Mary Toft; or, the Rabbit Queen

by Dexter Palmer

  “I feel that I owe you an apology,” said John, his own eyes watering in sympathy. “Had I known we were to encounter a sight so heinous, I would have spared you.”

  “I heard Mrs. Howard laughing at you. The night it happened. Why was she—”

  “She thinks, not unreasonably, that I must be…mistaken, in what I saw. The tale is, indeed, difficult to accept as truth. Incredible as the story is, it shrinks in the telling—I could not make my words convey the horror of the details. And my own mind declines to consider the matter, even if I beseech it to do so. Whenever I attempt to think on last week’s event, to try to form a hypothesis concerning its cause, my thoughts…refuse to proceed. Until I resign myself to ignorance, and move on to another, more comforting subject.”

  John leaned back in his chair, rubbing his eyes. “I don’t know,” he said. “Perhaps the incident will vanish into history and be forgotten. I, for one, will confess that I am happy to let it do so, and I would hazard that everyone else involved would agree. Wouldn’t you say?”

  “I would, sir,” said Zachary. “I don’t ever want to have to think about it again.”

  John gave a single sharp nod of paternal approval. “Very well, then. A shared moment of collective delusion, here and gone. 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.”

  “I look forward to that day, sir,” Zachary said, as the two of them heard three staccato knocks on the front door.

  “As do I,” said John. “Now. Would you please welcome our first guest of the day?”

  Zachary had barely gotten out of his chair when they heard the clanging rap of the knocker again, louder, more insistent. Wiping his eyes, he left the office to answer the door.

  And when he returned a few moments later, his face was white—for behind him was Joshua Toft, his posture that of a supplicant, head lowered, hat in hand.

  “Sir,” Joshua said to John, “I may as well speak quickly, and plainly. The event we all witnessed, last week—I believe it’s about to happen again.”

  “It can’t be,” said John.

  “It is. The signs—they’re all the same.”

  “You lie.” John seemed surprised that the accusation had instinctively slipped out of his mouth.

  Joshua stepped backward as if he’d been punched, his hand on his heart. “I do not, sir, and I ask you to see for yourself.”

  John rose from his seat, bracing his hands on the desk to stop their trembling. “You,” he said, pointing at Zachary. “Stay here. I expect I will be back directly, complaining about a half day wasted.”

  “Yes, sir,” Zachary said, relieved.

  * * *

  *

  John was absent for dinner, and so Zachary and Alice ended up eating her preparation of sausages and stewed cabbage in gravy alone, the seat at the head of the dining table conspicuously empty. “Might you know what errand engages my dear husband and your benevolent master this afternoon?” she asked.

  “He’s gone out to—to the Tofts’ home.” Zachary felt strangely embarrassed, as if he were confessing misbehavior, even though he himself had done nothing wrong.

  “Oh, really,” said Alice.

  The two of them continued to eat, the corners of Alice’s lips turned upward in private merriment, the room silent except for the occasional clink of a fork against a dish.

  “Would you like to hear a secret to a happy marriage?” said Alice finally. “No need to blush: of course you would. It is this: that a wife must not repeat herself. If one’s dear husband is deaf to the truth the first time it’s spoken, repetition will only stop his ears more tightly.”

  Zachary, confused, merely nodded.

  “One would prefer not to be labeled a harridan,” Alice continued, speaking half to herself. “A termagant, a fishwife. One must not harangue. Deliver the message once and have patience; wait for time and the Lord to confirm it.”

  Zachary tried to smile in a manner that matched Alice’s, seemingly knowing and self-amused, but the cocked eyebrow he received in response signaled that he’d advertised his befuddlement about the direction of the conversation rather than concealing it, and so he gave up the charade.

  Alice put down her fork. “One must be prepared for the degree of equanimity required of a woman to be immeasurable, beyond belief.” She stood, and began to clear the dishes.

  * * *

  *

  John returned to the office in the middle of the afternoon, haggard and distraught. He clutched his leather satchel of tools in one hand and held in the other a crumpled, stinking, bloodstained bundle of once white linen with something inside, weighing it down.

  Wondering what had happened, fearing to hear the news, Zachary wordlessly followed John into the surgery room. Dropping his satchel carelessly in the middle of the floor, John dumped the bundle of linen on the operating table and released its corners, letting its contents tumble out in full view. He beckoned Zachary over to look; then, with a drawn and bitter expression on his face, he stood aside and gestured expansively toward the array of objects, like a traveling merchant advertising the rarest of wares.

  The boy’s gorge rose at the sight of another rabbit’s head, this one with white fur, while the fur of the rabbit that Mary Toft had birthed last week had been dark brown. A fly perched on the surface of one of its sightless, sky-blue eyes, rubbing its front legs together. Next to the head lay a pair of clawed hind feet (one with white fur; one with brown); a long, pink, translucent string of intestine that held a series of black pellets suspended within it; and a hunk of burgundy meat that Zachary guessed was a liver.

  John retrieved the medicinal gin from a cabinet, along with a pair of glasses. He poured a dose for himself, carelessly splashing the booze over the edges of the glass, and downed it immediately; then he poured a second shot for himself, along with one for Zachary. Zachary gingerly accepted his glass and quickly tossed back its contents in imitation, grimacing as the stinging gin slid down his throat.

  Arms folded, John Howard stared down at the rabbit parts spread on the cloth before him; then he turned to Zachary. “We won’t be able to ignore this, I’m afraid,” he said quietly. “I was a fool to ever believe I could. A single occurrence such as that we saw last week might be called an anomaly, and might let itself be wished away, no matter how strange. But twice begins a pattern, and so we cannot turn from it: we must now prepare for the third instance that is sure to appear, and soon.

  “It may be that the guidance of the usual medical authorities may not suffice in this instance,” John said as he served himself yet another glass of gin. “We may have to stray from well-marked roads; we may have to head down darker paths.”

  * * *

  *

  A half hour later, feeling a little more relaxed, a bit less terrified and anxious, Zachary leaned over John’s desk, peering at the title page of the slim volume that John had pulled from one of its locked drawers—the surgeon hadn’t kept it shelved with the other books that a curious apprentice might easily browse. “Aristotle’s Compleat Master-Piece,” he read. “Displaying the Secrets of Nature in the Generation of Man.”

  “Not actually written by the great philosopher, of course,” said John. “A borrowed mantle of authority, meant to give credence to a survey of the folk wisdom of midwives. But the knowledge here has on rare occasions stood me in good stead, in cases where works with more storied reputations have failed me.”

  The illustrations that Zachary saw as John leafed through the volume were bizarre, and unlike the fussily precise diagrams of the medical texts with which Zachary was familiar—these seemed more fanciful, in a manner that would be suited for a book for children, were they not so grotesque. One page depicted what looked like a boy of about six years of age, covered in thick black hair from head to toe, incl
uding the insides of his ears, the tops of his feet, and the surfaces of his lips; another boy who wandered naked through a stylized valley sported four arms and four legs. All of his limbs were equally strong, none of them withered; his feet were identical to his hands, with fingers in the place of his toes. The look on his face was oddly beatific, as if he were the benevolent god of a foreign nation.

  “Here,” said John. “This chapter.” He tapped the heading with his index finger: “Of a Mole, or false Conception; and also of Monsters and monstrous Births, with the Reasons thereof.”

  “Monsters,” Zachary said. “Like those at the exhibit we saw, except we weren’t sure whether what we were looking at was real, or some kind of trick.”

  Surgeon and apprentice scanned the pages together. The first half of the chapter addressed the unusual incident of a pregnant woman giving birth to a mole—not a living, thriving child, but a mindless, soulless, featureless mass of tissue, a dead lump of matter. “True cause therefore of this carnous conception which we call a mole,” said the anonymous writer who’d taken Aristotle’s name, “proceeds both from the man and from the woman, from corrupt and barren seed in the man, and from the menstrous blood in the woman, both mixed together in the cavity of the womb, and Nature finding her self weak (yet desirous of maintaining the perpetuity of her species) labors to bring forth a vicious conception, rather than none, and not being able to bring forth a living creature, generates a piece of flesh.”

  “Horrible,” said Zachary.

  “But only loosely related to the case before us,” John replied. “See here: three tests to determine whether a conception is true or false. A mole cannot be said to be an animal; it cannot be said to be human; it cannot bear a resemblance to its mother. Toft’s issue passes the second and third tests, but fails the first—though it should not be able to be produced by her body under normal circumstances, it is clearly recognizable as an animal. But let us read further.”

  John flipped forward to the second half of the chapter, which switched to the subject of monsters. “ ‘Monsters are properly depraved conceptions,’ ” Zachary read aloud, “ ‘which are defined by the ancients to be excursions of Nature, and are always vicious either in figure, situation, magnitude, or number.’ ”

  “Vicious in figure,” John said. “A woman birthing a beast. Vicious in situation: its components ripped apart instead of a single creature, whole. Vicious in number: two, mere days apart. We are closer now. Here: a description of the cause.”

  “ ‘As to the cause of their generation,’ ” read Zachary, “ ‘it is either divine or natural: The divine cause proceeds from the permissive will of the great Author of our beings suffering parents to bring forth such deformed monsters, as a punishment for their filthy and corrupted affection, which let loose unto wickedness, like brute beasts that have no understanding.’ ”

  “God’s condemnation, visited on sinners,” John summarized. “But this seems most likely to result in creatures recognizably human, though the child might be missing an arm or a leg, or have one arm or leg too many. However. Look: farther down. The list of manners in which the woman’s womb might be at fault. The third.”

  “ ‘The imaginative power, at the time of conception, which is of such force, that it stamps a character of the thing imagined upon the child.’ ” Zachary looked up from the page at John. “Like the creatures at the exhibition.”

  “Yes,” John said, only the shadow of reluctance in his assent. He continued reading from the page where Zachary had left off. “ ‘So that the children of an adulteress, by the mother’s imaginative power, may have the nearest resemblance to her own husband, though begotten by another man.’ ” At that he made a sound that, to Zachary, sounded something like a strange cross between a cough and a clearing of the throat. “And I believe,” John continued, “that we are forced to at least consider the possibility that this powerful facility of female thought might, in rare cases, allow the woman to imagine something not only human, but other than human.”

  * * *

  *

  The rest of the chapter was a series of examples of monstrous births from France and England and Germany, from the previous three centuries (including a story about a woman with two heads “from the time of Henry the Third” that churned Zachary’s gut: according to “Aristotle,” one of the sisters outlived the other by three years, and was forced to drag the inert, decaying corpse of her sister behind her—“for there was no parting them”—until she herself succumbed to illness. He thought about the woman he’d seen behind the curtain at the Exhibition of Medical Curiosities; he wondered whether she knew what fate awaited her. Perhaps her two heads had made a pact with each other, in case one of them passed—surely in such circumstances God would not consider suicide to be a sin).

  At the end of the chapter was a short didactic poem:

  Nature does to us sometimes monsters show,

  That we by them may our own mercies know:

  And thereby sin’s deformity may see,

  Than which there’s nothing can more monstrous be.

  John closed the book, placed it back in the desk drawer, and locked it away. “Though to believe so goes against the instincts I’ve acquired over many years,” he said, “I am increasingly sure that we have encountered a problem we will never solve if we choose to rely only on the body of knowledge exclusive to the surgeon’s craft. More wisdom is required: we will have to speak to another authority.

  “Zachary: tomorrow morning, would you visit your home and ask your father if he is available for a consultation with me? Bring him back with you, if possible: make it clear that the matter is urgent.”

  | CHAPTER VI.

  MARY’S DREAM.

  An errand to another parish for a baptism prevented Crispin Walsh from attending the birth of Mary Toft’s third rabbit, two days later—John Howard supervised the delivery, with Zachary reluctantly accompanying him for observation. But the minister was present at the Toft house for the delivery of the fourth, on the morning of Friday, October 21.

  By now John justifiably felt that even though he had only a few days of experience, he was right to consider himself the world’s foremost expert in human-leporine midwifing, and so he approached the birth with the manner of an old hand. Zachary was proud of himself for maintaining his composure when the mangled parts of the creature were produced (this one with ink-black fur, except for a few spots of white that decorated the tip of the nose and the severed paws), and he felt a small, shameful sense of satisfaction when his father ran from the house after John extracted the expected pile of rabbit guts from the woman: the gagging and splatter of the minister’s retching soon followed, easily heard from outside. When Crispin returned, stifling coughs and splutters and attempting to act as if nothing unusual had happened, Zachary and John merely offered him wordless nods of recognition—there was no need to embarrass him further. The cleric had been made well enough aware that he did not know every single thing that went on under heaven.

  * * *

  *

  On the long walk back to John’s practice, Crispin was apoplectic. “After the woman’s churching, I thought you were mad when you told me what you’d witnessed,” he said to John. “Or that I’d misheard. Or that you somehow wished to approach the borders of blasphemy, by telling obvious falsehoods within the church’s doors. But I did not believe you, not at first—only, truly, now, do I believe, after I have seen. I offer you my apologies, for what little worth they may have to you.”

  “We have not always seen eye to eye on matters of midwifery,” John said, and once again Zachary had the feeling that there was a past history shared between John and his father that they both thought was best only looked at sideways. “But in this case I concede that my expertise has its limits. Your voice is wanted here. It is needed.”

  A story there, to be sure.

  * * *<
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  *

  Crispin’s belief cemented itself further still at the birth of the fifth rabbit, the following Monday. Joshua’s knock at John’s door that morning had almost been expected, as if a predictable schedule was becoming established—however, on entering, Joshua said he had the impression that Mary would not deliver the rabbit until that afternoon. She seemed troubled, and she sometimes muttered nonsensical incantations and wept an occasional bloody tear that her husband dutifully wiped away, but she was not exhibiting the raw anguish that suggested the birth was imminent. This fortunately gave Zachary enough time to return to his home, collect his father, and meet John at the entrance to the Tofts’ home, where Mary was, at this point, in a seemingly indefinite state of lying in.

  The three men entered the bedroom. Mary lay on her back in a nightgown, eyes glazed, breath wheezing, stray damp locks of hair pasted to her forehead. Her husband sat at the head of the bed beside her, gently wiping her brow with a folded piece of cloth; as John entered, he raised his hand to show him the dingy square of fabric, and its faint smears of pink. John merely nodded in response, as if to speak openly of the woman’s malady in her presence might somehow make it worse.

  Margaret Toft sat opposite Joshua on the bed, her back to the door, a teacup held in one hand and a chipped saucer cradled in the other—as Zachary passed the threshold, she suddenly swiveled, looked over her shoulder, made unerring eye contact with the boy, and, as the attention of all others in the room focused on the patient, her crinkled face screwed itself into an exaggerated wink, the corners of her blade-thin lips curling cruelly. Then, as Zachary’s breath caught and his heart stuttered, she turned away, and took a quiet sip of her tea.

  Placing a hand on John’s back, Crispin gently steered the surgeon back out to the front room of the house, where they spent a few minutes in quiet conference. (Zachary, left out of this, stood against the wall opposite the bed, hands behind his back.) The minister entered first when the two men returned. “Mr. Toft,” he said, “I might ask something of you that may provide some useful knowledge. I—I would like to listen to your wife’s stomach. With your permission.”