“He does, does he?”
“He will wait on you, sir. At any convenient hour.”
“Will he so? Marat? See my specimens? I’ll shred ’em first. I’ll burn down the whole—burn, I say, live and dead—rather than let that damned Wilkite into my premises.”
Because he is establishing order. Night by night: skull arrangement. He is beginning to understand hierarchy; and these democrats will play the Devil with it. And especially a man like Jean-Paul Marat, with his five different names, his silver tongue in seven languages, his embossed certificates, his academic cavils and his snarling quibbles and his slick fingers—what might the man carry away?
“John Hunter, your rages will kill you,” his colleague said, expressing a simple truth.
“Yes. And when I am dead, you will not soon meet with another John Hunter.”
So: Bitch Mary’s tale.
“They had left me the exact time till I was hungry beyond bearing. Another few hours, and I would have been beyond it, God’s mercy would have numbed me. I was reduced to meekness and weeping by that hunger, it was agony in itself, but I knew from experience it is a pain which passes. Yet, one may have a piece of knowledge, and be unable to act on it. They plucked me out of the cellar the very moment when my strength was lowest and my need greatest.”
“That is how I know it was Bride,” Claffey said. “For what nation is more tutored than ours, in the art of hunger and in its science?”
“Ah well,” said Joe Vance, “be that as it may, tonight we have men to dine. Mary, my love, I know your clothes are gone, but can you not wrap yourself in a blanket for decency, and then busy yourself? And if you prove yourself useful in putting the place to rights, then tomorrow you will have a skirt and shawl.”
“Dress me out of Monmouth Street, would you, Joe? Send the boy Pybus running to the rag-seller, so I can go out again for your purposes?”
“There is some very respectable clothes sold in Monmouth Street,” Joe said. “My waistcoat was got there, and you must admit it’s very fine.”
“Stolen.”
“Stolen, so? I bought it in good faith, I will claim my title to this waistcoat in any court in the land. Less of your lip, bitch. The only friends you have are under this roof. Be mindful of it.”
The Giant roused from his sleep in the corner. Their speech, he thought, is now a compound of vileness. We abandon our own language because we need extra words, for things we had never imagined; and because there are superfluous words in it, for things we cannot imagine any more. “What men?” he asked. “What men to dine?”
“Slig,” said Joe. “You remember hearty Slig?”
“And my brother,” Claffey said eagerly. “Constantine Claffey, as he is known at Clement’s Inn. Which is where he lodges.”
“Which is a midden,” said the Giant. “Have I not been all about those parts? It is a midden and a criminal haunt and packed to the gills each split-up low deceiving house and alley with footpads and coiners and runners of poor women, with uncertificated pox-doctors and cat-gut spinners, with tripe-merchants and rumour-mongers and rabbit-breeders and slaughterers of the peace of the Lord. Why must your brother lodge there, Claffey? Could he not come here to us at Cockspur Street?”
“He may do that yet,” Claffey said.
“As for the man you call Slig—does he not keep that infamous cellar where we lodged when we were freshly arrived?”
“By the dripping blood of Christ!” Vance said. “I am sick of your verbiage. Slig is a sworn brother of mine. Slig gave you straw and a shelter for fourpence. Infamous cellar? It was a usual kind of cellar. I tell you, O’Brien—it was good, of its kind.”
“Sick of my verbiage?” the Giant said. “Sick of my stories, also?”
“I leave them to the brutes that want soothing.”
“Sick of my person, perhaps, tired of my height?”
“Well,” said Vance, sneering, “it doesn’t seem as if your height is very remarkable after all. Considering the new intelligence from Cork, communicated to me only this day and then by Slig himself, which is that Patrick O’Brien is now nine feet tall and will be here inside a fortnight.”
“And lodge in Slig’s cellar?”
“I doubt it. Slig is taken over as his agent now. He will be finding him a good address and a dozen plump virgins to be shaking out the feather beds. He will be getting a pagoda, which I said all along was what we should have, but oh no, you would set your face against it, advised by some rustic—”
The Giant turned his face away. He closed his ears to Joe. Mary said, “When I was walking the streets, and I no longer knew where I was, nor had I known for some hours, I found myself on a wide square that I thought I should recognise. While I was looking about it, to know where I was—it being then broad morning, and I so ashamed of my state, my rags scarcely covering me—then a carriage came, and a lady called out to me from it. She called to me to run after, and I should have sixpence and my breakfast.”
Pybus sucked his teeth. “You should not have so.”
“I know I should not,” Bitch Mary said. “But can you not recollect, Pybus, that I had been many days without a breakfast, and that the thought of sixpence made me summon my last reserves of strength so I could do her will and trot?”
“Joe commands us,” the Giant said, “to cut the verbiage.” He imagines words hacked down, like shoots in a tangled thicket: slash and cut, cut and burn.
“And so I will,” Mary said. “For I have little more to relate. I came to a great house, and anticipated that I would be ushered into a hall, with candles blazing.”
