Mary Toft; or, the Rabbit Queen
Page 31
Once Phoebe’s chatter about the townsfolk had died down, Zachary and Oliver returned to John’s office almost as if on cue, and the smile on Oliver’s face and the crimson flush of his cheeks signaled that whatever mysterious ailment he’d had when he’d entered was most likely cured.
“No charge this time,” said John, as Phoebe signaled her thanks with a nod. “It’s wonderful to see you, Phoebe—please give Archie my regards.”
“Why, thank you,” Phoebe replied as she wound her scarf around her neck once again, preparing to face the chill outside. “It’s lovely to see you too, as always. I suspect you don’t hear this said often enough, but we really are happy to have you here. In Godalming. We wonder what we’d do without you, John.”
Phoebe’s mouth twitched briefly then, the flash of a grin there and gone. “So lucky we are,” she said. “Think of all the talented surgeons in England who make their way to London to earn their fortune, leaving behind the places where their skills would be put to good use. But here, in our little town, is one who practically works miracles.”
| CHAPTER XXXI.
BRIDEWELL PRISON.
No one had known what to do with Mary Toft once she was escorted from Dr. Lacey’s Bagnio, but clearly something had to be done—the entire idea of what she’d carried out offended the sensibilities, even if no law explicitly governed it, and her acts felt wrong on instinct. Men heard God and Justice and other such personifications whispering in their ears, and so she was branded a “notorious and vile cheat” and sent to Bridewell, a place for those who committed petty crimes, peddlers and pilferers and people who slept in the streets.
She was considered strange, and so she was housed apart from the general population of light-fingered and lewd women, as if she could somehow be a vector for contagion despite the fact that the nature of the hoax that she’d perpetrated was widely known, as if the prison’s wardens might arrive one morning to find that all of Bridewell’s prostitutes were birthing rabbits by the dozens, whole litters hourly, overrunning the place. And she herself preferred to be secluded—the women’s section of Bridewell was known to be prone to gaol fever, which covered your body in a rash, and made your eyes so sensitive to light that you had to squint at candles. Catching it was nearly as easy as looking at someone who had it out of the corner of your eye; the disease would kill you dead as often as not, and after her ordeal of the past few months, Mary was ill enough as it was.
The prison’s surgeons saw her not as a possible miracle, but as a mortal woman, and perhaps their lack of illusion led them to be more aggressive with their cures: perhaps once her fever, rapid heart rate, occasional vomiting, and reluctance to urinate could be clearly seen as a result of infection, the means of curing her announced itself. And so, to purge her body, came the antimonial cup—each morning for her first week in Bridewell, she was given a serving of wine that had sat for a day in a vessel cast in antimony, and the small amount of the substance that leached into the liquid was enough to make her puke for hours afterward. She thought, for a time, that the damned cure would kill her; but either through the effect of the purging, or because her body had merely decided it had had enough of illness, her heart’s pace soon slowed to something more like a human’s and less like a rabbit’s, the water she made returned to flowing regularly and freely, and her fever slowly receded.
Things could have been worse—perhaps out of appreciation of her notoriety, the keepers of her cell seemed to have been inclined to attend to her cleanliness, and so she slept on new straw and her clothes were regularly washed. Certain vagrants’ faces became familiar to her in the rare moments when she mingled with the rest of the prisoners, appearing every week or two as December passed, and she realized that they saw this place as a home of a kind, or at least a place that offered some of its comforts. If they could not come and go as they pleased, then shelter, food, and warmth were worth the temporary surrender of liberty, and the labor to which they were put had a more reliable outcome than begging.
Once she was well she was put to work. During the days she beat hemp that had been harvested and dried back in autumn, thrashing long, thick bundles of fibers rhythmically back and forth against the ground or crushing them in a simple press, preparing them to be woven into rope. (Men often came to watch this—the prison was wide open to visitors who were willing to pay the guards in coin or gin—and though Mary did not have the street-trained tongue of the whores and thieves she worked alongside, she nonetheless took silent amusement in the witty barbs the women shot back in response to the men’s crass sallies.) The work was not so different from the scythe swinging she did during hop season back in Godalming, though it was more prolonged and more strenuous, so much so that it wouldn’t let her think, and it was good not to think.
After a week or two of soreness she felt her shoulders becoming larger and her neck becoming thicker, even as the pains of her past experience healed. She looked less ladylike, to be certain, but given her circumstances this was no concern, if in fact it ever had been. For all their professed humanity, the minders at Bridewell had an unwelcome fondness for flogging those they judged lazy, and those same groups of men who came through Bridewell to watch Mary beat the hemp were an ever-ready audience for punishment (though if stripping a woman’s clothes off her back revealed her skin to be exceptionally white, a murmur of complaint from observers would convince the administers of correction to make it gentle, a mere caress with the cat rather than an outright whipping). Sometimes, in her little chamber, she’d hear the hoarse, perpetually startled yelps of women who’d never quite realized the body was capable of feeling such hurt; it was better, Mary considered, to have a broad, strong back than one touched by the lash.
She had no idea what had happened to the surgeons who had attended her, or even to her own husband or family. She saw the chance to briefly fall out of history as a gift, and decided to take it. At first she’d overheard her fellow prisoners referring to her as “the rabbit queen,” though the nickname seemed to have an odd affection to it, as if they thought the trick she’d pulled was worthy of admiration, if not exactly praise. Then that nickname disappeared, and in the memories of everyone she was washed clean of any name, of any past. There must have been a reason why she was kept alone, but almost everyone seemed to have forgotten it or pretended not to remember, which was a kindness.
She knew that at first the constables had brought both her and Joshua to Bridewell, where they were separated, but she had heard nothing of him since. This did not surprise her as much as it might have. He had his silver tongue and his gift of making himself small, and he was a man, for all of that. And in all her confessions, no matter how true they’d been, she had never blamed him, not once, because she loved him, and because it was right for her to take responsibility for her own actions. All of that should have been enough to let him talk his way out of the prison walls, to find his way home.
She soon lost track of time, forgetting to count the days. Christmas announced itself all at once as a burst of color on the edges of her vision come and gone, the muffled music of hymns through walls, and a supper that nearly qualified as luxurious—doubled rations of meat, and a pudding that encouraged the prisoners to play at raucousness that night, despite the fact that it didn’t have enough rum in it to get a rat drunk. Then December turned to January, and the world went dim again.
In the meantime, she waited, for history’s eye to alight on her once more. There was no hurry.
* * *
*
One afternoon in January, a gruff and portly constable appeared in her tiny chamber to tell her that she would have a companion, or perhaps some companions, from now on. “One or two,” he said, “depending on how you count. Either way, you’ll suit each other.” This was presumably meant to be a joke, but his words were delivered with a strange malice. In his face she saw a look that said, I see you. I know your face and your name. I remember you.
Two men brought the woman into Mary’s room with a burlap sack pulled over her head, and the first thing that Mary noticed was that the sack was a wrong and troubling shape, filled too much and stretched too wide. The shoulders beneath it were broad, too much so—not strong, but ill-formed. The figure was short, perhaps five feet tall, and her calves beneath her skirts seemed like those of a chairman, thick and muscular; her feet were clad in a surprisingly stylish pair of green silk brocade shoes, fastened with red ribbons.
“You’re a monster, right?” one of the men said. “You tried to make us think you were. So we wanted you to meet another monster. This one is real.” And he tore off the sack.
The woman beneath had two heads. Both had the same hazel eyes, and the same clumsily cropped brown hair pinned beneath caps; the right cheek of one was pressed tightly against the left cheek of the other. One of the heads stared directly at Mary, as if in challenge; the other looked at the floor with an expression of melancholy that seemed permanent.
The two constables retreated. “Well,” one of them said as they shut and locked the door to Mary’s cell, “we’ll leave you to it.”
Mary heard their laughter as they walked away. “The God-damned ugliest thing I’ve ever seen,” the other constable said; then she heard the slam of a door, and they were gone.
* * *
*
The three women became fast friends. There was some initial confusion about the sisters’ nature, easily alleviated when Grace introduced herself and Patience; once Mary realized that she was in the company of two people who shared much of the same body, rather than one person who had certain body parts that were somehow duplicated, her feelings of disquiet were much relieved. Grace and Patience were understandably used to being misunderstood by strangers, and bore Mary’s puzzlement with good humor.
Grace and Patience were also used to short but frequent sojourns in prison. It was impossible for them to find steady employment to carry them through the winter, and so in this time of year, the sisters were often reduced to begging. But their appearance often occasioned a feeling of wrongness in the guts of peacekeepers—though they themselves were comfortable in their shared body and took it for granted, they were forced to accept that others might not feel this way—and so they regularly found themselves escorted to one house of correction or another on a vague charge of “vagrancy,” where, like Mary, they would wait until the caprice of England’s legal apparatus swung once more in their favor and set them free.
Grace—the sister who’d stared Mary down when they’d first entered, trying to take her measure—was the talkative one, and was friendly once she felt sure that Mary would not be hostile, as so many strangers often were. According to her, this last run-in with London’s constables had occurred because they’d knocked on the wrong door asking for charity. “The woman who answered was pregnant,” Grace said as Patience shook her head and sighed, her eyes raised to heaven, “and once we saw that, we knew how the story would go from there. Hand on her belly; my baby, my baby. Screams and panic. And so forth.”
“Pregnant women are not to be frightened,” said Patience ruefully. “Or their children will turn out to be frights.”
“The mind of a woman with child must be kept as untroubled water, not to be disturbed,” Grace continued. “A blank sheet of foolscap, untouched by ink.” Grace and Patience spread their hands. “So after some hue and cry, here we are. And yourself? What brings you to this fine abode?”
“It is…quite a long story,” Mary said, “and you may find it unpleasant in its details.”
“We appear to have plenty of time on our hands,” said Grace with a smile.
“Having told you our story, we would be honored to hear yours,” said Patience.
* * *
*
As Mary talked, she realized she’d yet to tell the story to someone entire, and it was complicated and dark; after a couple of false starts she realized that she had to go back to her first miscarriage, and beyond that to her marriage to the man who, in this retelling, was not complicit, but merely a witness. It took what seemed like hours to relate the tale—the pain of the first rabbit inserted in her, and her disgust at what she was doing to herself; the surprise of the first surgeon (this part made Grace and Patience clutch their stomach in laughter); her slow creeping dread when she began to realize that the hoax had taken on its own life and would require her to “give birth” not just to a second and a third rabbit but who knew how many more, each sham of a birth drawing in yet more believers; the news that she had somehow gained the attention of the king of England his very own self (“Did you meet the king?” said Patience. “Let her tell her story in her own time,” said Grace); her transportation to London; her subsequent installation in Dr. Lacey’s Bagnio; the vigil kept by surgeons and lords that seemed as if it would not end; the threat of a surgery that put the best interests of others ahead of her own; the final relief of giving up the pretense at last and making her confession.
“It is a pity that you did not get to meet the king,” said Patience, once Mary Toft was done. “Though your recent past has not been deprived of incident, it must be said: an audience with the king is almost too much to expect, on top of it.”
“But I do have one question,” said Grace. “I do not understand why you chose to strip a rabbit of its skin, cut it into pieces, and insert those pieces into your vagina, to expel them in the presence of a surgeon. Patience and I would not do this to ourselves.”
“I hadn’t considered the idea until this moment,” said Patience, “but after some thought, I would certainly not.”
“I want to know why you would do this,” said Grace.
* * *
*
Mary considered it. She thought of what her husband had said, or what she seemed to remember her husband saying, one evening in the spring. God speaks to us, speaks through you, and damns you for your failures. But we might obtain salvation for you, if only you could speak back.
But that couldn’t have happened at all, not in that way. Joshua was a kind man, despite what one might think. He had a small voice that came out of a big body; his size was a curse that made people see him as something other than what he was, something nastier and more threatening. It would not have been his idea. He had gone home to Godalming, to earn a living, to care for James, and to return to the life he deserved.
She must have misinterpreted, or misremembered.
“I did it for the money,” she stated plainly. “I thought it would make me rich.”
Patience coughed.
“Mary,” Grace said, placing her hand on hers. “Did you not, during all those long and tortured months, think to yourself that surely there are easier, more reliable ways to swindle a man?”
* * *
*
“And everyone believed it,” Grace said. “Despite the fact that the idea seems ludicrous the moment you hear it.”
“I can appreciate a good trick,” said Patience. “And Grace and I have seen people only too willing to believe the ludicrous, just as we have seen people who insist on doubting what is plainly true. One never knows.”
“True enough,” said Grace. “Can you believe, Mary, that we have had people claim that Patience and I do not exist, even as we stand before them?”
For in the warmer months, Grace explained, she and Patience made a living by joining a traveling caravan operated by a Londoner, Nicholas Fox. “An Exhibition of Medical Curiosities, he calls it. People with unusual bodies, or exceptional talents. Though some of them are admittedly fraudulent—he would not be able to easily enlist enough people for his caravan to give an audience
its money’s worth, and so a few contrivances must make up the balance.”
“You came through Godalming last spring,” Mary said. “I didn’t attend. But I remember.”
“We have long since lost any curiosity about ourselves, having lived in this body for our whole lives,” said Grace, “but there is still profit to be had from the curiosity of others.”
“However, propriety prevents audiences from seeing us without a scrim to shield their eyes,” Patience continued.
“So when we stand before an audience each evening, as the last exhibit on the program, we see them not as individual men and women, but as a blurred mass of colors and shadows.”
“But we can hear them. And most of the time, they pass judgment.”
“Sometimes we hear a collective gasp of consternation,” said Grace, “and though I might wish that these people might be more accepting of what they have not seen before, it signals to us at least that they see us as true—that even in that dim light, something of our real nature has been conveyed through the fabric behind which we stand.”
“But sometimes the sentiment of the crowd curdles, and it turns to anger. Perhaps because they’ve seen through that sad pile of poultry that Fox tries to pass off to paying customers as a ‘boneless girl.’ ”