ACT TWO

My name is General Tom Thumb, and I won’t die, I won’t. Not before I have seen my boy.

Lord knows, I’ve thought of ageing often enough in the past few years. Can’t avoid it, in that looking glass, in that ache in my right knee. Can’t avoid it in the Commodore’s face, that fresh rosy insult. But death? Who’d have thought my angel of death would come to me just now, wearing cheap pomade? And like any angel, even the darkest ones, he means well.

I had just left my lovely expectant Lavinia and was alone in the hotel garden, inspecting some undersized grapes on the vine that straggled over the pergola. Maybe I was musing happily about young, scarce-formed things; I don’t know. And then there was Ned Davis, panting as if he’d just run a mile, gabbling a mile a minute, holding his bowler over his chest as if his heart would hop out into it. I sat him down on the step, got him to calm down, asked him what the matter was, and he told me what they were saying: that George deliberately tried to push me from the coach into the Goulburn river. Well, that was no more than I had said at the time, but I was very agitated then, and had thought better of it since. But had I been right after all? Could George really be so jealous of me?

Ned was still talking, about how George was plotting to write me out of the show, working against me both onstage and offstage, how he never lost a chance to lobby Mr B. Of course I just laughed, assured Ned that Mr B never listened to George. But my disquiet was growing, and more so when Ned told me that George had written those dreadful notices of the show himself, and had bribed the newspapers to run them. Why hadn’t I thought of that?

‘We will tell Mr B,’ I said. ‘Then the Commodore will be the one who is out of the show.’

But Ned said no, the Commodore was a desperate man. ‘He wants to be you, sir. He wants your fame and your history and your glory. He wants your wife and your child.’

The moment he said it, I knew it was true. I felt cold to my marrow, and then a rush of electricity. The scheming ratkin. I told Ned I would go to the police at once and nail the villain for slander and attempted murder. But Ned put his hand on my arm, and his fingers had a strong grip. ‘Please, General, hear me out. That’s not all. There are things he says you won’t want the police to know, or anyone else.’

What could be worse? Ned didn’t want to speak then, but I urged him and urged him, and at last, stammering and staring at the ground, he told me. ‘He says you are nothing and he is everything, and you can’t bear it. You can’t understand you’re just a fat old man and people laugh at you in contempt. That your wife secretly laughs at you, that she is disgusted by you. That you are a little squirming pig with a little pink tail that will not rise to do its business.’

I sprang to my feet and clutched the pergola posts. Like Samson, I wanted to bring down the vines upon us.

‘Take care, sir. The Commodore is angry.’

He was angry? How dare he?

Ned lifted his eyes to me. ‘He has asked me to come to you with a challenge. For slandering his good name. For saying he pushed you into the river. I tried to stop him, I begged him —’

‘What kind of challenge?’

Ned swallowed. ‘Pistols.’

A breeze buffeted the pergola, and that’s when I heard it: the beating of angel wings. All my rage froze; I was a stick of ice. I took a vine tendril in my hand and picked off a tiny grape, rolled it very gently between finger and thumb. Ned was on his feet, pacing back and forth, talking and talking, how he would tell the Commodore that of course I didn’t accept his challenge, there was no shame in saying so in this enlightened age, and even if there were, it was better to be called names and thought a coward than to lie wounded on some beach at the end of the world.

I popped the grape into my mouth. It was very sour.

‘Don’t tell him that, Ned. Never fear, truth and right will prevail. I will show him who is the hero and who is the nobody.’

He was silent then, raised his hands in a helpless gesture.

‘You have acted honourably,’ I told him. ‘I will not deal with the Commodore directly, but you can represent me.’

Ned clapped his bowler back on his head, gave a heavy sigh, said he’d be honoured to act as my second, and he knew just the man for the Commodore. ‘Tomorrow, sir, at dawn? It’s as well to do these things as soon as possible. I know of a secluded beach, just the ticket. And we’ll keep it all a secret. Leave it with me.’

I watched Ned walk away, and I fancied for a moment that his shoulders were less bowed than when he had found me. I thought of George’s pistol, Widowmaker. I had never seen him shoot it, but I knew he was rumoured to be a crack shot, or was that just his boasting? Whereas I was no marksman.

I had thought twice before I was going to die, and each time it was water that threatened me. The run and rush of water: that has always brought on my manly surges of electricity, has also been my undoing. But I could not remember how I had felt then. All that remained was a recurring dream, not by any means horrid, of dark velvet waves, and myself sitting on Mr Bleeker’s shoulders to see the sirens.

I placed my hands on my belly. Somehow I knew that this was where George would aim. What would it feel like, to take a bullet in the guts? To have a ball of metal tear through the padding of flesh that had taken years to pack around my person, the comfortable result of all those roasts and desserts and decanterfuls of port? To keel over, to see my last vision on this earth? I hoped it would be light enough to see some sky, a cloud or two, maybe a wheeling bird. On a beach, Ned had said. I’d stood on so many beaches, waiting to embark, waving to crowds, but I had never wandered on a beach by myself, with bucket and spade, perhaps with a curly-haired dog, trailing aimless strands of seaweed.

I held out my hands before me. They wouldn’t stop shaking. I thought of the fire in Mr Barnum’s study, burning my side. The coil of black hair on Lavinia’s forehead. And something I hadn’t remembered for many years: the faded Italy-shaped stain on my mother’s apron, in the days when she wore aprons, the days before she was the amusingly vulgar Mrs Stratton, the days when I wasn’t the General, just little Charlie, who would bury his face in Italy and cry …

Stop it. I won’t die, I won’t. George will never have the gumption to shoot me. He just wants to scare me, he will shoot wide, and he will expect me to run away in terror. What will I do then? It is a godsend, this duel, for I will destroy him.

It is not the past I must think of, but the future. My beloved wife, my tiny little Tommy, the Coming Man, a miniature man in miniature. I want a moment for him, like the night I had at the Théâtre du Vaudeville in Paris, when the danseuses stood in line and lifted their skirts to form an archway with their legs, and I ran down their avenue of honour, laughing and jumping and grabbing like a boy let loose in an apple orchard. Viens, mon petit poucet. I will get him that triumph, the pure joy of those ripe apples, and I will be there to see it, and nobody will stop me, no sir.