Mary Toft; or, the Rabbit Queen

by Dexter Palmer

  “Some of London’s sights that I had in mind for you would not be suitable for a woman’s sensibilities,” said Laurence.

  “Oh, I’m sure she has no such scruples at all,” said Zachary, as Laurence raised an eyebrow.

  * * *

  *

  Zachary and Laurence, and their masters, were interrupted in their conversations by a knock on the door, unexpected and authoritative. They all turned at once to find, standing in the doorframe, one of the most extravagantly dressed persons that Zachary had ever seen—if Laurence’s style of clothing was a copy of Nathanael St. André’s rendered in miniature, then this fellow was the sort of person whom St. André was attempting (and mostly failing) to imitate in turn. His wig seemed to grow directly out of his own head, while also subtly signaling its own artifice through the regularity of its locks, as if a wholly convincing simulacrum of lustrous ringlets would not be recognized as the expensive work of an extraordinarily talented artisan, but would be unwittingly confused for hair that was natural, and therefore cost nothing. Beneath his arm was a three-cornered hat of black beaver fur, ornamented with a single sapphire; the waistcoat of his suit (snow white, embroidered in gold) had a collar that came higher up his neck than those of any other Londoner that Zachary had yet seen, and he could tell that this was meant to mark the stranger as a setter of fashion that other men would emulate, always a year too late.

  The man strode into the room on the heels of his black leather shoes; though the oldest person in the room, he had the demeanor of a man decades younger. He moved with the ease of someone who took it for granted that the space directly in front of him was always his to enter, and who was happy to fill the eyes of those who looked on him, for he saw the care he took in his appearance as a matter of generosity to those less fortunate.

  As he watched the newcomer, Zachary was startled to find that Nathanael St. André was behind him, hissing into his and Laurence’s ears. “Do you know who this is? It’s Lord M——,” he whispered. Then, as if the word Lord might not have been enough for Zachary to comprehend, “The Duke of R——.”

  With the practice of someone for whom hearing his own name while pretending he hadn’t overheard was a common occurrence, Lord M—— turned after a moment to face Nathanael, giving St. André a chance to stand and step back from the two boys. “Is this the…patient?” he asked. “Though that seems too inadequate a word for someone so reputedly wondrous.”

  “She is my patient, yes,” said Nathanael as John opened his mouth and then shut it.

  “Our patient,” said Zachary, stepping forward as John glanced toward his apprentice in surprise.

  “Oh?” said Lord M——, looking down on Zachary (and in the clear eyes of Lord M——’s wrinkled face Zachary sensed a challenge, offered almost offhandedly—he knew he had to return the gaze and do precisely that, no more, no less. To shy away would be cowardly; to attempt to intimidate would be foolish; Lord M—— had deigned to grace Zachary with the exact amount of respect due to one human being from another, and if Zachary caviled or bristled in response, the favor would be just as quickly withdrawn, never to be proffered again).

  “Ours,” said Zachary. “My master was the first of her doctors; the three others joined later. And the two of us”—he indicated Laurence—“are apprentices.”

  “There are four surgeons who tend to her, yes,” Nathanael said, though no one had asked.

  Lord M—— gave Zachary the slightest of smiles, barely noticeable. “A strange apprenticeship for you, friend,” he said. He turned away, still smiling, as if giving Zachary a chance to show his relief unseen; Lord M—— had silently acknowledged Zachary as human, which, Zachary imagined, Lord M—— did not do for everyone, and rarely for people of Zachary’s age. That was another test passed, but when would his life become anything more than a seemingly never-ending series of unexpectedly sprung trials? (Perhaps never—perhaps every day carried its little challenges of intellect and character, until the last respite of one’s deathbed. The very thought made him weary.)

  Once again Lord M—— looked down on the woman, whose wheezing, labored breathing had suddenly grown louder. “May I sit?” he commanded, taking a chair at the marble table next to Joshua, who had escaped his notice entirely. “It would please me much,” he said, “to sit here in vigil for a time. If this is in fact the miracle that is advertised, then to spend a short while in its company might lead me to some kind of enlightenment, of a manner granted to few, and that I expect is not to be found in even the most learned texts.”

  His eyes shone as his face formed a smile that its creases and wrinkles, acquired through fifty years of imperious frowning, strained against. “And it would be one of the greatest honors of what has been, thus far, a long and fruitful life.”

  * * *

  *

  In the square outside the gaudy, pseudo-Turkish facade of the bagnio, amid the constant rumble of the merchants and customers of the Covent Garden Market, appeared a person who had no earthly business to transact, followed by another, and then another. They were not nearly as well dressed as the lord who waited two stories above, whom propriety prevents from identification by anything more than an initial; if Laurence were to see Zachary standing next to them, he in his naïveté might have noticed similarities in their style of clothing, though they themselves would have been wiser, and marked out Zachary as one not of their own.

  They stood before the bagnio, looking up at its faux cupolas whose gold paint was flaking away: two men, one woman. They had all resigned themselves to the realization that they would never get close to the woman that Lord M——, two stories above them, gazed upon in meditative contemplation; nor, in the end, did mere physical proximity matter. For Mary Toft was becoming an inhabitant of the minds of those who imagined her, as much as, or more than, the creature of flesh and bone who lay in the bed of the bagnio’s finest room. And if Lord M—— was a person who’d worn the mantle of power as easily as a second skin since his days in a crib, not all varieties of power were his to command: those standing outside the bagnio had more power than he did to decide how those who lived in the world perceived its shape and nature, if only because there was only one of Lord M——, and so very many of them.

  Another woman came out of the crush of laughing and cursing buyers and sellers to join them, and, looking up at the window, the four of them continued their intense collective dreaming.

  | CHAPTER XVIII.

  A COFFEE HOUSE MEETING.

  The Blackamoor was one of the most popular coffee houses in Covent Garden, though its good fortune was only recent: under its previous name as the Rusted Anchor, it had consistently seen its star eclipsed by Rawthmell’s, across the road on Henrietta Street, in the same location since the beginning of the century. In the spring of 1726 the Rusted Anchor had closed its doors for two weeks, ostensibly for a “change of management,” but that change was a fiction: the establishment’s operators merely reupholstered some of its furniture and, more importantly, changed the sign that hung above the door out front.

  The old sign for the Rusted Anchor had been exactly that, an anchor once rendered in gold, but flaked and worn by years of rain and smoke and wind until it was hardly visible against the wood; at that point, the sign was more a cue for regulars to recall the symbol it had once displayed rather than an advertisement to newcomers of a place of business. The new sign, once unveiled, was more detailed and less abstract, commissioned from a portrait artist who’d studied at the Academy at St. Martin’s Lane. It was of a charming black fellow with a welcoming smile, holding a steaming mug of coffee in his hand, dressed in a neat suit of dark blue with a tri-cornered hat in the same shade. Cleverly, there was no word hovering above his head to indicate the new name of the coffee house—the proprietors kept their faith in human nature, and it was only a day or two before customers began to refer to the place as the Blackamoor instead of the Rusted A
nchor, though the new title was written down nowhere.

  It was a stroke of genius on the part of the owners: watching from the window, one could occasionally see passersby walk past the sign swinging on its pole above them, slow to a halt, and gaze up at the beaming black man for a moment or two as if in reverie; then their feet would swivel to a new path almost as if they were briefly spirit-haunted, leading customers through the establishment’s doors. It helped that the portrait artist had graced the black gentleman on the sign with a smile that, warm as it was, had an impish twist to a corner: it seemed to promise that the liquid in the steaming mug might offer a stronger, more unpredictable drug than one expected.

  But it also helped that, in this year, in this city, black people were everywhere and nowhere, and could thus be everything to everyone. A Londoner who kept to his well-established daily paths, eyes on the ground, might go for days without seeing one in the flesh, and even then only at a distance; if he did happen to speak to one, the conversation would be brief and its form prescribed, for it was most likely that he would be answering the door at the home of a merchant of means (his skin meant to advertise the nature and extent of those means before negotiation with the merchant even began), or running a delivery errand for a duchess, or reciting lines on a theater’s stage. But the image of the black person, the continued reminder of his existence in a place out of direct sight—ah, that was everywhere, from the engravings displayed for sale in shop windows in which a black man might appear in the background of an assemblage of carousing drinkers or card players, merely watching, a curious and unexplained interloper, to the newspaper notices about escaped slaves that meticulously listed names and heights and shapes and scars.

  The black person was often out of sight, then, but never out of mind, and thus any shop that could find a reason to hang a portrait of one above its door could proffer an implicit promise that was all the more delicious because it was inchoate, and that could only benefit from not being openly expressed. The image lent an aura of the new and unfamiliar to that which otherwise could be nothing other than mundane. An engraving that might have sat in a shop window until the men who’d inspired it went to their graves would fly out the door in a patron’s hand, his pocket lighter; a coffee shop that had once spent its days half empty would find itself bustling, and if the coffee served was still made from the same beans in the same manner, with a noticeable bitterness that differentiated it from the brew at Rawthmell’s, then the lingering memory of the black’s face above the entrance might distract a customer from the unwelcome wince that accompanied the first daily sip.

  * * *

  *

  Like all the most popular London coffee shops, the Blackamoor was a thriving node of the great city’s distributed brain. A dozen copies of each of London’s newspapers were delivered to the place each morning, along with letters sent to London’s citizens from the rest of the island, or the Continent, or parts still farther flung. After the first hour of opening, the proprietors of businesses that did not depend on having a strictly physical location set up shop in one of the array of booths that lined the Blackamoor’s back wall, where they would trade the stocks of companies, or shares in ships on their way to India; or sell subscriptions to mutual protection ventures meant to preserve businesses against loss by fire; or insure the lives of loved ones (or ones who were not so loved, or perhaps only barely heard of). At high noon a man could walk in alone, sit at a table with a cup of coffee before him, close his eyes, and listen to the city talking to itself, certain words burbling up out of the conversations, repeating themselves and detailing the city’s obsessions.

  On this Monday, November 28, if the words Mary Toft were not on everyone’s lips—no single name could be; this city had too many names for even a king’s or a god’s to dominate a conversation for long—you could hear it now and again, at one table or another, spoken in horror or followed by a laugh. The one place where one could not hear it was at a table in the back of the coffee house, where the surgeons who attended the woman were ensconced in council: St. André, Howard, Ahlers, and Manningham, with Zachary also there, his chair wedged in between those of John and Nathanael. They spoke only of “the patient,” for they needed to do no other. (But their mere presence seemed to spark curiosity. Zachary noticed that at least a few people in the shop kept glancing over at their table: a man in a nearby booth who, Zachary gathered, was engaged in the business of purchasing a life insurance policy from a rotund, gaudily dressed gentleman who had something of the cast of a sharper about him; and, drinking coffee alone at an adjacent table, a young man whose eyes were more on the surgeons than on the days-old newspaper held limply in his hands. In Godalming it was impossible to step out of one’s door without encountering the regard of others, to be sure, but the town’s small size nearly guaranteed that the person who greeted you was known to you, even if that person did not necessarily have your best interests at heart. Here, though, in this enormous city, to be stared at by a stranger made one singularly uncomfortable—more so when those strangers were several, and failing to disguise their furtiveness.)

  “I believe that the most pressing order of business is the issuing of pamphlets,” Nathanael St. André was saying. “There is a danger of public misperception of the simple facts of the case, and of their subsequent medical, religious, and philosophical implications: we must, each of us, do what we can to ensure that the public has a collective understanding of the truth that is as close to our own as possible. I myself have a facility with prose that has brought me some small acclaim in literary circles, and am putting the finishing touches on my own publication that will be issued shortly; for those of you who may have less of a comfort than myself with wielding the tools of language, I offer my services as a discriminating editorial hand.” And indeed, Nathanael had a sheaf of papers in front of him, the top one of which had a title handwritten in large enough letters to be read at a distance: A Short Narrative of an Extraordinary Delivery of Rabbits, perform’d by Nathanael St. André. Nathanael had written his name in larger letters than the rest, the first name taking up one line, the last another.

  “The title of your proposed work is…interesting,” said Ahlers as Zachary, squinting at the pages before Nathanael, began to count on his fingers.

  “An effective title describes the work and nothing more, with no writerly trickery to be revealed in the reading,” said Nathanael. “The work must be short, so as to not unduly tax the attention. It must promise the pleasure of a narrative, rather than other, less engaging forms of discourse.”

  “It must be termed extraordinary,” said Manningham, “to differentiate it from the myriad ordinary accounts of rabbit delivery that bend the shelves of libraries.”

  St. André sniffed. “The learned gentleman attempts a jest—”

  “Ten,” said Zachary, raising both his hands with his fingers extended.

  Ahlers looked across the table at Zachary, smiling. “Ten?”

  “The number of rabbits that Mr. Howard and I delivered from the patient before you arrived, Mr. St. André. Ten, out of a total of seventeen.” He turned to John. “Do I have the number right, sir?”

  John Howard turned to see Zachary’s gaze steadily meeting his and gathered that there was something more going on here than the mere confirmation of a fact, that there were other questions lying beneath the question, and that one answer would do for all. “Yes,” he replied, hoping the noise of the coffee house was loud enough to cover the slight hitch in his throat when he spoke. Yes, I should have been the first to speak the words you did; yes, you are now an apprentice in name only, and we will talk further about this when we return.

  “It would seem that among us all here, Mr. Howard is the principal surgeon on the case, with the longest tenure,” Ahlers said.

  “I would say that I have brought a significant degree of knowledge and instinct to this case that would otherwise be absent—to disavow this w
ould be to sell myself short.” After this bristling, Nathanael paused, and seemed to deflate under the stares of the other surgeons, Manningham looking daggers at him over the tilted rim of his coffee cup. “I shall retain authorship of this document, naturally,” he said, more quietly, “but John, you may rest assured that in its title I will give you the credit that is your due—”

  “Excuse me,” a new voice intruded. The surgeons looked up to see a man standing over them, the gentleman from the booth who’d been purchasing a life insurance policy. “I couldn’t help but overhear,” he said. “I would guess that you are the surgeons for the woman Mary Toft? Just arrived in London?”

  “Yes! Yes, we are,” Nathanael said, before anyone could think to stop him.

  The man’s eyes brightened. “I’m torn between admiration and wishing you ill luck,” he said. He brandished a paper before him, a legal document with the ink of its signatures still wet. “I’ve just purchased a policy on her life—I expect to find it the smartest decision I’ve ever made.”

  “Are you related to her?” said Manningham, frowning.

  “Oh, not in the least,” the man laughed. “And neither are the dozen others that have bought the exact same policy from that fellow over there since business began this morning. But twenty shillings against a thousand pounds is a fair risk in this instance, yes? Look at all your sallow faces—I should say so!” Uninvited, he pulled over a chair from a nearby table and, reluctantly, the surgeons made room for him. “Matthew Richardson,” he said, sitting down. “I have a cousin in Godalming—his name is Rufus. He sent me a letter detailing the most absurd story I’ve ever heard—it can’t be true. But it gave me the idea.”

  The story, Matthew took pains to make clear even as he delighted in telling it, was not one that Rufus himself believed, but one that he had heard and thought worth passing on, as it indicated something of the nature of the town, and the predilection of its residents toward gossip. The word was that Mary Toft had been abducted by a mysterious black person, who arrived outside her house at midnight astride a snorting, slavering stallion with an ebony coat that shimmered in the starlight, the largest horse that anyone had ever seen. She had been found by her husband lying naked outside the front door of the house the next morning, confused and with no memory of what had happened to her the night before, “and you wouldn’t believe what happened next,” said Matthew.