Mary Toft; or, the Rabbit Queen

by Dexter Palmer

  Phoebe sat across from John’s desk, fidgeting and angry, but as soon as John asked her if she knew of any interesting events that had occurred in town in recent days, she relaxed and turned voluble, as if she’d at last received the signal for which she’d long been waiting. “Well. I had to give Mrs. Mitton a small bit of money,” she said, the practiced hushed voice and cocked eyebrow presumably signaling a secret relayed in confidence. “When I saw her with such poor posture I knew what had gone wrong, but I thought it polite not to let on that I noticed: it was only a matter of moments before she confessed to me in a whisper that she’d had to pawn her only stays. Why, I believe she’d convinced herself that none of us could tell! But she’s no longer nineteen. Right away I said, ‘Here, have a couple of coins to fetch them out, you don’t look yourself without them. I’ll settle with Archie later.’ The poor woman looked so grateful, I tell you. And I gave two shillings to the Tofts: I don’t think Mary’s seen a single day without melancholy since her miscarriage, and her husband seems to know no cheer either. Joshua must sit idle half the time—Lord knows there’s no money in cloth. Mary’s work in the hop fields might bring in a few pennies a day, but what will they do for the winter? It’s a year of bad fortune for them. I said, ‘I want you to put this toward socks for yourself and your child. I’ll settle with Archie later.’ Come November the poor fund will be stretched thin, but for now we will do what we can—”

  Phoebe cut off her monologue at Oliver’s timorous entrance. Zachary had a steadying hand on Oliver’s shoulder, though the patient seemed to be in no danger of falling; Zachary also appeared to have used a bandage for Oliver’s ear that was more appropriate for a compound fracture of the leg, tying it with knots that sailors had yet to discover. Half of young Oliver’s face was eclipsed, and he peered at his mother out of one downcast eye. John sighed. It would do.

  “I don’t expect that the scrofula will recur, with the proper treatment,” he said, pushing back his chair and standing. “As I said, we detected the distemper before it could progress. Change the bandage regularly until the wound heals; you need not be as…thorough as my assistant has been. His diet should promote digestion: mutton; poultry; corn bread. A broth of marjoram and mint, morning and evening. Avoid food that causes winds and vapors: onions, leeks, beans—”

  “No more farting,” Oliver said sorrowfully.

  “It is indeed a tragedy to rob you of what I gather is one of your greatest pleasures,” John replied, “but it must be done for your health; that of your family will, I presume, be a beneficial secondary effect. One shilling, Mrs. Sanders.”

  * * *

  *

  Over supper that evening, an asparagus ragout prepared by Alice, Zachary said to John, “I didn’t understand what Mrs. Sanders said today. About the queen curing scrofula with a touch.”

  “You were but a babe in those days,” said John, “but it is as she said. The late queen embraced a ritual that had been practiced by England’s rulers for centuries. It is why another name for the disease is the ‘king’s evil’: because it is thought by many that the king has—or had—a special ability to cure it. After the Restoration, Charles II alone touched tens of thousands. He gifted each supplicant with a golden touchpiece inscribed with the figure of an angel, signifying that the glory of the cure was to be credited to God alone, and not to the king. But once King George took the throne after Queen Anne’s death—before your third birthday, Zachary—he abandoned the practice, for reasons known only to himself.”

  “That sounds selfish to me,” Zachary said, frowning. “If I could cure the sick just by touching them, I would touch all the people I could.”

  “It is a complex issue,” said Alice. “John is perhaps too circumspect to spell this out for you, so the duty falls to me. It may be that King George no longer offers the royal touch not because he chooses not to, but because he secretly fears that he does not have the ability to perform it, and will therefore not risk the attempt. The events that led to George’s ascension would require a lecture, but let it suffice to say that in decades past, the powers that be decided that to have a Catholic seated on our throne would be the worst of all possible fates. So members of Parliament performed a close examination of the royal family tree while standing on their heads with their left eyes shut—”

  “Alice exaggerates, Zachary.”

  “Not by much. As I was saying: through the use of soul-corrupting dark arts, Parliament deduced that the proper king of Great Britain is one Georg Ludwig von Braunschweig-Lüneburg, a Lutheran who speaks not a word of the native tongue of the nation he rules. If King George tried and failed to execute the royal touch, it would bring unwanted additional attention to an already vexing question of legitimacy—it would suggest to those who are foolish enough to give credence to such things that God confers the talent only on Britain’s true ruler, who in this instance might be the Catholic Pretender James, now in exile on the Continent. Then we’d be in for yet another nuisance of a Jacobite uprising, yet another feeble failed invasion. Perhaps George thinks it best to let the issue lie. And I cannot blame him.”

  “There are other possible explanations that are…not so political,” said John. “It may be that King George does not practice the royal touch not because he believes he lacks the power to heal, but because he believes that no one has the power to heal with a touch, whether a king or no. He may think, as many now do, that the time of miracles is past. The practice of the royal touch has its skeptics, with louder voices in recent years, and knowledgeable people have offered other explanations for its seeming efficacy. Daniel Defoe has claimed that the gold in the touchpiece that was given to scrofula sufferers had occult properties—that is, it was the touchpiece that healed the disease, not the king. Others think that the cure was effected through the power of the sufferer’s imagination—that the momentous experience of breathing the same air as the monarch caused the sufferer to believe that he was being healed, and so he was.”

  “It’s just like the stories we heard at the exhibition last week,” said Zachary. “How the imaginations of the mothers changed the shapes of their children, and made them strange.”

  “It is…somewhat similar,” said John as Alice sighed in an exasperation she could not be troubled to conceal.

  “But what difference does it make if someone has the king’s evil and they’re cured of it through the powers of their own mind, instead of by the king touching them?” asked Zachary. “Is that bad? If that was what King George believed about how the royal touch worked, wouldn’t he have only stopped the ceremony if he thought that what he was doing was bad?”

  “It would be a deception,” said Alice. “Much as, I would hazard, the audience of which you were a part a few days ago was deceived by that Nicholas Fox fellow.”

  “But it is incorrect to claim that what the kings of past centuries did was deceptive,” said John. “Certainly, the monarchs themselves believed in the practice. We have the published testimonies of the sufferers themselves, and of surgeons of good reputation, who professed that their patients were cured by the royal touch when no other means was effective. Though perhaps it’s the case that what the sufferer generously described as a ‘cure’ was in fact only a coincident reduction in symptoms, or an increased willingness to tolerate those symptoms, granted by the experience of the ceremony. Or perhaps the ceremony led the sufferer to engage in a persistent act of self-delusion, so that a sick man who wore the king’s medal would look in a mirror and see a healthy man looking back. It is difficult to say without resorting to conjecture. We simply do not know enough about the matter to speak with confidence.”

  John pushed back his chair and stood. “But what happened in the presence of past kings and queens is no concern to us. If a patient comes to me with the symptoms of scrofula, or any other distemper, I will use the tools available to me to effect a cure: my eyes; my hands; my expertise; my books; and my knives. T
hese are all I have. Leave the patient’s mind to the patient; leave the king’s beliefs to the king; and leave God’s thoughts to God.”

  | CHAPTER III.

  A CONCERNED HUSBAND.

  The colors began to fade from the world as September slipped into October. With each passing day the sun struggled a bit more to lift itself above the horizon, its light cutting feebly through hazy clouds as it lumbered across the sky; afternoon gusts of wind played with coat lapels and hinted at the coming winter; night came on faster and lasted longer, and those who wandered Godalming’s streets after dark looked like ghosts of themselves, pale in the icy starlight, slow-footed and enervated.

  The hop season had neared its end, the sticky green cones plucked from their bines and dried and baled; a faint smell of beer still lingered on the hands of the harvesters, and yellow powder tinted their fingernails. Wives weighed purses in their palms and asked themselves if the coins inside were sufficient to keep a larder stocked through the coming winter. In past years, the town’s women would have commenced the steady knitting of woolen socks, a pair a day extruding from their needles as their fingers flew, hands temporarily divorced from bodies and acting of their own free will. But with the local decline in sheepherding, the necessary yarn would be too difficult to come by, and too dear to allow a decent profit to be turned. And even Londoners now preferred to import their woolens from the Continent—those once desirable English socks, even if they were made, were nearly certain to go unwanted. Families without sufficient reserves would have to make ends meet through other means.

  Neither Zachary’s master nor his father had any cause for concern: a mere change of season would not alleviate the constant need of the people for medical treatment or spiritual comfort. Over a supper of Alice’s simple roast chicken, which had quickly become one of Zachary’s favorite dishes, John Howard told Zachary that he expected a change in the nature of the duties required of him in the coming months. “Fewer wounds and broken bones,” he said. “Less time spent outside at work, in the close company of hammers and blades; less of a chance for boys to find mischief, falling from trees and roofs. More illnesses of the chest and throat. More need of my services as a man-midwife, this month and the next.”

  “Fire’s not the only means of heat that families resort to in winter,” Alice said, in response to the evident confusion on Zachary’s face. “October is when women pay the bill for January’s warmth.”

  “I…see,” Zachary said, nodding with what he seemed to believe was an expression of sagacity.

  Exasperatedly, Alice made a circle with the middle finger and thumb of her left hand and inserted the index finger of her right, in and out, in and out. “Alice!” said John, as Zachary’s eyebrows raised and twin blushes appeared on his cheeks.

  “Well, we’re supposed to teach the boy; it’s in the contract that you signed,” said Alice. “Clearly he’s learned little about the ways of the world from that cleric father of his. Is he not fourteen? Should he not at least have stumbled across those passages in the Bible that address the subject of fucking, the topic that any healthy fourteen-year-old thinks of more than any other? The poor thing’s been kept in the dark his whole life, to no good end.”

  “Alice!” John cried again, the pitch of his voice uncommonly high. His hands twitched as he began to lift them toward his ears and stopped himself.

  Alice smiled. “I’m pleased to know that you have not forgotten my name after all these years of marriage, dear husband.”

  * * *

  *

  Autumn was the season when Crispin Walsh’s sermons tended to drift toward the subject of hellfire, as if he, too, wished to do what he could to provide warmth for others. “It is easy enough for a man to follow God’s precepts in days of clear skies and sunlight,” he said to Zachary during one of the boy’s increasingly infrequent visits to his parents’ home. “A man is most likely to strive to enter heaven if he feels he already has one foot through its gates. But in times of darkness, the fear of damnation is a more useful means of keeping the flock on its proper path than the promise of salvation. Summer days call for the carrot; winter days warrant the stick.”

  At times, it seemed to Zachary as if his father’s God was constituted entirely of the commands that he had given, or that he had created humans solely in order to give himself beings over which he could exercise control. (And perhaps it was also true that Crispin Walsh saw this God as worthy of emulation. More often now, when Zachary was in the company of his father, they didn’t have conversations: instead, Crispin gave Zachary orders to complete chores that Zachary felt were beneath any fourteen-year-old boy, never mind one that was a budding surgeon. Zachary suspected that the chamber pot whose foul, murky contents sloshed against its edges had been left to stew until the last moment, in the hope that the son would return, convinced of his own wretched prodigality even if it was not the case, asking for forgiveness and a place as a servant, even if such forgiveness was unneeded.)

  Zachary had little idea of what John Howard thought of God; he wasn’t sure that Howard himself had much of an idea, either. His best guess was that, if Crispin’s God made humans in order to have subjects, John’s made humans in order to be surprised by their actions, or perhaps bemused. John seemed surprisingly comfortable with not knowing, in a way that Zachary’s father did not; John seemed paradoxically secure in his uncertainty, while his father would have seen the display of such uncertainty as a sign of weakness, an absence of faith.

  What did Zachary himself think of God? His thoughts were difficult to articulate to himself. Even the mere idea of “believing in God” was, he thought but was afraid to say, strange: though he was surely not an atheist, the word God held no meaning for him in the way that words did for things he could see or touch, like chairs, or knives, or chamber pots. But the adults with whom he spent his life all seemed to “believe,” even if the God in which they placed their belief seemed to wear a different face for every person, no two completely alike: to one man, a giver of rules; to another, a capricious and inscrutable judge; to still another, a distant observer of mankind’s foibles and grasping attempts to make sense of the world. Even Alice, in her occasional joyous blasphemies—he recalled her clear delight at getting the chance to speak the words Bible and fucking in the same sentence—seemed to confirm her belief that there was Someone to blaspheme against (and who presumably was relaxed enough to find that blasphemy as amusing as Alice herself did).

  Yet all of them probably thought that they all believed in the same God, who had the same shape in the minds of others as he did in their own. What sort of God could that be, who appeared in different guises to every person, but who had no presence here in the world, except in tales of long-ago miracles? Why, if he wanted to ensure that his followers would believe in him with certainty, would he not manifest in some manner that all could see with their own eyes, and agree on what they saw? What benefit could God gain from concealment, or from secrecy?

  * * *

  *

  On October 13, 1726, the first day of the year that was chilly enough to compel John Howard to light a fire in his office, his first visitor was one Joshua Toft, a journeyman in the cloth trade.

  The man was hulking and hirsute, and stood at the threshold of Howard’s office, a faded, weather-beaten cloth cap clutched in his hands. His slumping posture suggested a diffidence at odds with his frame: with his stooped back and drawn-in shoulders, he seemed as if he genuinely believed he was half his actual size. His eyes were at odds with the rest of him, twin glints of silver twinkling in the shadows cast by his hooded brows.

  John closed the volume of Locke on his desk, putting it aside with a mixture of relief and regret: he was finding Locke’s pedantic definition of infinity to be deeply befuddling, but unpleasant as it was, his confusion had a cast to it that signaled an impending enlightenment. It would take him another morning to pick up the thread of reasoning once
he dropped it. Alas: too late. “May I help you?” he asked, stifling a sigh, feeling the flickering flame in the back of his mind go cold.

  Joshua Toft took two timid steps forward, eyes on the floor. He mumbled something John couldn’t catch: a stuttered sibilant, a word that sounded like “wife,” and little else. “Speak up,” John said, becoming aggravated.

  “My wife!” Joshua fairly shouted, then cringed as if startled by the sound of his own voice. “My wife,” he said again. “Sh…she’s. She’s…she’s with child. It’s time.”

  He looked away from the floor and at John, who was leaning back in his chair, staring up at Joshua in puzzlement. “It’s time,” Joshua said again, his voice now steady and even, though his posture still suggested an instinctive supplication. “We need you. Today. Certainly before nightfall. Perhaps now.”

  Slowly, John pushed back his chair and stood. He looked at Joshua, then down at the book before him, as if some secret were hidden between its covers that needed urgent deciphering, then back at Joshua again. “That cannot be,” John said quietly; then, again, louder: “No. That cannot be.”

  “I tell you, it is,” said Joshua. “Perhaps I am not the expert in human anatomy that you are. But I know my wife, and I trust my eyes.”

  “Sit,” said John, gesturing toward an empty chair.

  “We don’t have—”

  “Sit, I said.”

  With slow steps Joshua found his way toward a chair and collapsed into it, the joints crying out as his formidable weight settled. He began to wring his cap in his large, meaty hands, as if he intended to tear it in two.

  “Mr. Toft,” John said, sitting down behind his desk once more and attempting to infuse his voice with a warmth and gentleness that he did not at all feel, “it has not even been six months since your wife’s…untimely exclusion, in the spring. The blessing of a pregnancy, even one that might appear to have progressed far along, is easily within the realm of probability: I grant you that. But to suggest that my services are needed urgently? That the birth is mere hours away? This defies belief—my apologies, but there is no other honest way to state it.”