“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!
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
