The Giant, O'Brien: A Novel

seven

The experiment had taken place on a Friday. Saturday, nothing. Sunday, a teasing itch. The itch gone by Tuesday. But then the hard chancre: a cause of rejoicing. His theories soon to be proved, on his own flesh.

He holds his pen as if it were a surgical tool. He begins to record, knowing what he can now expect: the attack upon the glans and urethra, the discharge of many colours, the bleeding, the irritation and swelling of the testicles, the muscle spasm which causes the urine to be voided by jerks; suppuration, fistula in perineo, pains in thighs, vomiting, abdominal pain, and colic. His handwriting is small—to save paper costs—but always legible. After the valerian, musk, camphor, cold bath, hot bath, electricity, and opium it will be the mercury cure. But not for three years yet. A man must have time to make his observations. Physician, heal thyself; this saying also applies to surgeons.

Meanwhile, experimentation continues. He becomes interested in the venereal blotches that break out on the skin. He inoculates a pocky pauper with matter from another person’s chancre, and is interested to find that chancres form. To be sure it is not a fluke, he does the experiment again and again. He inoculates another pauper with matter from an ulcerous tonsil—with no result—and with a gonorrhoeal discharge: this latter produces a chancre. Theories whizz around and around in his head. He takes out his organ and stares at it. The mysteries of the universe are here.

A woman of twenty-five comes into St. Georges’ Hospital with florid skin symptoms, and he detains her till he has found a person with buboes who has not been treated by mercury, and in whom he can be pretty sure that the buboes are venereal and not scrofulous. He injects matter from the buboes into the skin of the woman of twenty-five, and for good measure injects her with fluid from her own ulcers. He writes up his case notes.

He has become used now to the thick, snuffling voices of those who are affected in the throat. Unfortunately for them, their lesions don’t scab over, as the act of swallowing keeps the parts always moist. Deafness is frequent, with suppuration of the ear. Effects on the whole constitution are to be anticipated; a couple of years on, the deep ache inside begins, the pain that seems to bloom out of the bones. Nights, it’s worse. He lies awake thinking of experiments he might make. The question of the drowned persons haunts him. They used to roll them over a barrel, or hang them up by their heels, thinking the water would drain out. He turns over and over in his bed—his solitary bed. The spaniels yap, the mastiff growls, the leopards roar beneath the moon.

He is satisfied the venereal plague cannot be spread by saliva. He has tried his best and failed. It is not, then, like the bite of a mad dog. Some say it stays in the blood, year upon year. He cannot see this. How it can be. There are those who have too much imagination, its findings unbuttressed by results.

That summer the Giant grew rich. He washed in Castile soap, and made the purchase of some decanters. His followers ate green peas and strawberries. Joe Vance played with the writing set, and Pybus, Claffey, and Jankin haunted the skittle alleys, the cockfighting, the prize-fighting, the dog-fighting, and the bull-baiting. “If we go on so,” said Claffey, grinning, “we will have tamboured waistcoats like the quality, and silver buckles to our shoes.”

“What do you mean, if we go on so? I am not likely to shrink.”

“You’re of a testy temper these days,” Joe observed, glancing up from his calligraphy.

The Giant, by evening, was often tired from exhibiting, and they woke him with their drunken stumbles on the stair. Gin and water was their only tipple now, and they brought it back for Bitch Mary.

When the patron’s half-crown was given over—the price of viewing the Giant—Joe Vance would give back a tin token; this was the system favoured by all the best shows and spectacles. Select groups of ten or a dozen a time were admitted, and they came in a steady stream all through June and July: through those months when the streets steamed and the poisoned water trickled from the pumps and London shit baked in the ditches, when milk turned and fish stank and the blinded birds in their prisons of gilt were stunned and silent in the heat. Sometimes, a smaller party would be admitted: ladies, rustling, faces glowing, frou-frou of petticoats and scent of musk and powder and cut flowers dying. Often they asked to converse with the Giant—this he did very easy, very civil—and they not only paid their half-crown but left a handsome tip on top of it. He dreamed of their tiny feet on London staircases, skittering like the feet of mice.

“I don’t think he should have his percentage on the tip,” Claffey said, nodding towards Joe Vance. “After all, it’s not earnings, it’s a token of esteem, more a sort of prize or reward to Charlie for being tall.”

“So Charlie should have it in his own pocket,” said Pybus.

Joe’s eyebrows shot up. “You want your nose punched out of the back of your head?” he offered. “You want me to press on your cheeks so your eyes zing out of your skull and go bouncing about the room?”

August: sunlight slipped like rancid butter down the walls. Joe returned to the book he was reading, frowning and gnawing his lip. It was a book about a prince, and Jankin was waiting for him to finish and tell stories out of it. “He that writ the book is called McEvilly,” Jankin said. “Joe Vance’s grandad knew his grandad.”

The Giant looked up, smiling. “That’s right, Jankin. Weren’t they both turf boys together to the O’Donaghues of Glen Flesk?”

The horizon was bright, these evenings, with the pearl-like shiver of noctilucent clouds. But dark at last fell; blood-red Antares blazed over the city.

“For all the prodigies of nature, there’s an awful lot of blawflum,” said Hunter to Howison, his trusted operative. “Do you remember Mary Toft?”

“She that gave birth to fifteen rabbits?”

“She that did not.”

“And yet the court itself, sir—did not the prince of Wales send his surgeon down to Godalming?”

“What? There was a procession of them, man, rode down to Surrey to view the tomfoolery. And did the fools not fetch her up to town, and lodge her handsome? The woman had a vast distended belly, to be sure, and plenty of activity inside it, but that hardly diagnoses rabbits.” Hunter snorted: for sometimes people do snort. “It’s fairy tales, that’s what it is—fairy tales, and rabbit skins and scraps smuggled under the skirts and groaning and moaning from the lass while the coins are chinking into a basin. Sir Richard Manningham had the right of it, he threatened her with an operation to relieve her condition—aye, he showed her the knife.” John Hunter chuckled: for people do chuckle. “I tell you, her belly soon deflated. No, Howison, I wouldn’t give you threepence for a woman pregnant with rabbits. I wouldn’t cross the street to see it—no more would I ride out over wild heathland where I might have my purse taken.”

“Ah, sir, you might have your purse taken any fine night in Bond Street.”

“Not that ought is in it,” Hunter said, sighing, and scratching himself a little. “I am the greatest surgeon in Europe, Howison, it is acknowledged, and I frequently find myself as poor as when I was a raggedy scamp with a snivel nose and a hole in my breeks.”

It is a pity he has not got a hole in his breeks now, Howison thought, it would be convenient for him to ease his itch. “You have laid out so much in experimentation, sir,” he said, “and in the purchase of specimens.”

“And on Mrs. Hunter! Do you have any idea, Howison, what that woman costs me per annum in sheet music alone?”

“I have no claim on gentility,” said Howison. “The women I know will open their legs for oysters and gin.”

“Stick to your own kind, that’s my advice. If I had not the damned expense of her minims and her crotchets, not to mention her nightcaps—she must have lace, Howison, on her nightcaps—I would be able to purchase a savage.”

“I could get you a black, easy. Dead or alive or anywhere in between.”

Hunter wrinkled his nose. “Your London blacks have lost their virtue. They are bronchitic and gone slack. No, I want a free savage, the dust of the bush still upon him, his wanton yodel rattling through the clear pipes of his chest, his tribal scars still raw, his cheeks and ribs fresh scored, his parts swinging and unfettered …” Unlike mine, he thought, breaking off in a sulk, for it had become necessary for him to resort to a suspensory bandage.

Howison did not like to be worsted by circumstance. Hunter employed him for his resource as well as his brute strength and steady hand. He knew his master was mean as well as skint, but he knew also that he could find ways of laying his hands on funds if the right subject for experimentation came along. As if reading his thought, Hunter said, “I cannot just purchase from a seaman—for then my savage will have been spoiled, its sweating body swaddled in a tail-coat and its guts churning with weevil-biscuits and porridge. Oh, I know what you will say—go out to savage realms, and choose for yourself. But then, I am advanced in years, and the pepper of my temper as a Scotchman makes me unsuited to a voyage in the torrid zones of this world.”

Howison hoped that John Hunter was not hinting that he should go in person, off to Patagonia or Guinea, in search of some cicatrised wailer with webbed feet and his head under his arm. He, Howison, had got his feet under the table at the Dog and Duck in St. George’s Fields, and had hopes of confluence with the landlady’s god-daughter at the Swan with Two Necks: at least, she was supposed to be her god-daughter, and he had never heard of her charging anybody, not so far. Howison, for luck, turned his money over in his pocket; it was the night of the new moon.

Jankin had come home at dusk, inhumanly excited: “We have been to see Dr. Katterfelter’s magic show. He appeared a black kitten in a man’s pocket, he did, Charlie, so he did!”

Joe didn’t bother to look up from his book. “Katterfelter is a common conjuror.”

Claffey and Pybus came in, shouting, “Here, Bitch Mary!”

The girl came, from the corner where she rested from her labours; in this corner she settled herself on rags, like a dog’s wife scraping a nest for whelps.

“You see this water?” Claffey said. “You see this water in this bottle? It is no ordinary water. This water has been blessed by His Holiness the Pope and specifically magnetised under license by Monsieur Mesmer, the sage of Vienna and Paris. Its name is called Olympic Dew. The queen of France bathes in it every day.”

“Ah well,” Bitch Mary said. “Not enough for a bath, more a little facial splash—but I thank you, gentlemen.”

“But look here,” Claffey said. His fierce freckles were glowing; his peel-nailed finger went dart, stab at the bottle’s label. “See just here the cross, that means His Holiness, and here’s the painted eye within a triangle that means Monsieur Mesmer has blessed it himself with the animal spirits—”

“You sure he didn’t piss it?” Joe inquired.

“Or the pope piss it?” said Mary.

“For shame,” Jankin said. “His Holiness does certainly never piss.”

“His water is drawn off by angels,” the Giant said, “without pain or embarrassment, of course. What would you say that we all stay in tonight and I tell you a story?”

He hardly dared to raise his head.

Jankin said, “The dwarves with duck-feet, is it?”

“I hope if you met them, Jankin, you would not be so impolite as to mention their duck-feet.”

“Small chance of that,” Claffey said. “You claim that they occur in Switzerland. We could not prove you wrong.”

“And I could not prove me right,” the Giant said. “But at the mere breath of scepticism, I fall silent. What interest have I, Claffey, what possible interest could I have, in convincing you of the existence of web-footed Alpines of diminutive habit?”

Claffey gaped at him. He could not understand the question. His face flushed up to the hair-roots. He felt his big moment with Bitch Mary had been spoiled.

“Besides,” the Giant said. “You know I do not like dwarf tales. They are too sad. I do not like them.”

At nine-thirty that evening it was still light, but it had begun to drizzle. Bitch Mary, crouching by the window, made a squeak of surprise; they all swarmed—except the Giant—to see what it was, and within seconds Claffey, Pybus, and Jankin were down the stairs and out.

“What was it?” said the Giant. He felt disinclined to move; his legs ached.

“It was an Englishman,” Bitch Mary said. “Walking beneath a canopy on a stick.”

“Umbrella,” Joe said, bored. “The apprentices are always turning out against them. It’s a fact that they are easy prey because carried by their clergymen and the more fussy and nervous type of old fellow.”

“Such as,” Bitch Mary said, “those who think rain will run through their skins and thin their blood.”

“The boys like to throw stones after, then chase the fellows and collapse the tent on their heads, making them sopping.”

“Ah well,” said the Giant. He yawned. “I’m sure they wish they had such a lively time in Dublin.”

That night the three followers came back battered and bruised. Pybus, in particular, was shockingly mangled. They were cheerful and brimming with gin, and had hardly stepped over the threshold when Claffey demanded, “Give us Prince Hackball, the beggar chief!”

“Hackball?” the Giant said. “I remember when you yearned for stories of the deeds of kings.”

Joe had brought him a flask of spirits, the necessary sort. His head was clear and ringing, his speech precise and tending to echo in his own ears: as hero’s speech should do.

“Hackball,” the lads chanted. “We want Hackball.”

“Hackball was prince of beggars,” Claffey said. “Two dogs drew his cart.”

“For God’s sake.” Joe looked up in irritation from his prince book. “I think you confuse him with Billy Bowl, a man with no legs, who went along through the city in a wood basin with an iron skiddy under it, and his arms propelled him forwards. One day there were two women provoking him and calling him deformity, and did he not flail the flea-bitten she-cats? For which he was brought up—Charlie, was he not, support me here—”

“For which he was brought up before the justices, and—his bowl and skiddy being damaged in the fracas—he was brought to court in a wheelbarrow, and sentenced to hard labour for life.”

The Giant put his head in his hands. The bones there seemed to pulse, as if bones were living, as if they were fighting. The skin at his temples seemed frail, and he wondered if inner provocation would break it. Pybus and Claffey went away to bathe their contusions. The Giant was afraid that, under the new moon, his followers had got a taste for riot, and he wondered what they would do when the nights were lighter and the moon was full.

At full moon they went out with cutlasses, spits, bottles, and pokers, for an informal fight with some Englishmen. Afterwards they chased a Jew, finding themselves part of a light-night mob with drink taken, and passed on from Jew-baiting to window-breaking to tearing up railings.

The Giant was alone in their chambers. It was a hot night, and he opened the casement. The hour was ten and it was still and grey. The cries and groans of Londoners, their bedside prayers, drifted to him faintly on a breeze dank as the Honduras. Behind him the candle flame guttered, threatened to fail: as if underground. By its feeble light, he stretched out his hands and examined them. I need, I do so need, he thought, a stick for measuring. It may be that I’m seeing what I want to see—or, to be exact, what I don’t want to see. He stretched out his hand, to test its span. His new shoes were tighter, but then a man’s feet swell in the summer heat, it’s what’s to be expected. He crossed the room and ducked experimentally under the door frame. This was more informative. He had been in these rooms some weeks now, and the instructions for ducking were coded into his knee-joints. And it was not his imagination-in the last fortnight, he had to bend them deeper.

So.

He drifted back to the window. He looked down into the courtyard. Bitch Mary was standing by the gate, talking to a woman. He saw the pale glowing curve of the child’s skull; her hair streamed silver. She reached up her arms to embrace the woman, and as the woman stepped forward the Giant saw that he knew her; she was the red-head from the cellar, who wore a green kerchief and had punctured Joe Vance with her wit. He almost called down to them; but no, he thought, I will be poor company. He felt in his bones and his gut the truth of what anecdote and observation had taught him: a giant who begins to grow again does not live long.

Hunter stalks alone, by the crepuscular Thames. He thinks, I have had no opportunity of making actual experiments on drowned persons. Not his fault if he hadn’t. Still, it’s not the season for suicide. Spring kills the melancholy rich man, who seeks relief from his humour; in late autumn the beggars drown themselves, for better reasons, after they have spent the first night of the season in a trough or hole awash with icy rain. Women bearing disgraceful children drown themselves at any season of the year. If his people were only vigilant, he would have a constant supply of them, either for reanimation or dissection. Do not assume she is dead. Beat the water out of her. Tenderise the trollop as if she were a piece of meat. Squeeze her spongy lungs as if you had them in your very fists. And when they drown themselves in the depths of winter, when the ice is breaking up, then there is every hope—for the cold, he already suspects, brings on a shock to the system, which holds a specimen in a kind of suspended life. Properly treated, such a person may be revivified, though he has been under water for ten minutes, twenty minutes … where is the frontier of death?

What if, he thinks, this state of cold might be artificially induced, and suddenly induced—if a man in possession of his health and spirits, let’s say, were to volunteer to be packed around with Greenland ice … the cold would numb him, the cold would sleep him, and if the supply of ice were constantly replenished … . I want to get a white bear from Greenland … might he not sleep away a year or so? Or would his organs fail? It might be a welcome specific for bored men-about-town: an elegant excuse for failing to visit maiden aunts and plain heiresses. “I am iced up till next June, alas …” Or a good way to evade your debtors, of whom he has plenty. Imagine Howison, ushering them into his freezing-cabinet: “Gentlemen, you may see John Hunter now—but John Hunter is unable to see you.” Yet he doesn’t think, not seriously, of icing himself. His man Howison is a reliable man and wouldn’t let him thaw, but all the same, he has work to do, the progress of his disease to observe.

The clamminess of his skin, the natural clamminess of the humid night, has turned to a cold sweat that drips down his back. He thinks of the dead. His mind turns to them often. Corpses are my library, he would say, when an importunate bookseller pressed on him the vast Death Encyclopedia (illustrated) of Dr. Knogus-Boggus of Amsterdam or Professor Schniffle-Bum of the Vienna School of Medicine. Experiment, he would say, see for yourself, go in with the knife and lay bare and see what you see.

And yet the dead defy him. Something in their nature. The principle of life has gone out of them—the principle that he knows exists, but he is not sure what it is. He tells his men, you can never be sure, with the hanged no more than the drowned—reanimation is possible—do not pick their pockets, for fear of future prosecution. But when the body is brought to him, and stretched on the slab, it is frequently the case that he finds tears in his eyes. He says to himself, come now, John Hunter, this is mere dissection room nostalgia, mourning for the days when you used to cut shoulder-to-shoulder with Wullie, before you had your schism over the nature of the placenta; it is nostalgia for the early days, when you were a raw boy and not all Europe’s veneration.

But in his heart he knows it is more than that. It is the dead themselves who move him to tears. Numb to the scents of a hot summer’s evening; deaf to laughter, blind to clouds. Not just still, and not just cold, but waxen, quenched, extinct—and gone … gone where? This is what anguishes him: the question where. He wants to haul them back, with iron hooks. He wants to question them: where? He wants to know if there is a soul and if the soul can split from the body and if so, what is its mechanism for getting out—a usual orifice or permeation through the skin? What is the weight of the soul? If you pushed him, he’d guess a couple of ounces, not more.

A surgeon does not present himself often at a sick bed, and he is not able to make the moment-by-moment observations available to the physician: the changes in colour and respiration that signal that the wolf death is creeping up the stairs. The surgeon’s patients die violently under his hands, or he judges them beyond his aid and he disdains to practice on them, for there’s no point in mutilation without hope of cure. One would relieve the pain of any human creature, but what is the point in attempting to part a woman from her rotted breast unless she is hale and fit and likely to live to say thank you and pay her bill? Come: let’s be practical.

But the dead are not practical. They are no use except for cutting up. They answer no questions that are put to them. They lie and stiffen, in their perfect self-containment. They defy understanding. Hunter’s mind dwells on that split second when everything that is, is lost beyond recall. When life and hope go separate ways.

Pybus and Claffey burst in, disturbing the Giant in his first dew-like sleep. “Wake up Charlie—we have been to a tumult.”

“Not again.”

“It was a rare tumult—we rioted against anatomies. It’s one who cuts up persons after they’re dead and pulls out their hearts and eats them.”

“Their hearts alone?”

“They like to follow after the carts when it’s hanging day, and they pay over money so they may get the body and then the men—”

“And then the men—”

“—and then the men get all in a big mob and try to knock down the hangman—”

“—steal him away, the dead body—”

“—rub his neck till he’s back to life—”

“—rub neck and chest.”

“Or give him a decent burial.”

“But still if they can’t get enough hanged, they go into the graveyards, these anatomies, and dig them.”

“Eat their liver and boil their guts for tripe.”

“Yes, yes,” the Giant said. “So you rioted a little while, and then you—”

“There was a man in a carriage, and we took out his horses, cheering, and we ourselves went between the shafts and pulled him, with some Englishmen.”

“Who was this man?”

“We don’t know his name. He was the government. One of the horses that was unyoked was led away by a man from Limerick, Fancy Boy Craddock he called himself.”

“He was not the government, that we pulled along. He was against the government. That was the government, when we broke their windows.”

“Oh, was it.”

“Sometimes, when the anatomy is just going to make the first cut, the corpse sits up and seizes him by the throat. Sometimes the blackguard dies of it, he drops down with shock.”

“Does this happen often?” the Giant asked.

“Oh, two or three times in the year.”

“You wouldn’t think he’d be quite so shocked, then.”

John Hunter is at home now, and hears a great knocking at his back door, and hollers, “Howison, man, shift yerself.”

Two men, heaving with effort, dumping their burden on the flags, cursing quietly, fetching out a knife, and hacking at the rope; one sack off, hauled over the head, and he sees a livid, blotched face-

Swarming up beyond Howison, whose mouth is already opening to argue, Hunter thunders, “I have seen this corpse before.”

“True,” says the salesman, fawning. “All respect to your eye, Mr. John Hunter, you have seen this corpse before. But I’ve brought it back at a nicer price.”

It is left to Howison to boot the fellow out of the premises, the fellow and his confederate and his rapidly depreciating asset.

John Hunter sighs. He wants company, Howison discerns. Weary and wary both, he steps up the stairs. Hunter is brooding amongst his books—of which he has a few, though he says corpses are my library. “Here,” he says, “did I ever show you this curiosity? Never mind the text, man, feel the binding. It’s the skin of William Thorburn, that slew Kitty Flinch, the Wrexham Belle. It cost no little trouble in the flaying of him.”

He sees Howison’s face, and a mild contempt there. “Do you not believe me?” The pitch of his voice has shot up; his pulse rate risen; heat at his temples.

“That the flaying was difficult? Oh yes, it would be a job for an operator with a delicate touch. I mean just that I have heard other gentlemen say they have the same book on their shelves, so you must wonder of what extent was Thorburn, to furnish so many libraries?”

“So I am cheated, am I?” Master yourself, John, he says to himself. Easy, John. “Ah well, it is a trifle. It is no matter.” He slides the volume back in, beside the Osteographia of Cheselden. “Do you know of the Enfield child?” he says, casually.

Howison pricks up his ears. “Eighteen inches round the thigh, at the age of nine months and two weeks.”

“Over three feet—they allege—at the age of a year. A most famous prodigy. Pity he died.”

“Passed away at eighteen months.” Out of respect for the deceased, Howison removes his hat and holds it to his chest.

“And gone where? Who has the skeleton, that’s what I’d like to know.”

“There is”—Howison clears his throat—“there is a giant exhibiting in Spring Gardens above the cane shop. If your reverence would like to see him …”

“What does he charge?”

“Half-a-crown.”

John Hunter snorts. “Negotiate a lower rate, or free for me. What’s the use of eminence, if you’ve to put your hand in your pocket for every freak that tawdles through the town?”

“I’ll try,” said Howison, yawning.

“Away to your bed,” Hunter tells him. “And leave me to my thoughts.”

Alone then, he opens the shutter and lets the night into the room. They are at Earl’s Court, and he hears the bark of his bears, his watchdogs’ snarls. He seats himself, and pours a glass. Late at night, the mind refights its old campaigns. There is no such thing as gunpowder poisoning. Get me a savage. Or a dwarf. Or a giant. Half a crown! For a giant! Still: what cannot be cured must be enjoyed. Pay out, see the fellow. Might be of interest. Might be.

Remember the night the Eskimos came to dinner? George Cartwright brought them, the trader: knowing Hunter liked curiosities. They were a party of five—two men, two squaws, one infant. Cartwright had lodged them at Little Castle Street, showed them about the town, and presented them at court. Considering that they were savages and ate raw flesh, they were able to sit up to the table quite decent. After dinner there was a misunderstanding; he thought to show them his collection, but at the sight of the bones hanging up they became frightened into dumbness. He found out, afterwards, that they thought they were the remains of his previous meals.

All these Eskimos took the small pox, and died at Plymouth, except for one squaw. He had missed the chance to get an Eskimo for his collection; you cannot handle a small pox corpse, the risk is too great. Still, they are engraved upon his physiognomist’s memory: their heads were long and large, their eyelids folded, their skin bronze. He had little opportunity of hearing their voices. The younger squaw smiled pleasantly, though not after she had seen the skeletons.

He heard later that the hair of the dead woman had been cut off and carried back to Labrador and given to her friends, and that this was the means of introducing the malady into those parts, over three hundred dying of it at once. He does not know if this is true.

He remembers how on the night the Eskimos left his house, silent crowds stood in the streets to watch them go. Lamplight shone on their flat brown faces, and he thought they wore expressions of distaste.

John Hunter presses his head in his hands. Before he fell out with Wullie, they might have been here together at the end of the day, Wullie saying, Damned coarse stuff this, call it claret, I wouldn’t stir it into the meal to fatten a hog … always querying and carping, his queue neatly ribboned, a quizzical finger laid to his cheek, his abuse as crude as any Scottish boy. But now I am here alone, and true darkness coming down.

He takes down his favourite book, De Sedibus Causis Morborum . On the Sites and Causes of Disease. He opens it on his knees, and stares down at it, sightless. His mind moves slowly. Giovanni Battista Morgagni, the distinguished author, performed over seven hundred autopsies personally, and usually John finds the volume supplies endless diversion. But tonight he cannot be amused. He frets, he turns a page, he stands and shelves the book. Nothing will do but skull arrangement.

Candle in hand, he descends to his work room.

Under the moon the copper vat gleams, the copper vat for boiling flesh from bone. The eyeless stare at him; the nameless specimens grin and peer, a scribble of light on the curve of their jars; the lungs long-dissected take in one whistling breath. In his day he has been heroic in experimentation. He has transplanted a human tooth into a cock’s comb, and seen it take root. He has fed a pig on madder, so its teeth came out red-and-white striped. He has dissected a gibbon! He turns sharply; thinks he sees something in the shadows. The creeping of a polydactyl hand across marble … or perhaps the ripple of flesh and fluid, as conjoined twins elbow for space in their bottle.

He raises his candle. There are the skulls, in no particular order; or rather, in a chosen disorder, artfully hodge-podged so that no one can eavesdrop on his thoughts. He possesses the skull of a European man, an Australian aborigine, a young chimpanzee, a macaque monkey, a crocodile, and a dog. His stubby hand caresses the cold apertures, the tallow-coloured curves. He arranges them. Croc. Dog. Macaque. A monkey is half-beast, half-man, he thinks. His hand, sweating a little, imparts heat and moisture to the bone. Chimp. Savage. European Male. John Hunter stands back from them. He sees patterns he has no permission to see.

And sighing, disarranges again; and back upstairs, his tread slow. Something is baying from the cages: something far from home. The moon strikes down on Long Calderwood, strikes a cold kindling in the thatch, stirs brother James in his long-time grave; the night breeze sighs through East Kilbride, and rifles the tops of trees with the fingers of a Chick Lane pickpocket.

“Grave news,” said Joe Vance, coming in with a paper in his hand. “It’s concerning Patrick O’Brien.”

“Oh yes?” The Giant looked up, without much interest.

“They say he’s grown a good ten inches since we left home.”

“But Paddy is only a boy.”

“Yes, and the more time to grow! The way he’s going, Charlie, I can’t see how he won’t top you in the next three months. I can’t see how he can avoid being less than eight feet and a half. And the worst of it is, he’s threatening to come over.”

“Well, let him,” the Giant said. “Maybe after his novelty has worn off we can go two-for-the-price-of-one. Besides, it will be company for me. Giants, you know, have much to say when they meet each other.”

Joe stared at him hard. “I don’t think you quite have a grip on this, Charlie. I know Paddy’s agent, and he’s a slick bugger. All Paddy has to do is set himself up, advertising as, let’s say, ‘P. Byrne, Tallest Man in World,’ take a room somewhere central, and steal away a good half of your future customers. Some jobbin’ will be paid to run off a few handbills, and there’ll be you traduced and trampled, Charles. Then even if we come at him with the full force of the law, he can easy go to Bath, or where-so-ever, get the easy pickings, and deny you the fruits of a lucrative provincial tour.”

“Oh. Am I going on tour?”

“It was in my mind.”

“Call it a progress, there’s a good man. Tour has a low sound about it.”

“Don’t say that word low. I dream by night that I see Patrick as tall as the treetops.”

The Giant leaned forward, and opened his hand. He clapped it across Joe’s chest, spanning it. “Send out Pybus for a tool of measurement.”

“What can you mean?”

“Look, Joe Vance. Come here to the table. Do you see this knot in the wood? Now, do you see there, what you might call a mark or score?”

Joe nodded.

“You see the space? A month ago, my fingers could not bridge it.”

Joe stared at him. “You’re growing, Charlie?” A sly grin crept over his face. “You’re growing?”

“My head is lengthening and stretching. I feel the pain deep in my bones, as if the close knitting of my skull were beginning to ease itself, beneath my scalp, and unstitch. I feel a pain in my jaw, as if the swing of it were to be tested, as if the swivel cannot support the greater weight that is to come. My feet are bursting from my boots, Joe. See here—I’ve had to slit them. My knee-joints and ankle-bones are oppressed.”

“Oh, good, good!” said Joe Vance. “By the private parts of Mary, this will give him a check, Mr. so-called Patrick Byrne!” His honest blue eyes were blazing. “Let’s have a drink on it,” he said.

In September, the days innocent of chill, they went to Bartholomew Fair. The Giant was confined indoors, as usual, but they told him everything when they got home. Dancing dogs and monkeys. Musical operas, a French puppet show with Mr. Punch and the Devil behind doors.

“We had some cabbage to eat at Pye Corner,” Pybus said, “and a slice of beef each. Joe treated us.”

“That was handsome of him,” the Giant said.

“We ought to go down, Charlie,” said Claffey. “Get you a booth.”

“What, like a dancing monkey?”

“It’s where the crowds are, and where the crowds are, that’s where the money is.”

Pybus blurted out, “Joe Vance says you are growing.”

“Do you not see the change in me?”

“We see you every day,” Claffey said. “If it’s gradual, we might miss it.”

“But it’s proved by the measuring stick,” Pybus said. The late sunlight caught his red hair and made a fire in it. “By God, Charlie, I’m glad I decided to come on this voyage. Our fame is assured. We shall ride in sedan chairs!”

“Carry one, more like. That’s an attribute of Irishmen.” He looked up, at Claffey. “So—you have your own notions of taking me to market, do you? You think you know better than my accredited agent?”

Claffey puffed himself up. “I certainly know this town, Charlie, I can say I know this town. What say we ship Joe back to Ireland to fight it out with Paddy’s people, and I take on managing you, at a reduced percentage?”

The Giant studied Claffey. Narrow grey eyes close-set. An unintelligent expression, but an avaricious one. “So,” he said, “did you bring anything for Mary, from your day at the fair?”

“Oh, he did,” shouted Jankin. “Oh, he did and I liked the Devil behind doors. Oh, he did bring her Cyprian Wash-Balls.”

“Come forward, Bitch Mary,” shouted the Giant.

Mary crept from her bedding. She stood before Claffey without meeting his eyes.

“Claffey means to pay you his proper addresses,” Pybus said. “He is advanced in the art of courtship. He don’t mean to force you against a wall, but wait till you’re ready and you give him the word.”

“That’ll be enough,” Claffey snarled, practically spitting in his ire. He took a shuddering breath—calming himself, so as not to split and rupture Pybus on the spot: only because, afterwards, the woman would have to clean the floor. “Mary,” he said, “I am giving you these Cyprian Wash-Balls, but on one condition.”

“And what is that?”

“I have seen you at the gate these nights, when I am coming in, talking with that whore that wears a green kerchief.”

“Bride is her name.”

“I want you to keep away. Never greet her more.”

“Because she piqued your vanity,” the Giant said. “She did so, that night in the cellar. She worsted you and Joe both.”

“Not for that,” Claffey said. “But because she is a whoremonger. The very tips of her fingers are creeping with disease.”

“I’ll do what I must, and when I must,” Bitch Mary said. “Till then, I reserve my opinion. Will that content you?”

“I don’t like it,” Claffey said. “But go on—there you are.”

“What is the use of these Cyprian Wash-Balls?”

“To keep your hands white.”

Bitch Mary stared down at her paws. “I don’t know,” she said. “I’ll have to think. I like your addresses, Claffey, but then you may decide to quit these shores, which I know I never shall.”

“Ah,” said Jankin, “you are easier with their language than us. Even Charlie has not your sweet manipulation of the tongue.”

Claffey felled him with a blow. “What do you know of her tongue? You stuff-brain, you couldn’t turn your tongue around a corner!”

Mary ran for the bucket and a cloth. A large part of Jankin’s brains looked to be burst on the black floorboards of their room. Indifferent, she swabbed Jankin and the planks. She hummed softly as she worked. Pybus stood over her, drooling, looking down at her laboring flanks. “Bride says she can offer me lucrative opportunities,” Bitch Mary said.

Night’s drawing in. By candlelight again—just one for economy—John Hunter is compiling (speculatively) the index to his great work on venereal disease.

Decay of the Testicle 45 Carbuncles or Excrescences 48 Odematous Inflammation 75 Of f Sarsaparilla 112

And the Giant, turning in his sleep, hears Francis Claffey coming in, and singing on the stair.

There’s not a mile in Ireland’s isle,

Where the dirty varmint musters,

Where’er he puts his dear forefeet,

He murders them in clusters;

The toads went hop, the frogs went pop

Slap haste into the water.

Claffey: the entrepreneur.

And a pause, some bumping and boring in the dark. Then the Giant hears a different voice, though still Claffey’s; it is broken, distant, sober. “Give me to drink I beg you … a bottle of mountain dew.”