Mary Toft; or, the Rabbit Queen

by Dexter Palmer

  “The tradesman looked up at the king again, and the monarch smiled down at the tradesman with pleasure. And the robe the king wore had become, somehow, even more dazzling: its fabric had manifested as a rippling mirror, which reflected the tradesman back to himself as what he imagined himself to be, and as he once was, and as he would become. For a brief moment the tradesman had experienced what one might call a vision, some sort of devilish illusion, the details of the matter too embarrassing to repeat; but that cursed vision was gone now, and the hurrahs of the crowd grew ever louder and more frenzied as the team of horses pulled the king’s wagon onward.

  “The tradesman loved his nation, and in the king’s beatific gaze he felt that love affirmed and justified. He had only one regret: that he did not have a son with whom to share this day, for such a sight was the kind of experience that might set a boy on the path to a fruitful manhood, all in a moment.

  “But alas, the tradesman’s wife had only ever given birth to daughters.”

  * * *

  *

  In silence, Manningham let go of the halves of the turkey bone he’d been clutching in his hands, so tightly his knuckles had gone white. He rose, tall, thin, and ghostly, and looked down on the rest of those seated at the table. “I believe I will take the air,” he said; then, not waiting for any kind of acknowledgment, he unceremoniously left the room.

  Alice leaned forward once Manningham was out of earshot and said, “He is certainly the most unsettling of all the fellows who have come marching through here since this whole affair began,” she said. “I find him strangely refreshing.”

  “I have crossed paths with him in London many times before, as I have with Ahlers,” said St. André. “I will not lie, or underestimate him: our minds are not in harmony, but his is cunning, and quick. For all that his demeanor might recall the newly dead, he has, it is true, saved lives that other surgeons and man-midwives would have considered beyond rescue. Though I worry about his open profession of skepticism—he may be a judge who has already come to his verdict before the trial has barely begun, and who sees the consideration of evidence as a mere formality.”

  “He will have to witness one of the births himself,” said John, “as you and I and Ahlers have. Surely he will not reject the evidence of his own two eyes.”

  * * *

  *

  That evening, as Zachary lay in bed, he heard a quiet knock on the door that he’d been half expecting. He opened it to find Laurence, who entered without speaking and sat down on the end of Zachary’s bed, looking out of the loft’s lone window at the night sky.

  “I couldn’t sleep,” he said eventually. “Because of the story we heard this afternoon. When I do fall asleep, I expect nightmares.”

  “Me too,” said Zachary.

  Zachary reclined on the bed and stared at the ceiling; he sensed that Laurence was not yet done speaking.

  “There was one thing I did not understand,” said Laurence quietly. “The robe, in the story. Was it real, or not real?”

  Zachary thought about it. “Well, from the perspective of those of us sitting at the table this afternoon, none of it was real: neither the robe, nor the king, nor the three impostors. All of it was a temporary illusion to which we acceded, for our entertainment. But from the perspective of the people in the story…” He left the thought unfinished; he had no idea how to complete it.

  “Surely the tradesman in the story would not have been willing to kill his own son unless what he saw was real,” Laurence said. “But killing the son was what made the robe real, and then the son wasn’t real anymore. It’s strange.”

  “It was only a story,” said Zachary, yawning as his eyelids drooped.

  But Laurence was determined not to let the matter drop. “Wake up, Zachary. Consider this. What if the tradesman had left his son behind when going to see the procession? He, and all with him, would have seen the king in his wonderful robe. He would have returned home and described the robe to his son—the son might have regretted missing the experience, but otherwise his life would have proceeded as normal. He would have gone on to live a full life, with no harm done except for the possible delusion.”

  “But that’s not the story we heard. Your version is easier to digest, but somehow…less honest. Not so true—insofar as it makes sense to talk about the truth of a story like that.”

  “Perhaps,” said Laurence, thinking on it, “it doesn’t matter whether the king’s magic robe was real or illusion. Or perhaps the story’s moral—unintended, but still present—was that boys who wish to stay alive need to learn when to speak, and when to stay quiet.”

  Suddenly, Zachary felt himself snap wide awake again.

  | CHAPTER XIV.

  A STRANGE CELEBRATION.

  Thursday, November 24 (three days after Manningham had told his unsettling tale at dinner, and two after Manningham had delivered Mary Toft’s sixteenth rabbit), was the day when Zachary realized beyond doubt that events had escaped the control of Howard, or St. André, or Manningham, or Mary Toft herself, or anyone. The story of the Toft event had become its own creature, dragging the people associated with it in its wake, moving forward to who knew what end.

  He awoke, that morning, to the sound of cheers and the ringing of what sounded like a dozen tiny tinkling bells—he’d been dreaming, just before, of the crowd waiting for the king in Manningham’s story, finding himself in the throng of supplicants, seeing the impossibly beautiful robe, screaming so loud with unrestrained joy that he began to spit blood. When his own yells awoke him, the echoing holler from his throat dying out as his eyes opened, the applause of the crowd in the dream continued to ring in his ears, making him wonder if he had merely stepped out of one dream and into another; then he roused himself from bed, the haze beginning to clear from his mind, and went to the window of his loft to look down on the street below.

  The road was filled with marchers, what looked like at least a hundred, all headed on the path out of town that led toward Mary Toft’s house. Most of them were Londoners, rotund and red-faced, though more than a few of the local townspeople had mingled in with the gathering out of curiosity. Flanking the crowd were two small girls in brilliant gowns, striped in jewel-toned reds and greens, running gaily alongside the procession with their beribboned braids streaming behind them; before them, they held bells attached to long wooden sticks, whose chimes harmonized with their trilling laughter.

  What on earth was this? Even before he asked, he knew, and though Zachary thought that all of this was amiss for reasons he couldn’t articulate, he felt the urge to join the procession below. His reservations barely won out, and only because, close to the head of the throng, making wide gestures of speechification, his grand pronouncements made unintelligible from this distance by the crowd’s din, was none other than Nathanael St. André. Young Laurence trailed behind him, dressed as usual like St. André in miniature, dragging his feet in exhaustion.

  Zachary frowned as he realized that he’d bitten his tongue in his sleep, as well as the tender inside of his cheek: the little wounds would nag him for days. Still wondering where the girls in red and green had come from, how they had obtained the bells they rang, and by what means they’d been designated proclaimers of what must be the forthcoming miraculous birth—a conundrum for which, even after this was all over, he was never to receive a satisfactory answer—he pulled on his clothes and, still drowsy, made his way downstairs to Howard’s offices.

  Despite the noise outside, Zachary found Howard sitting quietly at his desk, intently reading Locke. He sat down in a chair opposite. “No word from Joshua Toft this morning?”

  Howard looked up at Zachary, his feigning of surprise at the question unconvincing. “Joshua Toft has not appeared this morning,” he said. “I would take it that my patient is not in need of my care. Though patient is, perhaps, an inadequate word for what she has become.”

 
He closed the book. “It seems there’s quite a commotion outside,” he said. “Shall we see what that’s about?”

  * * *

  *

  Two days before, Joshua Toft had arrived at Howard’s offices as expected, summoning Howard, St. André, and Manningham for a delivery. It had seemed to Zachary, and to Howard, that while St. André had regarded Cyriacus Ahlers with a barely restrained antagonism, he somehow wanted to ingratiate himself with this newest emissary of King George’s curiosity—despite his condemnations of authority and expertise once Ahlers had returned to London, Nathanael appeared entranced by Sir Richard Manningham, and approached him with an attitude of solicitous deference. As they walked over to the Toft house, Manningham and St. André were in the lead—Manningham strode purposefully with his hands clasped behind him, while St. André walked beside him, gesticulating whenever he spoke and responding to Manningham’s terse responses with exaggerated nods of approval. Howard could not help but feel forsaken, and as the usual press to fit Mary Toft’s myriad attendants into her lying-in chamber left Howard and Zachary stuck outside once again, Nathanael’s apology was perfunctory, and Howard accepted it with resignation, and without complaint.

  The subsequent routine was, to Zachary, depressingly familiar—as he sat in the front room of the house with Howard he could, with reasonable accuracy, predict the pitch and duration of Mary’s screams through the wall—and so, figuring that he had at least a few minutes before the delivery was over, he asked his master’s permission to step outside. Besides, he’d wanted to investigate a small gathering of people whom the group of men attending Mary Toft had passed on their way inside the house—the surgeons in consultation had paid them no mind, but Zachary thought they merited a second look.

  When he stepped outside he saw a white blanket spread out on the yellowed grass of the yard in front of the house. Seated on the blanket, with cheerful smiles and pink cheeks as if they were having a leisurely afternoon outing in high summer, were two London women, wearing fur hats and leather gloves and layers of wool to guard against the November chill. One of them was dandling the little Toft boy, James, nuzzling him and cooing: “You’re a monster. You’re a dirty little animal, and I’m going to eat you.” She bared her teeth and playfully bit into James’s neck as he squirmed and giggled and pushed at her face with his tiny hand.

  “Look here,” said the other woman, glancing at Zachary. “Here’s another one: too large to be devoured in one sitting, I fear, even for the two of us.”

  The first woman pulled her nose away from where she’d been rubbing it in James’s ear. She smacked her lips in mock desire. “Now here’s some mutton: richer in flavor, to be sure, but I expect he’d protest if we got out our carving knives. Not like my little lamb here,” she said, tickling the laughing boy as he futilely tried to slap her hands away. “Good only for eating is what you are, you awful little thing.”

  “Though I hate to disappoint, it’s true that I’ve grown old enough to become fond of keeping my flesh,” said Zachary. “Might I ask why the two of you are here?”

  “We are the Sisters Snelling,” said the second woman, “famous only to ourselves, perpetually nomadic, beholden to no man, forever inseparable. I am Frances; my carnivorous companion here is Henrietta.”

  They did not look like sisters in the least. Henrietta was small, ginger-haired, and chubby, pale-skinned with a dense band of freckles crossing the bridge of her nose; Frances, on the other hand, was tall, slender, and dusky, with a single curling forelock of white hair amidst a mane that was otherwise jet black. They certainly behaved in a sisterly manner, though, with a playful warmth between them that was easy to see, and that suggested a fellowship forged over decades, and so Zachary saw no harm in taking the two of them at their word.

  “As for what brings us here,” Frances continued, “in our search for adventure beyond London’s environs, we have heard a rumor about the woman inside that house that defies belief: we would scarcely credit it, were it not so often repeated.” And as Henrietta covered the little boy’s ears, Frances beckoned Zachary to lean over so that he could hear her whisper.

  “We have heard,” said Frances with a wink, “that the woman inside has bunnies leaping forth from her cunny.”

  “Rabbits, yes,” said Zachary reluctantly, feeling his face turn hot. “Though not alive—severed into parts, in fact.”

  “She ought to do better, then,” said Henrietta as she removed her hands from James’s ears. “If a woman goes to the trouble to engage in such business in the first place, she ought not to settle for half measures.”

  “I’m sure she’s doing the best she can, Ettie,” said Frances. “Please do try to be less censorious?”

  “My apologies, Fanny,” said Henrietta desultorily, as if she apologized to Frances a dozen times a day.

  “We came,” said Frances, “because no matter the truth of events, we could sense that something was happening, and we wanted to witness it firsthand.”

  “There are other Londoners here as well, filling up your beds and tossing money about—as Fanny and I do in London, we try our best to avoid them—but at present they possess too much propriety to approach the scene of the event,” said Henrietta. “We have no such silly scruples, and so we are first. Why come all this way to the village and fail to travel the last mile out of shyness?”

  “And we thought that perhaps we might get a glimpse of the woman,” said Frances. “Speak to her even, if there’s a chance of it; find out how she feels. How does she feel?”

  The question puzzled Zachary, even as he realized that perhaps it shouldn’t have.

  “We would love to know how she feels,” Frances prompted. “Is she thrilled or troubled? I can’t begin to imagine my state of mind, were such a thing to happen to myself.”

  Henrietta grabbed the belly fat of the boy in her arms and gave it a vigorous pinch. “And what has this poor creature done,” she said, “to deserve such an unending litter of devilish brothers and sisters? Shame on you, child. Shame.”

  “Stop,” the boy said, giggling.

  “Putting the obviously necessary rewrite of the woman’s last will and testament aside,” said Henrietta, “surely she must have offered her own opinion on the state of things, given the extent to which her very own body is involved in this matter.” Zachary thought it unwise to disappoint the women, to say that the first thing that anyone would notice when in the presence of Mary Toft was a face that clearly indicated her dull-eyed, bovine stupidity—if anything, she seemed to the men who served as her doctors to be her body’s hostage, rather than its owner. He could offer nothing in response but a noncommittal shrug.

  “Well, when you return inside,” said Frances, “please do make it known that there are those out here who have her in their thoughts, and are concerned about her well-being.”

  “I’ll do so,” said Zachary, turning to leave as, down the road, an apparent foursome of husbands and wives approached, the two women gaily chattering to each other, one of the men holding a bundled blanket beneath his arm.

  * * *

  *

  If Manningham had retained his skepticism after delivering Mary Toft of her sixteenth rabbit, he had kept his cards close. When they returned to Howard’s offices later that afternoon (as they’d left the Toft house, the gathering of people waiting outside had grown to a dozen), Manningham reported that he had examined the woman with close attention, and despite his “vigorous efforts,” he could find “no evidence of imposture.” (“Vigorous? I should say so,” complained St. André to Howard later that day, when Manningham had busied himself with study of the prior specimens that Mary had birthed, and the two of them were closeted alone. “He not only scrutinized every inch of the woman, but the bed in which she lay, getting on his hands and knees to peer under it, sliding his hand between the mattress and the frame. As if he were searching for the concealed mechanis
m of a magic trick! I thought to make a joke about how his peculiar notions of childbirth were at odds with the literature, but kept it to myself.”)

  Manningham did discern some medical irregularities in the patient, other than the obvious: as had Cyriacus Ahlers, he noticed a liquid leaking from her breasts, similar to milk, but too thin and watery to be nutritive; when palpating her stomach he felt a slight hardness on her right side, which St. André triumphantly announced was consonant with his own observations. Looking at her neck, slightly bruised and displaying the dot of an old needle prick, he inquired as to whether Mary had undergone a phlebotomy, and Nathanael replied that he had performed it, with Howard’s able assistance—that it was one of the first things they’d considered, and that it had not produced even a temporary cessation of the anomalous births: a new rabbit had continued to appear every two to three days, on schedule.

  Manningham concluded, then, that there was nothing to do but watch and wait. The group of people holding a vigil in front of the Toft house (fifteen arriving on the morning of Wednesday, November 23, swelling to thirty by that afternoon) appeared to have come to the same conclusion, but what they were all waiting for, none could say; nor could one say whether they were all waiting for the same thing, or whether each was waiting for something entirely different.

  * * *

  *

  John Howard locked up the entrance to his offices—he did not expect that anyone would come calling with urgencies for the next hour—and he and Zachary joined the procession marching to the Tofts’ home. There was an undeniable joyousness in the crowd: a gay laughter erupted, now here, now there, above the din of a hundred people in lively conversation, and occasionally people broke into cheers and clapped their hands for who knew what reason—perhaps no more than sheer pleasure at being alive, at a time and in a place that held such wonders and promised still more. Zachary felt his heart lift in happiness even as he found himself suspicious of that happiness’s cause; he felt the boundary that separated his own mind from those around him becoming porous, as the unrestrained delight of the crowd worked its way into him. How lovely it would be to believe, as all these people seemed to; the object of the belief was not important, merely that one believe in something, wholeheartedly, without question, to let that belief grant you its unadulterated jubilation—