Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits - Donoghue [64]
Hold it. Linger on the picture. Here, before poverty and ambition began to pose their questions, before strangers started knocking on the door, before the beginning of the uneasy vigil that would last four years. Here for one moment, silence in the small hot room in Cork: a private wonder.
Mr. and Mrs. Crackham named their daughter Kitty.
She could not be said to have had a childhood. Her whole life was lived in proportion to her body—that is, in miniature; infancy, youth, and adulthood passed as rapidly as clouds across the sun. She was never exactly strong, in her body or her head; she was never exactly well. But Kitty Crackham did have pleasures to match her pains; she liked bright colours, and fine clothes, and if she heard music she would tap the floor with her infinitesimal foot.
At three years old she was one foot seven inches tall, and seemed to have given up growing. She never spoke, and the cough shook her like a dog. Doctor Gilligan assured the Crackhams that the air of England was much more healthful to children than that of Ireland, especially in tubercular cases such as little Kitty's. He offered to take her over the sea himself. He mentioned, only in passing, the possibility of introducing the child to certain men of science and ladies of quality. A select audience; the highest motives: to further the cause of physiological knowledge. It might help somewhat to defray the costs of her keep, he added.
Such kindness from a virtual stranger!
The Crackhams packed their daughter's tiny bag and sent her off with Doctor Gilligan, but not before he'd given them three months' rent.
Later they wished they'd said no. Later still, they wished they'd asked for twice as much. They had four other children, all full-size, all hungry.
The child was silent on the coach to Dublin, and on the ship too, even when the waves stood up like walls. The Doctor couldn't tell if she was weak-witted, or struck dumb by loss. Certainly, she was no ordinary girl. Their fellow travellers gasped and pointed as the Doctor carried Kitty Crackham along the deck in the crook of his arm. He pulled up her hood; it irked him that all these gawkers were getting a good look for free.
After dinner, when he'd thrown up the last of his lamb chops, his mind cleared. It struck him that the girl's tininess would seem even more extraordinary if she were, say, nine years old instead of three. To explain her speechlessness, he could present her as an exotic foreigner. By the time they docked, he'd taught her to stagger towards him whenever he called Caroline.
It was Caroline Crachami, the Dwarf from Palermo, who landed at Liverpool in the year 1823: "the smallest of all persons mentioned in the records of littleness," the Doctors pamphlet boasted. In a fanciful touch he was rather proud of, the pamphlet suggested that her growth had been blighted in the womb by a monkey that had bitten Signora Crachami's finger.
The first exhibition, at Liverpool, drew barely a trickle of punters, but Doctor Gilligan forced himself to be patient. On to Birmingham, where the crowd began to swell, then Oxford. Town after town, room after room, month after month. Each of the child's days was crammed with strangers so big they could have crushed her with an accidental step. Such excitement in the eyes of these Brobdingnagians, now their Gulliver had come at last. Some called her she; others, it. Doctor Gilligan took to wearing a Sicilian moustache and calling her my darling daughter.
She made her audiences doubt their senses and cry out in delight. How strong she made them feel—but also, how clumsy. They could hardly bear to think of a child being so small and brittle, so they called her the Sicilian Fairy. As if a newborn baby had risen magically from her cradle and dressed herself to parade before them; as if her powers were in inverse proportion to her size, and she could fly out of any danger! She was the doll they had always wished would come to life.
In London Doctor Gilligan tested