will be like the national debt.”

“Picture his …” And the speaker choked; the whole room fell back as one, and opened its eyes wide, and fanned itself with a hand.

Just this morning Joe had said, “Play it up a bit, about the ladies, Charlie. Will you do that? Will you do that for me?” He had been every inch the impresario, purring and preening, but his guts turning over with nerves inside; now he stood grinning, caressing his bruised chin, neverminding about it, his gratified lips open and his greedy pink tongue just peeping out between.

The Giant leaned forward, causing the front row to sway back. “As you suspect, gents,” he said, “my organ is proportionate.”

A new sound filled the room: wistful, sibilant, yearning. The Giant sat back while it played itself out, melted sighing into the corners of the room. A young fellow spoke up, gathering his courage: “Yet women say, the women I know … they say size don’t count.”

“Do they?” The Giant held up his hand, scrutinised his fingernails. “And they say that to you, do they? Ah well. One can imagine why they would.”

A little laughter, edgy. “I see, gentlemen,” the Giant said, “that you wish me to enlarge. On the theme. On the subject. It is proportionate, as I say. Will I stand up again, so you can appraise my proportions? No; there is no need, I perceive; you can view my assets while I recline. A Tower of Ivory,” he explained, “at the base of which they fall, stunned. Not but what they do not recover themselves; the fainting, I think, is out of politeness largely. And then, gentlemen, their rhapsodical sighs and moans—but I see by your faces that you already know those sounds, albeit only in your imaginations. First they try to scale this tower—the ambition is natural to them—with their slick little tongues like the tongues of kittens. When I am satisfied in that way, I put out my little finger and flip two or three of them on their backs. When I say ‘two or three,’ when I say ‘them,’ I speak advisedly—for I have about me every night an eager set of the female sex. They fear … they fear indeed—but oh, it is their fear that delights them! And gentlemen, when dawn comes, I am the complete gallant. Which of you can say as much? I have a fellow in Covent’s Garden who brings each morning a selection of fresh bouquets, wound up with ribbon such as ladies like. Each morning he fetches half-a-dozen, at five o’clock—and when, three or four times in the week, more are needed, I have a smart lad who goes to run and tell him. And when you, at some stale hour, are rolling from your mattresses, and roaring for your piss-pots, and grinding the yellow pills from your eyes—and when, I say, your foetid molls are trolling forth, booted from your couches, unwashed, fishy, chafed between the thighs, slowly dripping your lukewarm seed—my douce delights are receiving their bouquets, with pearls of pretty laughter. Each one carries within her a giant baby. How can she not conceive? My seed is propelled within her like a whirlwind. I do not spill forth, like little men—I come like the wrath of God. When the years have flown, and my dear delights are grandmas, they will need only to think of the business we transacted, and their dried parts will spin like windmills in a gale.”

Clarke has got a preparation of an extra-uterine pregnancy. The foetus lodged in the tube and began to grow there, the mother dying of it. It is a very fine preparation, and I mean to have it. I have said to Clarke, will you give it to me? No, I will not. Surely you will. Positively, I will not. You will sell it me then. No no and no. Then if I see you in a dark alley I will murder you, I said. Clarke half-believes me, for he sees the flush rise up in my cheeks. I half-believe myself. I must have it.

“That’s my boy,” Joe said, when the pressmen had surged out, chattering, into the street. “It’s the very way to treat them, a touch of the flattery and a touch of the imperial contempt.”

Yet there was something nervous about Joe: he was glad and sorry, he was thinking it had gone well and yet it had gone too well, it was out of his grasp a bit. As the gentlemen had exited, he had called out in his brightest voice, “Eleven till three, five till eight, six days a week, only half-a-crown a person!”

One of the gentlemen had stopped. “Look here, sniveller, don’t be crying your wares as if your giant were a hot pie—get a handbill printed.”

“A handbill?” Vance gawped. His hand closed on the man’s arm. “Where would I get that?”

Claffey dug Pybus in the ribs, and turned down his mouth.

“Why, go to a jobbin’ printer,” the pressman drawled. “And will y’ quit molesting my cuff?”

Joe took his hand away as if the sleeve were heated iron. He was desperate not to offend.

“Jobbin’ printers,” Claffey said to him afterwards. “That’s what I heard mentioned by a few. I suppose you know what they are?”

“Them?” Joe guffawed. “Isn’t my uncle the chief jobbin’ of the parish? Leave it up to me.” He turned on the Giant, rubbing his buttocks, complaining. “I came down with a rueful crash there. There was no need to turn me arse-over-pate to make a comedy.”

“I was trying to calm you,” the Giant explained. “My finger went astray.”

Later, Jankin stole up and said, “Giant, have you ever, you know … with a lady?”

The Giant was impressed to know that Jankin had not believed a word he had said to the newspaper men. He confessed, “I am a perfect stranger to the rites of Venus.”

“Ah, then it’s only me,” Jankin said, melancholy. “The virgin of the world. If Joe would put a twopence in my pocket, I could make my addresses to a lady.”

“Has he given you naught?” The Giant fished a coin out. “Buy a sweetmeat. Offer it to a lady, do you understand? Don’t take out your diddler and ask her to suck it.”

“Can I not have a bite of the sweetmeat myself?”

“If she offers. But give it her nice, wrapped up. Not with your fingers stamped in it.”

“I wouldn’t know how to address an Englishwoman. Could I address Bitch Mary?”

“Mary? Leave that alone. Claffey would yoick your entrails out.”

The Giant stooped, and passed his hand over the seat of his throne. “Here.” He pulled out a great iron nail and held it up. “Is this your work, Jankin? All the time I’m boasting about Paris and Amsterdam, and this little device boring into my buttocks.”

“Sorry,” Jankin said.

“Ah well,” said the Giant, and snapped the nail in two between his fingers.

“It’s an experiment,” Hunter said. “You have heard of an experiment, have you?”

“Is it a disease?” the pauper said.

“Y’re way off, man,” said John Hunter. “An experiment isn’t a disease! It’s the thing that imparts the knowledge that makes a man of science like me able to cure the disease.”

“Is that an experiment?” the pauper said. “That blade you’ve got out your drawer?”

“We call this a lancet, not a blade. Brace up, can’t you! My man Howison gave you full information that you were to be in an experiment, you came here to my house on that understanding, and if you don’t like it you can walk out that door.”

“And if I do, will I get a penny for my trouble?”

“No, not a farthing, but my boot up your backside. Trouble? You? What trouble did it give you, to step along to a gentleman’s house and be treated civil? What were you doing else? Watching a cockroach race, were you? Oh, I’d be very sorry to drag you from a cockroach race, I’m sure.”

Calm down, John Hunter. Get a grip. Those arteries of yours are hardening, that blood pressure is shooting up the scale on the instruments not yet within your ken. You feel the blood in your ears, ker-clunk—and if you were to glance into the plain pineframed oval of mirror that lights the north wall of your consulting room, you would see your cheeks, with their outgrowth of ginger bristle, dappled with a flush as rosy as a girl’s. What is modesty in her, is choler in you: not healthy, John.

When I look out of the window and see the cats after my pheasants and digging up my flowers, I scramble for my gun, but by the time I get to it the cats have run away. This makes a spasm in my chest.

The pauper cowered against the wall, his hands covering his privy parts. “What are you going to do with me?”

“Give you a wee prick,” Hunter said.

“Will it hurt me?”

“Naw, man.” He plucked at the pauper’s shielding arms.

“Will it make my parts drop off?”

“Naw. It’ll do you good. In fact, it’s a dose of medicine for you, with my compliments.”

The man stared. He had never heard of getting something for nothing.

“Look, now,” Hunter said. “Let me show you how it will be.” Patiently, he unbuttoned himself, and took out his tackle, easing his balls through the placket. Scarlet against its bush of orange hair, his cock was as vivid as the part of some obscene tropical monkey. It lay glowing in the palm of his hand, looking as if it might break out into some violence.

“Come on now,” Hunter said to the pauper. “Fair’s fair. Now show me yours.” The pauper’s eyes were riveted. “I never saw one on a Scotchman before,” he said. “Are they all that colour?”

“Gaze your fill,” Hunter said pleasantly; it was an effort to be pleasant, but it would gain him his end.

“So what … so what are you going to do?”

“I will demonstrate,” Hunter said. He reached behind him and picked up the lancet from the table. “Now watch.” He rolled back his foreskin, bringing the instrument a whisker from his flesh—indicating with it. “I will just give you a tiny touch, right there. A man of vigour, such as yourself, you’ll not feel it. Then you may button up, and I will give you sixpence.”

“Eightpence,” the pauper said.

Hunter breathed freely. “Eightpence,” he said.

The pauper straightened himself a little from the wall, but his shoulders were still hunched protectively as he began to undo his buttons. He had no underwear whatsoever, and smelled rank. Hunter reached forward and seized his pale, shrivelled organ. The pauper yelped. “Get off me!”

“Calm yourself, man. I must examine you, to see are you healthy.”

“Am I?” The pauper’s voice shook.

Hunter pushed back the foreskin with his thumb, as if he were shucking peel.

“Looks all right to me.”

Absorbed, he hardly noticed that his own organs were swinging freely, until a sharp draught from the window caught him. Would have been more professional to button up, he thought, more workmanlike—if Wullie could see him now—but what the hell. He took a firm grip on the pauper. “Hold still now.” He pulled forward the man’s foreskin, jabbed it. In a split second, he slicked it back, then jabbed the head of the organ.

The pauper gave a yelp of horrified surprise. “All done,” John Hunter said. But not—not all done—not—good grief, what was this? The pauper was snarling like a diseased dog, drool running from his mouth and his eyes blank. “Take a hold of yourself,” Hunter shouted. “You act like you’ve taken a mortal wound.”

The man’s wrist shot out. His hand was splayed to a claw. It was starved, but it was sinewy. He grasped Hunter’s wrist, his right wrist. His other hand closed over the knuckle. He drove Hunter’s arm down, down and in, slamming it towards his body. The lancet, trapped in the great man’s fingers, drove hard into the flesh, and ripped a trail of blood from his organ—blood shockingly brighter than the sanguine flesh it sprang from.

With a whoop, the pauper relaxed his grip. The lancet fell to the floor.

Hunter stared down at himself. He moved slowly, reaching for a cloth and dabbing.

The pauper, who seemed to have grown a foot taller, was buttoning himself up with an almost jaunty air. “Now I’ll have my eightpence,” he said.

Ah well, Hunter said to himself. Perhaps it is a happy accident, after all. I should have needed to keep the man under observation, and he did not seem a very reliable pauper; perhaps he would have run away or got transported or hanged, and I should have lost the chance of observing his symptoms as they arise. And without a doubt, every time I asked him to appear before me he would have wanted money. Well, here I am, and within two or three weeks I will have the pox myself, and what could be more convenient? I can make my observations and recordings from the comfort of my own armchair. And I won’t send myself a bill either.