Mary Toft; or, the Rabbit Queen

by Dexter Palmer

  As the fuse burned down and the flame began to climb upward, approaching the first firework near the bull’s tail, the bull walked a few steps forward, as if to escape an insect that threatened to bite. It swished its tail lazily and lumbered forward once more with a sleepy, irritated snort; then, suddenly, it swung to face behind it, frightened, as the spectators tittered nervously.

  Zachary wanted to close his eyes; he wanted to be elsewhere. But he did not want to be seen in front of Anne and Laurence and Lord M—— with his eyes squeezed shut as if he were a child getting a splinter removed from a fingertip, and he had neither the will nor the courage to walk out (and, he would think later, perhaps he did not truly have the desire, and wished only to pretend to himself that he had, to spare his self-regard. Perhaps he had truly wanted to see, just as Anne had wanted him to see).

  The flame reached the end of the fuse, flared briefly just as it touched that first pink firework, and died out, and Zachary thought for a moment that this was all a prank at the poor animal’s expense, or that a dud incendiary would grant it a reprieve. But then the firework exploded with a muffled pop, a shower of golden sparks flying as the bull leapt in surprise, and half the audience jumped to its feet and cheered.

  Another firework exploded, and another, and two and three and then five more, and within a minute the bull was enveloped from head to tail in a cloud of blood and light, trailing a plume of black smoke behind it as it staggered in clumsy circles, bellowing in a voice that sounded like that of an old man, deep in nightmare. Thick droplets of blood spattered on the sand; chunks of meat flew. Zachary smelled singeing skin and burning hair.

  In the corners of the arena’s floor, the dwarves who operated the lights they’d brought in with them continued to turn their cranks, stoically staring at the flames before them, coloring the arena in hypnotic, shifting waves of red and blue, red and blue.

  At last, as the wooden platform in the center of the arena lowered once more, the golden light died out and the bull collapsed, its head striking the ground before the rest of it, its neck bending at a troubling angle, its bleeding tongue lolling through teeth clamped shut. One of its back legs was broken, and dangled loosely. The bulk of its body was drenched in blood; much of its skin had been burned or torn away, revealing glimpses of pink flesh and exposed bone.

  The bull drew three breaths, slow, liquid, and ragged, and died.

  The wooden platform came back up, bringing with it eight muscular men dressed in dingy, spotted trousers and leather butcher’s aprons; efficiently, they surrounded the bull’s carcass, hoisted it at a count of three, carried it back to the platform as its warm blood coated their hands and forearms, and descended once again.

  Nicholas returned to the center of the arena, hands raised in a sign that might have been read either as one of victory or benediction—it was hard to tell. “Was that not a special thing to witness?” he said. “Was that not beautiful and rare?” The audience of bewigged lords responded with a cheery round of huzzahs.

  “Wonderful,” Lord M—— said. “Wonderful.”

  “There will be an intermission to give us all a chance to catch our breaths,” Nicholas said. “And then—the cat.”

  * * *

  *

  “While we are waiting,” said Lord M—— to Zachary, “may I tell you my Theory of the Cat?”

  Zachary was not sure he wanted to hear this theory, but felt he had no choice. This was all so different from the exhibition that Nicholas Fox had brought to Godalming—this was raw and ugly, and stripped of scrims and shadows, it left no room to doubt its realness. Nicholas seemed somehow angrier here in his home, too, as if his secret motive were revenge or spite, rather than mere diversion. This was the sort of entertainment a hateful person would concoct for people he despised.

  “The Theory of the Cat,” Lord M—— said, “is thus. I have quite a lot of money, young friend, so much that, through the peculiarly British innovation of finance, it has become self-renewing, growing even as I sleep and idle the last years of my life away. It replenishes more of itself than even a fool could spend, and I am no fool. But I feel no sense of it growing, and without this, I feel no worth. A man who has only nine pounds to his name is thrilled to get his hands on a tenth, but for a man with nine hundred thousand pounds, another hundred thousand is almost nothing at all. It is just a number: it makes for no material change in life that one can truly appreciate. It is hard for the very rich person to have that very important sense that he is, day by day, becoming more than he was before, when the only record of this is a figure in a ledger, one that ticks higher whether he sleeps or wakes. And that feeling of growth is essential to one’s happiness—even, perhaps, to one’s sanity.

  “In a way, you might say that finance is the problem here, even though it provides so many solutions to civilization, for while goods are finite, money is limited only by our ability to dream it into existence. And the money will not be deterred from dreaming itself—it never stops. But do you know what there is a finite amount of, even in this crazed, finance-driven city, the harbinger of a future, finance-driven world?”

  Lord M—— winked. “Humanity, Zachary. At any time in the history of the earth there is exactly enough humanity to go around for each human on earth to have one full share of it, to entitle himself to say he is better than an animal because he walks on two legs, and sings, and invents money, and wraps a decrepit bull in a many-colored firework coat. But if I am very, very rich, and you are not so rich: well, then, I,” Lord M—— said, his hand on his heart, “can take some of yours.” And he tapped Zachary’s nose with his fingertip. “This is the last thing that money is good for, once you have as much as I do—to make myself more human, which regrettably but necessarily entails making you less human, by contrast.”

  Lord M—— retreated slightly, perhaps responding to the alarm in Zachary’s eyes. (Meanwhile, Anne and Laurence were huddled close together, talking excitedly in low voices. Since they’d entered the dram shop he’d felt as if their willingness to acknowledge his existence was provisional, to be given or withheld based on rules he didn’t know.) “I don’t mean you in particular, friend,” Lord M—— said. “Even having only spent a few minutes in your company, I know you too well to want to see you brought low. And you look enough like me to remind me of what I once was, which occasions my sympathy. But if I did not know you, if I had only heard news of you from a distance, or if you looked different from myself, then I might hit you, or put you in chains, or employ you in some demeaning occupation for a few coins, or hunt you for sport. And that would provide some satisfaction, but not what I and my like are truly seeking. If I were to use a woman’s mouth as a chamber pot—and you would be surprised how little money it takes to acquire this service, if one has agents in the proper quarters: the money I paid her was replaced in my coffers in the time it took me to finish pissing—then we would both be aware that the perversion was one that required human invention, and so the woman would believe she was a lesser person than I am, but she would still consider herself a person. To do what she did is humiliating, without doubt, but it is not a thing an animal would do. Slaves, I imagine, must think the same way, when they see that their chains are forged by human hands, that their freedoms are circumscribed by human laws. They may view themselves as lesser people, which would please me, but they would still view themselves as people, which is not entirely satisfying. Such a transaction of humanity favors me, but it is not quite as favorable as I would wish: I want a better bargain, and I know I can drive one.

  “What I want, Zachary, and what I have yet to see thus far, is to witness a human not merely humiliating himself but doing a thing that he knows only an animal would do, not a human. A final depth of debasement from which one could not return. Do you understand?”

  * * *

  *

  “Do you see now,” continued Lord M—— as the platform that had carri
ed down the butchers and the bull carcass began to rise, “why I was so excited when I heard the news of the particular affliction of your master’s patient? Because it was a possible sign that I was about to reach my apotheosis. Though I must confess I have my doubts about her—I sat and watched her in silence for hours, and though I have not yet witnessed the phenomenon I seek, I am sure that I will know it when I see it. And she still seems human to me—my instincts tell me that she believes herself to be made of the same stuff as myself. I cannot say why.”

  Zachary felt a hand on the back of his, and turned to see Anne looking at him. “You should let me take over from here,” she said to Lord M——, “because the rest of the explanation involves my father’s particular…innovation.”

  “Of course,” said Lord M——.

  And Anne continued, in a voice that seemed to borrow something of Lord M——’s hauteur, in a way that, subtle as it was, Zachary still found deeply unpleasant.

  * * *

  *

  “My father is not himself rich, but he knows how the rich think,” said Anne. “The opinions of Lord M—— and his like are not unfamiliar to him. So he thought: what sort of entertainment could he offer that would satisfy these people? If not the guarantee of what Lord M—— sought, at least the promise of it. And this is what he came up with—a social experiment that he and the lords have been conducting for four years.”

  “We are attempting,” Lord M—— cut in, unable to restrain himself, “to determine the exact amount of money that would induce a man to eat a cat, alive.”

  “Good Lord!” said Zachary.

  “There is a pool of money,” said Anne, “to which the lords contribute. Each month, during the winter season, my father finds a man, most likely a beggar with no roof over his head, and convinces him to take the chance.”

  “The pool is now greater than seven thousand pounds,” said Lord M——.

  “Is there a reason,” said Laurence, now entering the conversation, “that the fellow couldn’t just cook the cat beforehand? Outsmarting the rules, as it were?”

  “No preparation is permitted,” said Anne. “This includes strangling the cat just before. The cat must die during the process of being eaten; all of the cat must be eaten except its fur and bones.”

  “The man may not have utensils, for those are human inventions,” Lord M—— clarified. “To see a man sitting before a cat’s raw remains, dining with a fork and knife as if he were a gentleman in a club, would certainly be amusing, but it would not be satisfying in the manner I require. He must restrict his use to teeth and hands. Those must suffice.”

  “It calls for strategy,” Laurence put in. “Best to start with the soft flesh of the belly, and endure the raking claws for a few moments to gain access to the organs necessary for life.”

  “Perhaps,” said Lord M—— politely, in the manner of one who had long ago considered the possibility and dismissed it. “I believe that the man who is ultimately successful will summon the courage to begin not with the belly, but with the face. The teeth would pose a problem, to be sure—those feline kisses would be most unwelcome! But the face offers the surest point of entry to the skull, and to the brain inside—the bone structure there is delicate, and easily broken if you have the will—and so it presents the quickest way to snuff out the creature’s light.”

  The platform had completely risen now, and on it was a man, seated before an enormous desk, mahogany with brass accents, that looked as if it ought to be in the office of a fairly successful lawyer. On the desk was a small cage; in the cage was a tabby cat that looked as if London’s streets had schooled it into adopting the predatory habits of its distant ancestors. Scabrous as its fur was, with spots of mange among the black and orange, the cat was lean and muscular, and it prowled in tight circles in its rickety enclosure as if the cage were just a suggestion, to be disobeyed whenever it suited. The man seated before the desk in a plushly cushioned chair was clearly drunk, though his intoxication had done little to mute his distress—his milky eyes wandered constantly, unable to focus on anything as he avoided looking up at the audience, or at the cat before him. He was on his way toward old age, perhaps fifty-five, and was bald and wore no wig, though a few days’ worth of beard grew in salt-and-pepper patches on his pointed chin and sunken cheeks.

  “Too old to do it,” said Lord M——. “Someone younger would be more daring; would not have dietary habits so deeply ingrained.”

  “Ladies and gentlemen!” Nicholas Fox shouted. “At last, the event for which you have been waiting. The seventeenth attempt in this space of a man to devour a living cat, for which, if successful, he will receive a reward of seventy-two hundred pounds.” Nicholas reached into his enormous wig, and, as the audience laughed, he fished out a pocket watch, flipping its lid to consult it. “Sir,” he said, “no need for prelude. You know the terms. You have five minutes to begin—once begun, you have as long as you need until you either give up or the task is done. Now: start.”

  The spectators became dead quiet. The man peered into the cage as the cat inside retreated to its back; then, carefully, the man lifted the latch of the cage’s door, opened it, and reached inside to pick up the cat.

  Lifting it gently out, hands around its torso, the man held it up in front of his face. The cat, for its part, was limp, gone strangely placid, looking into the man’s eyes. They stared at each other for a solid minute, until Lord S——, across the amphitheater, shouted, “No need to romance the damned thing first!”

  “Three minutes remaining,” Nicholas said. “You must begin. We are all waiting.”

  The man mumbled something that Zachary couldn’t hear—from where he sat, looking at his lips, it seemed something like Time to get this done—and then, tentatively, he leaned his head around the cat, gulped, and placed his teeth on its neck.

  Things blurred then. What happened in those next few seconds was hard to follow, but it ended with the chair on its back, the man screaming as his arms flailed, and the cat treating his face as if it were a tree trunk, cheerfully scratching and scratching as it yowled with what sounded like a vengeful pleasure.

  “Oh, goodness, this is no good at all,” said Lord M——. “Anne, please convey to your father that I will contribute five pounds to defraying a surgeon’s expenses; more if he loses an eye, et cetera, but perhaps he will come out of this with nothing more than the cat’s autograph as a memento.”

  Lord M—— sighed. “One can, I suppose, hope,” he said, as Zachary grimaced and turned his face away.

  | CHAPTER XXIII.

  LEAVING THE BARN.

  Later that night, in the room he shared with John on London Bridge, Zachary stared at the ceiling, listening to the constant rush of the Thames River beneath them.

  On the other side of the room, John’s voice came out of the dark. “How was your day amid the wonders of London?”

  “We saw…some interesting things,” Zachary said.

  John said nothing.

  “I’m not sure how much I like London,” Zachary continued. “The place, or the people in it.”

  “Not what you imagined?” John said.

  He’d left it vague what he was referring to—the city, or the people Zachary had spent time with—but it did not matter. “No,” Zachary said.

  “Cities are complicated,” said John. “They can be both the beautiful thing you believed them to be and the dark thing you did not imagine they could be. The one does not obscure the other.”

  Zachary was silent.

  “People, too,” said John more quietly.

  * * *

  *

  Apprentice and master pretended at sleeping, but even though John was quiet, the nature of his quiet kept Zachary awake, as if he could hear the noise of the thoughts knocking against the walls of John’s mind, even over the sound of the river.

  “Are you awa
ke?” said Zachary, knowing the answer.

  “No,” said John.

  * * *

  *

  “I share your concerns about London,” John said, a little later. “A troubling city that turns its visitors upside down. I am not sure it was wise for us to come here.”

  “We were smart to know the limits of our expertise,” said Zachary, as John silently noted the our where one might have expected a your. “Involving the other surgeons was the best course.”

  “And I believed I was correct to think that the more great minds were brought in to the case, the better it would be for the patient,” John replied. “But perhaps I was not entirely honest with myself about my motives. When I recall how I spoke to Alice as I wrote the letters summoning those surgeons, I have a feeling not unlike shame. I spoke with a snappishness that I have rarely offered her, and that she has never deserved. I was a different person then, in the moment, perhaps desiring a fame I might not have ever seen otherwise.”

  “But sir,” said Zachary, “you are already the most famous surgeon in Godalming. What man could ask for more?”

  John chuckled at that, and Zachary heard him roll over, his voice becoming clearer as he spoke toward Zachary, rather than at the ceiling. “Perhaps you’re right,” he said.

  * * *

  *

  John lifted himself to sit on the edge of his bed. Zachary would have little sleep tonight, it seemed, but he felt little like sleeping anyway—this city sometimes made one feel as if an endlessly full mug of coffee were being held to one’s lips, and could not be pushed away.

  “Have they done anything that I couldn’t have done myself?” John asked. “St. André; Ahlers; even Manningham? For all their titles and honors? Other than bleeding her once, I feel we’ve done nothing but observe. None of us has even begun to offer a satisfying solution. The case is so strange that it offers little precedent for treatment outside of the half-true tales relayed between midwives. So what could a surgeon be expected to say, as knowledgeable as he might be? And your father, for all his study of theology, seemed nearly as baffled as myself as you and I left for London, though he did not advertise it. He posed a reason for the why of it, but not the how, and the how is what concerns us.”