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,
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?”
