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
