by Pat Murphy
“’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.
Charlie tasted it gingerly. “It has more of a bite than whiskey,” he said. “But it does warm me.”
“That it does,” she said. She leaned forward, resting her elbows on the table and looking up at Charlie, wondering what to do with him. An overgrown schoolboy, that’s what he was. “Why don’t you go home, Charlie? Go home to your mother’s farm. You don’t belong here.”
He downed the rest of the glass of gin and shook his head. “My father told me I must bring the Irish home. I cannot go home alone.”
Kathleen shook her head. “The Irish will never go home. We all talk of the green hills and how we long for them, but we remember the famines and the hardships as well. We won’t go back.”
“But you must,” he said, his tone urgent. He had another glass of gin, and told her of falling asleep in the Giant’s Boneyard. He told her of how his father came to him and told him what to do. “He gave me his sword,” Charlie said, gesturing with the staff. “It’s a magic thing. On the ship that carried me from Ireland, I waved my staff and a wind came to blow us to England.” He leaned forward, his face already flushed from the gin. “And when I waved it over the river, the waters parted, leaving a path of dry land.”
Kathleen sipped her gin and listened, watching his broad daft face. He was an innocent and a lunatic, that was clear enough. But she could not help thinking about the stories that her mother had told her when she was a little girl. Legends of giants and heros and magical swords.
Charlie’s story began like an old tale—the enchanted son, the magic sword, the quest.
As Charlie talked, he drank gin, downing glass after glass. With each glass, his words grew louder and made less sense. He was growing agitated. “And the Irish will follow me to the side of the sea,” he said, his voice loud enough to cut through the noise of the tavern. “And I will wave my staff and the waters will par
t before me.” He stood up, knocking over his bench and stretching his hands apart to show how the waters would open to let him through. “We will march across the empty seabed, walking back to the land where we belong.”
“Sit down, Charlie,” Kathleen said. “Calm yourself.”
Around him, the costermongers and apprentices were staring and laughing.
“Come with me,” he called to them, spreading his arms. “Come with me, my people. I will lead you back to Ireland.” The gin had released a passion in him, and he shouted to be heard over the laughter and the rude shouts. “Follow me,” he called to them. “Follow me back to Ireland.”
Kathleen watched him sway just a little, made unsteady by the gin. He lifted his staff, and apprentices scrambled aside for fear of a clouting. Charlie strode into the gap, his head held as proudly as a king. He lifted his staff high, and the crowd parted, leaving him a path that he accepted as his due. “Follow me,” he called, his voice slurred with drink. Kathleen stood to pursue him. The poor fool would never find his way home alone. But the crowd closed in behind him, leaving her to struggle slowly toward the door.
The night air was cold and Charlie was woozy from the gin. He found himself on the street, puzzled that no one had come after him. Surely in the tavern, when they had made way before him, they had planned to follow. But when he looked back, no one was there, not even Kathleen.
He had not meant to drink so much. But the gin had touched the empty spot that had been in his gut since he left Ireland, providing him with warmth and comfort.
When the wind blew, he shivered and shuffled in the direction that he thought might lead to his rented rooms.
His head seemed to have grown large and unwieldy: his feet seemed very far away and very slow in responding to his desires. He managed to walk just a few blocks before he sat down beneath a streetlamp for a little rest. Benumbed by gin, he fell asleep in the gutter.
On the far side of the street, a pair of whores trudged past, carefully picking their way through the garbage and filth from chamberpots. It was getting late, and law-biding citizens were at home in bed, their doors barred against cutthroats and robbers.
A dog ventured from the mouth of an alley where it had been feeding on scraps of garbage. The animal walked with a peculiar lurching gait, its right hind leg having been broken years before by the well-placed kick of a carriage horse. The bone had healed crooked, and the leg no longer touched the ground.
The dog sniffed Charlie. His suit smelled of roasting meat and gin, aromas from the Black Horse Tavern. Attracted by the man’s body heat, the dog curled up by Charlie’s side and went to sleep. In his sleep, Charlie moved a hand to encircle the dog.
For a time, the man and dog slept peacefully. A burning wick in the oil-filled globe that served as streetlamp cast a dim yellow light on Charlie’s face. He smiled in his sleep.
Charlie was dreaming: In his dream, there was music: the singing of larks and the laughter of children filled the air. He was leading a triumphant procession made up of all the Irish who had left the island to seek their fortune in England. He was bringing them home, and they were all dancing after him. The girl who sold flowers was dancing with the rude lad who had called Charlie King of Fools.
The girl’s rags flapped around her legs and her bonnet had fallen back on her head. She and her partner were pale from lack of sun and thin from bad food, but already the sunshine was putting roses in their cheeks again: Everyone was dancing: the prostitute from the tavern; the old woman who sold apples; the mudlarks and the ragged Irish beggars from the streets of London.
Charlie danced at the head of the procession, laughing at the way the old apple seller capered. Overhead, the sky was blue, and the sun was on his face. The earth was warm beneath his bare feet. He led them through the country roads to his mother’s farm, past the fields filled with growing grain, out to the Giant’s Boneyard, where he lay down in the fragrant grass. He belonged here, among the bones of his father. With his head pillowed on his arm, he closed his eyes. In the distance he could hear people laughing and singing.
Someone was calling to him: “Charlie. Charlie Bryne. You can’t just lie there like a great lump. Rouse yourself, man. Wake up.”
Charlie blinked his eyes. Kathleen was shaking him awake. “Wake up, you gin-soaked lump,” she grumbled at him. “The cold will be the death of you if you lie here all night.”
Charlie squinted up at her. “What happened?” he mumbled.
“Where did all the people go?” He stared at the houses around him—tall, gray, and foreboding in the dim light.
“I’ve been looking for you,” Kathleen was saying. “I knew you couldn’t find your way alone. Now where is it you’re living?”
Charlie sat up, groaning with the effort. Disturbed by the movement, the dog that lay beside him stood up, shook itself, and wagged its tail tentatively. Absentmindedly, Charlie reached over and rubbed the animal’s ears.
“I lay down to rest for a time,” Charlie said. “I felt mortally tired, Kathleen.”
“Mortally drunk, more like it. You put away enough gin to fell an ox.”
The dog leaned against Charlie’s side, a small patch of warmth in the chilly night. Charlie’s hand stroked the animal idly. “They didn’t follow me, Kathleen. It seemed to me they would.”
Kathleen reached out and touched his shoulder. “Go back home, Charlie. If you stay here, you’ll die in the gutter with a bellyful of gin.”
He straightened his shoulders. “The old blood runs in my veins. I’ll bring my people back to Ireland.” Then the edge of doubt crept into his voice for the first time. “You believe me, Kathleen. Don’t you?”
“You must get on home,” she said in a weary voice. “Tell me where you live and I’ll walk you there.”
“’Tis right by a cane shop on a narrow street where a man can scarcely see the sky,” Charlie said. “Not so far from Covent Garden.”
“I know the one,” Kathleen said. She held her hand out to him, coaxing him as if he were a wayward child. “Come along, Charlie. I’ll take you home.”
“It isn’t my home,” Charlie said stubbornly. “’Tis a place I live, nothing more.”
“True, but it’s a warm place to sleep, and for tonight you’d best settle for that,” she said. “Now come with me.”
Leaning on his staff, Charlie staggered to his feet. The dog moved away, wagging its tail in earnest. When Charlie stood; Kathleen’s head did not reach his chest. He looked down at her and placed a hand on her shoulder, seeking the warmth of contact with another person as much as the support. Charlie and Kathleen started off down the street, and the dog followed Charlie, trotting easily on all four legs.
Charlie sat in a chair by the fire. He had been on his feet all afternoon, answering questions from the gentry and showing off his size. His head ached with a blinding pain. For the past few days, the world seemed to close in around him when his head ached; his vision narrowed and blackness nibbled at the edges, like the premature coming of night. He closed his eyes for a. moment.
“Hey there, lad,” Vance said. Charlie heard Vance pull another chair close to the fire and sit down. “You all right?”
“I’m cold.”
Charlie heard Vance poke the fire and toss some more coal on the grate. He could see the light of the fire dancing on the inside of his eyelids and feel the heat on his hands. But the warmth did not seem to penetrate the skin. The fire could warm the surface, but his bones were cold. Only the sun and earth of Ireland could warm him deep down. The sun of Ireland or a glass of British gin.
Each night, he went out to the streets to preach to the Irish. There were some who came to hear him each night, a few who believed in him. The old apple seller called him a saint and brought her ailing granddaughter to him for healing. The little flower seller sought him out, but that may have been for practical reasons; she could count on him for a supply of fresh blossoms. The rude young men called him a conjurer, a madman, a fool. The costermo
ngers laughed at him. He offered to show them that he could make the river waters part, but no one would follow him to the riverside. Each evening ended the same way: in the tavern, drinking gin with Kathleen.
He blinked and Vance came into focus. The little man was leaning forward in his chair, peering into Charlie’s face with a considering air. “You’ve been drinking too much, lad. Gin will be the death of you.”
“This country will be the death of me,” Charlie muttered.
“Right you are, lad.” Vance was not paying attention.
He was counting the take. When he handed Charlie his share, he frowned a little.
“Now don’t spend it all on gin,” Vance said. “You’d do well to stay home tonight.”
Charlie stared at Vance. He did not like the man’s proprietary tone. “I will go or stay as I please,” he said slowly.
Vance stopped in the act of gathering up the coins.
“Well sure, Charlie, of course you will. I was just saying, as a friend, that you—”
“I go to the ginhouses to find my people,” Charlie interrupted. “I find them there, drinking gin to warm their bones. They miss the soil of Ireland, though they do not know that’s what it is they’re missing. They feel the hollowness, just as I feel it, and they drink gin to fill it. I go there to find them and bring them home.” He stood up and glared down at Vance.
Vance studied the giant with cold, blank eyes. “Just take care not to sleep in the gutter, lad. Your cough’s getting worse.”
Charlie’s shoulders slumped a little. His head ached and the power had gone from him. “Right you are, Joe. I’ll not sleep in the gutter. I’m sorry, Joe.”
Now that’s enough of Charlie Bryne. Let’s consider John Hunter, a man of science, as different from Charlie Bryne as a man could be. We can begin at Kathleen’s stall in Covent Garden, on a chilly morning just a few weeks after she met Charlie.