Points of Departure (38 page)

“You’re a big ’un,” Tom managed at last.

“I’m my father’s son,” the giant said, leaning on the railing beside Tom. The big man shook his head, staring out at the calm waters. “I have urgent business in London.”

Tom shrugged. “If you want to get there quickly, you have my blessing,” he said disrespectfully. “Call up a wind and blow us there in a hurry.”

The giant did not take offense
at Tom’s tone. “A wind,” he mused. “A wind to blow us away from Ireland.” He moved his hand and Tom noticed, for the first time, the staff he carried. The giant frowned at it, then waved it tentatively out over the rail, swinging it in a circle. A breath of fresh wind puffed against Tom’s face. The giant waved the staff again, smiling now. The wind filled the sails and gently pushed the ship
toward the shore of England.

London was larger than Charlie had expected. So many people, bustling here and there with their own business to attend to. He would have been lost in a minute without Joe Vance. He followed the little man down narrow winding streets, ducking to avoid the wooden signs that hung over shop doorways. Vance threaded his way through the commotion with ease, dodging coaches
and hackneys, pushing past fruit sellers with baskets and barrows, sidestepping odorous puddles of offal and horse dung.

Charlie was hard-pressed to keep up. He saw an Irishwoman selling oranges on the street corner, her black shawl wrapped tight about her shoulders to keep off the cold. He wanted to stop and chat with her, but Vance rushed on and Charlie feared he would lose his guide. He noticed
a young Irish girl selling flowers. But he could not stop to talk, he had to hurry to follow Vance. People stared at him as he passed, called to their friends and pointed to him.

Vance turned from a narrow street into an even narrower alley. The thin strip of evening sky that showed between the tenements was gray with fog; the air was damp and cool. Laundry, strung between the buildings, hung
limp in the still air. A group of boys was playing marbles at the far end of the street. Two pigs slept in a scatter of straw in the gutter. As Charlie passed, the larger animal lifted its head and sniffed the air, its small eyes regarding the giant with a dim sort of recognition.

The alley led to a small courtyard where tall buildings blocked out all but the smallest square of gray sky. Vance
stepped into a hallway that reeked of varnish from the cane shop next door and called up the stairs. The woman who came down shrieked when she saw him—a cry of surprise and delight, mixed with a little bit of chiding.

“Well, it’s Joe Vance, blast your eyes. Where have you been, you no-good scoundrel.”

While Vance and the woman talked, Charlie waited in the courtyard, staring up at the patch
of sky. He heard them murmuring about someone named Peg, and Vance said “God rest her soul,” in an insincere voice. But Charlie paid no attention.

He felt tired and confused. On the ship, he had begun to feel ill at ease, missing the solid warmth of Irish soil beneath his feet. When he had complained to Vance, the little man had attributed the complaint to seasickness and said that the feeling
would go away when he reached solid ground again. But the sickness had remained, a hollowness in his belly, like the emptiness of hunger without the hunger pains. He wore shoes now—Vance had insisted on that when they reached Dublin—and he longed for the touch of honest soil beneath his feet.

“Charlie, come along, lad. Mary will set us up with the rooms we need,” Vance called to him.

Vance seemed
familiar with the house. The woman showed them a furnished sitting room and a bedroom that attached to it. The bedroom was dark and cold, but Charlie just shrugged when Vance asked him what he thought. He barely looked at the rooms, knowing that he would not be in London for so very long. He would gather the Irish, and then be on his way. So it was not worth quibbling about the look of the rooms.

Vance engaged the rooms and then hurried Charlie along, saying that they had many things to do that day. They went to a tailor shop and Vance had Charlie measured for a suit of clothes. Then they went to the office of the Morning Herald where Vance placed an advertisement and ordered handbills to post. “Make ’em say ‘The tallest man in the world.’”

Vance told the clerk. “Eighth wonder of the
world.”

While Vance was talking to the clerk, Charlie stepped outside. He looked down the narrow street. In the distance, he saw the open sky and a spot of green. He left Vance behind, drawn to the greenery.

The River Thames flowed through London, bringing water to the city and carrying away the sewage and refuse.

Charlie walked down the street and found himself on steps leading down to the
river. A tall tree grew on the riverbank, providing a restful spot in the gray stone of the city. In the tree, a bird was singing.

Charlie sat on the stone steps. A sea gull landed beside him and cocked its head from side to side, studying him with one yellow eye and then the other. Charlie smiled at the bird, then tilted his head back so that the sun shone on his face. The river water lapped
gently against the bottom step, whispering comforting words in a language all its own. He rested there, soaking up the warmth of the sun and feeling a portion of his strength returning to him.

Sean was a mudlark, one of the filthy crew who made their living by scavenging bits of saleable refuse from the mud of the River Thames. When the tide was out, he and his two brothers waded into the dirty
water, foraging for bits of rope and old iron to sell to the ragman, or for lumps of coal that their mother could burn.

Sean was seven years old, and he had been mudlarking since he was six. His father, a laborer on the docks, had died after being crushed between two barges. With Sean’s father’s death, the family had fallen on hard times. His mother did char work when she could get it, and all
the children scavenged.

On warm days, it was not so bad to wade in the river: they could clamber from the water and let the sun warm them every now and again. But when the wind blew, there was no comfort for them—just cold mud and cold water and a gray and cheerless sky.

On that sunny day, Sean and his brothers had been both lucky and unlucky. Over by the docks where some men were repairing
a ship, they found a dozen copper nails, worth a half-penny for the lot. That was good luck—but bad luck came with it. Sean had stepped on one of the nails, running it deep into his foot. When the sailors chased them away from the docks; he could scarcely run for the pain. Even now, hours later, his foot throbbed with a hot pain and he hobbled after his brothers, walking on his heel to avoid touching
the wound to the mud.

“Look there,” David, his oldest brother, called. “By the river steps.” The tallest man Sean had ever seen was lounging in the sun on the stone steps that led down to the water. “Come on,” David said. “Let’s go talk to him.”

The three boys approached cautiously, marveling at the size of the man. Their mother had told them stories of the giants who lived in Ireland in the
early days. This man might have emerged from such a story.

Sean was in shallow water just a few yards away from the giant when the man opened his eyes. “Good day, sir,” said David, the boldest of the three. “Have you a penny for some poor lads?”

The giant blinked at them. “A penny?” He shook his head. “Not so much as a penny, though Joe Vance says that I will be a wealthy man soon enough.”

Encouraged by such an amiable response, Sean stepped closer. “You’re very big,” he said. “Are you a giant, like the ones in the stories?”

The man nodded. “My father was a giant. I suppose I’m one too.” He held out his hand. “Come up out of the water if you’d like.” He took Sean’s hand and lifted him from the water. “There now,” he murmured. “Sit down here.”

Sean limped up the steps to sit beside
the giant. His brothers hung back, gaping at him from the safety of the river. But the giant seemed friendly enough.

“What have you done to your foot?” the giant asked him.

“Stuck it with a nail,” Sean said, bending his leg and twisting his foot around so he could examine the wound in the sole. The skin around the puncture had turned a deep purple. The chill of the river water had numbed the
foot somewhat, but when Sean tried to wipe the mud away from the wound, he winced at the stabbing pain.

The giant’s hand closed over Sean’s, engulfing the boy’s hand and foot both. “Don’t poke at it, lad. Let it be, and perhaps I can help.” The giant’s hand was warm and it seemed to soothe the pain.

The boy gaped up at the giant. “Are you a doctor?”

The giant shook his head. “Not a doctor.
But it seems I sometimes have a healing way about me.” He wet his lips.

Suddenly, for all his size, he looked like he was not so much older than Sean. “My father gave me a magic sword,” he said softly, jerking his head toward a stout wooden staff that leaned against the steps beside him. “It has a power to it. You can touch it if you like.”

Sean reached out and fingered the white blossoms that
grew from the wooden shaft.

“Do you come from Ireland?” the giant asked.

Sean shook his head. “My mother came from Ireland. I have never been there.”

“Ah,” the giant said. “But still you are Irish by blood.”

He nodded slowly. “I have come to take the Irish back home. You’ll be coming with me.”

Young as he was, Sean knew the way of the world. He frowned at the giant. “We can’t go to Ireland,”
he said.

“We don’t have money for the fare.”

The giant studied him solemnly, as if this were the first time that he had thought of the fare. “Bran the Blessed once waded across the water between England and Ireland. He could have carried the Irish home—but he was a bigger giant than I am.” He hesitated, frowning. “Maybe we could walk.”

Sean shook his head. “We can’t walk across the sea.”

The giant looked mournful, and Sean cast about in his mind, trying to think of something that might help. “Moses parted the waters,” he said. His mother made a practice of telling them stories from the Bible, on nights when she was not too tired. “Maybe you could do that.”

The giant studied the Thames. He lifted his staff and waved it at the water, as if pushing it back. “Go back,” he rumbled.
“Show me some dry land.”

The water obeyed sluggishly, drawing back away from the base of the steps to reveal the black muck of the bottom. It stopped a few feet from the steps, and the giant waved again, as if herding a reluctant cow. “Go on now. Move yourself.” The water drew back another two feet, forming a smooth green-brown wall that was as smooth and shiny as glass. Sean’s brothers stood
ankle-deep in the mud, gazing at their own feet in amazement.

“Charlie! Where are you, you blasted Irishman? Charlie!”

Hearing an angry voice, the giant lowered his staff. The waters flowed back into place and lapped quietly at the base of the steps. Sean slipped off the steps and returned to the safety of the river. A small man appeared at the top of the steps and shouted again at the sight
of the giant.

“Where have you been, Charlie?”

“Right here by the river,” the giant said with quiet dignity. “Just talking to these lads. They’re from Ireland.”

Vance glared at Sean and his brothers. “Half the mudlarks in London are Irish,” he grumbled. “Come on now, Charlie. We have business to attend to.”

“They are my people, Joe. I’ll be taking them back to Ireland presently.”

Vance nodded
impatiently, but softened his tone.

“Certainly you will, Charlie. But now we must be going.”

Sean watched the giant go. It wasn’t until he followed his brothers that he realized that his foot no longer ached.

That night, he sat by the fire and searched for the wound.

But the sole of his foot was smooth and unblemished; with nary a puncture, a hole, or a scrape.

There are no gardens in Covent
Garden. The square that bore that name was in the heart of London’s West End, in the shadow of St. Paul’s Church and not far from the decaying tenement houses of St. Giles Rookery, a slum inhabited by the Irish. By day, costermongers, people selling fruit and vegetables, filled the square. As they called out their wares, their cries competed with the braying voices of would-be entertainers: a
juggler who sent sharp knives dancing through the air, a Welshman who swallowed live mice and snakes, a man with a monkey that danced on its hind legs to the music of a handcranked organ, another with a chicken that walked a tightrope.

In nearby Drury Lane, gentlemen wagered on the cockfights. In the coffeehouses, gamblers favored games that depended on the spin of a wheel or the toss of the
dice, playing roulette and faro, brag and basset, crimp and hazard and rolypoly. For those gamblers with money to spare at evening’s end, the south side of the square offered Mother Needham’s and Mother Cole’s, well-known among London’s brothels.

An Irishwoman named Kathleen had a stall in Covent Garden. Her face was pretty enough—she had even features and her eyes were the color of the ocean
caught in a tidepool. But most people didn’t notice her eyes or her face. Instead, their gazes lingered on the hump that rose from her back like the pack on a peddler. Kathleen was born with a twist in her back, and with this she made her living.

She read palms and told fortunes. Her stall was not far Tom King’s Coffeehouse where gentlemen gambled, and many a gambler came to touch her hump for
luck. Sometimes they asked her if they should gamble that night. She would study their palms and give them advice. “Not tonight, Your Grace. There’s a bad look to the moon and the luck is not with you.” “Stick to the wheel: The dice will be against you.” Maids, out shopping for fresh fruit, would give her a penny to tell them about handsome young men. “His heart is false, dearie,” she told them.
“Look elsewhere for your true love.”

On a sunny morning, she sat on a stool outside her stall, letting the warmth of the day soak into her bones. The weather had changed from foul to fair, and the changes made her hump ache with a deep abiding pain. She had smeared on a salve that a patterer had claimed would heal any misery, but the ache remained.