Mary Toft; or, the Rabbit Queen

by Dexter Palmer

  I find myself asking, in my darker moments: what matter is the unproven nature of an assertion if enough people become convinced of its truth?

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  *

  My wife, Alice, did not believe you; she does not, I presume, even now. Why didn’t I listen to her, that first night, she whose wisdom I cherished for all the years of our marriage? What strange spirit possessed me?

  Were I interested in defending my actions, one might say that we lure more flies with honey than vinegar, and that evening, when I told her of the new case I’d taken on, my whole house smelled of spoiled wine. I married Alice because of her unvarnished honesty, but that night I had no mood for it. She laughed merrily and labeled you an outright fraud; she described the nature of the subterfuge in fine detail, using words I won’t repeat, but that are not the accepted medical nomenclature for female anatomy. It seems obvious to me now that she was correct, but at the time, in the heat of the accusation, I could not tolerate the raillery for which I often loved her.

  I had a choice, in that moment—as Alice placed her hand on her hip and said, Good Christ, love, the husband’s cutting a dead rabbit into parts and shoving them up her before you arrive, it’s plain as day; oh, come now, John, stop with that serious look on your face—in living in one of two possible versions of the world. Simply put, there was the one in which I was fooled, and the one in which I was not. In the one in which I was fooled, then the woman I loved was married to a fool, and knew me for one; in the one in which I was not, my wife was married to a wise man, and did not yet realize it. And so it was because I wanted the best for her, wanted her to be married to the best person she could be, that I dismissed her, thinking that given enough time, I would be proven right. I chose to believe in you because I wanted not to be ashamed of the reflection of myself that I saw in Alice’s eyes. I ignored her because I didn’t want to disappoint her.

  You only had to deceive me once, but I had to deceive myself an uncountable number of times after that, day after day, minute by minute, maintaining my own constant vigil against an incursion of common sense that I had to force myself to see as its opposite, as a lack of faith. But I have kept up that vigil for too long, and I am tired. Not as tired as you are, I imagine, but tired enough.

  * * *

  *

  Was it easier to keep that vigil because we thought, the surgeons and I, that God might somehow be involved? Did our belief in a being wiser than ourselves, his methods forever inscrutable, his true motives inarguably good but only to be revealed on the Day of Judgment, lead us to credulity? I am uncertain. We surgeons, tasked with coaxing God’s creatures back from the precipice of death, often feel as if he is looking over our shoulders when we wield our knives, ready to punish us if we fail to play fair.

  And there is no time more fraught for us, no moment when we are more likely to feel as if we are observed by a higher power, than the moment when a midwife calls us for a birth too difficult for her to handle. There is a near certainty then that we will be shepherding someone on their first step to a grave, either a child or a mother, or both. Sometimes we make mistakes. Sometimes we do things we regret, because God has his eye on us. And sometimes, in order to satisfy God’s requirements, we perhaps perpetrate necessary deceptions upon ourselves, deceptions so complete that we willfully forget they even occurred.

  There was a time a few years ago when I was called to a difficult birth, and I had to make a choice to live in one of two versions of the world, just as I did when Alice called a true thing by its name and I chose to ignore her. I cannot say that I wonder if I did the right thing, because whichever version of the world I chose to live in, the facts would alter themselves so that I did. But I do wonder if the God who watched my actions, who sees all and knows all, had the same perception of the world as I did, at the moment I made my decision.

  The mother had had rickets as a child, with the consequent narrow hips that often make births difficult. Moreover, as I discovered quickly—I could see it in the midwife’s eyes before I saw the patient—the birth was transverse, presenting the left arm rather than the head. A breech birth, feet first, can often be saved through a surgeon’s skill with a judicious turning of the baby; a transverse birth is always fatal, though, and the only outstanding question when a surgeon encounters one is how many will die: one, or two. The indicated procedure is to remove the arm of the fetus, turn the fetus so that its head is accessible, perform a craniotomy, and complete the delivery. It is a ghoulish business, and it cannot be begun until the fetus is dead—more likely than not, the fetus will remain alive and kill the mother first, and attempts to save the fetus after the mother dies are often doomed to fail as well.

  On seeing the mother I immediately called for a minister—in fact the man who arrived was Crispin Walsh, my apprentice’s father, who waited on you on a few occasions back in Godalming. In moments like this, the thinking goes, mere medicine is not enough to save our souls: God, or his representative, must be brought into the room as well, as an observer, and a conveyor of absolution.

  So Crispin and I and the midwife waited—there was nothing else we could do. And dear God, did this woman scream. Every few minutes I would examine the fetus, and it continued to cling to life. And so we continued to wait.

  The mother cursed us; she begged us to deliver her from her pain, the muscles of her contractions forcing the child against an entrance it would never be able to pass through. The room began to stink, with sweat and shit and the peculiar rank smell of people who are deathly afraid. The mother clamped down on her tongue and bit it, drawing blood, and I rolled a piece of cloth tightly and placed it in her mouth for her to bite. Morning turned to afternoon. The fetus could not work itself free.

  Hours passed, and then the midwife, all at once, gave out. She burst into tears, she and the mother wailing together in sympathy. Then she said to me, sobbing, “I thought I was stronger than this, but I cannot take this anymore. I will pray for you, but I am forced to leave you to what you must do.” And those words seemed to be freighted with more meaning than she wanted to make explicit. As if everyone were aware that what I must do would be easier if there were fewer witnesses.

  Soon after she left, almost as soon as the door to the lying-in chamber shut behind her, it occurred to me that the fetus was dead. It crossed my mind that, in fact, I’d been fooling myself about its life for at least the past hour, confusing a wish with a fact. Once the thought manifested in my mind, it draped itself in the aura of certainty, and I began to see an exit, a door cracking open with a light beyond. The only remaining thing was to ensure that everyone saw what I saw; then we could begin to bring this to an end.

  Gently, placing my hand on the mother’s shoulder, I gave her the terrible news, and between us there was a moment of recognition: my recognition that she could see into my mind and that any attempt to deceive her would be fruitless, so it was a good thing the child was, in truth, already dead; her recognition that this was not an instance of having to kill her child in order to save her life, that I was not proposing such a horrible thing, for such an act would curse us all, but that the fetus was merely a lump of inert matter that needed to be removed, in the same manner that I might extirpate a tumor. She closed her eyes and turned away from me, and in her silence I saw her agreement and her consent.

  But Crispin Walsh, it turned out, wanted to cling to the delusions that the rest of us in the room had cast off. He insisted, in the face of all available evidence, that the child was still alive; he wanted to examine the woman as I had, and that I would not allow, as he had no expertise in the matter. He insisted that the diagnosis required no special knowledge; I countered that things that seemed simple to the layman had nuances that were only apparent to those with sufficient schooling, that many factors went into my assessment, some of which I would not even be able to articulate to myself, much less to someone who was not a surgeon.

  W
e argued, and it became clear that he was not just concerned about the correctness of my opinion, but afraid of the God that he had brought into the room with him. In the absence of that God, the three of us—the mother, the minister, and myself—would have used our senses and our past experiences to determine the version of reality in which we collectively lived, and, once we arrived at a conclusion, we would have contented ourselves with knowing that the world we lived in was the true one, for we could discern no more of the world than allowed to us by these senses, by these past experiences. But the presence of God brought into the lying-in room meant that we were in the company of a being who saw all and knew all, more than we could ever see or know, and who therefore knew that there was one interpretation of events that was true, and that all others were inarguably false. If we mortals all managed to convince ourselves that the fetus was dead, but we had all indulged ourselves in what, in this circumstance, counted as a pleasing deception, then a God who knew better, who knew otherwise, would not care, and would not grant us clemency. For a lie is a lie whether it is told to oneself or to someone else. We would, all of us, be damned.

  So we argued, and we kept our silence, and we argued some more, and the woman screamed, and her screams became quieter and farther apart though the fetus did not move, would not come any farther out of her, and I checked the fetus again and again and believed, and was certain in my belief, that it was cooling, that the twitches I sometimes thought I sensed in it were merely my own imagination, and Crispin would not agree that the proof I offered was proof enough, and he said, and I was forced to agree, that God’s authority would supersede the authority of even a thousand surgeons, and I would not permit him to examine the fetus myself for I knew that it would only encourage further misunderstanding on his part and further intransigence from him, and we waited for God (or, a cynic might say, Chance or Fate, going by another name) to deliver us from our dilemma.

  Afternoon turned to evening, and the mother closed her eyes and her head fell to the side, and her breathing became raspy and irregular, and she opened her eyes once more and they were lightless. So God had made his choice, and I was left to salvage what we could. Unfortunately, Crispin’s sudden and feverish bout of prayer was not efficacious, for we found, soon after I commenced my surgery on the mother, that the child was dead as well. Two were lost. It was the darkest moment of my career, exceeding even this moment in which I sit before you, though at least I can say to myself that I am not to blame. The watchful presence of God in the room at least granted me that.

  But here is what you need to understand—here is why you are in danger. Here is why you must speak, and why you must not allow us to speak for you. Because history is an act of continuous collective imagining, and the perception of truth is a constant, unending negotiation, with others, and with oneself when one is alone. I think that if the minister had not been there and the midwife had remained, we would have seen something altogether different through the same dark glass: we would have discovered beyond doubt that the child was dead; I would have done the terrible thing I needed to do—cutting off the arm; turning the fetus; splitting the skull open and crushing it; extracting the corpse—and the mother would be alive today. But the minister brought God into the room. And I will tell you this about God—that despite his presumed omnipresence he often arrives in the company of men; that men fear to interpret the world on their own authority when they are aware of his presence, because his senses are complete and perfect and his experiences are unlimited; that the standards for proof are much higher when God is involved, especially proof of life, or of what goes on inside a woman’s body; that weighed against God’s displeasure, or against a man’s feeling that God is displeased by his actions, the life of one woman is no great thing.

  * * *

  *

  God came with us into your lying-in chamber once: do you remember? The first time Crispin Walsh entered, and he placed his ear to your stomach, and was sure he heard the sounds of “opposing forces,” grinding the rabbits apart inside you? I had been ambivalent about allowing him the access to your body that is the surgeon’s by right. And in my bullheadedness I would accept no explanation for what I experienced, other than the preternatural. I let him touch you when I should not have, that time; I let him make a pronouncement that should have been mine alone. He was not the only reason that we find ourselves here, miles away from home with your life in the balance, but he surely sped us on our way.

  I fear, and expect, that we will bring God into this room with us once again tomorrow, and that in his presence we will claim a dominion over your body in both his name and the name of medicine. And I do not expect that you will survive the necessary inquisition to satisfy God’s rigorous requirements for proof.

  But while you and I are in this room alone, without the other surgeons, without your husband, we can decide, together, to shape another history, just as we shaped a history on the first day we met in October. I make no claims as to what goes on within you—I merely say that with a word from you, what is done can be undone. The world you describe will be the one that is. You have that power, but only for a few hours longer. Until morning, at the latest. Then all the men will enter, and we will begin.

  So please. Speak. Save yourself, and set me, and the rest of us, free.

  | CHAPTER XXVII.

  MORNING.

  The next morning found all four surgeons in the King’s Head room of the bagnio, standing at the foot of Mary Toft’s bed. Her husband was there, too, sitting in a chair in a darkened corner, shoulders hunched in disconsolation; a constable leaned with ease against the wall, hands behind his back, comfortable in his invisibility, waiting to be needed.

  John Howard was bleary-eyed; Manningham and Ahlers wore twin expressions of grimness; St. André looked like a chastened child. Zachary and Laurence did their best to represent their masters, but Zachary felt as tired as John looked, and Laurence’s drawn face rhymed with Nathanael’s dispirited demeanor. (For once, their clothes did not match, for Nathanael remained in the suit he’d worn since the night before—he seemed to have gotten no sleep at all.)

  But Mary Toft sat up in the bed, back propped against pillows, her hands clasped in her lap as if she were sitting for a portrait; her cheeks had something of a ruddiness to them, and her hair was combed neatly beneath her white linen cap, though her brow was damp and her breathing fast and shallow. Her eyes were bright, and a smile even seemed to lurk at the edges of lips unused to making one.

  She drew in a breath to speak, holding it in anticipation, and Zachary felt ten pounds lighter, as if his heart were buoyed on air. Through the open curtains of the window beyond, Zachary could see the sky above the Covent Garden Market brighten as light from the late-rising sun somehow managed to cut through the city’s persistent smoky haze. The market itself was still, the merchants quiet at their stalls; the group of people waiting outside the bagnio, grown to a battalion of a hundred fifty or more, stood staring upward at the window, frozen, as if they were waiting to breathe until the woman breathed.

  She exhaled and spoke, her voice thin and small, but clear and needle sharp.

  “Gentlemen,” she said, “I will not go on any longer thus. I would sooner hang myself.”

  She breathed in once more, and out again.

  “The rabbits were in pieces,” she said. “I put the pieces up me.”

  And the strangest thing—so Zachary thought later—was that when she stated this fact, so plainly, with such crude artlessness, it did not seem as if she was delivering information to the surgeons that they did not know beforehand, but as if she was granting them a long withheld permission to know something that, quite obviously, had always been true.

  * * *

  *

  She slid herself to the edge of the enormous bed with the awkwardness of someone who’d fallen out of the habit of using her muscles, threw her legs over the side, and stood. She placed her
hands on the small of her back and bent backward, rolling her shoulders, wincing with a grunt. Then she turned toward the window, squinting at the icy morning sunlight, and walked toward it with the slow, uneven gait of one clearly in pain.

  She stood at the window for a time, her back to the surgeons, and then she turned to look at the men over her shoulder. “Who are they?”

  “The people down there, in neat rows? They’ve been keeping a vigil for you,” said Manningham. “They believe that God works wonders through you.”

  Mary turned to look out the window for a moment longer, and back to the surgeons again.

  “That’s silly,” she said.

  Ahlers spoke then, his voice heavy with melancholy. “They do not seem to think so, Mary, and there are quite a few.”

  She turned away from the surgeons again, slightly unsteady on her feet, bracing her hand on the wall next to the window. Then, with a sigh and a cough, she threw the window open to the cold December air.

  “The rabbits were in pieces!” Mary yelled down to the assembled congregation beneath her. “I put the pieces up me!”

  Then she leaned forward, took the window by its handle, and closed it shut.

  “There,” she said, ignoring the other surgeons to look directly at John Howard, the newly found clarity of her voice already fading. “That’s done.”