Points of Departure (39 page)

Above the cries of farmers hawking their vegetables,
she heard a trill of birdsong. She looked to see if someone had caged birds to sell. The men with caged birds and the boys with nests to sell were the first and sometimes the only signs of spring in London.

When she heard the song again, she looked up and saw a songbird perched on the pole that supported her rain cover. He tilted back his head and loosed another sweet song.

“Look there,” an
apple seller cried. When she looked toward the voice, she saw a man who towered above the rest of the crowd. He wore the garb of a country lad and carried a walking staff decorated with hawthorn blossoms.

“That’s right, look sharp, lads,” said the small man who walked beside the giant. “My name’s Joe Vance and this is Charlie Bryne, the Irish giant, descendant of kings. I’ll wager you’ve never
seen his like before. Tell your friends to come and see him. On display every day except Sunday.”

While the small man shouted his pitch, the tall man glanced at the crowd, clearly a little bewildered by all the noise and confusion around him. If it hadn’t been for his size, he would have looked like a schoolboy, visiting the big city for the first time.

When Kathleen smiled at him, he smiled
genially back.

“Good day to you,” she called to him. “Would you have your fortune told, Charlie Bryne? No charge for the descendant of kings.” Telling his fortune for free would be worth her while, she knew, attracting attention to her and bringing her business after he was gone.

He came to her, the crowd moving aside before him like wheat before the wind. “Where in Ireland are you from?” he
asked, his voice a deep grumbling that blended with the noise of the crowd.

“My parents came from County Cork,” she said. “But I have been in England since I was just a babe.”

He held out his hand and she took it. His skin was warm and rough, like a boulder that had been warmed by the sun. The lines on the palm were etched deep, like cracks in a granite boulder.

“Someone is looking for you,”
she said. “You have a secret he wants.”

“I have no secrets,” Charlie said.

“Someone wants something you have. There will be pain and sorrow, and you will die far from home.”

He shook his head stubbornly. “That cannot be,” he rumbled. “I promised my father that I would return to Ireland.” He smiled down at her. “I will take you with me.”

Vance called to Charlie then, shouting across the crowd.

He squeezed Kathleen’s hand gently. When he walked off through the crowd, the songbird followed, circling the giant. After he left, Kathleen realized that her hump no longer ached. For a time, she was free of the pain.

The clock on the mantel struck eight and Joe Vance moved into the crowd. “That’s the end of today’s visiting hours, ladies and gentlemen. Come again tomorrow. The amazing Irish
giant will be accepting visits from the gentry from eleven to three and from five to eight each day. Tell your friends.”

Charlie stood by the fire and watched the crowd leave the room, glad to see them go. For the past four hours, he had answered the same questions over and over again: he was twenty years old; he stood eight foot two inches in his stocking feet; his foot was fifteen inches long.

He was uncomfortable in his new suit. The tailor had cut it too tight in the chest and shoulders. Whenever Charlie took a deep breath, the seams threatened to split.

Joe Vance had advised him to breathe shallowly.

Joe Vance sat in one of the chairs by the fire and spilled a handful of coins onto a kerchief that he had spread on the hearth rug. He was counting out Charlie’s share: one-quarter
of the take. Vance took the rest. He had explained to Charlie that out of this share he took care of all the necessities of business—paying the rent, arranging to have young boys hand out advertisements in the streets and so on.

Firelight reflecting from the coins sparkled in Vance’s eyes. He finished counting and pushed a small stack of coins toward Charlie. Charlie picked up the coins and jingled
them in his hand.

“There you go, enough money to keep you busy for the night, eh?” Vance grinned at Charlie and slipped the rest of the take into his money pouch. “Now I’ll be I off—I have business to attend to.” He winked at Charlie and hurried off. In the dark bedroom, Charlie took off his new suit and his new shoes, and put on his comfortable old homespun clothes. The hawthorn flowers that
bloomed on his staff perfumed the room with the fresh scent of spring. He took the staff in hand and set out to find the Irish and do his father’s bidding.

Night was settling over London as he left his rooms and made his way down the dark alley toward Covent Garden.

Here and there, an oil lamp in a doorway illuminated the threshold of a shop. Charlie kept to one side of the narrow street, ducking
beneath the hanging wooden shop signs. A few industrious shopkeepers had scattered cobblestones in front of their doorways. The stones, embedded in the hard-packed dirt of the alley, hurt Charlie’s bare feet.

The street opened into a square crowded with stalls and people. The air was loud with the cries of sellers. “Chestnuts, penny a score!” “Apples! Fine ’ating apples!” “Oysters, three for
a penny. Fine and fresh. Oysters!”

A candle cast an uncertain light over a vegetable stall. The hot coals of the chestnut seller’s stall shone with a hellish glow, painting the passersby as ruddy as devils. The oyster seller’s makeshift stall was beneath a streetlamp. The wick in the oil-filled globe cast a puddle of feeble yellow light. The flickering light distorted people’s faces, making them
looked pinched and angry.

Three gentlemen hurried through the square—swell gamblers by the look of them, on their way to a coffeehouse or a bordello. A young girl, no more than eight years old, trotted after them, calling out, “Please, gentlemen, do buy my flowers. Do buy a bunch please.” As she passed the oyster seller’s stall, the child lost her footing, tripping over a pothole in the street.
She bumped into the stall and fell, dropping her flowers and knocking half a dozen shellfish into the street.

She was in the mud, scrambling after her fallen bouquets, when the oyster seller swore and lifted his hand to cuff her. In the flickering light, his face looked frozen and masklike, as if all human feeling had left him.

“Here now,” Charlie called out. He stepped between the man and
the child. “She didn’t mean you any harm.”

The oyster seller glared up at Charlie. “Blasted Irish whelp,” he muttered, but he lowered his hand and stepped back, putting his stall between himself and the giant, clearly fearful.

Turning to the little girl, Charlie found her on her knees in the mud, gathering up her flowers. The blossoms were muddy and battered, and the child was weeping as she
tried unsuccessfully to brush the filth from the bouquets.

He squatted beside her. “Now, lass,” he murmured, not knowing what to say, “Come now, don’t cry.”

She ignored him, continuing to inspect her flowers through her tears. Charlie studied her a moment, then held out his staff, where the hawthorn flowers still bloomed.

“Look here, lass. You can pick a new bouquet right here.”

She glanced
up and Charlie helped her to her feet.

“There’s a lass,” he said, still holding out his staff. His legs were tired from squatting, and so he plucked the child from the mud and lifted her, supporting her on one arm.

He held the staff in his other hand, where she might easily reach the blossoms. “Pick a bouquet,” he urged her.

A few passersby, intrigued by Charlie’s size, had stopped to watch
him argue with the oyster seller. They lingered to watch the girl pluck flowers from the giant’s staff. She picked a bunch and bound them together with a dirty bit of string that she pulled from some hidden pocket in the rags that served as her clothes. She picked another bunch, larger than the first. The watching crowd grew larger.

Though clearly the staff should have been plucked bare, it was
as thick with flowers as ever.

The girl picked a third bunch of flowers working awkwardly with her right hand while her left arm cradled an enormous bouquet: Her arms were full when the giant set her down, and yet the staff still bore a crown of white blossoms. As the little girl passed among the crowd, selling flowers to people who marveled at how sweet and fresh they were, the crowd watched
Charlie expectantly, awaiting his next trick.

“’Tis a miracle,” murmured an elderly Irish apple seller. She wore her shawl over her graying hair and clenched a pipe in her teeth.

“It’s nothing but a conjurer’s trick,” said a dapperly dressed young gentleman. “A very clever one, I admit. How do you do it, man?”

Charlie blinked at him, a little confused. “What do you mean?”

“Where did the flowers
come from?” the man asked impatiently.

“From the soil of Ireland,” Charlie said, giving as honest an answer as he knew how.

The man snorted in disbelief. “They never give away a trick,” he said to the lady beside him. Before Charlie could speak again, the man reached out and took the staff from Charlie’s hand to examine it. When the staff left Charlie’s hand, the flowers wilted. Their petals
showered to the ground, like an early snowfall. When Charlie took the staff back, the blossoms returned, fresh flowers opening where no buds had even been visible.

“Trickery,” the man said, and pushed away through the crowd, the lady on his arm.

“Let us have another trick,” said a lad in the crowd. He was a ragged young man, bold because he was surrounded by his mates, who were as ragged and
dirty as he was. “Conjure us something.”

Charlie looked around at the crowd, not knowing what to do. “I don’t know any tricks. I have come here from Ireland to bring the Irish home.”

“Home to Ireland?” The bold lad made a rude sound, and his companions laughed. “I’d sooner go to blazes than go to Ireland.”

“But you must go home,” Charlie said. “The land, it needs you back.”

“The land needs
me,” one of the lad’s companions scoffed. “And what about what I need?”

“The land will give you what you need,” Charlie said, confident as could be.

Another of the young men laughed. “I need a fine suit of clothes and a gold watch. Will the land give me that?”

The first lad shouted, “I need a coach and four fine horses. Will the land give me that?”

“I need a house in the country!”

“I need
a roast goose for dinner!”

“I need five gold guineas!”

Charlie shouted above them. “These are not the things you need. You don’t understand. I have come to take you back where you belong. You must listen to me.”

But the crowd would not listen. Their pleasure seemed to border on hysteria: half of them were drunk; the others would like to be. Their laughter was not genuine and easy; it had a
frantic edge to it.

“Do not waste yourselves in this foul city where you can’t see the sky.” Charlie’s voice boomed over the babble of the crowd. “Come back to the island where you were born! Come with me!”

“And who are you to tell us what we must do?” shouted the first lad.

“I am my father’s son,” Charlie bellowed above the noise. “My father was a king. He sent me here.”

“A king, you say?”
The ragged lad laughed. “King of the beggars!”

Charlie protested, shaking his head. “No, a king of Ireland. He fought and—”

“King of the Vagabonds!” another young man cried.

“King of the Fools!” shouted a third.

“Aye, that is it,” cried the first lad, taking up the shout.

“King of the Fools! That is what we have.” They surged around him, laughing and pulling at him, like a flock of starlings
harrying a raven. “King of the Fools!”

They crowned him with a garland of watercress, snatched from a vegetable seller. They dressed him in a rude cape of flour sacking, grabbed from the protesting baker. They would have done more, but a policeman came to stop the merriment, and the lads left Charlie sitting in the mud not far from Kathleen’s stall.

Kathleen found him there when she stepped
out to see what all the noise was about. Charlie was leaning against a wall on the edge of the square, the flour sacks around his neck, the garland drooping over one eye. He still clung to his staff.

Kathleen took pity on him, helping him from the mud, taking the garland from his head, using her kerchief to wipe the muck from a cut he had somehow gotten beneath his eye.

“What is it you did,
to make those rowdy boys treat you so rudely?” she asked him.

He shook his head, obviously still bewildered by it all.

“I only told them that I had come to bring them home to Ireland.”

Kathleen dabbed at his wound, making exasperated sounds beneath her breath. He was like a big child, he was. “Bring them home to Ireland? You’ll have to tie them up and put them in a box for that. They’ll not
go willingly.”

He shivered in the cold of the night fog, shaking his head. “I don’t understand these people. This place has changed them. This place makes people hard, scarcely people at all.”

She shook her head. “They’re people, right enough. People trying to make their way in a hard cruel world.”

“’Tis a cold place, London. I have not been warm since I left Ireland,” Charlie muttered.

He
looked so mournful and hangdog. She cast about for a way to cheer him. “There are ways to warm yourself, Charlie. I’ll show you a way out of the cold. We’ll stop a bit at the Black Horse Tavern. You’ll find more Irish there, right enough.”

The Black Horse Tavern was crowded and noisy, ringing with the shouts of drunken young costermongers playing at cards, dice, and dominoes. A whore who had
paused to warm herself with gin was laughing at a bawdy joke; a pimple-faced apprentice stared at her half-exposed breasts and grinned. The air was close with the greasy aroma of roasting mutton.

Kathleen found them a place to sit at a rude wooden table and waved a hand to a serving man. “Gin will warm you,” she muttered. “It’ll warm you as you’ve never been warmed before.”

The man brought them
two glasses of gin, and she sipped at one. The liquor stung her lips and the biting aroma brought tears to her eyes, but it warmed her. A glass or two, and the pain in her hump would ease, the ache in her bones would subside. The gin was medicinal, she reckoned, and that was why she drank it. “It’s a foul drink, but it eases a person,” she said to Charlie.