Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits - Donoghue [65]
For a foreign child, people said, she was a quick learner of English. She put her hand over her mouth when she felt a cough coming, and she tottered across the deep carpets as if always about to drop. She was seen to express emotions of various kinds, such as gratitude, irritation, mirth, and panic.
The Doctor was less pleased when his measurements showed that she had grown a quarter of an inch.
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Caroline Crachami was now one foot eight inches tall—still, by a good thirteen inches, the smallest female on record. The papers called her the Nations Darling, the Wonder of Wonders. The King took her hand between his finger and thumb, and declared himself immensely pleased to make her acquaintance. He sat her on his footstool and had her thimble filled with a drop of his best port. She coughed and whooped and all the ladies laughed.
After that the crowds swelled and multiplied. Three hundred of the nobility visited her, three thousand of the quality, and as many of the lower sort as could beg, borrow, or steal the price of admission. Gentlemen adored Miss Crachami. Ladies grew jealous, began to call her powdery and withered.
For an extra shilling Miss Crachami could be handled. When sceptical Grub Street men came in, Doctor Gilligan invited them to handle her for free. One gentleman with a stubbled chin picked her up in one hand—she weighed only five pounds—and kissed her. She was seen to wriggle away and wipe her face. He got a highly amusing article out of the episode. Readers were assured that there was every probability of this Progeny of Nature living to an advanced age.
But nothing about Caroline Crachami took long, and her death was particularly quick. That Thursday in June she received more than two hundred visitors. A little langour was noted, and was only to be expected; a little rattle when she coughed. In the coach on the way back to their Duke Street lodgings, while Doctor Gilligan was looking out the window, she dropped soundlessly to the floor and died.
He assumed she was only in a faint. He couldn't believe it was all over.
Given the Doctor's commitment to the furthering of physiological knowledge, what came next was no surprise. He carried the body round to all the anatomists and finally sold it to the Royal College of Surgeons.
Doctor Clift was not the kind of doctor who offered cures. He was an articulator; a butcher in the service of science, or even art. His job was to draw grace and knowledge out of putridity. He needed a delicate touch in this case, as the carcass was so small.
First he cut it open, and learned what he could from the spotted lungs and shrunken organs. Then he chopped the body into convenient and logical sections, just like jointing a hen or a rabbit, and boiled it down. For several days he stirred this human soup and let it stew; finally he poured it away, leaving only the greasy bones. He'd got inured to the smell thirty years ago.
Odd, he thought, that the same people who would retch at the stench of such a soup would line up to drink in the sight of the same bones, once he had strung them together. Such was his artistry. It was the hardest of jigsaw puzzles. All his years of drawing and copying and assembling more ordinary skeletons had prepared him for this. He needed to recall every one of the two hundred and six bones in the body, and recognise their patterns, even on this miniature scale. His eyes throbbed; his fingers ached. He was going to raise a little