Mary Toft; or, the Rabbit Queen

by Dexter Palmer

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  Mary Toft’s words floated down on the winter air, their vowels smeared and their consonants stripped away by wayward gusts of wind, so that by the time they reached the ears of the hundred fifty citizens who stood there waiting below, each of them heard different things, most of them nonsensical—haven’t fir or nieces, hook and seize us from me; Babbitt’s fur indecent, foot the least of bunting; habits nor caprices, look to Jesus stop me. They looked at each other in confusion, repeating their own received messages to each other—savages and creases? Shoot the easel hungry? Agate interstices? Soot the bees and honey?—and though each was sure at first that what they’d heard was what she said, it became clear, soon enough, that all of them were wrong. So revisions were made as the people debated, with possible words and phrases selected and discarded as a consensus came closer and the message developed something closer to a meaning—the habits were indecent, I look to Jesus finally; our rabbits are in pieces, the pieces ask for mercy—until a woman in the center of the crowd picked the true pronouncement out of the noise and blurted it aloud, blushing furiously as it slipped out her mouth and she realized what she’d said.

  And for all those people who heard her, a light in the world went out. They stood there, staring at each other, faces fallen; then the neat regimented lines of the battalion began to fray and blur. At last they were merely a group of people, with nothing in common and no reason to remain together, and so they quietly drifted away from each other, down the side streets and between the market’s stalls: a tall, slender woman who drew her arms around her body as if to protect herself from some unknown fear; a heavyset gentleman whose stride was initially sure but whose gait, hobbled by comically large shoes, soon developed a limp, each step of his right foot accompanied by a grimace; an elderly couple who were at first holding hands as if they were a pair of sweetly lovestruck youths but who, slowly, let each other go.

  | CHAPTER XXVIII.

  PAMPHLETS.

  London’s presses were warm and waiting, once Mary spoke and once the constable led her and her husband away. Manningham, Ahlers, and St. André, though of vastly different temperaments, were London surgeons, after all, and knew the rules of the game—they left the bagnio with only the most perfunctory goodbyes to each other and fairly ran back to their abodes to begin writing. Manuscripts could be delivered by the evening of December 5; the typesetting and correction completed the following day; the pamphlets distributed on the morning of Wednesday, December 7.

  The pages spat forth from the presses that Tuesday night; by Wednesday morning they were in coffee houses, in homes by Wednesday night, and ground into the dirt beneath the wheels of carriages by the evening of the following day, part of the city’s sediment that layered history upon history, its constant, never-ending process of recording and recall and revision, of exaggeration and lying and forgetting.

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  From An Exact Diary of My Attendance Upon Mary Toft, the Pretended Rabbit-Breeder of Godalming, by Sir Richard Manningham:

  From the moment I saw her, it was apparent to me that the Godalming woman and her husband had perpetrated a vile and monstrous fraud—my chance encounter with the bagnio’s porter beforehand had only confirmed my suspicions, and the only thing left to determine before I sprung the trap was which of the other surgeons had been deceived, and which had engaged in active collusion with the woman. I came to believe, during the conversation at the coffee house when I made my threat to execute a surgery upon her that she would not survive, that all of them are honest men: excessively credulous, perhaps, and too willing to exploit in one particular case, but honest all the same. They may have even realized, at this moment, that they had been hoaxed, and merely wanted a means of escape without public embarrassment from the net in which they found themselves ensnared. This I granted them, through my stratagem.

  They all behaved as I expected. Ahlers, the most sensible of the group, immediately placed himself in alliance with myself; St. André, the most artful, became terrified when he realized that his artfulness might indirectly result in the loss of a life; and Howard, who had spent the most time with the patient and who was also of a kindly and sympathetic nature, undertook to quietly rescue the woman from the fate I claimed to have in store for her. He proved himself to be a good man, and his gentleness surely convinced the woman to decide to reveal herself as a fraud when the other three of us might not have succeeded, or may not have desired to try.

  When she confessed, she did so with the serenity of one who knows that, at last, she is doing good, and laying down the burden that doing evil places on us. She spoke of the horrors that she had done to herself with an even-tempered clarity, as if she were describing yesterday’s weather or indifferently flavored food, and this horrified me in turn. For it seemed that from her perspective, such vile behavior was perfectly ordinary, to pass with little remark.

  When the constable led her and her husband away—the woman will surely be committed to Bridewell; of the husband, I know not—we four surgeons felt relief that our shared journey had at last reached its end. I do not know what punishment awaits the woman, but short of hanging, it must surely be lesser than that which she inflicted on herself daily, and so it must be counted as a form of liberation.

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  From Remarks Made After Continuous Observation of Mary Toft, the Pretended Rabbit-Breeder, by Cyriacus Ahlers:

  After I first spoke with the first two surgeons involved with the Toft case, John Howard and Nathanael St. André, I suspected that a fraud of some kind was being perpetrated; once I “delivered” a rabbit from Toft herself, I was certain of it, and could barely countenance its vile nature though I saw it with my own eyes. It remained only for me to determine which of the people involved with the case were knowing conspirators and which were dupes, and so I kept my silence and pretended as if I myself had been deceived, the better to observe the behavior of the other surgeons as well as of the patient.

  Nathanael St. André I did not trust—his reputation, though storied, was dubious in the circles in which I traveled, and I briefly entertained the idea that he might be the motive force behind the conspiracy. But my instincts told me that though his inclination toward self-advertisement might make him susceptible to fraud, he would not be a willing party to such a dastardly act. John Howard himself seemed not to possess the necessary cunning or perversion—he struck me as a simple, provincial man whose willingness to think the best of those around him led him to be taken in, and I could not help but pity him. I attempted to warn him in a subtle manner, to bring him around to realizing for himself what I perceived—I feared that baldly confronting him with the truth would be sure to drive him further into disagreement and delusion. Either he did not sense my signals or chose to ignore them; either way, I dared not risk speaking with the clarity I desired, when the situation was so precarious and I risked finding myself outnumbered.

  When Sir Richard Manningham became involved with the case, I began to see a way out for all of us—with two of us implicitly in league, the fraud might be exposed with some care. I presented the evidence that I had (so-called) to the king, and gained permission for Toft to be transported to London—I expected that the change of location would disrupt the mechanism by which the fraud was performed, and once there, Manningham insisted that she be placed under a round-the-clock watch. From that point, we only had to wait to exhaust the woman’s reserves of resolve.

  This took longer than expected, and Manningham was eventually forced to feign a threat of a surgery that Toft would be unlikely to survive; understanding what his aim was when I saw his charade, I went along with him. Perhaps by then John Howard understood that he had been deceived, or perhaps he believed what Manningham said—the fact that he was credulous enough to believe Mary Toft argues for it. What went on in his mind makes no difference—I was not privy to the
conversation he had with her the following evening, but whatever case he made was undoubtedly effective.

  Her confessions are a muddle—I have seen transcriptions of the three she has given, and they conflict, and seem to pull new stories out of the air. At first she claimed that the entire scheme was the invention of a Godalming woman whose husband was a traveling knife grinder, and who said to her that through this she would earn enough money to last her for the rest of her life. But it is curious that she did not appear to recall this woman’s name, or seem to think her interlocutors would find it of interest. (She also claimed during this first confession that once I myself examined her and produced a rabbit from her, I promised to ensure that she received a pension—this is in no way the case.) She wished to absolve her husband and her mother-in-law of any wrongdoing, saying that any culpability for the fraud should fall on her and on this mysterious woman, who in subsequent confessions she failed to mention.

  In her second confession the following day—“I am ashamed to tell the truth now,” she said, “after telling so many lies”—she seemed to want to pretend that she had been deceived just as anyone else, that the hoax itself seems to have appeared out of thin air, without a person conceiving it. She said that if the rabbits did not breed inside her—implying that up to now, she believed that they had—then Mr. Howard must have placed the rabbit parts inside her in collusion with her mother-in-law (that is, after the first monstrous birth that caused Howard to be summoned). This seems impossible to me—either any potential participants in the fraud must have been party to all of the instances of monstrous births, or none. And Howard appeared to be as revolted by the proceedings of which he was a part as any normal person would be, even as he seemed to believe that he was witnessing an occurrence unique in the medical history. My instincts continue to lead me to pronounce him an honest man.

  In the third and final confession, she blames the mother-in-law entirely. (“I was unwilling to tell the truth because it lit upon her,” she said; “when I have told the truth God knows if I shall ever be forgiven for it.”) This also lacks plausibility, for she also says that her husband brought her rabbits, but knew not what her mother-in-law did with them. Surely the man is not such a complete fool.

  And so we have one falsehood, replaced with three others at war. They have two things in common. The first is the one thing that must undoubtedly be true—the woman was in pain. “In pain at night.” “In pain all the time.” She calls it “rack and torture.” She mentions her pain so often that it appears to be not just a description of her travails at the moment, but the single dark thread that runs through her life.

  The second is not a presence, but an absence—of her husband. He is absolved of all guilt in the first and second confessions, and briefly portrayed as an unwilling dupe of the women around him in the third. Whether or not her fraud managed to convince those who wished to be convinced, anyone who sees all three of her confessions side by side would agree that she is a poor liar, and the truth can often be approached by paying attention not to what a poor liar includes, but what she leaves out. It is likely that we will never know the full tale of his involvement in the case, but he was clearly a witting party to it, and, I have come to suspect, its principal instigator.

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  From An Addendum to the Short Narrative of a Fraudulent Delivery of Rabbits, by Nathanael St. André:

  The most perceptive readers of my previous publication, A Short Narrative of an Extraordinary Delivery of Rabbits, will have discerned what I was wise enough to avoid stating explicitly—they will have understood immediately that I knew beyond doubt that Mary Toft was committing a monstrous fraud, but that for reasons that should be clear, I could not yet reveal my suspicions publicly. It was apparent as soon as I first examined the patient in the company of John Howard, who seems to have been unwittingly fooled—I will admit that at first I believed he had joined with Toft in conspiracy, and thought it wise to pretend to have been duped as well, waiting for the perpetrators of the fraud to make an error and reveal themselves, as such perpetrators always do. But Howard behaved with perfect innocence, and should shoulder no share of the blame.

  As the fraud began to ensnare more and more people, including such esteemed colleagues as Cyriacus Ahlers and Sir Richard Manningham, I found that I could not stand idly by—if there is one thing I regret, it is my delay in this matter. I persisted in my pretense longer than I should have, even going so far as to issue a pamphlet describing my “observations,” trusting that later events and my revelation of the true facts of the case would redeem me in the eyes of the public. (I also wished to record an impartial recounting of events, in case someone were to claim that they had dissembled as I had, and that I in fact was a dupe—in the aftermath of such an event one can expect those who are unexpectedly embarrassed to attempt to recover their reputations.)

  It was I who concocted the gambit that would convince Mary Toft to reveal herself—once I planted the seed of my idea in casual conversation, mentioning that this peculiar case would most likely necessitate conducting a surgery that she would not survive, I had only to wait for that seed to sprout. I was startled at Manningham’s ferocity once he embraced the idea—bloodthirst is a tendency that surgeons must forever guard against—but it was that ferocity that appears to have terrified Howard enough to speak to Toft directly: she must have seen the terror in his eyes and known that it was past time for her ruse to come to an end.

  I know not what will become of her, but I hope that her punishment will be light. For who can condemn a person for deceiving others who were so willing to deceive themselves? Which of us does not have a devil that lives inside of us, whispering not what is true, but what we wish to believe, out of innocence or cupidity or a hundred other reasons? We must stay ever vigilant against that demon, ever on watch against his pleasing music—if the tale of Mary Toft has any moral at all, it is this.

  PART FIVE.

  | CHAPTER XXIX.

  ZACHARY AND ANNE.

  John Howard wanted no part of the manipulation of the public’s opinion—he was weary, and even in his weariness he felt that he was correct in thinking that none of it, in the end, mattered. Only God had a truly long memory, and he presumably had greater concerns than the public embarrassment of a country surgeon, who’d gone into a case with the best intentions and come out of it narrowly avoiding criminal charges for fraud (for if the three competing pamphlets of the London surgeons accomplished one thing, it was Howard’s implicit absolution).

  He and Zachary rose early on the morning after Mary Toft had been taken into custody, on their last day in London. A stagecoach leaving in two hours would have them back in Godalming in two days—there was no need for haste on the return trip.

  Once he’d packed the few possessions he’d brought along with him, Zachary stood at the window, watching the boatmen shoot the Thames, listening for what might be the last time to the overwhelming roar of the river. The thrum of the rushing water drowned out his thoughts and replaced them all with its own noise, and this was wonderful, for when he returned to Godalming’s silence his own rough memories would make their voices known again, and would chase themselves in circles in his mind until they wore themselves out.

  John joined him at the window, and the two of them looked down together for a while at the boatmen. Then John said, quietly, “Are you going to say goodbye to your friends before you go? Laurence and…” He made a brief show of not being able to remember her name. “Anne.”

  Even over the tumult of the river, Zachary heard the noise of fireworks exploding, of an old bull bellowing, of Anne’s half-embarrassed giggle that Zachary thought would likely have been a full-throated belly laugh had he not been present. “I hadn’t thought about it,” he said.

  He felt a hand on his shoulder.

  “You should say goodbye to them,” John said. “To Anne, at least.”
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  So for a last time he returned to the neighborhood of Covent Garden, the scene of his master’s ignominy and, by extension, his own. He walked there through a light snow that dusted the ground and showed footprints and the tracks of carriage wheels. (In the Covent Garden Market, a few of the people who’d stood vigil in front of Dr. Lacey’s Bagnio still remained, drifting aimlessly in slow circles like bumblebees who’d lost their hives.) Anne answered when he knocked on the door of her father’s apartment, and the look of surprise on her face—a startled “Oh!” when she opened the door; a single half step backward—put a knot in his stomach that his brain had yet to catch up with: he knew, despite not knowing yet why he knew, that coming here was a mistake, that at this point the only thing to be done was to wait for his mind to comprehend what his gut already knew, but could not yet articulate.

  “It’s good to see you,” said Anne, a flutter creeping into her voice at the end of the sentence. She looked surprisingly well dressed for the morning: she wore a dress that Zachary had not yet seen her in before, a paler version of the blue that was her signature color; earrings of sapphire and silver hung from her lobes, and her hair was done up in an intricate series of braids that confused the eye and suggested strong knowledge of mathematics.

  There was an awkward silence, during which Zachary was wise enough not to say, “You look nice,” as it would have come off as an inquisition (which, to be fair, it would have been) rather than a compliment. However, he was not wise enough to stop himself from saying, “You look well,” which gave the impression that he had not seen her for months or years, rather than days, and that her lack of apparent illness was an unexpected and pleasant surprise.