Mary Toft; or, the Rabbit Queen

by Dexter Palmer

  “Ma’am?” said Zachary over his shoulder, having second thoughts. “M-may I have some tea?”

  “No,” Margaret replied flatly. “You were a foolish boy, and now your chance is gone.”

  Unnerved by the exchange, Zachary briefly found himself alert once more, but his mind soon started to drift again. He wondered whether this vigil would make him miss a timely dinner—whether Alice would think to prepare something that could be left to eat cold as soon as he and John returned home, or whether he’d have to starve until supper. (Or perhaps—horrors—they’d still be here come suppertime, and through the night, and into the next day, waiting, waiting, in unending silence.) He thought about the girl with the port-wine stain on her face, from the Exhibition of Medical Curiosities: though he had only seen her twice, she had appeared in his mind ever since at the most unexpected times. Despite the birthmark, or perhaps even because of it, she had almost been pretty, and admittedly, her impish insouciance had held an inexplicable allure. When she entered womanhood, the man who could look past the blight on her face might find a kind of love with her. Perhaps beneath her clothes her skin would be of flawless porcelain; perhaps she’d be secretly piebald from head to toe, which itself might be a peculiar kind of beauty, heretofore unheard of, reserved for a lucky husband’s eyes alone—

  Mary Toft screamed.

  She sounded as if devils were driving nails into her palms. She began to thrash wildly in the bed, kicking and moaning, arms flailing as she grimaced and punched the mattress with her fists, sending straw flying from its unstitched rent. Her wayward foot nearly caught John Howard across the jaw. “Joshua!” he shouted into the other room, clamping his hands on the surgeon’s tools arrayed on the bed to stop them from spilling. “Come in here! Hold her down—calm her.”

  Joshua barged through the door as one of the legs at the foot of the bed gave way, splintering and shooting out from under the frame. The bed dropped with a loud thump, bouncing Mary and coming to rest at an angle, the sheet covering her body flying away, and as Zachary turned his head and closed his eyes, he heard a piece of crockery hit the floor and shatter in the other room.

  He saw the soft flesh of a breast; he saw a pale expanse of thigh; he saw a tuft of hair in a crevice.

  Joshua ran over to Mary, grabbed both her arms, and wrenched them down, pinning them at her sides; as her legs continued to kick, he bent over, placing his forehead against hers. “Be still,” he whispered as she struggled, his voice even, and unexpectedly tender. “Be still. Be still.” She began, slowly, to settle down, her breaths coming in hitching rasps, and John retrieved the bedsheet from the floor, shook it out, and draped it over her body once again.

  Slowly, Joshua released his wife and stood. She kept her arms at her sides, teeth clenched, eyes squeezed shut and leaking tears. Then she grunted something that Zachary couldn’t make out, though it sounded unpleasantly like a curse in another language.

  “She says it’s coming,” Joshua said.

  John looked up at Joshua, puzzled. “I don’t see—”

  Mary grunted again, louder, more clearly this time: “It’s coming.” She threw her head back and shrieked, her body contorting beneath the sheet into a posture almost inhuman, as if her muscles wanted to snap the bones that gave them shape.

  Leaning to the side and hunching to examine Mary on the lowered, crooked bed, John Howard shook his head; then, tentatively, he reached with one hand beneath the sheet that covered Mary’s bent knees. He probed gently, his head cocked and his eyes closed; then, as a look of distress suddenly appeared on his face, he made a noise that was somewhere between a yelp and a bark.

  He snatched his hand back, bloody, as if he’d been stung. “No,” he said. “No.”

  Zachary felt both of Margaret Toft’s hands on his shoulders now, pressing him down in the chair, moving close to his throat.

  “No, no, no,” John said, reaching toward Mary again. “No. No, no, no.”

  “Sir?” said Joshua, his voice remarkably placid. “What’s wrong?”

  “No. No.” Both of John’s hands were beneath the sheet now as he worked, taking deep, irregular breaths, biting his lip. Beads of sweat broke out in a line along his forehead.

  Zachary felt his heart rattling against his rib cage.

  John leaned toward the bed, farther than Zachary could understand, as if something beneath the sheet was grasping at the surgeon’s hands, catching him, dragging him in. As Mary brought forth a larynx-tearing screech, John pulled back, nearly losing his balance and falling off his stool.

  John looked at the little thing he held pinched between his thumb and forefinger, and began to weep.

  It was a severed rabbit’s foot.

  Zachary heard the young boy James’s gay laughter from outside the house, immersed in his own private amusements.

  “Mary?” Joshua said, his voice barely audible. “Mary.” His wife was glass-eyed, still as stone.

  “No,” John whimpered. “No. No.” He deposited the blood-matted hunk of fur and meat with its four tiny black claws on the bed next to Mary with a strangely ceremonial reverence, as if he had no idea what else to do.

  Wiping away tears with the back of his hand, John reached beneath the sheet once again.

  A hind foot followed to match the forefoot; then John pulled out a thin, glistening rope of intestine, flinging it angrily to the floor. “God damn us all!” he shouted.

  Zachary leapt up and tried to run, but Margaret grasped his shoulders and slammed him back down into the chair with an unexpected strength. She pressed her lips against his ear, her spittle coating it as she said, “You should have taken the tea. Now, sit and watch. Boy.”

  The rabbit’s head came last, one of its ears broken and listing, its jaws frozen open to reveal teeth seemingly bared in a snarl, the marble of one of its eyeballs popped free from its socket, dangling from the hole by a tendril of muscle. John’s initial shock and horror seemed to have given way, at last, to an uncanny reserve. Carefully, he placed the decapitated head on the bed, next to the two severed feet. He silently performed a last examination of the patient, withdrew, and covered Mary’s legs neatly with the sheet.

  Then he stood, nodded once at Zachary, and sprinted from the room, covering his mouth.

  Zachary slapped aside Margaret’s hands and followed, colliding clumsily with the wall as he ran. The acrid smell of puke hit him in the face as soon as he burst out of the front room of the house into daylight. He bent, hands on his knees, and joined John in retching, gagging as his guts twisted in his stomach and wrung themselves dry, his half-digested breakfast spattering on the ground.

  The boy James stood before them in his dirty frock, pointing at John and Zachary and cackling, dancing an irregular jig to music only he could hear.

  Out of breath, Zachary looked over at John, who was wiping a thread of bile away from his mouth with the back of his hand. “Sir?” he said. “I have a question.”

  The ghost of a smile flitted across John’s face, and his red-rimmed eyes crinkled. “Yes?”

  “What fee will you charge for this?” said Zachary, rising. “A shilling or two seems, somehow, too little.”

  | CHAPTER V.

  ARISTOTLE’S MASTERPIECE.

  The hours following that first horrific delivery, through the afternoon and evening and into the next day, were a blur in Zachary’s memory, as if he’d somehow contrived to imbibe a few stiff doses of gin without realizing it. He remembered that he and John Howard had managed to return home, though after they’d walked a quarter mile down the road from the Tofts’ house, John had realized that he’d forgotten his satchel and his implements, and shamefacedly had to turn back to retrieve them—after vomiting in tandem they’d both felt an instinctive compulsion to flee, consequences and professionalism be damned. Zachary remembered that John had closed his practice for the remainder of the day, secluding
himself with his books, leaving the sick and injured to look after themselves or travel to another parish—fortunately, no one with a serious condition arrived at their door that day, and John was left in peace. He remembered sitting before the supper that Alice served, a salmagundi whose ingredients she must have been quietly collecting for days—roast chicken and potatoes and capers and onions and olives and currants and who knew what other wonderful things, all mixed together. He remembered leaving the dish almost completely untouched, asking for permission to go upstairs to his room after a few polite bites.

  He remembered lying in bed, moonlight shining through the window of his loft, listening to the conversation of John and Alice below—though he could not make out the words, he could clearly discern the tenor. John’s voice crept up in volume the longer he spoke, in tones of alarm that soon shaded into anger and frustration; Alice’s responses were occasionally interrupted by a high ringing laughter of raillery, to which John would respond sulkily, as if wounded. (Why the mockery, so insensitive and undeserved? If only she had been there, to see for herself what he and John had seen! The vision of the rabbit’s severed head with its broken ear and dislocated eye floated in the field of black behind the boy’s closed eyelids.)

  He remembered the dream he had had just before he slipped under—in it, he’d just gotten married hours before, and he stood with his bride beside their wedding bed as rose petals rained from the sky. She was the woman with the port-wine stain on her face, and she was naked—he knew this, even though she still wore her wedding veil and her body from the neck down was obscured by a pale, swirling mist, so that it seemed as if he were looking at an oil painting left incomplete.

  The time had at long last come for the revelation of secrets, of curve of hip and shape of breast, destined to be known by him alone, for all eternity. Eager and full of ardor, breath quickened, yard standing, Zachary carefully took the veil in both hands and lifted it, to reveal the burgundy blotch that almost entirely covered the woman’s face, the startlingly long incisors that protruded from beneath her top lip, the long white whiskers that drooped below her merrily twitching nose, and her blinking, shining eyes, a matched pair of inky black marbles. Then he woke.

  * * *

  *

  Three days later, on a Sunday afternoon after services had ended and the congregation had dispersed, Zachary’s father, Crispin Walsh, performed a shorter second ceremony, in which Mary Toft was churched. Seated on the front pew were the few witnesses to the ritual: the Toft family, Joshua, Margaret, James, and Mary herself, face concealed by a moth-eaten lace veil; John Howard and Zachary Walsh; and Phoebe Sanders, the wife of the Overseer of the Poor, who had decided, and which one might have reasonably predicted, to make the churching her personal business. She sat in the middle of the Toft family as if she were a well-loved cousin just arrived from a nearby town, head held high, an inappropriately wide smile worn on her face as a shield, impervious to the frequent stabs of Margaret’s practiced scowls.

  Crispin, still in his vestments, stood before Mary and beckoned: at the gesture Mary knelt in front of the pew on a pillow placed before her, head bowed. The cleric placed his hand on her head (and Zachary caught his father’s quick glance at John Howard, who returned the look expressionlessly, even as Phoebe eagerly leaned forward in her seat in an undisguised attempt to interpret John’s face).

  Crispin’s voice assumed the stentorian tones he used to suggest that powers greater than his own were speaking through him. “Give hearty thanks unto God,” he said, “for your safe deliverance from the great danger of childbirth.” Mary, in response, said nothing: she merely nodded, tentatively at first, then vigorously, until Crispin’s gentle tap on her shoulder brought her to a stop.

  “ ‘I love the Lord, because he hath heard my voice and my supplications,’ ” Crispin declaimed, eyes closed. “ ‘Because he hath inclined his ear unto me, therefore I will call upon him as long as I live.’ ”

  This all seems so normal, Zachary thought—it seemed incredible to him that what most would consider the most salient fact of the matter was being left unaddressed. But then, why was he himself not speaking up? He had been there, after all; he’d seen it all firsthand. But at this moment, this ritual and its quick and orderly accomplishment seemed to be more important than the declaration of the truth in its entirety, for reasons he could not quite discern.

  Crispin continued to recite the psalm, his right hand still on Mary Toft’s head. “ ‘Gracious is the Lord, and righteous; yea, our God is merciful. The Lord preserveth the simple: I was brought low, and he helped me.’ ”

  Who here knew? All of the Tofts, except perhaps for the child, who would not know what to do with such knowledge if he had it; John Howard; Zachary himself. Phoebe, with that grin plastered on her face, clearly did not. Did his father know—did he understand that the circumstances that occasioned the ceremony he now performed were most unusual? When he’d spoken of the “great danger of childbirth,” had there been the smallest of quavers in his voice?

  “ ‘I said in my haste, All men are liars,’ ” Crispin said. “ ‘What shall I render unto the Lord for all his benefits toward me?’ ”

  Perhaps this ritual, performed in the same manner as all the ones before, was meant to make the past a thing that had not happened, by consensual agreement. Zachary’s memory—of the bloody rabbit’s foot retrieved; the surgeon’s sudden tears; the string of guts and the mangled head that followed—would become a dream, and then that dream would dissipate as all dreams do, shredded by morning sunlight, carried away on the wind. The ceremony would convey to all who participated a welcome permission to forget, granted by the merciful God who spoke in his father’s voice.

  “ ‘I will pay my vows unto the Lord now in the presence of all his people, in the courts of the Lord’s house, in the midst of thee, O Jerusalem. Praise ye the Lord.’ ” As Crispin finished the psalm and removed his hand from Mary, she stood and, head still bowed, offered the quaint suggestion of a curtsy, no more than a small dip and a bend of the knees.

  From farther down the pew on which he sat, Zachary heard Phoebe Sanders’s derisory snort.

  * * *

  *

  After the ceremony had ended and Zachary began to make his way down the central aisle between the pews and out of the church (his father and John Howard a few steps behind him, heads inclined toward each other, whispering in restless consultation) he felt a hand on his shoulder—not Margaret Toft’s pinching grasp, but a lighter touch. He turned to see Phoebe Sanders smiling at him. He was young, but not too young to be unaware that when adults address youths in such a familiar manner, as if they themselves are also adults, they are often in search of loose tongues. Phoebe’s smile shrank slightly at his look of suspicion, then returned, more brightly still. “Isn’t this so unusual?” she said.

  “Yes, it is,” said Zachary, instincts telling him to change the subject or back away, but Phoebe was too quick for him. She approached; she pounced. “I mean,” she said, lowering her voice, “that if she had another miscarriage, no one wants to say.” She quickly counted out the months on her gloved fingers. “April was when I was here for poor Mary’s last churching. May, June, July, August, September, October: barely six months—”

  “Zachary!” He turned to look up at John advancing on him rapidly, his father just behind. “Do you remember those chores I asked you to finish?”

  He nodded, slowly, though he did not recall any mention of chores at all.

  “Well, you’d best return home and take care of them,” John said, his tone uncommonly brusque.

  Zachary was nonetheless glad to have been excused from Phoebe’s interrogation. As he turned to go (and as Phoebe glanced sideways at John Howard, giggling sheepishly), he looked up at his father, and the expression he saw on his face was one he would never have expected there—it wavered between undisguised confusion and un
diluted terror.

  If he hadn’t known before he churched the woman, he surely did now.

  * * *

  *

  The next day was Monday, and Monday mornings were always quiet for John Howard’s practice, as if the predictable, sedate routines of Sabbath evenings warded off the kinds of accidents that might require his attention. Zachary was awake early, for once—recent events had robbed him of his inclination to sleep in, since lying abed gave his mind too much of a chance to wander. He polished all the tools in John’s operating room, then examined them once again to ensure that his work was thorough. He leafed through Heister’s Compendium of Anatomy, the book that had been one of his first steps on the path to his apprenticeship. He looked at the illustrations, but did not see them; his eyes slid over the paragraphs uncomprehending, while his mind hummed its own dark melodies.

  Eventually, heart pounding, he walked across the hall into John’s office, where John was, as expected, reading An Essay on Human Understanding. He sat opposite John’s desk, watching him read, and he waited.

  John turned over a page and stared at it for some time, frowning; then he looked up at Zachary, his face downcast. “I suppose you have little interest in hearing what Locke has to say about the distinction between active power and passive power,” he said.

  “No, sir; I don’t, really.”

  John sighed and shut the book before him. “I thought as much.”

  “We haven’t talked about…”

  “The…incident,” John said. “I know.”

  “We haven’t talked about it at all and it’s the worst thing I’ve ever seen,” said Zachary, tears flowing freely now that had been corked up in him for days.