Mary Toft; or, the Rabbit Queen

by Dexter Palmer

  With each example, Crispin Walsh nodded with quiet grunts of understanding, while the divot between John Howard’s eyebrows carved itself in deeper. Zachary himself felt torn between father and master, and was not sure what to think—though he’d been initially convinced of what he saw, and the logic behind it, he felt that there was something missing from the presentation. All of it was, for lack of a better word, grotesque.

  As the sun descended in the late-afternoon sky, dimming the barn further still and lighting the scrim on the stage in shades of gold and red, Fox took the stage alone to introduce his final exhibit. “This last example is one with which I must take care,” he said. “Both for her sake and for yours, I cannot bring her in front of the curtain to be seen with the naked eye: she must remain behind it, so that you may only view her silhouette. She takes no pleasure in the gazes of strangers, which may either make her weep violently or send her flying into a rage; as for you, were you to see her face-to-face, you might vomit, or go temporarily mad. Even the most adventurous, curious mind has its limits on what it can bear to know before it breaks.”

  Behind the scrim, Zachary saw a shadow, oddly shaped but suggestive of a human form, taking on definition as it approached. As his mouth went dry, he recalled John’s words from the day before: Mrs. Glasse wondered if she were not looking on some kind of chimera.

  “Consider,” Fox said, “the woman with child who reads. Who seeks to occupy her mind with matters of art and science at a time when she is intended to embrace the role assigned to her by God, that of a wife, and of a mother. Who spends her days in the company of imaginary folk such as Moll Flanders and Roxana the Fortunate Mistress, while her belly swells and her needle goes neglected. Who fails to meditate on her responsibility to the new life that grows inside her. Such a woman’s thought is torn in two directions—is it no surprise that if she were to give birth to a child in such an afflicted state of mind, that it would assume the most hideous of manifestations?

  “Behold,” Fox said, “the woman with two heads.”

  As the audience collectively drew in a breath, the translucent scrim billowed forward slightly as the woman behind it pressed her face—no, no, her faces—against it. She seemed to be roughly five feet tall, and her proportions beneath the waist, as indicated by her silhouette, appeared to Zachary to be close to normal, but her shoulders were disturbingly broad, and the two heads atop them were wedged tightly against each other. The leftward head was perfectly vertical, while the one on the right canted away from it, as if it were forever attempting to escape. Zachary tried to imagine what that must be like for her (for them? He didn’t understand, and couldn’t decide): another ear constantly brushing against your own ear; another mind in another brain, eternally so close to yours, always forcing its own troubled thoughts upon you; the pace of your own heart speeding because of another person’s panic. Or perhaps there was only one mind shared between them; perhaps one of the woman’s skulls held only dreams, or fog, or nothing at all.

  Silence fell in the barn as the woman stood behind the rippling scrim, its hem lifted tall enough to display her feet, clad in a pair of pointed green silk brocade shoes, fastened with red ribbons. Fox’s gaze swept back and forth across the audience, his shoulders squared, his jaw set in pugnacious challenge, daring someone to speak. Crispin Walsh closed his eyes and covered his face with a trembling hand; John Howard looked at the woman behind the curtain, and at Fox, and at the reactions of the audience members, and back to the woman again, as if he were contemplating a particularly difficult conundrum.

  “Every woman is a wonder,” Fox said, “and every woman carries within her the capacity to be the conduit for one of God’s miracles. For what else is the birth of a human being but the sure confirmation of God’s grace and power? But a woman who does not take care of her own mind during the time of her pregnancy, who does not fully accept the role with which God has chosen to favor her, presents”—and here his voice rose—“a danger: not merely to herself, or to her offspring, but to the public. For such poor creatures as you have seen before you today become the public’s burden, even as they are outcast from society; they are forbidden to darken the doors of those of us who are not malformed, and yet they have no homes of their own.”

  Fox looked down at his feet as if in prayer; when he lifted his head again, his eyes glistened. “The exhibition that you see before you today is, I believe, my calling, and my moral duty,” he said. “The few pennies that I collect from you allow me to give these people a domicile and occupation for some months out of the year, where they might not have had one otherwise and been reduced to charity. If you can find it in your heart to favor us with an additional donation, my assistant will receive your gift at the exit; even the smallest of coins will help.

  “And with that, my exhibition ends. Good day to you all.”

  Behind the curtain, the woman dipped in a brief curtsy and retreated, her silhouette dissolving into a blur with each slow step backward.

  * * *

  *

  “I am glad I attended that event,” Crispin Walsh said, once he had left the barn with Zachary and John. (He had given an extra penny to the girl with the birthmark who stood at the door, collecting coins in an upturned three-cornered hat; John, on the other hand, had distractedly walked past the girl as if she hadn’t even been there. As Zachary had passed, the two of them had briefly locked eyes, and the girl had grimaced and wrinkled her nose at him in a manner that inexplicably made him wish for her to do it again.)

  “That was…surprisingly salutary,” Crispin continued. “A reminder that not all of God’s messages are to be found beneath the roofs of chapels, or between the covers of sacred texts.” Zachary somehow had the feeling that he was intended to take this as a concession in an argument that he and his father had once had, long ago.

  Crispin favored John with the briefest of bows, as if men of God could only be expected to bend so much. “Good day to you both,” he said, turning to take his own path home. Zachary felt a brief tugging at his heart as his father walked away, but after a single misplaced footstep, he righted himself and fell in line with his master.

  John was quiet, striding along with his hands clasped behind his back, and Zachary thought it best to leave him to his contemplation. Then, finally, he spoke. “Zachary.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Did you believe all that you saw today?”

  Even as he recalled the bear’s monstrous eye buried in the man’s back, fixing him beneath its stare, Zachary hesitated: the fact that the question was even asked suggested that there was at least one wrong answer. “I don’t know,” he said, after a pause that, in his own ears, went on too long. “I know that I saw things, but…it is hard to truly say what they were.”

  “I don’t know, either,” said John. “I do know that we were…restricted, from fully observing, through means that were perhaps circumstantial, perhaps sly. This raises suspicions.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Did you notice? The exhibition was arranged so that the afternoon sun would shine into our eyes. And we could not see as well as we might have in broad daylight. What we believed we saw may have been what Nicholas Fox said it was; or it may have been fraud from beginning to end; or a mixture of the two, truth and falsehood blended together. The fellow with the ursine affliction may have had a rug attached to his back with some sort of glue, made for the purpose of deception; there may have been some rudimentary puppetry involved, some throwing of voices. The so-called ‘boneless girl’ may have merely been a pile of poultry with a wig on top. The man whose mother had a supposed love of viewing hangings may have had the shape of his head altered in the past, through some kind of necessary surgery. An illusion of a two-headed woman might be accomplished through any number of means—perhaps a second false head, attached to the pretender’s shoulder, crafted from a substance light enough for her to support it. She m
ay have stood behind the scrim so that we could fill in the silhouette we saw with our own imaginings, taking them as fact.”

  Zachary found this train of thought strangely deflating, and his realization of the truth of John’s reasoning was laced with a resentment that he thought it wise to disguise.

  “And I am inclined to dispute Mr. Fox’s…theories of generation,” John continued. “If it were fully true that the bodies of children are shaped by their mothers’ minds, what about the children of mothers who are more innocent than most? Shouldn’t the daughters of sinless women sport angel’s wings, or possess eyes that sparkle in darkness? Did it not seem strange to you that the transformations we witnessed today were always monstrous? That they were always meant to punish?”

  Suddenly Zachary wished he’d never seen the exhibit that he’d been so excited to attend. “I suppose, sir,” he said, and heard a sadness in his own voice.

  They trudged along together in silence as night began to fall. Then John said, his voice just above a whisper, “I believed it.”

  “Sir?”

  “The two-headed woman. When I saw her, for the first time, behind the curtain, I believed in the truth of her, and the reason for her existence. I had no doubt. Only when I had left the barn did I start to question, to consider alternatives. It was as if a spell had been lifted once I had come into the open air.”

  Zachary nodded.

  “Here is another question,” John said. “In the moment when we were in the barn, looking at the woman as she stood behind the curtain. If all of us believed in her, would not her existence be a matter of fact, and not a fraud?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  John’s pace slowed as he wrestled with the idea. “The truth of the matter. Is it a thing that exists outside of our minds, waiting for us to perceive it and know it as true? Or is truth a thing that collectively resides within the minds of all men, a matter of consensus, subject to debate, subject to alteration? The world outside our minds neither true nor false, but merely there?”

  “I—” Zachary shook his head. “I am uncertain, sir.”

  “As am I,” said John. “I am led to consider that the latter possibility may be the case; that our world has some secret horror that I cannot fathom if so, controlling the minds of men though it is impossible to perceive with our senses alone.

  “But put such thoughts aside: they will keep you awake at a time when you need rest, for tomorrow. We are home.”

  | CHAPTER II.

  THE ROYAL TOUCH.

  A few days later, Mrs. Phoebe Sanders paid a visit to John Howard’s practice, towing along her shy and lanky son Oliver, who had begun to display symptoms of the king’s evil. Phoebe was more or less the parish’s de facto Overseer of the Poor—it was her husband, Archibald, who had been elected under duress to the unpaid position last Easter, but after a month or so, his wife had discovered that the duty of deciding which members of the parish were deserving of poor relief dovetailed nicely with her hard-won and diligently defended status as Godalming’s preeminent gossip. It soon enough became evident to all the town that Archibald was more interested in discovering what mysteries lay at the bottom of a glass of beer than in considering the welfare of the town’s citizens, and would dispense funds to needy families only after a word from Phoebe in his ear. This fact gave her the chance to inquire with shameless relentlessness into the lives of the townsfolk under the guise of a woman whose only aim was the determination of the proper amount of charity, and to carry the news to people like John Howard who might not hear it otherwise, delivered along with stern pronouncements of the moral worth, or lack thereof, of the temporarily indigent.

  The scrofulous boy’s tumor lurked behind his right ear. As Howard folded the ear back to examine the lesion, Zachary sensed an uncommon tentativeness in his behavior: he leaned backward slightly and squinted at it, rather than bringing his face close to the affliction as was his usual habit. “Its color is uniform,” he said. “It hasn’t yet ruptured. A single cluster of kernels, and it hasn’t spread.” He looked at Oliver’s mother. “This could be much worse. How is his health otherwise? A lassitude, I’d expect.”

  “He sleeps half the day if we let him,” said Phoebe. “And his food goes untouched unless we threaten to punish him. It’s gone on like this for longer than a week—I only noticed the lesion just now.”

  “You are nonetheless fortunate, I believe,” John said. “The distemper is still in its early stages. Removal by incision should cure it fairly easily.

  “Zachary,” said John as Oliver’s eyes widened in terror and he looked at his mother with a barely audible whimper, “pour a glass of gin for our young guest, and lay out my tools.”

  * * *

  *

  In the room across the hall in which John would perform the operation, Phoebe looked at the array of scalpels on their wooden tray, neatly aligned parallel to each other and equidistant, as Zachary had quickly learned that John preferred. “Knives,” she said.

  “These are knives, yes,” said John. “And knives bring blood: if you are squeamish, it will be best for all involved if you do not watch.”

  Phoebe edged closer to John. “There is…no other way? An unguent of some sort? Might you mix up some manner of healing balm?”

  “The only other way is for the disease to spread: across his neck, onto his face. It will turn an angry purple; it will scar. And members of the sufferer’s family are more likely to contract it, the longer it persists.”

  Frowning, she retreated. “Knives seem so…primitive. I don’t like them; neither does he.”

  “To bear illness when we have the wisdom and the method to relieve it is even more primitive, I would hazard. Mrs. Sanders.”

  Oliver entered the room with Zachary just behind him; the afflicted boy’s cheeks glowed bright pink, and he seemed not to have a care in the world. John patted the operating table with his hand. “Up here. Lie on your stomach.”

  “Fifteen years ago,” Phoebe said, “I would have taken him to a minister, instead of you. I would have taken him to this boy’s father.” She motioned toward Zachary, the lackadaisical gesture suggesting that she saw him as a poor stand-in for a genuine cleric. “He would have identified the disease just as well as you did—I knew it when I saw it myself; the diagnosis needs no expertise—and then I would have journeyed to London, with a certificate in hand that would have gained me admittance to a healing ceremony performed by Queen Anne herself. Think of it!”

  “This will hurt for a few moments,” John said, leaning over Oliver, scalpel poised. “But it will be over soon enough. Breathe slowly; breathe deep. Think of nothing other than your breaths, in and out.”

  “The queen would have cured the boy with a touch, for no cost at all, and placed a golden medal around his neck in the bargain. But those days are past. That England is gone.”

  “Zachary,” said John, “hold him still. Pin back his ear. And don’t touch the lesion.”

  “Now we are ruled by a German,” said Phoebe, drawing out the word in contempt. “Who chooses not to exercise the gift that God has granted to all true kings and queens of England since time immemorial. Have you ever stopped to consider why King George of the House of Hanover would choose to forgo to use the royal touch? Unless—”

  With a sigh, John turned away from his patient to face Phoebe. “I offer you two choices, before you warm to your chosen theme,” he said. “Either continue your political carping, in which case I will cease my efforts here and leave you to ship this child off to Rome, where I believe the Pretender still performs the service you describe. Perhaps young Oliver here will come back cured, and a Jacobite.

  “Or you may close your mouth, and let me work.”

  Phoebe closed her mouth.

  * * *

  *

  Once the surgery was complete, and John had cleaned his hands by stan
ding outside and having Zachary douse them with two buckets of well-drawn water, John left Zachary to bandage Oliver, and escorted Phoebe into his sitting room. He felt a twinge of guilt for snapping at Phoebe in the midst of the operation, and though he was the only surgeon available in the parish and could therefore have forced his clientele to put up with any of his changes in mood, he did not want to acquire a reputation as a curmudgeon: soothing small talk was called for, in advance of the presentation of the bill.