Mary Toft; or, the Rabbit Queen

by Dexter Palmer

  The silver in Joshua’s eyes brightened. “I know what I see,” he said, his voice rising. “We have had three children before this—James, and the girls Clara and Bridget, both taken by the smallpox two years back. I am no fool. Sir.”

  “I did not intend to suggest you were,” said John. “I offer you my sincerest apologies, once again. But you do see the problem here, all the same? The situation presented to me requires either strange biology, or new mathematics; I refuse to ponder the latter, and cannot find any justification for considering the former. There must be some mistake; the facts must not be as they seem.”

  Joshua became still more anxious, twisting his cap in his hands, biting his lower lip, knocking his knees against each other. “There is…something else,” he said. “This is a matter of shame for me; when I tell you of it, I fear you will come to the wrong conclusion, and call me the fool I say I’m not.”

  “Speak freely, Joshua: I am a doctor, not a judge. And these walls have overheard more confessions than you can ever know, from patients who contracted their illnesses through sins beyond most men’s ability to forgive.” John spread his arms in magnanimity. “I promise you: your secrets will remain within this room.”

  Joshua sat in silence for nearly a full minute, and John thought it wisest to stay silent as well, and wait. Then, with a long, heavy sigh, Joshua said, “Since the…exclusion…I have not…lain with my wife. But I tell you: I am no cuckold, either, and Mary is not one for adulterous intrigues. I know her mind as I know my very own.”

  John frowned. “Whether or not this is the case—”

  “It is not!”

  “I believe you. As I intended to say—whether or not this is the case, adultery would not resolve the basic impossibility of what you claim. Though it is true that the lack of adultery makes the situation even more confusing.”

  “There is…still more I might reveal,” said Joshua, his voice barely above a whisper.

  “Friend, you need not parcel out the details of this case in such a parsimonious manner,” John replied. “The knowledge only has value after I’ve received it.”

  “You may perhaps not find this credible, sir. My wife…these past few months, she…talks in her sleep. Mumbling, but also…curses. The foulest language. I can’t bring myself to repeat it. And, a few weeks ago, she began to weep in her slumber. Each night, without fail, I am awakened by her sobs. In the morning I ask her about her troubled sleep, and she remembers nothing.”

  “It seems that the two of you have failed to put the past behind you,” said John. “All of what you describe to me—the illusion of a pregnancy by which you are both convinced; the ceasing of your marital relations; the woman troubled by dark dreams—all this suggests to me that neither of you has brought yourself to accept the unfortunate loss of your child a few months ago. I fear, Joshua, that you and your wife have indulged in a mutual comforting fantasy, in an attempt to recover—”

  Joshua leaned forward. “Sir. She weeps not tears, but blood. In the morning I see the evidence on her face: twin tracks of red, leading back from the corners of her eyes to her ears. And spots of blood on our bedding as well.”

  John Howard stared at Joshua in silent shock.

  “For months now,” Joshua continued, “I have attempted to turn a blind eye to these details, for they were too bizarre for me to comprehend, and I could only hope that they would somehow vanish just as they came. Her restless sleep; her bloody tears; her complaints of the symptoms of pregnancy, despite the fact that relations between us have grown cold, and her belly has not swollen. But she tells me, this morning, that a child is ready to come, and I believe her. I do not understand what I see, but I can no longer pretend that I do not see it.

  “And sir—I am terrified.”

  * * *

  *

  “Remain here for a moment,” John said to Joshua; then he stood, left the office, and crossed the hallway to his surgery room, where Zachary was perched on the operating table, reading a small, leather-bound copy of Tauvry’s A New Rational Anatomy. (John glanced at the chapter title on the open page, “On the Sense of Love,” and reminded himself that he would have to explain to Zachary that just because certain parts of the body did not have functions that made for salacious reading did not mean that they were unimportant. It would be good for the boy to spend as much time contemplating spleens as he did testicles.) “Did you overhear our conversation in the other room?” he said.

  “Much of it,” said Zachary, which of course meant All of it.

  “It is…quite unusual. I have as little understanding of this as the man who has paid us a visit—perhaps even less. But you and I will attend this woman. I expect that this mystery will resolve itself the moment I lay eyes on her, and that treatment of the mind and soul are required here, rather than ministry to the body.

  “But one never knows.” John sighed, and then a wry smile bloomed on his face. “Perhaps we will witness something wonderful today.”

  | CHAPTER IV.

  A BIRTH.

  The Tofts’ home was a mile and a half distant from Godalming’s center, a thirty-minute journey on foot. Joshua Toft had a long, lurching stride, kept a brisk pace, and wasn’t one for idle conversation, and so he soon drew far enough ahead of Zachary and John for the two of them to speak together in low voices without concern for being overheard.

  The worn leather satchel that contained the tools of the surgeon’s profession bounced against Zachary’s leg as he carried it. Concealed among them was one of the rarest of medical implements, which John Howard kept under lock and key apart from all his others, only bringing it out in circumstances such as these: “midwifery forceps,” which Howard had obtained through means that he refused to describe. The forceps had been a tightly held secret of the legendary Chamberlen family of surgeons for, Howard guessed, sixty years or more; Howard judged that the tool was the key to the Chamberlens’ famous skill in matters of difficult births. “It is a sin to keep such valuable knowledge to oneself, to invent a lifesaving device only to use it to procure oneself an advantage in trade,” he’d said, though Zachary could not help but notice that Howard himself did not choose to advertise his ownership of the forceps, preferring instead to let his local reputation as a veritable miracle worker grow through word of mouth. That Joshua had chosen to solicit Howard’s services instead of those of a conventional midwife spoke well of the forceps’ quiet effect.

  “Are you nervous?” John said. “I understand. The event that we are about to oversee was, until recently, considered one at which only women ought to be present. Women preferred to keep their mysteries and rituals to themselves; men preferred not to trouble their minds with them. An agreeable situation for all. But times have changed. The advanced knowledge of childbirth that we have acquired in recent years now places it more clearly in a surgeon’s purview, and makes it the duty of men, no matter what noises midwives might choose to make about the ruination of their womanish ceremonies. The word man-midwife is a tortured locution, and somewhat embarrassing, but I accept it.”

  Zachary nodded, eyes resolutely on the road ahead of him.

  “I suppose I should speak to you plainly, as Alice would,” John said, dropping his voice lower still as they left the town center, veering from the main road that cut through Godalming as they followed Joshua’s path. “This is knowledge you should perhaps not be granted until you are older, but it is the fate of the surgeon’s apprentice to be initiated into secrets before his time.”

  Zachary looked up at John and offered a quick nod, his lips pinched, his face already gone bloodless.

  No reason not to be honest, John thought. “Witnessing the delivery of a newborn terrifies men,” he said. “It can be as difficult to watch as a death. All our lives we see the features that differentiate women’s bodies from our own as sources of our pleasure; then, in the moment of birth, their true purposes are reveal
ed. A human head emerges from the place that once served as a sheath for your yard. It is one thing to know it in theory; another thing entirely to see it. And so we speak of the process of birth in the language of miracle and mystery, to avoid confronting the fact that women’s bodies are profoundly different from ours, and are not our own.

  “I say that to say this: do not be deceived by any high-flown rhetoric you may have heard in the past about the magic of childbirth. Whatever is about to happen, as strange and even frightening as it may seem to you, will not be a miracle. It is a biological process, as much as digestion, or voiding of the bowels. It is a thing that animals do, and though we stand upright and wear garments and discourse on human understanding, we are, all of us, animals still. To believe that some sort of magic beyond our ken is occurring before your eyes may lead you to unfairly discount your own knowledge, and fail the patient in a moment of crisis. Do you see?”

  “I do,” said Zachary, the quiver in his voice signaling that, in fact, he did not. Well, best to see for himself: perhaps the only way for the boy to truly comprehend.

  * * *

  *

  A small boy, perhaps two years old, was waiting in the yard outside the Toft home when the party arrived, lying on his back in the patchy grass, gazing up at the late-morning sky. Joshua reached the house ahead of Zachary and John, and from a distance, Zachary saw Joshua’s quick, sharp gestures, his large, fleshy hands like ax blades cutting, signaling commands and criticism; at that, the child slowly roused himself, standing with the slouch of one who shouldered an adult’s burdens and harbored an adult’s resentments, or who at least had already learned to imitate such posture by example. “James,” said Joshua with a desultory wave of his hand as surgeon and apprentice approached, introducing the boy with the inflection one might use for a cow in which one had a small but not undue amount of pride. James looked up at Zachary and grinned, his frock threadbare and dingy, his eyes shining in a face coated with a meticulously acquired patina of dirt.

  “Stay outside, James,” said Joshua, “but don’t go far.” He pushed the front door open and entered the house, with John and Zachary trailing behind.

  It took a moment for Zachary’s eyes to adjust to the dim interior. The front room was sparsely furnished, and held few if any signs of a leisure life for its occupants: three chairs and a three-legged footstool, all of wood; a tiny table with a few cups and a stack of plates; a teetotum, lying in wait on the floor to carve its autograph into a parent’s unshod foot sole; no books, unlike the homes of the Walshes and the Howards, where the spines of library volumes advertised the natures of their owners as soon as guests set foot inside. The smell of the house tangled itself in Zachary’s nostrils and wouldn’t let go: the persistent mustiness of unwashed people forever in close proximity; the lingering smoke from hearth fire and scorched food; and, beneath that, a faint tang that put Zachary in mind of new blood, the butcher’s-shop odor of meat just stripped of its pelt. He winced, blinking, and looked up to see that John was doing the same.

  The bed in the back room, expansive with a wooden bedstead, spoke of better financial times for the Tofts in the past. But it was in bad shape, canting at a slight angle and sagging in the middle, with straw poking through a rent in the ticking. The sallow-faced woman who lay in its center, head propped up on a pillow, bedsheet pulled up to her neck, stared up at the ceiling in silence.

  Zachary stood beside John, looking at the woman on her back in the bed as she breathed laboriously through her gaping mouth. It immediately occurred to him, with a certainty of which he was almost ashamed, that she was stupid. She had the face of a dullard: a large, sloping forehead; wide glassy eyes beneath heavy eyebrows; a lumpy, bulbous nose; fleshy, crooked lips; a double chin. Sweaty strands of sand-colored hair peeked out from beneath her faded lace cap. It seemed clear that this was a woman condemned to forever see the world through fog.

  “Mary,” said Joshua, nodding at the bed; then, indicating a woman whom Zachary had not yet noticed, standing next to the bed in the shadows: “My mother. Margaret.” Except for Joshua, she was the tallest person in the room, slender and meager, face long, eyebrows thin and arched, dressed in the faded black of someone who had found mourning a suitable habit, and continued it long after it was warranted. She nodded once in turn, her gaze positioned halfway between John and Zachary, as if greetings were best doled out parsimoniously, and this one was expected to be shared.

  John Howard stood at the foot of the bed for a minute, looking down on Mary Toft, his forehead furrowed; Margaret and Joshua Toft watched him in silence. “Zachary,” he said at last, in a voice that Zachary found strangely absent of John’s usual surety, “would you retrieve the stool from the other room? And after that, bring a chair for yourself. Just sit and watch today.” He took the leather satchel from Zachary and extracted a bundle from it, wrapped in linen.

  From outside came a cheerful squeal from James, the young boy playing at some kind of secret game he’d perhaps just invented.

  By the time Zachary had brought the stool for John and the chair for himself, John had pulled Mary down closer to the foot of the bed, her knees bent, the bedsheet draped over her legs to make a sort of tent into which John could peer while seated. Silently, John pointed at the chair in Zachary’s hands and at a space near the head of the bed, next to Margaret, and Zachary carried the chair over and seated himself. He could see John’s face as he continued to look beneath the sheet, though what John himself saw as he examined the patient was left to Zachary’s imagination, filled in by the woodcuts he’d pored over in medical manuals. The place where a man sheathes his yard. But preparing to transform, to become another thing not meant for men’s pleasure.

  He felt Margaret Toft touch him as she stood beside him, the tip of a single outstretched finger gliding back and forth along his right shoulder. The gesture was, Zachary assumed, meant to be taken as friendly, but nonetheless it made him break out in goose bumps from head to toe.

  “This is…unusual,” said John, after a few more moments. “There is bleeding here, but…from abrasions. There appear to be several small cuts and bruises. But I see no evidence of what I came here to—”

  Mary suddenly screamed then, her left leg kicking in seizure, striking John Howard in the chest and jolting him backward.

  “Labor pains,” Margaret said, her finger still gently stroking Zachary’s shoulder. “Since well before sunrise.”

  “Strange,” said John, rubbing the sore spot opposite his heart, where a bruise was sure to develop.

  From outside they heard the young boy’s wavering wail, as if in answer to his mother’s call.

  John continued to examine the woman, as all in the room kept silent. At last, he looked up and at each of the others there in turn: Joshua, Margaret, and Zachary. Then he stared into the space before him, mouth half open in confusion.

  After a brief pause he returned to himself, straightening his back and shaking his head as if to clear it. When he spoke his voice was deeper and a little more imperious than usual, as if to compensate for the short moment of displayed weakness, unbefitting of an expert in his profession. “I know of nothing to do but wait,” he said.

  * * *

  *

  They did not have to wait much longer, not more than a quarter of an hour: that evening, John Howard would ruefully joke to his wife that he wished all of the deliveries to which he was summoned would be so considerately prompt.

  Joshua Toft had taken to pacing back and forth between one room of the house and the other, head bowed in meditation, his broad-shouldered, gigantic back stooped. His wife continued to lie supine, knees bent, eyes on the ceiling, her body occasionally shifting slightly beneath the sheets as if to ease herself, but otherwise unmoving.

  Zachary dearly wanted to fidget, and knew he could not—he was, after all, a professional, or at least aspired to wear a professional’s mantle, and a
professional would not jiggle his knee, or wring his hands, or hammer out a drumbeat on the floor with his feet. He tried to make eye contact with John, who was still seated at the foot of the bed, but John continued to focus solely on Mary. John was silent for the most part, forgoing the patter he usually employed to put patients at ease while he wielded his knives—his one quiet question to Mary about how she was feeling was met with a wordless mumble from the woman that nonetheless managed to convey a deep irritation, as if she had no patience for questions that John ought to have been able to answer for himself.

  Zachary had almost convinced himself to slip into a reverie that he was sure would go unnoticed, sinking down in his chair, his eyes half lidded, when he felt Margaret Toft’s hot breath on his ear as she stood behind him, bending over him. Its odor put him in mind of freshly turned soil, or a moldy, waterlogged book.

  “Do you want…tea?” she asked, her voice a hiss just above a whisper. “It is refreshing. The water: it boils.”

  “N…no, ma’am,” he replied, sitting up straight again, not daring to turn to look at her.

  Slowly, Margaret pulled back from him and rose. “You may soon wish,” she said, her hand oddly heavy on his shoulder, “that you had accepted my generous offer.”

  Joshua rambled into the room, peered at each of its inhabitants in turn, swiveled, and strode out once more. John took no notice of him—he continued to watch the woman lying before him, as if attempting to will some kind of change with his mind, wishing for something to happen within her.