“Right, Kane. And in these days too.” The Giant stood up. “I will not finish this tale.”
“Temper, temper,” said Mrs. Cricklewell.
“Right,” the Giant bellowed, from the doorway. “Will I tell you what the woman said, as she stood on one leg? Will I tell you what she said? She said, ‘I see your destruction, your utter destruction: you will not leave this house, none of you, neither hide nor hair, except for the fragments that are carried out in the claws of birds.’”
He turned away. His bitter shoulder. He heard Con Claffey say, in a low tone, “The fella’s on to us. He comprehends our scheme.”
He heard Slig say, “No matter. What can he do?”
And Kane: “They say the crocus is panting like a bride. Howison will drive the price up. We’ve got him on a percentage. It’s in his interest.”
At Jermyn Street, Howison attended his master’s gashed scalp, all the time talking to him soothingly. “Try the eminences. Apply to the worthies. Money will forthcome. You must have that giant.”
And by the fireside, Slig: “I have known men and women who were exceptionally hairy.”
Says Kane, “I have known a salamander, lives up Tooley Street. He has a sister would eat live coals as some eat sugar plums.”
The Giant thinks, I have known people with claws instead of hands. They terrorise people. Their mother loves them but they murder her, so what then? They go out in the world murdering.
Mrs. Cricklewell bites on a bodkin. Crack, crack, crack. A splinter falls from her lip.
Protect me, thinks the Giant. Breastplate and shield. King Conaire and all his men.
Slig says, “At Petticoat Lane we have a thing called What Is It.”
“And what is it?” Claffey asks.
“That is what you cannot know, nor I divulge. It is a thing beyond decribing. We keep it behind a curtain, and charge extra.”
“Can we see it?” Claffey looks eager.
“That you cannot.”
In the stories, a giant has a cap which makes him disappear. He has slippers that take him around the world in minutes.
What had Bride Caskey said? In England they hunt them down with large dogs.
Negotiations are in progress. The Giant’s price is driving up and up. Heads are whispering together at the Crown on Wych Street. Two hundred, three. John-o near-apoplectic. Howison’s part in this should not be inspected too closely. Slig is planning on extending his cellar empire to the east. Tibor the Terrible hopes to get a new horse out of it. “I’ll call her Jenny,” he says, sentimentally. “Set men closely about him,” Hunter begs.
Says Howison, “They are close.”
Hunter makes an itching motion with his fingers. “I should like to examine him. To see how near the end. But he would not admit me.” He sucks his lip. “Not even for half a crown.”
The Giant: “If only I could get a good poet. Somebody to recite at him. A good poet can recite a man to death. A poet takes a person’s earlobe between his finger and thumb and grinds it, and straight away that person dies. With a wisp of hay and a cross word they drive a man demented. They chew flesh and set it on the threshold and when a man steps over it he drops to his knees and expires.”
The Spotted Boy comes in, bearing a message. It’s late May and he’s shivering. There’s a smoky ring around the pupils of his eyes. Slig looks knowing. “Another for the knacker’s,” he says, when the Spotted Boy goes out.
“God curse him!” cries the Giant. “If he cuts me up, I cannot rise again.”
“But your throne in heaven!” Jankin says. “The cushions of scarlet silk! Stuffed with the down of a thousand swans! Tassels is in it. And jewels the size of soup-plates.”
“Yes,” says the Giant shortly. “It is prepared for me, Jankin, for I never hurt any creature. But if my bones are dispersed, I cannot have it.”
Jankin’s mind is moving slowly, theologically. “And cannot you go to hell either?”
The Giant shakes his head. “I can go nowhere. Nothing is to go. Dead is dead, for me.”
Jankin says, shaken, “I had not thought of this. Does Mr. Hunter know?”
The Giant stared hard at him. “Hunter has no god. What is faith? He cannot anatomise it. What is hope? He cannot boil its bones. What is charity—aye, what is charity, to a bold experimentalist such as he?”
Jankin’s face was white. “I did not realise it, Charlie. That you could not rise.”
“Jankin, would you bury me at sea? Would you place me in a casket of lead?”
Jankin began to weep.
“I did not realise it,” he said. “God forgive me, Charles O’Brien. It is a thing I did not know.”
The Giant rocks himself a little.
He thinks: no person rocked me, I was a giant child. The cradle would have burst.
Here I am: a man grown.
What could his life have been, if he had not been a giant? He might have been a poor scholar, wandering the roads; his cloth satchel on his back, the shape of his books evident through them, so every traveller he met, and every householder whose door he visited would recognise his calling, and any stranger would offer him a place at the hearth. He might have made his life on the roads, a useful man and a hired dreamer, offering his services in each settlement for the writing of letters and the drawing of leases; stopping in some place he liked the look of, to hold school in the hedge and conference under the tree, to dance at the tavern and sharpen his wits on the priest, to court the girls and beat into the boys the principles of geometry and the alphabet in Greek. He might have been a poet and diviner; lying in the dark, his hands crossed over his face to shut out any beam of light: until the light
