God's Fool (16 page)

In this essential task, of course, Hunter and Coffin played their part. An appropriately severe-looking man with a long, horse like visage made even longer by the kind of side whiskers General Burnside would make popular half a century later, Captain Coffin had changed considerably since our days on the
Sachem
. Then, much to the crew’s amazement, he would invite us to his stateroom, where he would try to teach us how to play chess, or show us the collection of curiosities he had collected on his travels. Now, increasingly taciturn and irritable, he hardly spoke to us at all except to demand a change in our clothing or our manner, or to mumble into his sherry about wasted days spent “dribbling over a countess.”

Initially, it was Robert Hunter who came to our aid, who insisted, over Coffin’s complaints, that the carriage be made available to us, who seemed the more willing of the two to give us some measure of liberty. Feeling, perhaps, some remorse for the way he had behaved in the past (or believing he could afford to be magnanimous, given how things had turned out), he genuinely appeared, from the time we stepped aboard the
Sachem
, to have nothing but our best interests in mind. More than once, where some small matter was concerned, he intervened on our behalf. Where once he had seemed oily by nature, instinctively disingenuous, he now appeared refreshingly direct, blunt to a fault. Gone, or nearly so, were the pious exclamations that had pocked his speech at every turn; gone, too, the painful mannerisms, the little flatterings and insincerities we had come to despise so much. In their place now was a businesslike matter-of-factness we could deal with and even respect.

With the four of us sitting like equals in the captain’s comfortable stateroom, all dark wood and polished brass, he had explained—at length and without a hint of condescension—what we might expect in the year to come, how our business arrangements would be worked out, why, given his and Coffin’s expenses, income from our appearances would be divided forty-forty-twenty, and under what future circumstances
that might change in our favor. Eng, who had a head for such things, and whose ability with numbers never failed to amaze me, said that it seemed, on the face of it, a fair arrangement, and given our situation, even generous.

Had they lived up to it, it might have been both; as it was, it was neither. We were shown books and figures that made no sense, quoted sums for expenses that a child would have found absurd. When we demanded our share of the receipts, we were told they were unavailable, that they, Hunter and Coffin, had taken the liberty of investing them for us, and that, in any case, we would not receive the balance of our money, as per our contract, until such day as the partnership was dissolved. When Eng complained that we had signed no such agreement, they laughed, incredulous, and airily waved a piece of paper in our faces, a copy of which, they said, was on record with their solicitors at Evans, Lamberton.

They did not know—though they could certainly guess, they said—who could have put such notions in our heads. (Insulting, they were, damned insulting, said Coffin, taking his pipe from his mouth and promptly growing purple in the face as though a valve had been shut, while Hunter, next to him, simply shook his head, averring there must be “some misunderstanding.”) Did we truly believe we were being cheated, after all they had done for us? They couldn’t understand how we could think such things. Still, as it appeared we were serious, they felt it their duty to inform us that power and precedent (as well as the natural sympathy of the courts, given our, ah, respective stations in life, shall we say) were all on their side. Should their reputation as honest businessmen be challenged, they would have no choice but to defend themselves with all the means at their disposal; they could assure us that Evans, Lamberton, who played the Court of Chancery like a flute, would … well, there was no need to bring up unpleasantness that would surely never come to pass. The contract which we so mysteriously did not remember signing—though sign it we both most certainly had, and with pleasure—was legal and binding. In the fullness of time, if we could but curb the natural impatience of youth, we would receive
our money, and a pretty sum it would be. How much? That would be hard to say.

Where could we go? Sophia, fighting on a hundred fronts, would not have been able to help us, even if we had been willing to ask her. In our desperation we turned to Dumat. He listened carefully, a worried look on his face, as Eng listed the facts of the situation—the head counts, the estimated receipts, the likely expenses we had been quoted by third parties—then promised to look into it for us. “If this is true … but no, I cannot believe it. Still, what you say is most troubling, my friends. I need hardly add that as a business associate of Monsieur Coffin and Monsieur Hunter, I, too …” Sharply tugging down the corners of his waistcoat, he seemed to snap to attention. “I shall look into this matter at once,” he said, his trim little beard fairly bristling with indignation. “Rest assured, my friends, they shall not pull the cloth over the eyes of Emmanuel Dumat.”

Of that I have no doubt, if only because they needed his help in pulling it over ours. A week later he was back. “You will be relieved to hear, my friends, that your fears are entirely unfounded,” he announced, perching awkwardly on the edge of a chair in our cramped rooms. While Messieurs Hunter and Coffin were, admittedly, not the most sophisticated of men, he believed them to be essentially honest in their dealings with us. He had taken them to task most directly, most directly, and had left convinced that both gentlemen, while certainly not averse to making a profit, had only our best interests in mind. Though hurt by our accusations, they bore us no ill will, and, in fact, cherished an almost fatherly affection for us both; indeed, he felt compelled to add that, just as in real families, in which the strongest feelings often bespeak the strongest bonds, here, too, the harsh words, the wounded feelings, even the anger with which they had responded to our accusations, were but proof of their regard. And so on.

Though it was particularly difficult for Eng, who took great pride in his business sense, and who for well over a year now had been pacifying himself with the thought of our growing fortune, patiently trading in
each indignity for its worth in coin, we neither of us let on that we knew where matters stood. We dissembled like masters (it certainly
was
a relief to us both; how simple it was to misunderstand the motives of others when far from home …) and immediately began collecting evidence of our own, quietly writing down dates and figures and monies received in a small, pocket-sized notebook Sophia gave us during one of our visits, preparing for the day when we should take our stab at freedom.

IV.

It was not to be. The jailers, as it turned out, would escape before their prisoners. Once before we had rejected Hunter’s advances only to be forced by circumstances to beg his forgiveness. This time, however, we were not even given the chance to atone for his sins, to reinstate ourselves in his good graces. Perhaps it is just as well. He had forgiven us the first time because he had stood to gain by it. This time, we had nothing he wanted. He and Coffin had shelled the nut.

When I recall the arc of our fortunes in Europe that year I see a short, sharp peak—glorious and dizzying—followed by a long downward plunge. An Alp. A veritable Zugspitz of easy success and utter humiliation. For nearly eight months—a time so heady and disorienting we could hardly take any pleasure from it—we were entertained by heads of state, welcomed in the homes of the wealthy and the well connected, introduced to ministers and dignitaries, barons and baronesses whose names we could hardly pronounce, much less remember. In London we were presented to His Majesty King George IV (I remember a coughing, yeasty-looking man), then exhibited at the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly before “the most eminent professors of Surgery and Medicine in the Metropolis.” This august body, to whom we were introduced as we sat in the center of the stage on a red divan (Hunter leading them forward one by one, strewing the path with flatteries), collectively pronounced
us not only genuine (“a wonderful caprice of nature”) but assured the public that the sight of us would be quite inoffensive to even the most delicate sensibilities.

The gentlemen of the fourth estate concurred: “In their figure, countenance, manners and movements, there is nothing that can offend the delicacies of the most fastidious female,” we read in
John Bull
. “Without being in the least disgusting or unpleasant, like most monstrosities,” wrote the reporter for the
Universal Pamphleteer
, “these youths are certainly among the most extraordinary freaks of nature we have ever witnessed.” The
Times
agreed. So did the
Mercury
. Indeed, to judge by the blizzard of letters, testaments, speculations, and scientific reports our appearance in London elicited, there was hardly a soul in England at that time, living or dead, who did not have an opinion regarding us. If living, they published it; if dead, they communicated their feelings by proxy.

Ours was, truly, the well-examined life. In a paper presented to the Royal College of Surgeons in London, Dr. Robert Buckley Bolton reported that “the tongue of Eng is at all times whiter than that of Chang, and his digestion more easily deranged by unsuitable diet. Moreover Chang, by his own testimony, has never passed a day without alimentary discharges, but the contrary has often occurred in Eng.” From these humble particulars Dr. Bolton then proceeded on, by a series of daring leaps that must surely have amazed his audience, to the underlying nature of form. We had never thought of ourselves as apertures onto the hidden laws of organology.

Nor was our fame limited to the world of science. In letters to the editors of newpapers and magazines published across the length and breadth of England, men we had never met speculated about the significance of our single navel, wondered whether the appellation “monstrosity” was properly applicable to us or only “to those preternatural births that are analogous to animals,” dilated on what a mournful sight it was “to behold two fellow-creatures thus fated to endure all the common evils of life, while necessarily debarred from the enjoyment of many of its chief delights.”

“This link which unites them,” wrote the reporter for the
Examiner
, firmly grasping the udders of pathos in his turn, “is more durable than that of the marriage tie—no separation can take place, legal or illegal—no Act of Parliament can divorce them, nor can all the power of Doctors’ Commons release them from their bond. Taken, poor fellows, from their native land, doomed to pass their lives in a species of slavery, to be dragged about to all parts of the world, exposed to the painful vicissitudes of climate, can we wonder that their expressions, when we saw them on Tuesday, were less than cheerful?” We considered writing the young man to inform him that our somberness that evening had been due less to the vicissitudes of climate than to certain unmentionable alimentary concerns best understood by Dr. Robert Buckley Bolton of the Royal College of Surgeons, but refrained.

And yet, however gratifying our audiences with the crowned and nodding heads of Europe, however touching the minor avalanche of letters mourning our fate, these did not yet represent the high-water mark of our fame. Our correspondents, you see, did not limit themselves to prose; for a time, like tulips blooming under the feet of the Magi, verse—or something like it, at any rate—flowered wherever we walked. Of the dozens of poems penned on our behalf, I managed to save two, neatly folded in the small blue notebook in which we had begun to accumulate evidence of Hunter’s and Coffin’s crimes. Thus, to the
Sunday Times
of London, on April 4, 1830, had come the following:

My yellow friends! and are you come,
As some have done before,
To show the sign of “Two to one,”
And hang it o’er your door?

How do you mean your debts to pay?
Will one discharge the other’s?
Or shall you work by subterfuge,
And say, “Ah, that’s my brother’s”?

For well we know if one by chance
To Fleet or Bench is sent,
The other would an action bring
For
false imprisonment
.

Have you the consciences to sit,
And when your eating’s done,
Rise up and “pay the piper,” but
Pay only as for one?

This was lovely, and in the years to come, would be a particular favorite of Gideon’s, who would commit it to memory, and greet us at his door with the opening verse. Even then I admired the anvil like tread, the sonorous music of its language, those whimsical italics. Still, as
literature
, I much preferred the second, which Coffin had neatly clipped from the pages of the
Literary Gazette
.

If in the pages of Holy Writ we find
That man should not divide what God has joined,
O why, with nicest skill, should science dare
To separate this Heaven-united pair?
United by a more than legal band,
A wonder wrought by the Creator’s hand!

A good question. Why, indeed?

From London, where we had enjoyed the sights of Covent Garden Theatre and the Baker Street Bazaar, Grosvenor Square and Grub Street, we moved on to Bath and Windsor, Reading and Oxford, Birmingham and Liverpool, then boarded a carriage to Scotland. Glasgow and Edinburgh passed in a blur of wayside lodgings and public coaches. The roads were pitted and hard as bone, then soft as rotting fruit. The scenery bumped and jolted by, the hours passed. We spent weeks, it seemed, in the wheeze and rattle of Coffin’s snores, staring at his open
mouth, a small, wet cave nearly obscured by the wiry thicket of his whiskers. Bored, we poked each other and whispered while Hunter, sitting ramrod straight, forever snuffing after profit like a pig after truffles, scribbled away as best he could on a makeshift desk that fit over his lap. Preceded by a man named Hale, whom Hunter had hired to secure accommodations and exhibition halls and to paper our route with billboard advertisements extolling the wonders of the “Double Siamese Boys,” we had little to worry about from dawn to dark.