was pulled off her head and lay beside her, lifting in the wind; the merest inch was trapped beneath the boot of the man Slig, and Pybus watched it flapping, fighting to be free. Slig was unbuttoned, and he held his member in his hand, rubbing the tip and watching and listening as the woman’s skull tapped the cobbles, tip, tap, tip, tap, with every lunge of Claffey.
Something touched Pybus. He almost screamed. A human shape fell back into the darkness of the passage; it was Bitch Mary. “Pybus?” When she raised her skirts, her white thighs shone like two slivers of moon. “Be quick,” she said. “Here, against this wall. I must get my own baby, wizened or yellow or dwarf, to replace the babies hanged.”
Pybus opened his breeches. He looked back over his shoulder. Surely by now they were forcing a dead woman? There was a sort of blot on the cobbles by Caskey’s head, but he did not want to think about its nature. Mary put her hand out and yanked at his cock. He gave a little yelp, so small—saw her eyes blaze up, and then her fist came out of nowhere, and his nose spewed blood, and it was dark.
The Giant lay, bug-bitten. His blanket covered him no more than a handkerchief would cover an ordinary man, but something seemed to have got into the weave, into the knitting of it, so that it fratched against his flesh, and he thought by morning he would be rubbed raw in patches. The city’s bells tolled: two o’clock. He realised he was alone, except for Jankin—who had never made a success of sleeping in a bed—curled whimpering in the corner.
He rose. He stretched himself, not upwards but outwards; he did it cautiously; but still the walls skinned his knuckles. He pulled on his breeches and shirt, and threw the blanket around his shoulders. “Hic,” said Jankin in his sleep. “Hic.” And, “My eyes are blinded.”
Down and out into the street. Down the back alley, towards the noise that had cracked the eggshell of his rest.
Pybus lay like a landed fish on the cobbles. The girl stood over him. She was angry, broad-shouldered and set, her hands on her hips. “I have a disease,” she said. “I have taken a dislike to this ape here, and I meant to pass it on to him before I die. But then, I could not. And there was nothing for it but knock him down.”
“You should not defame apes,” the Giant said. “And Pybus is only a boy.”
“I am only a girl.” Mary sucked at her knuckles; they had met the teeth of Pybus, on the way to his nose. “They have slaughtered Bride,” she said, “Claffey and the man Slig.”
The Giant took a step, and stood over Bride. Her face was a vacancy; everything had gone out of it. He put his hand under her head, and felt his palm sticky, blood and brain. “Murder is their nature,” he said. “Just as my nature is giant, and Joe’s nature is agency.”
“And mine is street molly and tib, it is Covent’s Garden nun. Nature cannot be helped, I suppose. It cannot be prayed against. I ply my trade on my back; I am a stargazer.”
“Where can we take her?” the Giant said. “I am not familiar with the burial customs in these parts.”
“Some midden or tip,” Mary said. “It’s the fate of our nation.”
There was a soft
“They say,” said Mary, “that the road from Ireland to heaven is a beaten track, worn smooth with the feet of all who tread it; but the road there from England is grassed and flowery, for it is walked but once in a decade. I understand this now, as formerly I did not.”
The Giant looked down at Joe Vance. “I cannot alter your mind, Joe. You are the agent and prince of us all. But I will not be accomplice to the cutting up of Bride Caskey. Murder has been done; it is enough. If you wish to sell her to the man Hunter, you must hire a handcart, for I will not be the one to carry her to that filthy fate.”
“Very well,” Joe said shortly. “You’ll have the grace to place her under cover. It’s coming on to rain.”
The thin night drizzle fell on his blanket as the Giant stooped over Bride. Her body seemed half the size of the living woman, as if Claffey and Slig had systematically reduced her in some type of bone-crusher. “Heavy as a bird,” he said. “Heavy as a bag of feathers. It only amazes me that Constantine Claffey was not engaged in this piece of desperation, for there’s another raider of the high hills of hell.”
He laid Bride under the jutting eaves, and threw his blanket over her face. It can’t itch her now, he thought. He picked up Pybus and carried him up to their room, where he washed his face and so roused him: to face the broken day, to feel his tender gums, to take his split—by eleven that morning—for watching the murder of Caskey and saying naught; Joe came in brisk and cheery, the guineas from Howison in his hand, and moved about the room quite liberal: “A shilling for you, Pybus lad. A shilling for Mary, and a shilling for Charlie O’Brien.”
The Giant threw his shilling on the boards. Joe picked it up again. “Suit yourself,” he said.
“A shilling for Claffey …” But then he thought better of it. “After all, Claffey had the gratification,” he said.
Claffey was hacking at a lump of cheese. His appetite was excellent. “Bloody buggering scheme of yours,” he said, “to take the bitch to the anatomy—a stroke of brilliance, Joe. At least we got some cash out of her carcase. Plus, when cut up into little bits, she won’t be rising again, on the last day or any other bloody day, to torment a good man with her witticisms and sell young girls into sin.”
Joe—his expression wondering—handed Claffey the shilling. God help him, the Giant thought; all my stories have not prepared Joe for this extremity, and nor has his book about the prince. He said, “Gentlemen, I shall treat you one and all. Tonight I open my purse, and we will carouse at the Black Horse.”
“We’d sooner the Crown,” said Jankin, but Joe swatted him and said, “Don’t put the man off his pleasures.”
All of them were grinning. “I’m thinking,” the Giant said, “you’ve been too much at the Crown lately.”
Diversion was his idea.
Wullie has shrunk, was John’s first impression; the deathbed wiseacres remind him that this was quite a usual misperception. He thinks of the diminutive Irishwoman brought only yesterday, raped and half-throttled and bashed to death—her skull beaten in, against a wall, he supposed, or on the ground. The Giant’s band of mad Irish had fetched her, and Howison knew better than to ask questions: only take in fresh supplies, welcome while they are supple, and get them on the table.
William had begun to complain of his symptoms on fifteenth day, third month, Year of Grace 1783. He, John,
