The Giant, O'Brien: A Novel

ten

“Now then, O’Brien,” said Joe Vance. “You’ll have to get another trade. It’s not enough to be tall.”

The Giant stretched his hands out before him. They were trembling slightly. He knew his elongation not good news, but he wanted Vance to admire him. “But see, Joe. You’ve remarked yourself how I extend. Paddy, I’ll bet you, cannot top me. Nor will for many a year yet.”

“That’s all very well, growing and growing. But the public’s fickle, and in my opinion it’s had its fill.” He mimicked the mincing tone of an English-speaking gentleman. “Ooh, giants—giants were last year.”

“You mentioned a provincial tour, did you not?”

“Sure, but look at yourself, will you? Huddling by the fire, your nails not trimmed, your coat not brushed, your hair greased on your head like you’d rubbed it with a rasher—are you a sight to inspire Ipswich? Will they batter the doors down in Bath? Will the burghers of Bristol turn out with a pipe band?”

“It was only a thought,” the Giant said, sulking.

“The expense of being on the road, Charlie—I’d have to know it was going to be worth the while. No, what I was thinking … have you considered fire-eating? Fire-eating’s a fine profession.”

The Giant gaped at him. “And why must only I have a profession? Why cannot Claffey?”

“Surely,” Joe said, “you would not want the attention taken off yourself? As I understand it, any man with a steady hand and his wits about him can be a fire-eater, but why should Claffey have the glory? Ask yourself.”

“I wouldn’t mind a profession,” Pybus said. “Highwayman would suit me. If I had a horse.”

“You could be a footpad,” Jankin advised.

“Get out of it,” said Joe. “Earn a living by any other means. Or they’ll tie your gullet, and you’ll morrice on air. Remember the litany of the blind man Ferris?”

The Giant had fallen silent. “I have plenty of money,” he said at last. “I have no need to continue here, I am not bound in articles to you or any man. I could return to Ireland as soon as passage can be booked. I could take my sack on my back, and turn up in person on the holy site where Mulroney’s once stood.”

“I’ll tell you your trouble,” Joe Vance said. “You drink too much.”

Early in November, his followers had been out on the streets throwing squibs and crackers; it was an English custom. “I’ve never been warm since,” Claffey said. There had been fighting afterwards. This was five days after the gentry of Ireland had flitted to their wintering grounds, moving silently, gliding white in the dusk. It is unwise to obstruct them, to walk on their paths, or look at them directly. Their existence depends on tricks of the light, and shadows moving through water; their natural state is shadow. They don’t count, don’t know the days of the week, and use only wooden implements, distrusting iron and steel. They have children by the basketful, and carry them on their backs. All these gentlefolk are very old.

Constantine Claffey came around from Clement’s Inn—the egg-stain still on his waistcoat—to tell them a piece of news. It seemed that Goss’s pig had become such a huge attraction to the public of Dublin that some cockalorum magistrate rattled in to break up the show, believing it to be an assemblage for the singing of glory-o songs and fomentation of plots against rich men’s hayricks. His sergeants had slapped old Goss around the head and threatened Toby with hanging up and salting. Gathering his belongings and his store of money, Mr. Goss had fled for Chester, but hardly had he disembarked when he was seized by brain fever and expired.

“The murdering bully-boys,” Pybus exclaimed. “Them blows to the skull of old Goss was no doubt the direct result of his brain fever.”

“The cause,” the Giant murmured. “Not the result. And Pybus, post hoc ergo propter hoc is a pernicious fallacy to lead along the streets.”

“I think you are all missing the point,” Vance said testily. “The point is, what has happened to Toby?”

Con, with a heave of the chest: “This melancholy tale I shall relate. Toby mourned for two days by his master’s grave, off his swill and giving tongue to porcine bleats. On the morning of the third day, when the nephew of Goss, that resides in Chester, came to tempt the pig into better spirits—why, he found him gone.”

“Found him gone,” said Charlie. “Now there’s another phrase to ponder.”

“Will you snick your teeth on your pedantry?” Vance demanded. “And you, Con Claffey—less of your bloody bombast. Where is Toby now?”

Con spread out his fingers. “That is what no man knows.”

“Then put a description out,” said Vance. “And with it, the word that I, Joe Vance, will pay a—what’s the phrase, Charlie?”

“Munificent.”

“Ah,” said Con Claffey. “What a word to roll upon the tongue!”

“Will pay a munificent reward for said pig or information leading to said pig.”

“This mu-un-niff-ee-sensse,” said Con. “Will it be all your own work?”

Vance shrugged. “I am but a shilling-in-the-guinea man, as you know. But I am hoping O’Brien will seize this investment opportunity.”

The Giant made his decision. “If I am not enterprising, I am nothing. Shake hands on it, Joe Vance. I will invest in the pig.”

That night, by way of celebration, they had a few drinks, and the Giant told the tale of Tannikin Skinker.

“She was born in a town on the river Rhine, neither a free Hollander nor a subject of the emperor. Her mother, before Tannikin’s birth, was asked for alms by an old beggar woman, but she chased her off. As she scuttled, the crone was heard to mutter, ‘Hog by disposition thou art, and thy child shall have hog written on her face.’

“Mistress Tannikin, when her mother bore her, was a very proper baby, except for her snout and bristles. Her family, who were of a wealthy sort, kept her hidden in their dark and panelled rooms, behind the casement …

“Panelled rooms, in their tall house: where doors opened to reveal doors opening, where shadows painted themselves in the corners, and the dark oils, framed in the low gleam of scarred gilt, pictured doors opening on doors, and women reading secret letters behind looped curtains.”

The Giant paused: he saw Tannikin, a big-boned, likely lass of fifteen or sixteen, her snout pressed to a windowpane, the shutter clipped back one fold; beneath her, far below, the little golden ships passing silently down the Rhine.

“Her mother and father tutored her well, and she became proficient in crewel-work, rhetoric and grammar, the use of the astrolabe and terrestrial globes, together with the transcription of music onto the staff; she also possessed a theoretical knowledge of baking, brewing, and the art of beekeeping. Though she had comprehension of seven languages, her voice was a grunt, and she wore always over her face a veil of black velvet.”

Again, the Giant paused. In describing Tannikin he had, he realised, gone far beyond the details given by the pamphleteer who had written her life-story. Honesty drew him back to the brutal facts.

“The old woman was at length discovered and taken up by the magistrate of those parts, but was unable or unwilling to lift the curse she had placed on the family. One fact she did divulge, before they touched the torch to the stake—if Tannikin Skinker obtained a husband, one who would love her in spite of her deformity, then she might be restored to the delights of a human countenance, her snout retracting and her bristles falling away as she first experienced the rite of love.”

“A pig-face?” Joe Vance said. “Very piggy?”

“Essence of hog.”

“Well, I don’t know,” Vance muttered. It was as if his manhood were challenged. “Was she rich, there’s the point of it. Had she a settlement?”

“Her dowry”—and again the Giant saw the gilded ships, freighted with woolsacks and Flanders hops, with silver looking-glasses, oranges from Sicily, and the fruit of Franconian vines. “Her dowry was … munificent. It was … ample.”

“Then put a bag on her head,” Claffey said, “and I’ll do the business. Is she still on the market?”

“Mistress Tannikin,” the Giant said, “was born in the Year of Grace 1618.”

“So?” Claffey said. The almanac was no part of his education.

The Giant continued on. “When this was noised abroad—and there were, as you may imagine, many curious and talkative spectators at the trial of the old witch—the town and even the house of the Skinker family were discovered to the public, and a parade of valiant but impecunious gentlemen besieged the door. They bore hand-coloured illustrations, on vellum, of their armigerous bearings, and in lieu of these, written references from magistrates, ministers of religion, and some in triplicate from the Holy Ghost himself.

“The Skinker family employed the town’s best dressmaker and its most applauded coiffeur. They had their dear daughter Tannikin padded with horsehair hips and entrammelled in hooped petticoats, and her sweating pink limbs encased in the finest brocade and sateen; and they persuaded the bespoke hairdresser to pin up and powder her coarse hair according to the best fashion of the time, and then they called for the milliner to deck her with a bonnet that was so beribboned, so decked with fruit and flowers, so embroidered over with every manner of child and beast, that men called it the Wonder of the West.”

He paused again. Gone too far with the bonnet, but what did they know of female modes? Gone too far with the Holy Ghost and the suitors, but what did they know of theology, or romance? He pictured Tannikin Skinker, while they tweaked and pinned and powdered her, with her trotter shielding her eyes, afraid to peep: longing again for the comforting dusk of her black velvet mask.

“And yet it was to no avail, any of it. Englishmen came, Frenchmen and Italians, Chinamen and Tartars, yet at the sight of the pig-face of Tannikin, all quailed: all made their excuses: all doffed their bonnets, and sadly took their leaves.”

“I’d not have been so precious,” Claffey said.

“But Tartars—” said Joe Vance.

Said Claffey, “Tartars are nothing.”

“Tartars, I’ll have you know, are very fine trick-horsemen. I wish I could get a Tartar.”

“And so she lived to the end of her days,” the Giant said. “Her father and mother died …” It must have been so, but he had had only just realised it. “Her father and mother, who tutored her in the liberal arts, and who would have given their whole fortune to have discovered to their sight her true, human face. Then poor Tannikin was alone, behind the shutters peeping out to see the river run, and the fashions change, and her lovely bonnet grow into ill-repute—ever willing, till she reached advanced years, to entertain a suitor who had heard of her but lately …”

Until her servants died, he thought, the old servants who had been used to her, and there was no one to shine the silver bowl in which she used to eat her swill, and no one who could bear the sight of her face, no one who would read her a sermon or bring her Holy Communion, or stoke up her fire when the nights were sharp. “Mistress Tannikin Skinker,” he said, “lived a long time, in humility and solitude. As such creatures always do.”

Pybus, looking up, thought he saw a tear on the Giant’s cheek; but the light was fading, and appearances can deceive.

“It’s a pretty enough tale,” Con Claffey said, yawning. “But I would sooner have the coal-heavers strike, and how Murphy and Duggan were brought to the fatal tree.”

The Giant thought, there are trees in worlds unknown to Claffey and his ilk, that bear fruit and flowers on their branches at one time.

“And come to think of it,” Claffey said, “I would sooner have a drink at the Talbot in Tyburn Road. Are you coming, brother?” He nodded back towards the Giant. “Another you would do well to add to your agenda is the Irishmen’s gallant charge on the butchers of Clare Market.”

“Why were they charging on the butchers?”

“Because they made an effigy of the sainted Patrick, and were burning it on a great fire, and singing songs.”

“Did they so?” Pybus shouted. “By God, I’d have charged myself.”

Said the Giant, “Pybus, these days you’d charge if a cabbage leaf blew across the street.”

Said Constantine, “We stripped them flesh from bone.”

At Jermyn Street, alone and in the dark, John Hunter is juggling with the metacarpals of an ass.

Soon, from the Talbot and the Swan with Two Necks, from the Quiet Woman and the Three Keys, there came a flood of false intelligence concerning pigs; and worse, a steady procession of handlers and herders, dragging up Piccadilly with dreary porkers on chains. One of them was not even a pig, but a bulldog shaved; which offered, the Giant said, a measure of the English intelligence. Said Pybus, “I wonder what became of the pig from the cellar, you remember, Charlie, the pig that was the blind man’s hope?”

“Gone to rashers,” the Giant said: rashers long consumed. Pybus crossed himself.

Joe Vance stood out in the yard, mopping his brow at the parade of gross rolling flesh. “It’s well-known,” he said, “that Mester Goss’s pig is a slick black pig, that was under training with Goss—God rest him—since he was a yearling, and is not now above three years old. Why do they waste my time with these impostures?”

He mopped his brow again. “An agent’s work is never done.”

The Giant said, “What about the Scotchman? The little animal-trainer? Is it not likely that he may have some information? He is no doubt able to write, and may have provincial connections he could consult.”

Joe rubbed his chin. “We have not seen him lately. Did he not leave his card on you, Giant?”

The Giant said, “It is among my effects.”

Howison has been reading a book about werewolves. By and large, the werewolves of France are malign and drooling, scarlet-toothed predators on the meek lamb Christ and the sheep who are his people; whereas the werewolves of Ireland are heroes and princes, cast into melancholic lycanthropia by ancient curses, condemned for seven years to their grey hairy hides and their glinting eyes, to raw meat and dread of flames. Yet sometimes they are still Christians under the pelt: witness the Werewolf of Meath, who besought a travelling priest to bring the last sacraments to his dying wife, and peeled back her skin to show her human nature. Another brute creature—a wolf indeed—terrorised the Massif Central, in 1764, attacking grown men and causing fifty deaths. One small boy who was badly frightened but not eaten by this wolf stated that it had a row of buttons on its underside. The louche reported that it came to town when it needed to visit its tobacconist; the pious stated that it came to town when it wished—being a talking wolf—to confess its sins.

And receive absolution?

The English do not have werewolves. For them, you’re either one thing or the other.

The mornings were icy now, and for the first time in his life the Giant began to feel the cold. Aching and snuffling, he brooded over the smoking fire; and when Claffey said to him, “Coming to the Scotchman then?” he looked up, lethargic, and shook his head.

“Hunter frightens me,” he said. “When he laid his hand on me to feel my pulse, he felt right through to my bone.”

“Suit yourself,” Claffey said. “You look like a sick dog.”

At Jermyn Street, the door was opened by a hulking man they had never seen before. “Yes?” he barked. “Are you an experiment?”

Claffey did not understand him at all, but he thought a shake of the head might be safest.

“Then why have you come around here by broad daylight? Where’s your sack?”

“Our sack, sir?”

“Where’s your deceased, you dimwit. Where’s your corpse?”

“We are still living, mester,” said Jankin.

“We have come about the animals, sir,” said Pybus.

“Oh.” The big man let his breath out, and looked at them less hostile. “Animals is sent to Earl’s Court, that’s where Mr. Hunter keeps his animals. What have you got? Alive or dead?”

The Irishmen looked at each other. Claffey’s feet twitched, in spite of himself, they clearly thought he should cut and run. But Jankin said, disconsolate, “So we cannot see their tricks then?”

“Tricks?” the man said. “God blast you, we’re not a circus.”

“Look,” Claffey said, “it seems to me there’s some misunderstanding, sir.” He reached into his pocket, and pulled out a piece of paper scribbled over. “The little Scotchman gave this to our giant. It’s his name written down, I believe.”

“Yes,” said the man, staring. “This is a page from the sacred pocket book of Mr. John Hunter.”

“That’s the fella. A twist to his nose, and his shoulders up under his ears, and bristles on his cheeks.”

“Why, you insolent rogue,” the man burst out. “I’ll pull out your kidneys for you.”

Just then they heard a sharp voice from the interior of the house. “Howison, who is it out there?” The Scotchman appeared, wearing a long smock over his coat; on the front of it, exactly where Constantine Claffey had his egg-stain, there was a particle of something ruddy and gelatinous.

“Bunch of paddy thatch-gallows,” Howison replied. “I’ll boot ’em, sir.”

“No, wait. Aren’t you fellows the Giant’s crew? Haven’t I seen you with Charles Byrne?”

“That’s us,” replied swagger-boy Pybus.

A look of effortful geniality spread itself at once over the Scotchman’s face. “And how’s your big fella today?”

“Like a sick dog, sir,” Jankin said. “Ain’t he, Francis Claffey?”

“Hm,” said Mr. Hunter.

“Sits by the fire and does naught,” Jankin added.

“I see. Now then, gentlemen”—Mr. Hunter plunged his hand under his gown and fished about. Pybus braced himself, wondering would he pull out a knife; he distrusted the nature of the stain on his clothing. Mr. Hunter’s flat palm came out with three-halfpence on it. “Oh dear, Howison. I shall have to step out to a patient and earn a guinea. How is it I’m down to this?”

“You purchased those newts. An impulse, sir.”

“True, I had forgot the newts. Well, gentlemen, take the will for the deed. I would have seen you right if I could. Do you ever take a drink at the Crown, on Wych Street?”

“We might,” said Pybus.

“If you see my man Howison in there, he’ll treat you all round. Howison, take notice of these men. They and we shall have some dealings before many months have passed.”

“It’s a mystery walking,” Pybus said, as they set off back to Cockspur Street. But by the time they got there, Joe Vance had solved it for them. “Slig’s been round, he put me wise. The man is no animal-trainer. He is what they call in England a crocus.”

“Which is to say?” asked the Giant.

“Which is to say, he is a surgeon. He cuts for the stone and takes off green legs. He is one of those anatomies of whom you have been singing.”

“His man offered to pull my kidneys out,” said Pybus. “I took it for banter.”

“We’d best stay away from him,” Jankin said. “And his man Howison. And the Crown on Wych Street.”

Vance gawped. It was the longest speech he’d ever heard Jankin make, and it was stuffed with sense. But Claffey said, “He swore he’d treat us all round, and I suppose his drink’s as good as any other man’s, crocus or no crocus.” Claffey was out late these nights, scouring for Bride Caskey. No matter what Mary might say, he was convinced that it was she who had despoiled his darling.

Mary went out on her own account these nights. “I have nothing left to lose, so I try to make gains,” she explained. She was angry when they tried to hold her back. “I too want money in my pocket. I want a sack like the Giant’s. But I know I shall be dead before I get it.”

Mary’s hair seemed to have darkened; she looked older, and wilder. The Giant thought of the eldest brother, the eldest brother of the dwarves. Of his word, his look of love. It was these things detained the maiden in the forest. He said nothing to Mary. Let her go: as well be outside in the disaster, as inside, locked up with it.

Each night the rooms grew smaller, at Cockspur Street. There was a scraping noise inside his chest. “You could do with a dose of physic,” Vance suggested, but he said no, no, keep away from physic, and keep away from the crocus. God bless us, he said. St. Comgall keep us. Mary neglected the scrubbing. The rooms grew fusty. One afternoon he burst open the nailed-shut window. A black north wind rattled the sashes.

Christmas came on. The peck was getting rougher. They dined on a sheep’s head boiled, and called it a banquet; most nights it was bad bread and loblolly.

“Open your sack, Giant,” young Pybus groaned. “Let us have a slice of ham, as we did in former days. Let us have seed cake.”

“I will open my sack for Toby,” the Giant said. “For no project else.”

“Not even eating?” said Pybus. “Oh, pitiful.”

“The devil of a pig,” said Slig, as slowly he stirred his turnips and gruel, “the devil of a pig is, will it sit in a chair? Now, Constantine Claffey has heard of a bear that’s for rent—”

“I am not parting with my money for a bear. A bear is disagreeable to me.”

“But Charlie, you’re not listening. The fact is, you can get a bear and shave it. Then you put a bonnet on it and a gown, and its face peeps out shy and lovely—and you must put gloves on it and pad the fingers.”

Said the Giant, “You’d think grown men would have better things to do.”

“Then you drape its chair very full, so that a little lad can hide under. You cry it out as ‘the Pig-Faced Lady’—we can call her Tannikin if you like—and when the folk have paid their money, you ask it a question, such as, ‘You are a lady of Limerick, I believe?’ Then the boy pokes it from beneath with a stick, and Tannikin goes grunt. Then you say, ‘How do you feel, that people describe you as the Pig-Faced Lady?’ And the boy pokes it twice, and it gives two grunts, very angry, and so you pretend to be the soul of consideration, and you say, ‘We’ll not talk of it,’ and the boy tweaks the bear, and she gives a little soft groan, as if she were pacified.”

“It seems to me,” the Giant said, “that the beast’s repertoire would be limited. I cannot imagine you would attract more than a low class of gawper.”

“It’s a clever thing,” Slig insisted. “I’ve seen it done.”

From their first visit to the Crown in Wych Street, the boys came home slewed and rolling. Constantine Claffey was sick on his waistcoat, but he wore it next day just the same. “When they go to the tavern these days,” Joe Vance explained, “they call the first bevvy their quencher. Then it’s their rouser, then it’s their cheerer. After that they don’t bother giving it names.”

Joe was a leaner man these days, and his eyes were mild as he sat by the fire with his book on his knees, and gazed into the middle distance. One day, when the Giant came home, he found that Joe had sold the siskins. Seated on the chair with the dint in its back, the Giant wept.