It was not surprising to find that the landlord Kane was in the freak racket. It turned out he owned the garret where the pinheads clustered, and—by extension—owned the pinheads. He had not been working them because of a glut on the market, “but won’t I dust off the little devils?” he said. “By God, Con, it’s a prime plan. Let all the monster-makers of this city co-ordinate their efforts, let the trick-trainers move in concert. Meet Fernando, will you?”
Fernando was a young man of twenty-six or so, with flippers where others have arms and legs. He spoke in a high bright voice, his lips pulled savagely back in a smile that was very like a snarl. “Fernando,” he said, “will play at ninepins. Fernando will shoot a bow and arrow. Fernando will play the flute. Thread a needle.” A drop of foaming spittle whipped itself across the room. “Fernando will dress his own hair.”
“We have some savages,” Kane explained. “They’re not real ones. We have to pin their tails on before we can start the show. We did have some real ones, but they died in the cold weather.”
Claffey said, interested, “What does a savage do?”
“Basically,” Kane said, “they eat toads and flies, bite the heads off rats and chickens, and suck their blood. If you can’t find real savages from overseas you have to find Londoners that know no better. If you can find them mad enough, they will go down on four legs and bark like a dog.”
And coming and going in that cellar and others, in White Hart Lane and Bedfordbury, in Smock Alley and Bow Street, they met the fire-eaters and the posture-masters who perform contortions; with the amiable grey-faced Tibor as conductor and guide, they met Sham Sam the Conjuror, and men dressed as monkeys, and monkeys dressed as bearded ladies. “All these people are my friends,” Tibor said. “As for the savages, some of them come from extinct lines. They sing songs, lamenting how they are the last of their tribes.”
“Tribes of Whitechapel,” snorted Con Claffey. “Tribes of Seven Dials. How’s your nephew, Sam, got over the measles yet?”
“Mending, thank you,” said Sham Sam. “My nephew’s the Son of a Cannibal, you know. Well, we used to show him as the Cannibal himself, gnawing a rabbit bone and saying it was a young child. But then a woman who was in pod took a screaming fit, and threatened us with fetching the Lord Mayor. So we’ve dropped him down a generation. Now we give him a bone and he toys with it. Looks at it wistful. You know. Like he would suck it, if he dared.”
That day, they had been teaching the pinheads to bow. A flourish of the wrist, arm drawn neatly across chest, palm spread, then a low sway from the hips. It made a change for the pinheads. Usually they just sat in a corner, looking listless.
They are wonders, they are prodigies, the Giant tells them; they are nature’s curlicues and flourishes, extravagances of flesh. He moved among them, carefully, the fruit of God’s absentmindedness : the web-footed ones, the ones with sloped heads and fish mouths, the ones with great wobbling heads and loose yellow skin dropping from their frames in folds: the ones with strange growths, the bird-faces, and the bat’s faces with folded eyes.
Jankin said, whispering to him, “Charlie O’Brien, I never thought it—but there’s lower than Irish.”
The Giant looked at him, his tow-head and vacant face—a hair’s breadth from exhibition himself.
“Jankin, you wouldn’t sell me, would you?” he asked. In a low voice. For he had begun to suspect it.
Jankin’s face was perplexed, but then his expression cleared. “Oh well,” he said. “I’m threatened to tell you nothing at all about anything of that.” He tapped the side of his nose.
“I see,” the Giant said.
At night he dreamt of the freaks, their pug-noses and protruding tongues, the characters set free from his stories; and Francis Claffey in his crib dreamt of the pennies mounting up.
The Giant has learned this lesson: anything you can imagine, can exist.
The Giant was sicker. He had grown by three or four inches (and still Paddy did not come). There was constant pain in his fingers and feet, his skin was stretched, and his head ached. His skin had a low shine on it, like pewter. At nights he coughed, with a sound that roared down Cockspur Street like cannon fire.
“You were a stubborn fool,” Claffey said to him, “not to take the Scot’s money.”
The Giant watched him. What double game is this?
“I might re-consider,” he said. “I doubt I have three months in me. I’d like to have once more a sack on my back. I could give the runt the slip, and go back and die in Ireland.”
He watched a pale rage washing to and fro through Claffey’s eyes, slap slap slap like the water in some dirty tributary of the Thames.
“Ye’ll never,” Claffey said. “You’re done for, you’re shot. Face up to it, O’Brien. You couldn’t take the voyage.”
Now he understood Claffey’s game; it was to place his intentions precisely; it was to understand them. It was to see if he knew he was dying. “And besides,” Claffey said, “the word is out that Hunter’s withdrawn the offer.”
“Oh yes?”
“Yes. He’s more interested in pinheads these days.”
“Then he shouldn’t have long to wait. The way you starve the poor little brutes.”
“Ah, they get their wibble and slop. It’s what they understand. You couldn’t give them meat. Their teeth are out.”
Claffey went downstairs, whistling. It’s fact, the Giant told himself. Cold and stark. They mean to sell you.
John Hunter was in his counting house, counting out his money.
Thirty-four pounds, seven shillings, and a halfpenny.
Howison came in. “They say they are willing to guard him, till he’s dead.”
“And guard him
