Mary Toft; or, the Rabbit Queen

by Dexter Palmer

  The Godalming citizens sometimes found the speech of Londoners difficult to understand; when approached by one of them, it was generally easy to pick out enough words from his rapid patter to determine that he sought directions, or lodging, or sausages, but conversation beyond that could pose a challenge. The way they pronounced words made one want to suggest they speak more loudly or be more careful with their enunciation. It was easy to mishear them, and in addition, they seemed to express unusual ideas; some were perhaps not entirely in their right mind. For instance, Michael Burwash, the town’s local farrier and veterinarian, swore that one of the visiting Londoners told him he had come to Godalming because there were reports in London that one of its residents, a woman whose name he didn’t yet know, was a performer of miracles: she had been blessed by God with the ability to give birth to rabbits at will, as often as once a day.

  Clearly the Londoner could not have meant what Burwash heard him say, or was more than half mad. The very idea was absurd: most reasonable people would call such an affliction a curse, not a blessing. But the Londoner had paid good coin to Burwash to have his horse newly shod, forgoing bargaining even though the farrier had looked at his clothing and decided on the spot to charge a fee double his usual rate. His money would spend the same as anyone else’s, and so far as Burwash was concerned, he was free to believe what he would.

  * * *

  *

  In the meantime, John Howard and Nathanael St. André began to consider possible cures for Mary Toft’s unfortunate condition. The two of them stayed cloistered in Howard’s office that Saturday, bent over the proliferation of open volumes that covered his desk. “Despite the age of his writing, the work of Descartes may illuminate a path forward,” Nathanael said. “It was he who identified the pineal gland in the center of the brain as the seat of imagination, and, as you point out, the good anonymous author of Aristotle’s Master-Piece suggests that our poor patient’s births may be caused from an irregular operation of the patient’s imaginative faculty. Might her pineal gland be overactive, or perhaps swollen? Needless to say, the poor woman would not survive a direct investigation into the matter! But we can act under the suspicion that the patient is suffering an inflammation, and treat her as such—phlebotomy ought to reduce the swelling.”

  “I fear I can’t agree,” said John. (I should have just said I cannot agree and been direct, he briefly thought, but nonetheless pushed forward. Still, he found himself ceding ground to Nathanael by inches.) “She has undergone twelve births in the space of a month—an ordeal never before experienced by a human woman. Her constitution simply won’t allow it.”

  Seated behind John’s desk, Nathanael looked up from his volume of Descartes’s The Passions of the Soul and offered John an indulgent smile. “But does not the very fact of her frequent, repeated births suggest that she has been gifted by God with a stronger constitution than that of an ordinary woman?” he said. “Is this not, indeed, an essential characteristic of the preternatural phenomenon? And whatever the suffering that might be induced by the bleeding, it is nothing when compared to the deliveries she is subjected to several times a week—moreover, if the bleeding has a chance of relieving the pineal gland’s inflammation, thus bringing these deliveries to a quick and welcome end, we have a moral obligation to take that risk. Do we not?”

  * * *

  *

  They returned to the Toft home that afternoon, the two of them, to bleed the woman: John felt it unnecessary to bring Zachary along, and Nathanael left his apprentice Laurence behind as well. Since they speculated that Mary suffered a disorder of the head, John and Nathanael agreed that the site of the bleeding should be a jugular vein, and John preferred to execute the operation himself. In her lying-in chamber, John lifted up Mary’s head while Nathanael wrapped a handkerchief around her neck, yanking it tight and tying the knot. Tears formed in her eyes as her breathing dwindled to a slow rasp, but soon enough the vein in her neck was turgid and ready for the lancet.

  “You must act neither with rashness nor with timidity,” Nathanael said in a low voice as John approached the vein with the blade, hand steady. “In either case you run the risk of—”

  “Quiet, please,” said John.

  “But—”

  “Quiet. And have the vessel ready.”

  “I merely offer advice,” said Nathanael.

  Thankfully, Mary fainted the moment the lancet pierced the vein. Blood spurted from her neck in a fast hot jet, spattering the floor before Nathanael was able to catch the flow with a large ceramic bowl, in which John also placed the lancet. They drew what John estimated to be two or three pints; then, as the stream began to lose its vigor, John pinched the wound on Mary’s neck shut with the thumb and forefinger of his left hand while he applied a compress with his right. (“So much of the surgeon’s craft involves growing a third or a fourth hand when necessary,” he said to Nathanael, who stood by watching, holding the bowl of blood.)

  After John had finished bandaging Mary’s neck, he retrieved the lancet from the bowl and wiped it down, while Nathanael cavalierly dumped the rest of the bowl’s contents out the window. Then the two surgeons entered the front room of the house, where Joshua sat waiting. He held his son, James, on his lap, who slept with his head tucked against his father’s chest. (Margaret Toft had chosen to take her taciturn disapproval elsewhere this afternoon, it seemed.) “We have executed the operation flawlessly,” Nathanael said. “Your wife will awake directly. And perhaps we will find soon after that our ordeal has, at last, reached its end.”

  “I certainly hope so,” Joshua said, weariness evident in his voice. “This has been difficult for all of us.”

  He lifted his head, slowly, as if it were double its usual weight. “When I look on her, lying in that bed,” he said, speaking quietly so as not to disturb the cheerfully snoring boy, “sometimes I no longer recognize her for the woman she once was. As if some strange demonic creature has taken her shape, or wears her skin. Often when I speak to her now, she does not respond: she just stares at me, or she whimpers, or she screams to wake the dead. This morning I had to put my hand in her mouth to stop her from biting off her tongue.” He presented his hand to Nathanael, who held and examined it: there, across the tips of three of his fingers, were a row of teeth marks, angry and red.

  “I don’t know if she can ever return to the person she once was,” said Joshua, taking his hand back from Nathanael as James stirred in his slumber. “But I ask you, please: do what you can. If these monstrous births end and Mary still somehow retains her sanity, I swear I will count myself lucky.”

  * * *

  *

  Zachary was in his loft, that afternoon, lying on his bed and drifting in and out of sleep—these days he took his rest when he could, for his sense of unease often kept him awake long past midnight. Increasingly, he found himself wondering if becoming a surgeon necessarily involved learning things that he would have preferred not to know. It might have seemed to others that he’d become acclimated to the sight of Mary Toft’s deliveries after twelve of them, but that only meant he’d developed enough reserve to prevent his terror from showing on his face: the images still rose in his mind when his head hit the pillow each night, of shrieking women and beheaded rabbits stripped of their skins. He wondered if becoming an old surgeon meant becoming haunted, in the way an old soldier might be by the memory of unspeakable deeds committed on a battlefield. He was uncertain that the rewards of a surgeon’s career were truly worth becoming haunted in that way, witness to devils dancing in daylight that only he and his accursed like could see.

  He was awakened from his thin, unsatisfying twilight sleep by a soft, tentative knock on his door. Rubbing his eyes, he rolled out of bed and answered the door to find Nathanael’s apprentice Laurence standing before him, dressed in a neatly fitting suit of burgundy and gold. In his hands he held a wooden box; a band of bright red ribbon ran around it
s lid, and it was kept shut by a pair of brass latches. “May I enter?” he said.

  Zachary stood aside and waved him in, sneezing at the smell of the starch from Laurence’s freshly powdered wig. The boy entered, looked around him, and sat down on the edge of the bed—here, outside the presence of his master, he somehow seemed more childlike, even more a person in costume. “I want you to try something,” he said. “Come sit next to me.” Zachary could swear that Laurence’s voice had a slightly different pitch than usual, and that this voice was his natural one, while the lower register in which he spoke when in the presence of adults was a performance.

  Zachary sat down on the bed next to Laurence, the mysterious box between them. With reverence, as if there were some sort of ancient reliquary inside, Laurence opened the two latches and lifted the lid, inviting Zachary to peer within.

  In the box was a pile of white hair that, as Zachary stared, resolved itself into a wig, just like the one Laurence wore. “I believe our heads are the same size,” he said, “though you really are meant to shave your head when wearing one of these. You should try it on.”

  “Oh, my, no, I—”

  “It has no lice—I guarantee it. My master and I had all our perukes boiled by the wigmaker before we left London: this one hasn’t been out of its box since.”

  Zachary edged away from Laurence on the bed. “I—”

  “You needn’t be afraid of it,” said Laurence. “It isn’t alive. Just try it on. No one will know but you and me, here in this room. Aren’t you curious? Don’t be a coward, Zachary.”

  The accusation of cowardice got under Zachary’s skin, just as the mere suggestion that Zachary was curious brought that curiosity into being. As if he were picking up a cat by the scruff of its neck, Zachary lifted the wig out of its box, clouds of powder blooming as its horsehair locks tumbled down.

  He held the wig up before him, turning it, examining it. “How do I—”

  “Oh, goodness, let me,” said Laurence, taking the wig from him. He oriented it, gripped it in both hands, reached toward Zachary as if to embrace him, and jammed the wig firmly atop his head. Then he adjusted the fitting, looking at Zachary from one angle and then another, running his fingers through the locks in a gesture toward combing. “There,” he said. “Do you not feel twenty years older?”

  Zachary straightened his posture, as if the thing perched on his head required balancing. “I feel…” He brushed a lock away from his eyes as Laurence stared at him expectantly. “In all honesty, I feel ridiculous.”

  “And you also look ridiculous,” said Laurence. “But not as ridiculous as I do in this town of yours, with this wig on my head and a full suit to go with it.”

  Startled, Zachary’s mouth dropped open. “Well, now you are attempting to trap flies, and you look sillier still,” Laurence said.

  Laurence kept an admirably straight face as Zachary smirked, then giggled, then fully surrendered to his laughter, throwing himself back on the bed and kicking his legs in convulsive glee; only then, finally, did Laurence join in. They chortled in harmony for what seemed like minutes: once they would calm down, Zachary would reach up to feel the peruke on his head, and it would set him off again, which would send Laurence into a paralytic series of guffaws. It seemed that the amusement would never end: there was a dark thing that the laughter was allowing Zachary not to think about, but Zachary could not remember what it was, and to recall it would break the fragile, temporary spell.

  Eventually, Zachary sat up again and yanked the wig off his head, hand on his hurting stomach. “A good joke,” he said, catching his breath. “A good joke.”

  “In London,” Laurence said, “ridiculousness is the height of fashion. Garments in six dozen colors; wigs that tower to twice the height of the men who bear them on their heads. I just want you to be prepared, for the time when you come.”

  Laurence sidled closer to Zachary. “I fear I have cut a strange figure, here in Godalming.”

  “You have: that’s beyond doubt. But all is forgiven, Laurence. I am glad, very glad, to name us friends.”

  “That is a relief,” said Laurence. “You will come to London sometime, yes? I expect we will not be here much longer, a day or two at the most. My master is perhaps a strange person, and something of a showman and a braggart, but I do believe he is a genius, and I have seen him perform remedies that both patients and other men of medicine have deemed almost miraculous. It’s highly likely that, today, he has effected a cure, and is already writing a triumphant notice for the London journals.”

  “Perhaps,” said Zachary quietly, as a shadow descended on his mind once again. “I suppose we’ll see, soon enough.”

  * * *

  *

  On the morning of Monday, November 14, 1726, Mary Toft gave birth to her thirteenth rabbit.

  | CHAPTER XI.

  SOME UNANTICIPATED VISITORS.

  The first patient to visit John Howard’s practice the following day, Tuesday, was an unexpected surprise. His small stature, rotund build, ruddy-cheeked face, and swaggering gait seemed inexplicably familiar, but it nonetheless took a few moments for John and Zachary to recall where they’d seen him before. It was the suit, the same deep green from head to toe, that finally clued them in: Nicholas Fox, the proprietor of the Exhibition of Medical Curiosities that had passed through the town back in September, a time that now seemed to Zachary as if it were a century ago.

  Fox entered Howard’s waiting room, with the young woman with the birthmark following behind. (She was pretty today, thought Zachary, in a dress of sapphire that contrasted pleasantly with her father’s suit of emerald, her long blond hair tied loosely in the back with a white lace ribbon. She glanced at Zachary as she passed him, one of her icy eyes shining amid the crimson splotch that spread across her face, responding to the smile he gave her with a haughty sniff.) The four of them settled in Howard’s waiting room, where Fox told John and Zachary that his tour of south England had come to an end a few weeks ago. At the exhibition’s final stop, in Glastonbury, he’d paid off the participants and sent them on their separate ways, so that those who had homes and families to return to could reach them before winter arrived in earnest. Meanwhile, he and his daughter Anne were returning to London. In late spring, those exhibition members who were willing to sign on for another six-month stint would reconvene there, along with any other newly added and sufficiently unusual specimens of humanity whom Fox had chanced across in the meantime, and the show would set out again.

  When John asked Nicholas what business brought him to his door on his way back to London, he expected that Nicholas had heard of the local rabbit-related goings-on, and John readied himself to rebuff any of Fox’s attempts to draft his afflicted patient into his traveling show. But either the Toft phenomenon was as yet unknown to Nicholas, or he knew of it and did not care. Nervously, Nicholas made an attempt at crossing one leg over the other, though his legs were too stubby and his thighs too large to fully allow it. “In Glastonbury,” he finally announced, drumming his fingers against the frame of his chair, “I had a grand adventure.”

  “You need say no more,” said John abruptly, standing and glancing briefly at Anne. “Mr. Fox, you’ll come with me across the hall for an examination—this won’t take long. Zachary: keep the young woman entertained? I’m sure you can manage that.” With a brief, weak smile, he escorted Nicholas out, leaving the two of them alone.

  When he heard the door shut across the hall, Zachary turned to Anne, who squinted at him steel-eyed, wrinkling her nose as if she smelled something bad. Zachary briefly thought that John had taken the easier job for himself; nonetheless, he soldiered on, pulling his chair closer to Anne’s so that the two of them were but a few feet away (and half believing that the sound of the chair legs sliding across the wooden floor covered a high-pitched yelp from Howard’s operating chamber. But perhaps he was hearing things).

&nb
sp; “What a long trip you’ve been on,” he began. “It must be wonderful to see so many different towns in England. My duties keep me here—I can only dream of travel.”

  “No, it’s not wonderful; it’s awful,” Anne replied. “Ever since my father and I left in April, I have been counting the days until we return to London. These people, in every town we pass through: they’re all so provincial. They know little if anything of what goes on beyond their village borders, and what’s more, they seem not to care. They are uninterested in the miracle of candlelight—when the sun sleeps, they sleep with it, wasting time when books might stir their spirit of inquiry or make them wise. But a person could live and die without leaving London and still be a person of the world: the city is the whole world, rendered in miniature.”

  There was a knot in what Anne said that Zachary could not quite untangle, but he decided to let her comments pass. He chose to change the subject, realizing that now might be an unlooked-for opportunity to satisfy his curiosity about a conundrum for which he’d resigned himself to living without a solution. “I have a question,” he said. “When my master and I attended the Exhibition of Medical Curiosities—afterward, when we walked home, we could not help but ask ourselves—”

  “How much of it was brazenly fraudulent?” Anne interrupted. “Whether my father and I are the unscrupulous leaders of a traveling gang of cheats?”