“I am half inclined,” he said, “to go down there and join them—if only to find out what they believe they see, up here with me. Perhaps I’m wrong about them, and distance and imagination allow them a more perceptive view. But I suppose we shall see, soon enough.”
| CHAPTER XXI.
THE PROOF.
When John Howard and Zachary Walsh arrived at the Blackamoor for their daily meeting with the other surgeons on Thursday, December 1, Ahlers was absent, for he was on his six-hour shift observing the patient (who had not birthed a rabbit for seven days, though she ran a fever and her pulse was rapid. Orange tea would treat the fever, Cyriacus thought, bringing her pulse down in turn). Nathanael St. André had a stack of papers assembled before him, a proof of the manuscript that was due to be published in a few days, and he’d changed the title as promised: it now read A Short Narrative of an Extraordinary Delivery of Rabbits, Perform’d by Mr. JOHN HOWARD, Surgeon. (Beneath that, in smaller letters, was printed Published by Mr. St. André, Surgeon and Anatomist to His Majesty.) “Does this title meet your approval, John?” Nathanael asked as Howard sat down. “I assume that you will want to publish your own, more comprehensive account of the case—this only details my personal experience, coming into it later as I did. If you agree on all points, all the better; if our stories conflict in parts, there is no harm, though I doubt any such conflicts will be more than trivial.” He pushed the papers across the table to John. “We will all want to take oaths attesting to the truth of what lies in these pages, to be appended to the narrative before its publication—”
“I will do no such thing,” said Manningham, “and I believe I speak for our colleague Ahlers when I say he will do no such thing either. Not when the facts of this case are so far from being settled.”
“Well, perhaps Toft herself will swear to what Ahlers said in her presence,” said Nathanael, leaving it at that. “I will speak to her personally about this when I tend to her this afternoon.”
John turned over the title page. The one beneath it featured only a single centered sentence: The account of the delivery of the eighteenth rabbit, shall be published by way of appendix to this account.
“I feel certain that there will be at least one more delivery, though she has not produced a birth in seven days,” Nathanael explained. “There will have to be an appendix published for each successive birth, and in addition I am planning to produce a separate publication, with drawings from life of the preternaturally produced rabbits, comparing their anatomies with those of ordinary rabbits so that the reader may see the difference—”
“How much do you plan to charge for all these publications and appendixes?” said Manningham.
“Not very much at all!” said Nathanael. “My aim is to inform the public rather than to accrue personal gain; profits, if any at all, will be modest.”
John leafed through the proof to find that the letter he had sent to Nathanael and a few other surgeons, back in late October, was reproduced in full here and signed with his name—its appearance there surprised him, but then again, there was no explicit reason to expect Nathanael’s confidence, nor to keep the correspondence a secret, and the letter, once Nathanael had received it, was his, not John’s, to do with as he wished. And he stood by what he said in it, still. He knew that others held their suspicions of St. André—the other surgeons sometimes seemed to tolerate his presence out of professional necessity, and Alice had not concealed her dislike of him during his stay in their home—but this new and scrupulous willingness to grant credit where it was due signaled that it was sometimes profitable to revisit one’s initial assumptions about character, and that people, when encouraged, could change.
Most of Nathanael’s text detailed the nature of the rabbit parts that he’d delivered from Toft himself, comparing them to those that Howard had delivered before St. André’s arrival in Godalming and preserved in spirits, and his descriptions struck Howard as pleasingly, meticulously observed:
All the heads which I examined had their complete number of teeth, but they appeared not in the least worn nor stained, as the teeth of other rabbits are by mastication.
The nails of the paws were most of them exceedingly sharp.
The skins were of several colors, as to their fur, which was exceedingly long, and in one particularly, that part which covered the head was curled.
From all these considerations I was fully convinced that at the same time that the external appearance of these animals was exactly like such creatures, as must inevitably undergo the changes that happen to adult animals, by food and air, they carried within them the strongest marks of fetuses, even by such parts as cannot exist in an adult, and without which a fetus cannot possibly be supposed to live. This, I think, proves in the strongest terms possible that these animals were of a particular kind, and not bred in a natural way; nor will there be any doubt remaining (even with the least knowing in these matters) when those parts which are subservient to the circulation of the blood, and nourishment between an adult creature and its fetus are brought away; which I am fully satisfied must shortly happen, or be the cause of this woman’s death.
John looked up from the pages at Nathanael. “Death?”
“We need not deceive ourselves,” said Nathanael. “The fellow we spoke to two days ago, who took out a policy on her life, had the right of it. Whatever is happening inside her must be the result of a highly irregular constitution—her womb is at war with the rest of her body. If we believe that this is the result of God’s direct intervention, then there is no reason not to believe that he will withdraw his favor once his message, inscrutable as it may be, has been relayed in its entirety. And then, unless we ourselves can work a miracle and remove her irregular womb intact, she will die.
“But perhaps the four of us, working in concert, will be able to manage it. If there is any hope for her life at all, it lies in our hands.”
“We will not cut this woman open,” said Manningham, his coffee cup trembling in his hand.
“I sincerely hope,” said Nathanael, “that it does not come to that. But I fear that it will. With each passing day it becomes more difficult to see another way out.”
| CHAPTER XXII.
A PRINCIPLE OF ENGLISH LAW.
As the meeting at the Blackamoor broke up, with St. André headed to the bagnio to relieve Ahlers at his vigil, Zachary took Laurence aside. “Do you think your master could do without you for an afternoon?” he asked. “I spoke to the friend of mine with whom I promised to spend some time—she has been occasionally joining the vigil outside the bagnio, and yesterday I spied her from the window.”
“Does she stand with the madmen?” asked Laurence, arms folded. “With the shambling madwomen?”
“Not with so much as among, I think. It’s hard to tell what she thinks of anything: everything with her is laced with teasing. Nonetheless, I thought the three of us might head forth into the city together tomorrow afternoon. Her father is an entertainer of sorts, and she can gain us entrance to his show tomorrow evening. She promises something strange—beyond that, she won’t say.”
Laurence paused for a moment, and his face was difficult to read, as if he were making a calculation to which Zachary was not meant to be privy. “I suppose,” he said eventually.
“Excellent! Then we will all meet tomorrow afternoon, after Mr. Howard finishes his morning shift with the patient.”
“And there is somewhere I’d like to go with you all beforehand,” said Laurence. “Not such a mystery—it is quite blunt about what it is—but I believe you will enjoy it all the same.”
* * *
*
And so, on the afternoon of Friday, December 2 (as Mary Toft went into her eighth day without giving birth to a rabbit, and her husband assured the lords and surgeons who kept her constant company that a birth was surely due shortly; and as Cyriacus Ahlers sat at the desk in his study
and wrote in his diary that “one way or another this horrible business will soon near its end—I dearly wish I had never encountered this woman, for I am coming to believe I know what must be done, and have not the will to do it”; and as Nathanael St. André’s pamphlet went to the press with a last hurried addition, a record of the patient swearing under oath that when in Godalming, “Mr. Ahlers [had] examined her breasts, and found milk in one of them,” followed by “The Mark of Mary ‡ Toft”; and as Lord P—— considered the menu for the supper at which the storied Sir Richard Manningham would be his single guest, and thought that even if Manningham was not the sort to appreciate a good joke, this would not stop Lord P—— from telling it; and as Nicholas Fox made the last few arrangements for the evening’s entertainment, taking delivery on a box of fireworks, a bull whose breeding days were long behind it, and a pair of shrieking, mange-ridden feral cats), Laurence and Zachary met Anne outside Dr. Lacey’s Bagnio, where the group of people holding vigil had swelled to twenty-four. (When she stepped away from the formation of four rows of six to greet the two boys, the remaining watchers began to rearrange themselves, swirling around in a restless, agitated mass for a few moments until two other strangers drifted out of the market’s crowd to join them. Their arrival soon settled the rest down, and soon enough they were standing in five rows of five, staring up at the bagnio’s facade, continuing to wait in silence.)
It occurred to Zachary that it was odd how the memory of a woman you had anticipated seeing after a long absence could enlarge her beauty as she stood before you at last. She was wearing nearly the same clothing as she’d been the last time he’d seen her, as she and her father passed through Godalming on their way back to London—the same blue dress that rhymed with her eyes, though her hair was now loosely tied with a ribbon of red silk that drew attention toward her birthmark, rather than away from it. Somehow the deliberate choice to emphasize the port-wine stain transformed it into something stunning, and as Anne greeted Zachary by looking into his eyes and briefly clasping his hand, he was reminded of the other times she’d favored him with her gaze, azure twinkling impishly in the midst of scarlet. Even beneath today’s smoky overcast skies, she shone.
“I have something to whisper to you,” said Anne, and as Zachary leaned forward and Anne brought her lips close to his ear (and he smelled some kind of lovely girlish scent he’d never encountered before, a fragrance distilled from a plant whose name only women were permitted to know) she said:
“Zachary. Your hands are sweating. In December.”
“Oh!” Zachary pulled his hand away from her and wiped it on his shirt, chuckling nervously, hearing his own chuckle and regretting it, wondering why he cared about it, what had changed to make him so prone to cringing—
“And this must be your friend,” Anne said, mercifully rescuing him from his spiral of self-doubt. “Aren’t you a funny one,” she said to Laurence, looking him up and down. He was dressed in a sharp slate-gray suit of ditto with golden buttons and accents, his wig freshly powdered. She was two inches taller than him, but he smiled at her with an ease that gave the impression that he considered height no matter—again, Zachary had the idea that Laurence was a different creature in his native element, with social rules he knew. Anne briefly clasped Laurence’s hand as she had Zachary’s, and smiled, and said, “I have something to whisper to you, too.” And she leaned down to speak a few words in Laurence’s ear: Zachary could not hear what she said, but whatever it was made Laurence’s eyes widen as he suddenly felt the need to clear his throat.
Zachary thought that it was good of her to be kind to Laurence in this way, and not show clear favor to either of them (though he was certain that she had not touched Laurence’s hand for as long as she’d touched his, nor held it as firmly, and he found himself hoping that Laurence’s hand had been clammy, too. Surely, it must have been. Surely whatever she’d whispered in his ear was trivial, was nothing, was something un-girlish and uncouth, meant to shock and unsettle, meant to create a healthy distance between her and this new stranger before the question of distance had even been posed. Yes).
“I’ve arranged entry for the three of us to my father’s Cavalcade of Forbidden Wonders this evening,” Anne said, withdrawing. “It’s also in Covent Garden, not far from here—not quite in a theater, but…well, you’ll see. I promise that what you witness tonight will positively make the blood surge in your veins. But we have a little time beforehand—Laurence, Zachary said you had an idea for somewhere you’d like to take us?”
“I thought we might go to a dram shop,” Laurence said. “There are aspects of London that the city would not think, or choose, to display to visitors: a dram shop is as good a place as any to see them.”
Delighted, Anne sidled next to Laurence and looked at Zachary side-eyed, playing at conspiracy. “And which of these lovely establishments did you have in mind?”
Laurence frowned, considering. “Bambridge’s?”
“We’re likely to run into my father there—it’s one of his haunts. He’s a nervous man, and needs liquid courage before stepping on a stage. Defour’s?”
“Isn’t that place sometimes a bit…indecorous? It has a reputation for occasional violence—”
“Yes it is, and yes it does,” said Anne. “We’re agreed, then: Defour’s it is. Good choice, friend.”
“I have a question,” said Zachary. “If I’m to be dragged into this. Is it…I suppose, permissible, for us to walk into a dram shop and just—”
“Order glasses of gin as if we are adults, with sons and daughters our own age?” Anne finished. “Is there a law prohibiting us from entering such places, or proprietors from taking our money? No, there is not. Everything which is not forbidden is allowed, Zachary—if we’re going to spend any time together at all, you must learn that and take it to heart. Now off we go.”
* * *
*
Anne led them down an alley branching off from the Covent Garden Market, into the city’s labyrinth. She stepped sure-footed through the twisted streets, steady on the uneven cobbles, tenaciously asserting her right to spaces on sidewalks, deftly avoiding puddles and mud and horseshit, and the two boys with her soon found that the wisest choice was to travel close behind her, in her wake. The air was filled with a mist that occasionally coalesced into rain, and by the time the three adventurers reached their destination, a seemingly unmarked door draped in late-afternoon shadows, Zachary felt as if he wanted to go back to his apartment on London Bridge and wring himself dry. But one soon learned to accept the brute fact of London’s pervasive smoke and dampness—Zachary saw a few women with umbrellas, but no man would want to be seen wielding such a frivolous device instead of keeping a hand ready for better use.
“Defour’s,” Anne announced, and pushed the door open, revealing the dimly lit interior beyond. The place was small and closely packed, its air thick with the fumes of alcohol; the clientele was mostly male, seated in rickety chairs at canting tables or standing at the bar that lined the back wall, playing cards or trading stories. Scattered amid the men were a few women, their laughs merry and melodic and rising above the conversation, loud as it was, and another group of children like themselves, three boys huddled at a table in a corner, making themselves invisible in a manner that was likely to work on adults, but not other children. Zachary and Laurence spied them, caught their eyes, shared a quick moment of confidence in their glances of recognition, and dutifully looked away to avoid drawing further attention.
In Anne’s company, Zachary and Laurence had no such chance at anonymity; nor did Anne seem to desire it. She marched straight through the crowd of men toward the bar, her deep blue dress a sharp contrast to the grays and blacks and browns favored by the assembled drinkers, and as Zachary followed behind he could see the men’s faces, some smiling, others turning away or stifling sputtered laughs, but none of them indifferent to the face of the young woman they saw.
The publican was an awesome pile of old and seasoned flesh, acquired pound by pound over decades spent seated in front of plates of mutton and mugs of beer. His pale, bullet-shaped head was shorn completely bald, and his eyes were tiny and dark. As he turned to retrieve a bottle of gin from a high shelf behind him, his thick, stubby fingers and the sweaty rolls of fat on the back of his neck put Zachary in mind of links of sausage.
“You never pull that bottle down for me, Keith,” said the man standing at the bar next to Anne, smiling.
“Because, Michael, you are not a pert young minx who strides through my door to offer a challenge,” Keith replied in a booming baritone as half the dram shop erupted in a long, rolling roar of laughter. “To her, and her two young friends who are clearly in well over their heads,” he announced to more raucous guffaws, “I give my rarest ambrosia, brought here from the Continent.”
He decanted servings of gin into three tiny glasses, stopping each pour just before the rim, and Anne carefully passed them back one at a time to Laurence and Zachary, taking the last for herself. Zachary immediately tossed his back in one long gulp, as he’d done with every glass of gin he’d ever had before this one (all of three, each handed to him by John Howard, and never for pleasure). It didn’t taste much different from every other swallow of gin he’d taken—it stung his tongue and felt warm going down his throat—but afterward he noticed that a few of the other patrons were looking at him as if he’d done something embarrassing.
Mary Toft; or, the Rabbit Queen Page 22
