Mary Toft; or, the Rabbit Queen

by Dexter Palmer

  That hard-edged boy hurt, coming out of me—I screamed in awe at myself, that he did not tear me in two as he escaped. Do you know what carrying a child inside you does to your idea of space, of what you own? Even the poorest man takes for granted that he holds clear title to the space inside his skin. Oh, but ask a man about a woman, and he’ll tell you that her body is so very different from his, that it holds empty spaces that stretch and hold mysteries, that measure time with strange and bloody clocks—whose empty spaces are those? Who holds their precious title? Ask a man again, and he’ll argue that the case is not so simple when the sex is switched. The mere pockets of air inside men that erupt in belches and farts are of little account, but the spaces inside women are meant by God for so much more that women’s ownership of them is clearly only ever provisional. Those empty spaces cannot be left unoccupied for no reason—they are intended to be penetrated, colonized, stuffed to bursting. The rule of men: all spaces must be filled. And so Joshua shoves his little prick against me beneath the bedsheets.

  * * *

  *

  Pained and cursed. Two daughters followed James, but the smallpox took them before the spaces inside them had any value. Faces and arms and legs stippled with boils, puking night and day, complaining of aches in their backs as if they were ten times their age. Clara lasted thirteen days against it; Bridget died in eleven. Then, in spring, came the creature, the misformed fourth, a hot mass of flesh tumbling out of me five months early. Dear God, did that one hurt, from gut to heart.

  Joshua made himself small to press his case, after that, and it was such a relief, that he made himself small instead of big, that I could not help but agree. He laid his heavy, enormous head on my lap and looked up at me, his ear against my stomach. “Whose is this?” he asked, and I knew what this he spoke of, even as I knew I would give him the wrong answer, to give him the chance to correct me in turn. That was his true request—for me to do wrong, so that I could be put right.

  “Whose is this?” he said.

  “Mine.”

  “Whose is this?” he said again.

  “Ours.”

  “Whose is this?” he said a third time, the voice of the other, harder Joshua rumbling beneath that of the softer one before me.

  “Yours.” The answer I knew he’d wanted all along.

  “Might it be,” he asked, his voice oh so very caring, “that you were a poor steward of what was mine?”

  I told you: do not think that I do not know how to love. “Yes.”

  “The smallpox would not have taken Clara and Bridget had they not come out of you with imperfections that we could not yet see, that took their time to flower.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you would not have experienced the early birth of the monster, had you bent your mind daily to the task at hand.”

  “Yes.”

  He was silent then, as I ran my fingers through his hair.

  “God speaks to us, speaks through you, and damns you for your failures,” he said. “But we might obtain salvation for you, if only you could speak back.”

  “Yes,” I said, not yet afraid, too dumb to yet feel the terror I should have.

  “Prayer will not do,” he said. “The Lord’s ears are stuffed full of prayers, so many that he cannot understand a single one. But I know a better way.”

  * * *

  *

  And so I am becoming, not myself, but a mixture of the dreams of others, of the many pleasing lies they tell themselves: my husband, and the surgeons, and those to whom the surgeons speak, and those who overhear their words. But you must understand that this is not a transformation, not a disappearance, but a recognition. And I am no different from you, despite what my ever-growing collection of caretakers might choose to claim, despite that you can speak while I go unheard.

  Have you ever been fortunate enough to be loved? At the beginning of a romance, you saw yourself mirrored in your lover’s eyes, a better person than you knew yourself to be—cleaned of stains, free of filth and shining. Did you speak to correct her foolish assumptions, out of a need for her to know the truth at all costs? Did you list all your flaws, show her your scars? Or did you stay silent, keeping your own counsel, granting your lover the sweet gift of her self-deception, for just one moment longer, and another, and just one more, and then another.

  Well, then. Now you know why I would hold my tongue, even if I believed I’d be heard if I spoke. When my husband shoved his fingers in my mouth and yelled, Bite me, bite me you idiot bitch, harder, they have to see the mark, then the taste of the blood I drew from him was the sweet and hard-won declaration of his love. And it is good to be loved, and to love in return.

  * * *

  *

  Oh, dear God: listen to me.

  This hurts.

  | CHAPTER XVI.

  MOLL FLANDERS.

  In the future, thought Zachary, every man would travel by pegasus.

  The signs of this evolution were already clear to see: if it were possible for a human woman to give birth to rabbits, then the barriers between species that were once thought inviolable were more permeable than mankind once thought, and all manner of cross-breedings might occur with God’s tacit permission. The secret was perhaps locked up inside the very patient that he and his master had been attending for the past two months—once it was discovered, it would only be a matter of time until men bred sows with the minds and demeanors of dogs, eager to obey and easy to command; or they might cross horses with swans, to create ponies with majestic, feathered white wings that could carry themselves aloft on zephyrs of their own making. Six of such wonderful creatures, towing a sleigh behind them crafted from the light wood of linden trees, would let a man fly in comfort through the air—the ride would be as smooth as if he were sitting in his own chair at supper, the only indications of movement being the wind against his face and the landscape scrolling by beneath him. There would be no more need in the world for roads and wheels.

  But this was the winter of 1726, not the far-off nineteenth century. Here, in this moment, Zachary was stuck on a stagecoach headed to London, and as its wheels rolled over the rutted, rocky road his brain jostled around in his skull, and his teeth clacked together, and his guts churned, and he was deeply miserable. The journey by stagecoach from Godalming to London took about seventeen hours, counting two stops to change horses; they had left well before sunrise, and would arrive in London at night. By noon, Zachary found himself wishing he had chosen to walk the sixty miles instead. This day would last a year.

  John Howard sat in the coach next to him. The three London surgeons, St. André, Ahlers, and Manningham, had left for the city the day before, along with Mary Toft and her husband; Margaret Toft had remained behind in Godalming along with James, the child. Crispin Walsh had stayed behind as well; as much as he might have liked to pretend otherwise, there was no immediate need for him on this journey (for which Zachary was secretly glad—John was likely to be a less attentive chaperone).

  Sitting across from John and Zachary were two passengers who had both been on the stagecoach when they boarded—the first, an elderly man who reminded Zachary somewhat of his father, had gotten up from his seat and moved to the other side so that master and apprentice could sit together, greeting them with a taciturn nod of the head. He did not seem to be a minister—though his gray suit had Crispin’s sense of austerity, the gold rings on his fingers gave the game away. A lawyer, perhaps.

  Next to the likely lawyer was a woman, traveling alone. She seemed magically able to preserve her stillness in a place of ceaseless movement: while the men were constantly swaying back and forth (and as the gentleman across from John and Zachary did his best to keep himself as far away from the woman as possible), she somehow managed to sit ramrod still, as if her body were in fact engaged in an invisible, elaborate series of compensating countermovements to the vehicle’s regular jolt
s. The glances of the men in the carriage toward her went unreturned, for she kept her eyes on the book she held up before her, as if to screen her face from their gazes.

  The book she read, Zachary saw, was a popular one, and had been for a few years: The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders, &c. He hadn’t read it himself—he did not prefer to waste his time with novels, and neither his master nor his father displayed such volumes on their shelves—but had spied enough copies of it in the hands of women, and overheard enough conversations about it, to feel a secondhand familiarity with its story of a woman who seems to dedicate her life to committing every conceivable crime, before the final few pages that (so Zachary had inferred) offered the reader a fig leaf of redemption.

  The silence in the coach was a heavy, velvet weight: Cyriacus Ahlers, before leaving for London himself the day before, had told Zachary that one of the (apparently few) pleasures of stagecoach riding was that the forced close proximity to random strangers over the course of a day gave no other choice but to engage in conversation, and such conversations were often entertaining in a peculiar way that those between longtime friends were not. But John and Zachary were bound together in a bizarre confederacy, its nature heretofore unheard of, and to speak of the subject most likely to spring to their lips would surely alienate those not in that confederacy who would overhear. And the woman wielded the book before her as both veil and shield: it seemed that she would see any attempt to engage her in discourse as a bother.

  Nonetheless, John Howard made the first sally at small talk. “What brings you to this stagecoach, ma’am?” he asked.

  After a moment, as if to realize that she was in fact the ma’am that John was addressing, the woman lowered the book just enough for her eyes to peer over it at John. “Returning to London,” she said. “I was visiting my sister in Witley.”

  She raised the book again.

  “You have a sister in Witley?” John asked halfheartedly.

  “Yes,” the woman said, not even bothering to lower the book this time. “She’s ill.”

  Not wanting to follow two clearly unwanted and begrudgingly answered inquisitions with a third, John lapsed back into silence, leaving the passengers to once again listen to the rhythmic clopping of horses’ hooves ahead of them as they dealt with the rocking of the stagecoach (except for the woman, who continued to appear as if an invisible mechanism kept her vertical).

  It was after the first stop, after the passengers had stretched their legs and had a meal at the way station where the stagecoach’s horses were changed, when the other gentleman made the second attempt to speak to the woman. “I don’t approve,” he said, into the open air, seemingly not intending to address anyone in particular, though Zachary and John knew better.

  When no one responded, he said again, turning his head ever so slightly toward the woman, “I don’t approve.”

  The woman lowered her book again. “Of what,” she asked. “If you speak of me, I fail to see how I offend.”

  “Not you—a woman such as yourself clearly could not cause offense to a gentleman, even if you sought to.” The elderly man made a deliberately casual gesture with his index finger toward the volume. “The book. It seeks to deceive.”

  “How so?”

  “First, it is the work of a man, choosing to speak in a woman’s voice, purporting to speak about ways of women he could not know. His first deception, but not his gravest. Second, the book pretends at morality, but any honest man can see that its true purpose is titillation, nothing more—sure, there are a few fine phrases tacked on at the end, meant to absolve the reader of taking pleasure in sin secondhand, but only after hundreds of pages of the most scurrilous, debased actions, recounted in the most depraved detail. Prurience, for its own sake.”

  “You have a surprising familiarity with the work you’re condemning as scurrilous,” the woman said. “One might think you wouldn’t have desired to dirty yourself.”

  “Oh, I know of her tutelage in pocket picking, her pretended widowhood, her bigamy, her incest. My wife has read it twice, and describes its events to me as if they were recent news, real instead of imagined. I do not like the light in her eyes when she does this—it’s unseemly.”

  “Well,” the woman replied, “I have also heard the rumor that this tale is written by a man. And to be frank, I do not believe it. A woman’s honesty, laid out as bare as it is here, without apology, causes discomfort to those not of the so-called ‘fairer’ sex, it seems: better for men to consider it a fantasy, so that they can continue to imagine that the women with whom they spend their lives remain innocent of the world’s vast variety of sins. Why else would you choose to ignore the bare evidence of the title page, that this is ‘written from her own memorandums’?”

  “I have heard that, too,” John Howard put in. “That the author of the book is a man. Though it’s not known who. He hasn’t come forward. There are similar rumors about that other popular book, Roxana: The Fortunate Mistress. Perhaps it’s even penned by the same man, who saw a second chance that was liable to be as good as the first.”

  The woman gave John a gentle smile. “Do you have any evidence for that?” she said.

  “Well, no, not here in this carriage,” John stammered, “not in my pockets.”

  “Then here in this carriage,” said the woman, “it seems that Moll Flanders must be judged as real as you or me, just as she is everywhere else. For in our little game, I have a hand with one very good card”—and she indicated the book, which she’d opened to the title page—“and you have no worthy cards at all: not one. Though if the supposed true author of this piece chooses to reveal himself, I will be happy to change my mind. But not before then, I am sorry to say.

  “Now then. Moll calls.”

  The woman returned to her reading, and the travelers rode on in a silence that the men suddenly found preferable, until the second stop for a change of horses.

  * * *

  *

  For the final leg of the trip, as evening came on, Zachary rode outside the stagecoach, next to the driver, whom he’d managed to befriend at the inn while the horses were being changed. The driver was a stout fellow, his faded clothing threadbare, his chin covered with salt-and-pepper stubble, his wig a dingy bird’s nest. “Our bodies change to suit our professions, new young friend,” he said to Zachary as he snapped the reins of his horses in punctuation. “As a chairman develops large, strong calves, the better to convey the rich through London’s streets so that they are not soiled by dirt, and as those same rich have withered legs that wouldn’t carry them a mile, but gigantic, swollen heads, the better to enable the constant, rapid totaling of their pounds, shillings, and pence, so I myself have developed a large and generous arse, the better for sitting upon in comfort as I drive these teams of horses back and forth across God’s England. Three healthy servings a day of the finest meats and beers: indispensable necessities of the job. Along with coffee to keep my eyes open, during the final miles of a run like this, when I long for sleep.” He graced Zachary with a yawn that transformed into a long, rumbling bass of a burp, following it with a gap-toothed grin that Zachary answered in kind.

  “And your future occupation?” the driver said. “What do you see yourself as, in ten years’ time?”

  “I am a surgeon’s apprentice,” said Zachary.

  The stagecoach driver’s eyes widened in mock surprise. “Oh, a surgeon, are you? Good on you, and the Lord knows we can use you and a hundred more like you, but I pity your fate. Your guts will transform to clockwork, because when you split a patient’s belly open that’s all you’ll see inside: a broken device, in need of repair. The tips of your ten fingers will transform to scalpel blades; all the women who love you will be cut by your caresses!”

  The boisterous laugh that the driver favored Zachary with as the boy shrank away from him seemed half apologetic. “I joke, with a new
friend,” he said. “If I believed you less than human I would not let you sit here beside me, on this last leg of the journey before you are swallowed up.”

  “Swallowed up?” Suddenly, Zachary found himself trading one kind of alarm for another.

  “In order not to go stark raving mad as you enter London, overwhelmed by the sheer size and variety of it,” the driver said, his japery now turned most of the way to seriousness, “it is best to think of it not as a collection of hundreds of thousands of people, each with his own mind and desire, but as a single living thing, of which you will become a tiny component during your tenure here, just as your finger is a part of your own body. Though you have your own thoughts and desires, once you become a part of the city you may find that it bends you to its will, that it makes you have thoughts and aspirations that you will believe are your own, but are in fact the city’s as it sings to itself. I tell you, it lives and breathes and it has its own cycles.” He lifted his nose and sniffed. “Do you smell that? Even here, when we are still six or seven miles away?”

  Zachary inhaled in imitation: certainly, there was something different about the air here when compared to the air of Godalming, though the scent he detected was so faint as to be nearly imperceptible, the merest rumor of a stronger odor.

  “Smoke, mostly, is what you’re smelling,” said the driver, “but the discerning nose will note the undertones: the sweat of bodies unable to escape from each other, and beneath that, shit and piss. Even the most brilliant of London’s minds are unable to abscond from their flesh, much as they might long to. They must shit; they must piss; that shit and piss must go somewhere. And so, the evening ceremony of the removal of night soil, when men who are no less necessary to the city’s life as its scientists and bankers collect the contents of hundreds of thousands of chamber pots and convey them to a secret place, out of sight and out of memory. The city has its own bowels, young friend; those bowels have a rhythm, as do yours.