Mary Toft; or, the Rabbit Queen

by Dexter Palmer

  “Thank you,” Anne said, her expression one of sudden dread; then, as she looked over Zachary’s shoulder, he turned to see, approaching behind him, none other but Laurence. And Laurence looked surprisingly pin-neat this fine morning as well, his ivory suit magically innocent of the city’s smoke and ash, his wig voluminous and freshly powdered. “Oh!” he said upon seeing Zachary, with the same backward half step, followed by a reflexive glance at Anne that made Zachary’s poor gut twist again.

  “Zachary,” said Anne, “would you like to come inside?” She took Zachary’s arm. “Laurence, just wait for a moment,” she said, and though the things she said to Zachary and Laurence were things that Zachary preferred—Zachary coming inside to be alone with her; Laurence left to wait—the way she said those things was strangely reversed, so that she spoke to Laurence with a melody that she should have used for Zachary if all was right with the world, and at this realization his dull mind began to catch up with his mute but perceptive heart.

  * * *

  *

  Once she had escorted him inside, she shut the door and the foyer turned dim, the light muted by curtains drawn over the windows, the woman’s face veiled in half darkness, its port-wine stain indistinguishable in the shadows.

  He heard her sigh. “I don’t know what to say,” she said, “except…that I’m so grateful that you thought to introduce me to Laurence. You have done me a great kindness—I can’t thank you enough.”

  “I…uh, yes,” said Zachary.

  “I would not have expected that we would become so fond of each other so quickly, that we would have so many sentiments in common,” she said. “Who would have thought that such a fellow as him would have a taste for gin and violence? But it seems you knew the both of us better than we might have known ourselves.”

  Did she realize how much her delight stung him? But there seemed to be no malice in what she said—she appeared to be genuinely happy, and to want Zachary to share in her happiness. The whole thing was a puzzle.

  “I can’t thank you enough,” she said again, as if the two of them were on a stage and he had missed his cue.

  And finally it occurred to him that she was in fact grateful, and that, in her way, she was doing him a service. She was proposing a better version of events than the one in which he believed, one in which they both arrived at a kind of satisfaction, and all he had to do was agree. So much had been left unstated that the slight revision to history would be effortless, forgotten as soon as it was executed. Little evidence existed, and that was weak—a few ambiguous spoken words that had disappeared into the air; a touch that could be interpreted in a dozen ways; a letter that could just as easily have meant one thing as another. And, truly, there was no point in contesting it. When Zachary and Anne went back outside, Laurence would still be there waiting patiently in white, and Zachary would be on his way back to Godalming. No need to leave on a note of spite.

  “It was the least I could do,” said Zachary, and Anne, delighted, clasped her arms around him and kissed him on the cheek.

  “He’s adorable,” she said, her icy eyes shining despite the dim light. “I wish he were a little doll, so I could carry him around in my pocket.”

  * * *

  *

  The two of them stepped outside and Laurence stood on the step beneath them, looking up. “I just wanted to tell Zachary how happy I was that he thought to introduce the two of us,” she said, and Laurence broke into a smile. “Yes, certainly,” he said. “Good fortune that I met you. I never would have expected this, but this is how such things happen.”

  “How is your master?” Zachary said.

  “He will land on his feet, surely—already, he is behaving as if the last two months had never happened. And yours?”

  “He…will be fine, eventually,” said Zachary. “Melancholic, perhaps, but I expect the light will return to his eyes when we leave this place.”

  He moved away from Anne, and, climbing the steps as Zachary descended, Laurence took his place next to her, his feet fitting neatly in the prints that Zachary had left behind in the snow.

  Zachary turned to face the two of them, standing side by side.

  “London is not for me, I think,” he said.

  * * *

  *

  “…and then she said,” he complained to John in the stagecoach, raising the pitch of his voice in imitation of Anne’s, “He’s so adorable! I want to put him in my pocket!”

  “It is unmanning to have such a thing said of one,” said John distractedly, looking out the window at the passing countryside, the rolling hills dotted by the mansions of the rich, those people who thought to abscond from the city but were in fact its pioneers.

  “Yes!” said Zachary. “Yes, exactly. If a woman said that about me, I’d be ashamed.”

  They were lucky enough to be alone in the stagecoach on the way out of the city, the two of them facing each other on their seats as the coach swayed and jostled. John said little—he seemed to be content to watch the scrolling landscape—but Zachary had things on his mind, and could not help but speak.

  “None of this turned out the way it was supposed to at all,” he said. “I was supposed to kiss a beautiful woman, and meet King George. We didn’t even meet the king!”

  “I doubt he knows we’re gone,” said John. “He may have never been aware that we arrived.”

  “I just don’t understand how we could have been so wrong about everything,” Zachary said.

  John said nothing in response, and the two of them fell into silence again.

  * * *

  *

  A while later, once the moneyed mansions had entirely disappeared from view, the hills they saw from the coach’s window no longer stripped of greenery but covered with forests of ash and beech, John took a deep breath, held it for a moment, and let it out. “Do you smell that?” he said to Zachary.

  Zachary lifted his nose and sniffed. “What?”

  “The air,” John said. “The air is clearer.”

  | CHAPTER XXX.

  JOHN HOWARD RETURNS.

  When the stagecoach deposited John Howard and Zachary Walsh in front of Godalming’s inn, the Silver Hart, the first thing that Zachary noticed was the silence. London’s streets were filled with ambient noise that one learned to ignore soon enough, a mix of rushing river and cartwheel and footstep and scream and shout, and when they’d left Godalming last month the town had been filled with Londoners who had brought their clamor along with them, and with it a change to the town’s character. But now the only sound this late afternoon was from a slight wind, and from John and Zachary’s crunching footsteps through a dusting of snow as they returned to the Howards’ home.

  It was wonderful, and it made John realize how much he’d missed his home, though part of the reason for that silence was that Godalming’s main street was strangely deserted. John had the faint suspicion that he was being watched; the periphery of his vision seemed to indicate a constant procession of observers ducking furtively behind corners or stepping back from windows into shadows. But perhaps that was only because he had feared that the streets would be lined on either side with people ready to jeer at him; surely the news of the Toft hoax had had enough time to travel here from London ahead of him. The emptiness of the road before the two of them seemed to be its own unexpected kind of condemnation—or, possibly, anticipation.

  They reached the Howards’ home, and, for a moment, John and Zachary stood before the door. John reached up for the knocker and then hesitated, putting his hand down again and nervously wiping his palm on his trousers.

  “Look at me,” he said, half to Zachary, half to himself. “I’m not a suitor.”

  Then with one motion he lifted his hand again, grasped the knocker, and gave it three firm, slow raps. Knock. Knock. Knock.

  Nothing happened at first, and Howard dropped his
hand again. “Well, that’s done,” he said, his voice barely audible.

  Eventually, they heard some noise from inside the house, the quiet rustle of someone rousing herself. The footsteps they heard from the other side of the door approached it, becoming louder; then, in front of the door, they stopped, and there was silence on the other side.

  John and Zachary continued to stare at the door before them, at the brass knocker in the shape of a cross-eyed gargoyle with a ring hanging from its mouth in the shape of an ouroboros, a snake gobbling its own tail. Then, with a creak, the heavy wooden door swiveled backward, and John saw his wife.

  She stood before him with her arms folded and a smile playing about her lips, and John considered his impossibly good fortune, to be so sure of forgiveness, so dearly wanted, so easily asked for and sure to be given.

  “Zachary,” John said, eyes on his wife, “would you go upstairs, please?”

  The boy’s happiness at seeing Alice was clear to read on his face: he had news to tell. “I just—”

  But it could wait. “Now, please, Zachary,” John said.

  Without another word, except for a nod at Alice, Zachary left the two of them alone.

  She turned to look at her husband, and he stepped forward and placed his hands on her shoulders, the muscles there unexpectedly tense.

  “Alice,” he said, “I’m a fool. I’m a fool and I should have known better. I’m the biggest ass in all of England—there are a pair of donkey’s ears growing out of my skull.”

  And all at once her shoulders relaxed, and John felt the warmth flood his heart that comes from seeing the person one loves after a long absence. He looked on her face, at the twin lines that decades of daily laughter had carved into either side of her mouth, at the spark of light in her eyes that was always on the edge of flaring into mischievous flame.

  She clasped her arms around him and held him close. She smelled like Alice.

  “You are a fool, John,” she said. “Completely. Absolutely.”

  And all between the two of them was well.

  * * *

  *

  A shared moment of collective delusion, here and gone, John had said to Zachary back in October, when this strangest of cases had begun. In later days we might whisper of the legend between ourselves—perhaps over the drink that will celebrate you becoming my colleague, rather than my apprentice.

  He had not expected the occasion for that drink to come so quickly, but there were many things that had happened since October that John had not foreseen. For Zachary, a year of education in human nature had been compressed into these past few months, and it was clear enough to John that in the way Zachary had handled events, he had become his own man. Perhaps he did not yet have the skills to handle something as crucial and difficult as man-midwifing, but that was only a matter of time; it was safe to say that in the majority of services a surgeon normally provided, Zachary now stood beside John rather than in his shadow, and John had come to see him not as a subordinate but as a partner. So mugs of beer at the Silver Hart seemed warranted, the day after John and Zachary returned to Godalming, if only to establish a sense of normalcy in their lives once again.

  They sat at one of the six wooden tables in the room, the only people drinking there that afternoon except for the driver of a mail coach seated alone two tables away—the same one, John thought, to whom he’d handed those fateful messages addressed to London’s Persons of Distinction. The coachman didn’t seem to recognize him; he probably delivered hundreds of letters a day, and the face of one person giving him a few more would not have lodged itself in his memory. This was fine.

  What was less fine was that no one in Godalming seemed to recognize John Howard at all, or to want to let on that they did. He had not even been absent for two weeks, and yet as he and Zachary had walked from his practice to the Silver Hart, all the eyes on him had been strangers’ eyes, his nods of greeting gone ignored. He knew these people by the boils he’d lanced and the bones he’d set, and had in the past enjoyed with them a surgeon’s peculiar intimacy, the salutations of his former patients always delivered with a quiet, gratifying gratefulness. But on the street Rufus Richardson and Michael Burwash and Mary Mitton had all seemed to look straight through him, their eyes all steadily on the horizon as they’d passed. Though perhaps he reminded them all of something they’d rather forget, or that they were in the midst of actively forgetting.

  This should have been a celebratory moment, but it wasn’t, not exactly—there was a sense of relief that the whole thing had ended, but that relief was tainted with the fact that neither Zachary nor John had any idea what would result from the travails they’d gone through. They sat in silence and sipped their beer, staring at their glasses; eventually the coachman on the other side of the room rose, handed a few coins to the innkeeper (who seemed slightly irritated to have been roused from his doze in a chair by the door), and left the two of them alone. After a few moments, Zachary and John heard the snap of the reins that signaled that the coachman was on his way, bringing his messages to London.

  John leaned over toward Zachary and said, quietly, so as not to disturb the innkeeper, “How do you feel?”

  Zachary looked up from his beer at him. “Invisible,” he replied.

  * * *

  *

  Back in John’s offices, the two of them sat reading, waiting out the rest of the day—Zachary had at last shown some curiosity about John’s volume of Locke, and John had been happy to hand it off to him, feeling that even though he had not completed it, a burden had been lifted off him, or at least given to another to shoulder. John himself had begun reading Alice’s copy of The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders, &c., having had his curiosity piqued by the conversation he’d had about it in the carriage on the way to London. Already, a few pages in, it seemed so sensationalist and sentimental that it was difficult to credit as memoir, and it was a bit too womanish for his usual tastes. But each page nonetheless compelled him to read the next, and he was temporarily able to put his suspicions that the author was a man behind him, or at least decide that the issue of whether “Moll Flanders” was real was neither here nor there.

  Zachary looked up with relief at the knock on the door—he’d been frowning so deeply as he puzzled his way through the book in his hands that John was half afraid his face would stick that way. He fairly leapt out of the chair like the apprentice he’d once been; then he assumed the stately demeanor more appropriate to a surgeon (which didn’t yet come naturally, but would, in time), and left the office to receive the guest.

  Once again, the visitor was none other than Phoebe Sanders, with her son Oliver coming along behind. John closed his book (and placed it in a drawer of his desk, for good measure) and came around his desk to greet the two of them (and he was thankful, for once, for Phoebe’s searching busybody stare, for at least it meant that someone in Godalming was willing to acknowledge his existence).

  “There is something wrong with Oliver,” Phoebe said as she unwound her woolen scarf, “and I’m very much concerned.”

  “There’s something wrong with me!” Oliver affirmed brightly, red-cheeked from the winter weather.

  John and Zachary glanced at each other (and John privately noted that Zachary admirably restrained the desire to roll his eyes). “What are your symptoms?” John asked Oliver.

  Oliver looked at his mother, and at John, and at Zachary, and at the floor. “Well, I—”

  “Oh, you know,” said Phoebe, cutting him off, “just a general…you know.” She made a circular gesture with her neatly gloved hands that was difficult to interpret—it was intended to suggest either the unknown nature of Oliver’s affliction, or to imply that said affliction was so dire, despite his present appearance of good health, that its name could not be spoken out of fear.

  “Zachary,” John said, “would you take Oliver into the other roo
m and…examine him?”

  “Certainly,” said Zachary.

  “Yes,” said Phoebe with a surprising alacrity, “please do, Zachary.”

  “And I will keep his mother company,” said John with resignation, “while she waits.”

  * * *

  *

  Was Phoebe Sanders, in some sense, the town’s implicitly elected ambassador, here to negotiate the terms of his embrace back into Godalming society, such as it was? It seemed so. He could tell not because of what she spoke of, but because of what she didn’t—she gave him the news of Mary Mitton’s suspected pregnancy (“she’s not showing yet, but a woman can tell”); she mentioned that Amelia Glasse’s elderly uncle was visiting from Glastonbury (“a complete nuisance, with too much of a taste for drink, and who knows when he’ll leave”); she told him that William Hargreaves, the town’s chandler, was doing a roaring trade due to the short, gloomy winter days (“the things are out his door as fast as he can make them—people are nearly grabbing them out of his hands”). But she seemingly had no news to offer of Margaret Toft or, indeed, Crispin Walsh; she displayed no curiosity of where Mary and Joshua Toft had gone off to; she had no questions about how John and Zachary had spent their time in London, nor did she mention any news about them that might have preceded them on their journey back, carried on the coaches out of the city.

  The bargain here was as clearly stated as it could be without speaking its terms aloud, and John was eager to accept it. He showed appropriate concern for Amelia Glasse’s irritating guest; he thanked Phoebe for her suggestion that he stock up on candles from William Hargreaves; he promised to keep the information about Mary Mitton’s pregnancy to himself until it was self-evident. He told no tales of his time away; a person overhearing their conversation would not have known that he had even been gone. Eventually, Mary or Joshua or both of them would make their way back here, and Godalming would have to decide how to deal with them, whether to shun them outright or proffer the same agreement that the town, through Phoebe, was now extending to John, of silence in exchange for silence. But that would happen in its own time.