Mary Toft; or, the Rabbit Queen

by Dexter Palmer

“Certainly,” said Zachary.

  “First. How is it that a man in the employ of King George chooses to lodge himself in the house of a stranger, presumably at no cost, and that he leaves a perfectly well-appointed inn in order to do so? I am sure the king would not mind the expense. One might also wonder why such a man wears a wig of horsehair, rather than human hair. It is quite interesting! Zachary, look under the bed to see that the chamber pot’s there: place it where it can be easily seen. Who knows what he’ll do if he can’t find it at a moment’s notice.”

  Zachary got down on his hands and knees and retrieved the chipped ceramic pot from beneath the bed, wiping the dust off its surface with his hands. “Who would have thought that man-midwifing was a profession of such drama and intrigue?” Alice continued. “Though those most often given to speak of conspiracy are also the most likely to try to dream it into being. I expect he gave the wrong warning regarding whom to beware, but what do I know: I am not Ahlers, or Davenant, or Stillingfleet, or Manningham, et cetera, et cetera. Hand that here.”

  Zachary passed the pot to her, and she turned it over, inspecting it as if it were a valuable piece of art she was considering purchasing. “Do you think it’s large enough?”

  Zachary looked at the receptacle in Alice’s hands. “It seems the same size as any other, ma’am,” he said, and donned the appropriate expression of perplexity on his face that he believed Alice was hoping for. Let her make her joke.

  “Well, keep in mind,” said Alice, “that it also has to hold all the shit coming out of his mouth.”

  | CHAPTER IX.

  CONFIRMATION OF THE PRETERNATURAL.

  On the following morning, of November 9, a column of a half-dozen men made the march from John Howard’s practice to the Toft home: Joshua Toft; Nathanael St. André; Crispin Walsh; John Howard; and the surgeons’ apprentices, Zachary and Laurence. Joshua and Nathanael were at the head of the procession, a fair distance apart from the rest; though the rest of the group could not hear what they discussed, Nathanael’s expansive gesticulations suggested that he was regaling Joshua with a tale of yet another “uncommon incident.” Crispin and John walked behind them, deeply engaged in a private whispered conversation, as they often seemed to be these days whenever together; seeing them from the back, side by side with their heads inclined toward each other, Zachary was reminded of the two-headed woman of the Exhibition of Medical Curiosities, and what he imagined to be her—their?—endless oscillation between argument and harmony.

  Zachary and Laurence brought up the rear. Once again, Laurence was dressed like a miniature version of his master, in a black waistcoat accented with golden trim, along with a burgundy coat and breeches. His swaggering stride was an affectation that seemed intended to convey some kind of manliness, but so much effort went into the swing of his arms and the occasional toss of his bewigged head that he appeared to be constantly stumbling forward, as if perpetually rescuing himself from falling on his face. Occasionally he would glance sideways at Zachary to verify whether Zachary was looking at him in turn, which Zachary often was, primarily to avoid an inadvertent clout by his windmilling arm.

  Eventually, perhaps due to exhaustion, Laurence settled down into something approaching an ordinary gait; then he spoke, directly acknowledging Zachary’s existence for the first time since his arrival in Godalming. “How long have you been an apprentice?” he asked.

  “A little more than six months,” said Zachary.

  “And,” said Laurence, “how much have you learned, in that time?”

  “Oh, quite a lot! Mr. Howard has a great library, and I’ve read through almost all of it. And I’ve attended most of his surgeries, as an assistant—I performed my own first surgery, just yesterday. For quinsy.”

  Laurence made a show of concealing his amusement. “Were you to see the library of Mr. St. André, in London, you would be embarrassed that you ever thought of a library as something that one could finish reading. He has enough volumes to keep a man occupied for centuries, and he has read them all.”

  “I did not know that your master was a Methuselah in disguise,” said Zachary. “I myself don’t expect to live longer than a single century at the most, and so a library of such size is of little use to me. Mr. Howard may not have all the volumes of Mr. St. André, but I am sure he has the most useful ones.”

  “Hmph,” said Laurence.

  They walked along together in silence for a while, and then Laurence said, “Quinsy. That is not much of a surgery. It is something that your master let you perform because he knew you could not fail.”

  “It is more difficult than it might seem,” said Zachary. “When making the initial incision, you must be careful to draw the blade across the proper place at the wrist. Too close to the hand, and you will kill the patient.”

  “Of course,” said Laurence after a brief pause. “Though an experienced surgeon would know that it is best to make the incision perpendicular to the wrist, rather than parallel.”

  “I see that knowledge of medicine must be greatly advanced in London.”

  “It is. I have no idea how one learns anything out here.”

  Zachary turned away from Laurence with the slightest of smiles.

  * * *

  *

  It took some doing to cram everyone into Mary Toft’s lying-in chamber who had a plausible reason to be in the presence of the patient: the six men who’d walked over together, plus Margaret Toft, who, one could easily infer, would not leave her station at the head of Mary’s bed even if asked. But after some rearrangement, with people moving in and out through the doorway and occasionally colliding with each other, the congregation came to an arrangement: St. André, the honored guest, at the foot of the bed, seated on the stool where John Howard normally sat during deliveries; Howard and Crispin Walsh on either side of him; Joshua Toft at the head of the bed, on the opposite side from his mother; and Zachary and Laurence standing behind their respective masters, peeking around them at the woman, whose labor pains increased sharply as soon as the men had settled themselves. James had been sent outside to amuse himself however he could, as he always was during these events.

  “We begin,” Nathanael announced, and went to work. The rabbit he brought forth from Mary only ten minutes later was beheaded, missing its legs, and stripped of its pelt; to his credit, he did not have the violently nauseous reaction that Zachary, John, and Crispin had had when they were first present at one of Mary’s deliveries, though Laurence, unsurprisingly, gulped and quickly ran outside. Perhaps Nathanael had in fact experienced so many “uncommon incidents” that he’d become inured to the kinds of sights that would normally shock a man. Seeing his equanimity in the face of such grotesquerie, Zachary felt unexpectedly reassured.

  With a smile, Nathanael held the gory rabbit trunk aloft as if presenting it to the mother for viewing. “Magnificent,” he said. “Astonishing. I assume that, in this specimen, the lungs are fully formed and intact. John, have you performed a close examination of the lungs of any of the others? We should excise a piece from one of them, and place it in water to see if it floats—if it does, it will tell us that air has become integrated with the flesh, and therefore the rabbits are breathing when inside her.”

  “I have preserved most of the specimens in spirits,” John said, “but I have admittedly done little else in the way of experimentation.” He sighed, and in that sigh Zachary heard a quiet, reluctant ceding of authority and control. “Beyond preservation, I have been at a loss as to how to proceed.”

  “A perfectly understandable loss! But that is why I have come,” said Nathanael, handing the rabbit trunk to John. “Please wrap this in cloth, and return it to your practice: tomorrow, we’ll examine this one in addition to the others you have thoughtfully saved, make some anatomical comparisons, and determine if the nature of the births has changed in some manner over time. And perhaps that will be the first step to
a cure. Because, Mary,” he continued, reassuringly placing his hand on her leg near her ankle, “we will cure you. I, Nathanael St. André, promise this to you.” He lifted his gaze to meet the eyes of Joshua and Margaret Toft in turn. “I promise this to each of you,” he affirmed, his voice trembling. Joshua nodded his solemn recognition of the vow; Margaret merely offered the surgeon a thin slit of a fleeting smile.

  As Laurence returned to the lying-in room, coughing and sweating, his complexion pale, Nathanael stood. “Now,” he announced, “enough pleasantries. We must examine the patient just after delivery, to determine if there are any anomalies in her reproductive organs that may show evidence of themselves only at these particular moments.”

  He pulled Mary’s legs flat and approached the head of the bed. “With your permission,” he said to Joshua, who once again nodded his assent. Then with a single quick motion he yanked the covering sheet off the bed, revealing the woman’s naked body to the world. “No need for delicacy here,” he said as Zachary and his father both glanced away. “We don’t want to deprive ourselves of valuable information in the name of an unnecessary sense of decorum.” Looking at Crispin, he continued, “If we are to be agents of God, who will cure this woman just as surely as he has chosen to afflict her for his own inscrutable but no doubt just reasons, then we must attempt to look on her with the same unsparing scrutiny of God, yes? We must not conceal what can be seen; we must not embrace ignorance out of propriety.” This reasoning seemed to satisfy the cleric, who returned his gaze to the bed.

  “Good,” said Nathanael. “Good.” Bending over Mary, who lay still and insensate, her breathing fast and shallow, he spread apart the lids of her right eye with thumb and forefinger and peered into it, then did the same with the left. He commanded her to open her mouth and looked inside; with the tips of his fingers, he then rubbed the glands of her neck. He cupped and then kneaded one of her breasts, then the other. Then, with splayed fingers, he began to press upon her stomach with particular care, gently, then deeply, then gently again, moving back and forth across it. “Yes,” he said to himself after a minute or two of this, alternating between the left side of her stomach and the right. “Yes. Howard. Come here.” Eyes still pinned to the patient, he reached out a hand and beckoned him.

  “Place your hand here, as you have seen me do,” said Nathanael. “Then here. Left side, then right. You feel the difference?”

  Howard moved his hand from one side to the other as St. André asked, frowning. Back and forth, once, and once again.

  “The right side,” Nathanael said, as if he were a teacher giving a student a hint to a challenging question. “It’s harder to the touch. More resistant.”

  Once more Howard felt both sides of Mary’s stomach, pressing down with his five extended fingers. “I feel it,” he said, eventually. “Yes.” He looked at Nathanael, who nodded, and he nodded back.

  “An irregularity in the Fallopian tubes, no doubt,” said Nathanael. “The right one is larger than the left, and thicker. My conjecture, which I’m sure will be proven true, given enough time: the rabbits are bred not in her uterus, but in her right Fallopian tube. Thus, no placenta accompanying the birth. Her initial painful agitations are a signal that the rabbits are being dispensed into the uterus, and being violently torn apart in the process. From there the delivery proceeds as would any ordinary birth, barring the timely manner and the exceptional speed.”

  Retrieving the bedsheet from the floor where he had tossed it, Nathanael shook it out and draped it gracefully over the bed once again, covering Mary up to her neck. “I feel,” he said, “that we are doubtless in the presence of the preternatural, and that this promises to be the most challenging case of my career thus far. Busy days are ahead of us, friends and colleagues—busy and exciting days. But I tell you this: tomorrow, we begin to inscribe our names in all the world’s history books.”

  Nathanael turned to John Howard, grasped his hand, and, with a beaming smile, shook it firmly, clasping his other hand tightly over it. Then, surprisingly, he took Howard in an embrace, firm, close, and warm. As the other men in the room dissolved into relieved laughter, Crispin grinned and began to clap—Zachary and Laurence joined in, then Joshua, while Margaret continued to stand in the shadows, silent.

  From her lying-in bed, Mary Toft offered a sympathetic moan.

  Zachary could see his master looking over Nathanael St. André’s shoulder and down at him—amid the merriment and applause, his eyes shone with tears. There is no rarer and more precious comfort than this: when a man who is the sole possessor of a truth, and who feels himself misunderstood by all the world, looks into another man’s eyes and finds, at last, that another believes what he believes, and he is no longer alone.

  | CHAPTER X.

  THE SEAT OF IMAGINATION.

  By Saturday, November 12, 1726, the day after Mary Toft delivered her twelfth rabbit, there were at least nine people in Godalming who knew of the strange events going on in her household, and in London, the notice that had been printed in the British Journal had been circulating among interested parties for over two weeks. In other words, there was more than enough tinder to spark a rumor in the town: it was perhaps a miracle that it did not happen earlier.

  In Godalming, the genesis of the gossip appeared to be spontaneous, as if once enough people knew of a particular set of facts, a distorted version of those facts would manifest in the minds of those nearby, without the need for speech to convey them through the air. Or perhaps Nathanael St. André’s tongue became loose after one too many pints of beer at the local inn, or Crispin Walsh made the rare decision to confide his innermost thoughts to his wife, or young Laurence walked in his sleep to the town center and proclaimed the news aloud. Whatever the cause, bits of hearsay began to float from person to person, in beds and markets and church pews, accreting details as they traveled, and becoming full-fledged narratives that were just as likely to support as conflict with each other.

  And so the gossips of Godalming felt a smug and doubled pleasure: they believed themselves wise enough to know a tale to be factual that those less wise than themselves would consider self-evidently silly; meanwhile, they also considered the equally incredible tales of others to be ridiculous, and thought themselves smarter than the benighted fools who retailed them as truth. When Mary Mitton crossed paths with Phoebe Sanders on Godalming’s main street (with Phoebe plainly looking up and down at Mitton’s figure, to assure herself that the money she had given Mitton to retrieve her stays from the pawnshop had been put to its intended purpose), Phoebe breathlessly relayed the story she’d heard from a reliable source whose identity she would not divulge: that poor Mary Toft had gone insane, and now kept a pet rabbit, a young kitten, that she believed to be invested with the spirit of the child she had miscarried earlier in the year. “It’s why she hasn’t left her home in weeks, why she was churched for a second time last month, and why the surgeon Howard and the minister Walsh pay a visit to her almost daily,” Phoebe said. “Though neither prayer nor medicine has yet to offer a remedy for her madness. She constantly cradles the little thing in her arms—she sings lullabies to it, and won’t let it go. It’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard.”

  Mary Mitton nodded in silence, thinking that it would be indecorous to correct this insufferable know-it-all by relating the true and revolting tale of Mary Toft in daylight. The account she’d heard from Amelia Glasse was of a freakish event that admitted of no explanation besides the preternatural: one night earlier this month, when Joshua Toft had returned home after a bout of heavy drinking, he’d demanded of his helpmeet that she satisfy his amorous inclinations. Finding his inebriate entreaties rebuffed, he’d threatened force; his wife had responded by lifting her skirts, standing with her legs apart, howling like a wounded dog, and dropping a litter of a dozen scurrying field mice. The sight of that certainly shrank Joshua’s yard, of that you could be sure—when a woman has no desire to d
ance Adam’s jig, it’s wise to leave her be.

  The word circulating among some of the men of Godalming was that Mary had had a tryst with a blackamoor, one of the members of the Exhibition of Medical Curiosities that had come through town back in September. The fact that there had been no such black person in Nicholas Fox’s exhibition did not prevent the rumor from traveling, of course: after enough telling and retelling, the fantasy of his dark-hued skin, ink-black eyes, and shimmering golden robes became a memory, and some even found themselves able to recount the charming African’s dulcet seductions word for word. That such a rendezvous would not sufficiently explain why Mary had not left her house in over a month was of little relevance, nor did anyone trouble themselves with wondering why such an exotic specimen of masculinity would bother to debauch a wife and mother who could only be described as plain-faced on her best days—on the street, Joshua’s friends greeted him with the particular expression reserved for cuckolds unaware of their own natures, half sorrow, half mockery. Joshua, for his part, seemed oblivious to the chorus of whispers, and no one was reckless or foolish enough to confront him directly: though a quiet man, he was a large one, and verification of the allegations wasn’t worth having his meaty slab of fist collide with your face.

  * * *

  *

  Along with the rise of local rumors regarding the Toft family came the appearance of strangers in Godalming, two or three arriving each day, identifiable on sight as Londoners. Fed almost from birth on an urban diet of meat, they were taller than the native villagers; they moved through the streets with the long strides of giants, their big, fleshy bodies swathed in layer after layer of fine clothes, dyed in colors rarely seen beneath God’s sun. They had a tendency to gaze rapt at the ordinary, as if these rural English were of a different nation altogether than city folk. They stopped in the middle of the road, paused, and drew in deep breaths with their eyes shut, as if the very air of the village had some strange and novel perfume; they stared unblinking at passersby of both sexes, following them with their eyes until their heads threatened to twist themselves off their necks; they pointed and smiled at sheep. In the market, Alice Howard had to step backward with her hand ready to slap when one of them reached out to touch her linen cap.