Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits - Donoghue [66]
Her parents read of her death in the Cork Inquirer. Mr. Crackham took the night ferry. In London he banged on doors of parish authorities and magistrates' courts, and toured the hospitals and morgues, but all the bodies he was shown were too big: "This is not my daughter," he repeated.
He never caught up with Doctor Gilligan—who'd absconded from his lodgings owing £25—but he did find his way in the end to Surgeon's Hall in Lincoln's Inn Fields. He got to the laboratory a week late. Doctor Clift was putting the final touches to his masterpiece with a miniature screwdriver.
When the Irishman understood what he was looking at, he let out a roar that was not fully human. He tried to throw his arms around his Kitty, but something halted him.
This tinkling puppet was not his anymore, if she had ever been. Her clean, translucent bones were strung as taut as pearls, and her spine was a metal rod. She stood on her tiny pedestal with her frilled knees together like a nervous dancer, about to curtsey to the world. Her ankles were delicately fettered; her thumbs were wired to the looped ribbons of her hips. Her palms tilted up as if to show she had nothing to hide.
Her head was a white egg, with eye holes like smudges made by a thumb. Nine teeth on the top row, nine on the bottom, crooked as orange pips. She grinned at the man who had been her father like a child at a party, with fear or excitement, he couldn't tell which.
How lovely she was.
It occurred to Doctor Clift then, watching as the porters hauled the child's father off howling and kicking, that Kitty's bones would last longer than his own. She was a fossil, now; she had her niche in history. Shortly she would be placed on show in the Museum Hall between tanks that held a cock with a leg grafted onto its comb and a foetus with veins cast in red wax. She looked like a human house of cards, but nothing could knock her down. She would stand grinning at her baffled visitors until all those who'd ever known her were dust.
Note
The girl known as Caroline Crachami died on 3 June 1824, probably from a combination of tuberculosis and exhaustion. But basic facts about this child's nationality, age, medical history, and life before her arrival in England in 1823 are still disputed.
My inspiration and main source for "A Short Story" was a long and highly original article by Gaby Wood, "The Smallest of All Persons Mentioned in the Records of Littleness, "published in the London Review of Books, 11 December 1997, and afterwards in volume form by Profile Books. I also drew on Richard Altick's The Shows of London. Crachami's skeleton, death mask, limb casts, and accessories are displayed in the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons in Lincoln's Inn Fields, London, next to the remains of the Giant, O'Brien.
Dido
I was in the Orangery at Kenwood that June morning, picking plums and grapes. I knew nothing. My name was Dido Bell.
The Orangery smelt of flowers and was warm, as ever; the underfloor was heated with pipes from the bake-house next door. There were orange trees in tubs; they had never borne fruit yet, but my great-aunt and I had hopes for that summer. There were peach trees and myrtles and geraniums, sweet marjoram and lavender. I looked out the long windows, delighting as always in the prospect, the paths of grass and gravel that wound between the ivies and the cedars and the great beeches.
In the Hall, Diana ran along beside her nymphs and hounds; I traced her foot with my fingers. My great-aunt was in her china closet, sorting her collection of Chenise, Derby, Worcester, Sèvres, and Meissen, and not to be disturbed lest she drop something, the housekeeper said. I had nothing particular to occupy myself with that morning, having seen to the dairy and the poultry-yard already. My cousin Elizabeth was out on the terrace, having her portrait painted.