The Giant, O'Brien: A Novel Read online

  “Jesus!” Claffey said. “I am getting weary of the catalogue of furnishings, so I am. A hand plucks back the curtain and she sees—”

  “—a yellow-skinned babby, its skin wrinkled, its eyes rheumy—”

  “Much like he must have been,” the red-head said, indicating Vance.

  “—so ugly she had never seen a child like it, and her gorge rose, and she said—putting aside all common politeness, such was the strength of her feeling—I don’t know that I can touch it. Then the man and woman again spoke to her, and their voices were low and whispering and they seemed to hold in them the same shivering note of the harp-string and the melody of the golden birds bowing on their perch—and they said, cooing to her, ‘There’s nothing the matter with the child, except want of nourishment.’

  “And the woman shook her head, saying, ‘If that’s the manner and appearance of a king’s son, my own fair child should be emperor of the earth and skies.’ But she pitied them, and she pitied the yellow baby, and so she lifted it from the cradle of velvet and ivory, and laid it to her blue-veined breast. And all the while her own child lay sleeping in the arms of the woman so richly dressed, and lay so quiet and still that it seemed he was under an enchantment.”

  “Which indeed he was,” the red-haired woman said. Again she plucked nervously at her kerchief. “You could see it coming a mile off.”

  “I wish you’d be quiet, mother,” Pybus said.

  “Yes.” Jankin broke off from his play with the pig. “I want to hear, I want to hear. It is not the demon tale we thought it was.”

  A man laughed. “They are simple, these. Come over the water just now.”

  But the blind man shushed him, saying severely, “It is seldom, in these debased days, we are able to hear a tale told in the antique fashion, by a gent of such proportions.”

  “So when the yellow child was laid to her breast, he took a fierce hold, and drank greedily, and she cried out, ‘Oh, you did not say he had teeth! Surely, blood is springing from my tit!’”

  “Dear, dear,” Vance said satirically. “What the female sex have to endure!”

  “‘Ah, my dear, he has but one tooth, one tooth only,’ said the queen, soothing her. ‘He will suck me dry!’ the young woman cried. ‘Feed him but one minute longer,’ they coaxed, ‘and then you shall have a soft bed to lie in all night, and a goosedown quilt to cover you, and in the morning we will give you seven gold pieces, and shoes to your feet, and in no time at all you will be in Galway amongst your own people.’

  “So, thinking of the bed, and the quilt, and the shoes, and the gold, she let the yellow child drain her. The moment it was done, it flinched away its head, like a rich man offered a dry crust. And the queen took it from her—and all at once, she felt her eyelids droop, her legs weaken—and that was the last thing she knew.”

  “Now you will hear the coda,” said the red-head. “I feel I could whistle it. It is no pretty tune.”

  “Morning came at last. She woke, and put out her hand to stroke the feather bed—”

  “But felt,” said the blind man, “only a mulch of leaves.”

  “It was cold, and the harp-string was mute, and only a common sparrow of the hedgerows sang in her ear. She opened her eyes, sat up, looked around her—and the hand that had smoothed the bed grasped a handful of weeds, too rank to feed a cow—”

  “And her babby?” the freckled girl said. Her fingers parted her curtain of hair. Her voice was sharp with anxiety.

  “She is twelve years old,” the red-head said. “Excuse her. She has not heard many tales.”

  The Giant shook his head. “Then this is a sad one, for a beginner. For the young lady, who last night was in the hall of kings—now her feet are in the ditch, her mouth is dry, there is muck in her hair, and her belly is empty. And she cries, ‘My babby! Where is he?’ She casts around, but her rosy babby is not to be seen—and then from the hedge she hears a little bleat—”

  The red-head laughed. “Time to run.”

  “—and looking into the hedge what should she find but the yellow child, its skin flapping, its eyes running and its nose snuffling, its evil pointed teeth grinning at her, and its wizened arms held out to fasten about her neck.”

  “Well?” asked a woman in the shadows. “Did she turn and walk away?”

  “I think not,” the red-head said. “It’s the hand you’re dealt, isn’t it? She’d pick him up. It’s what women do. She was a fool, and well-intentioned, and just a little bit greedy, and isn’t that like most of us?”

  Jankin gaped. “What happened to her babby? Did she get him back?”

  “He was never seen again,” the Giant said emphatically.

  There was a long silence.

  Jankin broke it. “Do you know what I think? I think, if she had not made the remark about the child’s ill-looks, and not said that about her own child being an emperor, I think they might well have seen her safe back on the road and a penny in her hand. For they are decent-minded people on the whole, the gentry, but they will not stand for spitefulness.”

  “In my opinion,” said the red-head, “when the old man first offered her a gold piece, she should have said, ‘Show us the colour of it,’ then grabbed it in her hand and run.”

  “Well, however it may be, and however you think,” said the Giant, “this happened to my own cousin, on the road to Galway, but one or two years back. And this is the story, as I had it from her own lips; and if you don’t like it, you may lengthen it by your complaints.”

  There came from the company a great sigh, an exhalation; they were, on the whole, satisfied. Drink had now been taken, and Slig came down the steps with a cannikin, offering more. The cellar was warming up, with the press of extra people, and the heat of the pig, and the heat of contentious opinion. The blind man had sunk down against the wall, into a heap of rags, and he held out his beaker, his voice searching, “Slig? Slig? Fill us up here.” He turned his face in the Giant’s direction. “Would you like to hear our ballad, big man?”

  “Certainly, yes.”

  “It is still in the making.”

  “That is the most interesting stage.”

  “So polite you are!”

  “I add it to the advantages of nature.”

  “You do well.” The blind man paused. “We are making a ballad about the circumstances in which we find ourselves. Does that suit you?”

  “There was in former times a great poet who made verses upon the subject of the shovel he used to dig a road for Englishmen—so simple and pure his heart, and that object not too low. Can I then disdain your cellar, or the circumstances in which you are found?”

  The blind man nodded. “So. Very well. I will proceed. We are making our ballad on Hannah Dagoe, a wild girl, that when the hangman came to noose her she knocked him clean out of the cart.”

  “What was her crime?” asked the Giant.

  “Stealing a watch only, and that on St. Patrick’s Day. She came out of Dublin, and her trade was milliner.”

  “Whenabouts was this?”

  “I don’t know. Some year. They hanged her, anyway. We have also a ballad of Thomas Tobin and William Harper, how William Harper was rescued from the Westminster Gatehouse by twenty Irish boys with cutlasses.”

  “And Thomas Tobin?”

  “And how Thomas Tobin was not.”

  “Did they hang him?”

  “I expect so. For Robert Hayes was hanged, though he spoke Latin like the pope. And Patrick Brown was hanged for stealing silver spurs. Bryan Cooley was hanged, and his wife and four of his children came from Ireland to see it. Patrick Kelly was hanged, that was fifty years old, that filed coins, that made a speech about if each had their own no man would be poor. James Carter was hanged, him that was five years with the French armies, and John Maloney, that fought in Sicily, which is a hot country at a good distance but it’s not the Indies. John Norton was hanged, and him twelve years a soldier. Thomas Dwyer was hanged, that came from Tipperary and had no coat to his
back. William Rine and James Ryan, Gerald Farrell and James Falconer, they were all turned off together. Teddy Brian was hanged and Henry Smith, that robbed the high bailiff of his gold-topped cane. Katherine Lineham was hanged, but her husband was hanged before her, and Ruggetty Madge was hanged, that was Katherine Lineham’s friend, and Redman Keogh, and black and damned Macdonnel that sold them all to save his neck, but they hanged him anyway. William Bruce was hanged, that stole a silk kerchief and a man’s wig off his head, and they found him in a barn, he was a man out of Armagh. James Field was hanged, him that was a boxer, and the watch were afraid of him till they came to take him in strength. Joseph Dowdell was hanged, he was a Wicklow man but fell to picking pockets in Covent’s Garden. Garret Lawler was hanged, that was a cardsharp. Thomas Quinn was hanged, and Alexander Byrne, and Dan the Baker, and Richard Holland, and all of those you could find any fine night of the year drinking at the Fox Tavern in Drury Lane. Patrick Dempsey was hanged, he was a sailor, turned off when he was drunk. William Fleming was hanged, he was a highwayman. Ann Berry was hanged, a weaver turned a rough robber, and Margaret Watson, she heeded no laws. Robert Bird was hanged, and of him I know not a jot that would make a line or half of one. James Murphy and James Duggan were hanged, and their bodies cut up by the surgeons.”

  “Dear God,” said the Giant. “Was the whole country of Ireland hanged, and not one spared?”

  “When the people gather they call it the crack-neck assembly. When you are turned off they call it the cramp-jaw, and the new jig without music, and dancing in the sheriff’s picture frame.”

  “It is the slaughter of a nation,” the Giant said.

  “Katherine Lineham was what we call a hemp-widow. Her husband was a month in Newgate, and she so in love with him that every day she waited till she saw him led from the cell to the chapel, that she might see his shadow slide against the wall. Oh, then how he did bounce, his face to the city! Rope is the first word of English that an Irishwoman learns. Hang is the word of her husband: hang him, the thief, he is a rebel, hang him for a rogue. Dog is the word of her children: kick them out, kick them out like dogs. These are the next words: papist, and starve him, and let him be whipped.”

  They separated then; the women moving chastely to one side of the hovel, the men to the other. A low hum of good-nights, smiles in the dark. By the last flicker of light the Giant saw the red-headed woman draw the fair young girl to her breast, patting her, and he heard the tiny bleatings of sorrow and loss suppressed. Later, when the darkness was thick and clotted and absolute, he heard Claffey and Joe Vance whispering to each other. “I for one don’t believe it. Because, lion skins? He said she saw them, heaped in the great chamber. How would they get lion skins? How would they get lion skins, in Ireland?”

  “Also,” Claffey said, “it couldn’t have happened to his cousin. He wouldn’t be able to have a cousin that was low and small. Any cousin of his would be a monster like he is.”

  I have a difficulty myself, the Giant thought. The fine workmanship of the flask: how did she see it in the dark?

  Through her fingertips? That’s possible.

  Jankin and Pybus lay on their sides in the straw, heads down and knees drawn up. Both of them cried in their sleep.

  “Sir, let me tell you, the noblest prospect which a Scotchman ever sees, is the high road that leads him to England.” It’s true. True. Buchanan, all that giggle and tripe—it’s behind him.

  Long Calderwood’s behind him now: the thatch, the tending of the graves, pulling up weeds when ye could be doing something more useful. Beginning as Wullie’s gofer, sleeping on the floor at Hatton Garden (we all, my dear brother John, must endure these preliminaries), he became a trusted manager in Wullie’s deeper designs (to each Englishman, one corpse) and in summer attended upon Cheselden as he committed surgery against the patients at Chelsea Hospital, while in the winter he served as dissector and factotum to Wullie again, who was then pursuing his increasingly celebrated series of lectures in anatomy. A year later he was a surgical student at Barts, and a year after that he moved with Wullie to Jermyn Street, and fetched down sister Dolly, who had been left alone at Long Calderwood with the weeding. Wullie—always carping, criticising, and finding fault—came to him one day and told him to proceed to Oxford, to obtain a seemly education: “For your uncouth manners, John, hamper the family, and my nerves are frayed with anticipating what you will say and do next. And at the venerable seat of learning they will inculcate that knowledge of the great civilisations of Greece and Rome which seems to have escaped you, and they will instil merely by example, shall we say, a more urbane demeanour, a lighter touch, a wittier—oh well no, perhaps not.” Wullie turned away. “We must be realistic in our expectations, must we not? But try, brother John; do make a little curtsey in gentility’s direction. You are too much the North Briton still.”

  John thought: I see you every night in your bed, fockin a skeleton.

  At Oxford he lasted all of two months, and he made sure that, even at two months, he outstayed his welcome. He cracked Wullie’s scheme like a louse; what, make a canting professor of him? All he knows, all he needs to know, he feels under his hands, or through the knife’s blade. Flesh and steel; they are their own encyclopedia.

  Yet did they not give him a post at St. Georges’ Hospital, and a little house to go with it? Later, St. Georges’ elected him a governor, but by now he was possessed by a great interest in gunshot wounds, an interest that he found hard to indulge, so near to Hyde Park. It was a defect, in Londoners, that they did not shoot each other enough. “Why, why, why,” he asked (his face reddening, blood thudding through his system, ker-clunk, ker-clunk, ker-clunk), “why do you insist on treating a gunshot wound as different from any other?” “Because it is,” was all they could say. Because it is. Because it is, because we believe it is. Exasperation drove him to the post of army surgeon. William flared his nostrils. “A step retrograde, I’d have thought?” Wullie by now had got his dainty fingers up to the wrist in the cunt of the queen of England, who was puffing and squeezing out of her innards a prince of Wales.

  But later John was able to publish a treatise on gunshot wounds, which owed nothing to Wullie at all, and brought him the wholehearted esteem of the profession. In the year 1767, he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society, an honour which came to him a full three months before it came to his brother. In that same year, while dancing—an understandable reaction to good news, though a rare one, for him—he snapped his Achilles tendon. (“Really, John—what Hibernian romp was this?”) Another St. Georges’ appointment put some money in his account, and by the time Wullie vacated Jermyn Street and he took over the lease he had surgeon-apprentices bound to him at five hundred guineas for their five years, and live-in students who paid a hundred per annum for their board—surprising, when it comes to it, what a student can bring in when it’s one hundred pounds minus cost of porridge, meat but sparingly, linen-wash extra, and always use yesterday’s milk.

  In 1771 he published a first part of his treatise on the teeth—his knowledge, again, thanks to his presence on the battlefield, because the dead don’t squeal and scream when their teeth are drawn, and in order to write in this speciality what do you need? Teeth, teeth, a plentiful amount of teeth! That year also he got married to Anne, the daughter of Robert Boyne Hume, a surgeon of repute who had helped him in his career. It was ten years since he had met her father, and it was true he had dallied, after his initial proposal, but women cost so! Lace and musical evenings, the scraps for covering screens and what-all, minced chicken-liver for lapdogs, and accoutrements for their heads! It is Anne’s fancy—and she had one of her relatives execute it—to paint a gallimaufry of cupids on the panels of their bedroom wall; there they bob and gambol, in and out of season, bare pink flesh bubbling and seething among the fair-weather clouds.

  Since 1780, Wullie and John are no longer on speaking terms. They have quarrelled about the structure of the placenta.

  So raise a glass.
Here’s a toast to London, where the Hunters live and thrive, and where their prey survive as tripe-makers, spinners of catgut, coal-heavers and vinegar-brewers, industrious pencilmakers and ballad-singers, soap-boilers and cobblers, drovers and match-sellers and dealers in old clothes, where cobblers sleep under their stalls and milk-walkers in the cellar with the cow, where the cow is dying from lack of light and air, where the people are dying of dropsy, quinsy, tisick, measles, croup, gout, canker, teething, overlaying, mold-shot head, thrush, cough, whooping-cough, duelling, surfeit, pleurisy, dysentery, lethargy, child-bed, king’s evil, and unknown causes: and some from grief, and some from a footpad’s ball, some double-ironed in dungeons and some from the bite of a mad dog, some from French pox, cholic, gripes, flux, scurvy, fistula, worms: and are buried at St. Andrew above Bars and St. George the Martyr, at St. Saviour, Southwark, and St. Paul Shadwell, at St. Giles without Cripplegate and St. Botolph without Aldgate.

  Joe Vance was visibly cheered when daylight came. “It’s just as the people said last night,” Slig told him. “They’re crying out for giants. They’re also extremely keen on two-headed calves, so if you have—”

  “One wonder at a time,” Vance said. He turned to O’Brien. “I have made up my mind on it. We will call you Byrne, Charles Byrne. It meets with the approval of all here.” He tried it out. “Charles Byrne, the Surprising Irish Giant. The Tallest Man in the World.”

  five

  “Gentlemen, you will recall that my experience in this matter reaches back some thirty years, ever since, a young lad fresh from the farm, I was charged by my illustrious brother William to bring him the suitable and neccesary materials for his great work. And you will know that I stand before you not as some sniggling schoolmaster with his text and rule, but as an honest man like yourselves, who has digged and delved and dirtied his hands.”