“And it grows. Stealthily, but it grows. Do you see these houses here? Their lovely views, their pastoral surroundings?” The driver waved his arm to take in the scenery—a half-dozen mansions visible in total, each surrounded by vast swaths of denuded landscape, dotted with dead tree trunks. “Londoners, all, who thought to escape the city, hoping that their riches would allow them to enjoy bustle or silence as they chose, not realizing that they themselves were the city’s agents of expansion. Because first they had to bring their servants. Then they brought a road with them, wide and nicely paved, because they also wanted to be able to choose between meditation and mayhem with ease and speed—without wonderful arses such as mine they cannot enjoy the journey from one place to another for its own sake. And now they complain because the city reaches out to them, spoiling their view; they gripe that others use the road they thought was meant for them alone. Not realizing that in fact they were the city’s vanguard, the first tentative expression of its desire.”
The driver’s low chuckle was freighted with menace. “It drew you to it,” he said, “and when you leave you will take part of it with you. Your mind is already undergoing its first subtle, irrevocable alterations, the better to carry out London’s ambitions. Soon the grasping creature will cover this entire island; then it will find a way to leap across the water to the Continent, and then what will stop all the world from becoming London, every square inch covered with it? Think on that as you come closer; show caution and respect, in the presence of this great and monstrous thing. Pray that its usage of you is kind rather than rough, for you will be used: no avoiding it. Best accept it.”
Turning slowly to focus on the road ahead of him with just the smallest amount of theater—there had been other friends on other journeys, Zachary sensed, who had heard this monologue before—the driver left the surgeon’s apprentice to his thoughts, as night descended and the city approached.
| CHAPTER XVII.
DR. LACEY’S BAGNIO.
Zachary could not have imagined the extent to which London’s storied marvels would exceed his expectations the moment he saw the city in daylight.
He knew of the Thames River that cut through London; he knew of the single bridge that spanned it, the artery that led to the city’s beating heart. But he had somehow remained unaware that on that bridge there were buildings, cleverly constructed four-story structures with archways cut through the middle that conveyed a constant flow of horse and foot traffic in both directions, and that people made their homes in these structures, that a few people were lucky enough to live on this most majestic of the world’s bridges.
He had been so exhausted when the stagecoach arrived in the city that he could hardly stand upright. It was clear enough through his drowsy haze that the three London surgeons who’d gone on ahead of them had made arrangements for Zachary and John’s lodging, though when the stranger who greeted them as they stepped down from the coach led them to the place where they’d stay for the coming weeks (the female passenger and the lawyer who’d shared their journey going on their separate ways without a word; the stagecoach driver saying goodbye to Zachary by screwing his face into a cartoonish wink), Zachary soon gave up on any attempt to keep track of his path. He became a sleepwalker. He gave himself over to the overwhelming conglomeration of signs advertising inns and shops and pubs, the miasma of smoke, and the glimpses of light in darkness, from candles and stars and the pale-faced boy in a trim, tiny golden suit and wig of curled and powdered locks who preceded them through the urban maze, solemnly holding a lamp aloft to illuminate their path through the ramshackle buildings that loomed over them. He entered a hallway; he climbed some stairs; he was led to a bed on which he fell asleep; his dreams were tangled and uneasy, with their details easily forgotten, though all of them were filled with the sound of moving water—pouring bottles, emptying bladders, rushing rivers.
He awoke the following morning, unsure where he was: the ceiling above him was too close to his head, and the sounds of the room were not his own. There was a man here with him, snoring: a light, self-contented wheeze that Zachary soon realized was John Howard’s.
Morning light shone muted through the room’s lone window as through a scrim, and as Zachary arose from his bed and padded over to it, he saw that the veil was not in the window, but in the sky: the rising sun was dimmed by the city’s smoke to a muted orange circle, easy to look at without squinting.
Then, beneath it, he saw the river.
It was the first body of water that large he’d ever seen in his life, and it surged and tumbled beneath the bridge with astonishing ferocity (and only now did he notice the constant low tremble in the floorboards beneath his feet). The watermen who shot the bridge (and Zachary could see the boats emerging from the bridge beneath him, each one flying as fast as a bullet from a pistol) seemed to be on comfortable speaking terms with disaster, if not death—each successful shooting, and there was one every minute or two, was accompanied by gay laughter that drifted up to Zachary’s ears as the boat made its way into relatively calmer waters, while the occasional overturned boat (that sometimes dumped a passenger too reckless to take to solid ground before the bridge and reboard afterward) was greeted with a chorus of mockery by watermen in boats nearby, and the audience watching the never-ending show on shore.
Beyond the bridge, farther down the river, Zachary saw the Port of London, with more varieties of boats than he knew existed, clogging the waterway so tightly, even as they danced around each other in a nautical ballet, that they might have served as a second bridge—Zachary thought that a goat might have a good chance of crossing the Thames farther downstream merely by jumping from one deck to the next. The galliots and barques and catamarans maneuvered delicately between each other when they were not tied together, unloading their cargoes onto fleet lighters that conveyed the goods to shore. If, as the loquacious stagecoach driver had said, the city was best thought of as a single living thing with its own unique anatomy, then the Port of London was its enormous mouth, the enabler of its gluttony. Merchandise from a dozen countries fell into its maw, and the lighters might be seen as agents of digestion, sorting the various goods and delivering them to the places where they could best satisfy the city’s need for nutrition, the copper and iron and hemp and flax and sugar and hundreds of other things that keep the city running, that would be placed aboard these same or other ships again in weeks or months, transformed by nimble hands in the meantime into other shapes that gave them more value—iron to nails; flax to damask—or merely held in a dark warehouse until the economic weather changed.
How could a person keep his mind on a single subject in this city, with so many sights to distract, and so many ideas to consider that lay behind those sights? He could have spent hours watching the watermen shoot the bridge, envisioning the biographies of each one, wondering about the choices that led them to take up such a dangerous profession; he might have thought of the histories of each ship milling about in the port beyond, the histories of each nation that sent each ship to London, the lives of all the sailors on all those ships. A man with enough imagination could keep himself forever entertained by staring out of a window, as stories yielded other stories and none of them ever reached its end. But that man would starve, unless he could somehow feed himself on dreams and digressions.
With some regret, he turned away from the window: he would try to take in as much of this wondrous place as he could by glancing out of the corners of his eyes, but his focus would remain on the task at hand, the job for which he had come here.
* * *
*
He found, as he left the window, that there were four envelopes scattered just in front of the door to the room—they’d been slipped under it. He’d heard from John about the postal delivery system in London, a miracle of communication that seemed to function with a high reliability largely through coffee houses and word of mouth, but even then, its efficiency was a surp
rise. The news of their arrival seemed to have preceded them (though if the London surgeons knew where they were staying, it seemed logical that others would know, soon enough).
Two of the letters were for John Howard, from Cyriacus Ahlers and, surprisingly, from Nicholas Fox; the other two, Zachary was even more surprised to find, were addressed to him. He handed John’s to him as he arose from the other bed in the room; then he seated himself on his own bed to read.
The first letter was from Laurence, the writing cramped and pinched, the lines like the scratching of a chicken in the dirt; Zachary had to squint to read it.
Dear Zachary—
My master tells me you and your master should have arrived in London by now, and so I send greetings, so that you do not feel alone in the city. (A place as large as this can quickly breed loneliness: one of its tricks.) I fear that for the near future we will be occupied by events of the day, but I do hope to take a moment for quiet conversation, or to show you an interesting sight or two, something that will distract us from current events and give an indication of London’s true nature (though you have likely already gathered it is impossible to fully survey the place in so short a visit). We will cross paths again soon, most likely at Dr. Lacey’s (I do not know why the patient has been housed in such a place, except that someone in the king’s employ has thought to make a joke, too oblique for me to understand).
Yours with affection,
Laurence.
The second was in a woman’s hand, bold and clear despite its loops and curlicues. The script filled both sides of the half sheet of foolscap, and seemed designed for mockery.
Oh, dear Zachary.
What a wonderful world of coincidences this is—this letter to you accompanies one to your master from my father, thanking him for services expertly rendered some days past, the exact nature of which I remain ignorant (note: I most certainly do not). How was I able to contact you so readily, so soon after your arrival, you might ask? My father returned yesterday from a visit to one Dr. Lacey, the nature of whose practice is unfamiliar to me (note that I lie again: it is, and your master’s skilled ministrations are the reason my father can so readily pay this other doctor such regular visits). He was quite excited to tell me of a woman who, it seems, gives birth to rabbits almost daily, and who finds herself staying in this same Dr. Lacey’s residence! Such a wonder of nature seemed peculiarly attuned to his chosen occupation, and so after a day of feverish inquiry in the local coffee houses regarding the woman’s history, we discovered that a team of London surgeons was in league with none other than the great John Howard of Godalming, who had treated my father so ably (and whose apprentice had been admirably tight-lipped about a conversational subject that would have been sure to elicit a certain woman’s interest).
You must come see me: an audience grows outside Dr. Lacey’s even as you read this, sitting vigil, and on occasion I may be a part of it. (I trust you will remember my face, as all men do.) I want you to be my guest at one of my father’s winter performances. The caravan of curiosities he brings to the villages outside London is small beer, for you provincial folk are amused easily enough: for more jaded eyes he must offer stronger, darker entertainments.
Yours,
Anne.
Well, perhaps Zachary would not be able to concentrate solely on the patient he had come here to assist in the care of, not entirely. He might still steal some time for pleasure and curiosity, here and there.
* * *
*
The bagnio where Mary Toft and her husband had taken up lodging was in Covent Garden, a district of London whose days as a desired residence of men with titles was decades behind it—it was now largely known for the bustling marketplace that occupied its central square, its burgeoning theaters, and, most notably, its prostitution. Truth be told, John Howard was initially as puzzled as Laurence by the fact that his patient had been housed in a place whose repute was certainly dubious, if not entirely ill—to be sure, it was conceivable that one might use a bagnio as a kind of hotel without partaking of all the benefits it offered—but eventually reasoned that she’d been placed there because the building had the convenience of running water, a precious rarity, even here. (Such a place as this would have customers who’d want baths both cold and hot: there was some thinking to be done about how sexual predilections were a secret driver behind the expansion of luxuries from the very rich to everyone else, but it seemed somehow predictable to John that out of all the buildings that could have used plumbing, Dr. Lacey’s Bagnio would be one of the first to receive it.)
On arriving at Dr. Lacey’s that afternoon, John and Zachary (the boy still bleary-eyed and sore from a long day of stagecoach travel) found the Tofts installed in Room No. 1 of the bagnio (the sign on its door named it “The King’s Head”). The place was quite well appointed. Two wide curtained windows filled it with light and overlooked the piazza below, the hawkers of goods outside loudly doing business among a tightly packed conglomeration of ramshackle wooden stalls. The room was furnished with a card table with a marble surface, whose inwardly curved legs, painted in gold, each ended in a clawed three-fingered talon clutching a sphere; a dining table of richly colored, highly polished mahogany; and several chairs scattered through the room, plushly upholstered, with their frames carved from walnut. The bed that dominated the chamber was enormous, large enough to let a half dozen sleep in comfort (or engage in other, more strenuous activities if the mood caught them, one supposed); Mary Toft seemed lost in its middle, face chalk white as she stared at the ceiling, her head nestled among a pile of embroidered pillows, her hair a matted tangle, her body buried so deeply beneath layers of blankets that one could not reliably make out its shape.
Joshua Toft, Nathanael St. André, and Laurence were waiting for John and Zachary when they entered, and Joshua rose from his chair and approached the three of them, his hand offered in greeting. There was a moment, not much more than an eyeblink, when Zachary thought that Joshua seemed thankful for his own good fortune, but then the shine in his eyes vanished, to be replaced with the grave and downcast aura of concern that one would expect.
On the other hand, Nathanael’s grin as he sprang from his chair was wide and unsuppressed, and seemed intended to make up for Joshua’s deficiency of joy. “You are well, all of you? Recovered from the journey? Bones all settled back in their proper places? Good. Good.”
“How is the patient?” said John.
“Oh, quite lovely, all things considered. No impending births, it appears: perhaps the regular cycle of fetal maturation has been disturbed by the journey, but I’m sure it’ll start up again soon enough. A slight expansion and toughening of the hardened area of her stomach in the vicinity of her Fallopian tube, but that is to be expected as her body becomes inured to the traumatic processes it regularly undergoes. She moans sometimes. Again: expected.”
From the bed came a low, tortured whimper in answer.
Meanwhile, Laurence had greeted Zachary with a gentle hand placed on his elbow. “You look well,” he said. It had to be said that Laurence, in his usual wig and coat that matched his master’s, looked more suitable here in his native context: though the claw-footed table and walnut chairs were not to Zachary’s taste, Zachary could admit that Laurence belonged among them, and looked at ease. He somehow seemed taller, more of a man, even as he appeared to have decisively given up the manly affectations that had made him initially seem out of place back in Godalming. Shortly after, it dawned on Zachary that in the clothes he thought of as normal for a boy of fourteen, he’d be the odd one out, but reasoned that there were so many sights in this city, and so many styles of clothing on so many different people, that he would be unlikely to draw any real notice—
“Some might observe that you look like a beggar,” Laurence said, looking him up and down, “but pay such rudely expressed opinions no mind. You and I know better. I continue to be pr
oud to know you.” Surely the sentiment was well meant, but if it was intended to reassure Zachary, it didn’t help.
“I’m glad you arrived here in one piece,” Laurence followed up quickly, perhaps in response to Zachary’s sudden blanching. “The time before us is…fraught, you might say? But we will have some time for touring, you and I.”
“There’s someone else—” Zachary blurted, his mouth leaping a regrettable half second ahead of his brain.
“Someone else?” Laurence prompted, as if he were briefly considering the bizarre possibility that someone to whom he’d extended an offer of friendship might nonetheless choose to have more than one friend.
“There’s a woman,” Zachary said, and Laurence’s face twisted in a strange way. “A girl, I mean,” Zachary continued, and Laurence’s mouth seemed to briefly exchange places with his nose.
“A girl,” Laurence replied, once his features resumed an approximation of their original places.
“Someone I met. Passing through town with her father. Twice this year.”
“Passing through town,” Laurence said.
“And she said she wants to show me the city, too. I received her letter at the exact same time as yours—can you believe it?”
“Astonishing,” said Laurence drily.
“And perhaps the three of us could amble about together, I thought,” Zachary stammered. “I think you two might enjoy each other’s company, even. Though you are, admittedly, quite different.”
Mary Toft; or, the Rabbit Queen Page 18