Mary Toft; or, the Rabbit Queen

by Dexter Palmer

  Keith, the publican, blanched. “That wasn’t made by amateurs, friend,” he said quietly.

  Meanwhile, Laurence and Anne had both taken small sips, enough to ensure that the gin wouldn’t splash out of the glass, and were deep in concentration—Anne’s eyes focused on nothing in particular, while Laurence’s were completely closed. “Not much juniper,” he said, “though it appears later.”

  “What’s that at the beginning, though?” said Anne.

  They both took another small sip as Michael beckoned Keith, leaned over the bar, and whispered something in his ear.

  “Cardamom,” Laurence and Anne exclaimed simultaneously, as Keith nodded.

  Laurence laughed to himself. “French.”

  “Interesting,” Anne said, “and I like it, but I wouldn’t make a habit of it.”

  “It is interesting,” said Zachary, too late.

  * * *

  *

  While Anne and Laurence finished sipping their servings of gin, Zachary played aimlessly with his empty glass—humiliated, he’d found that he’d wasted something rare, and showed himself as unworthy of a second helping (which he thought he wouldn’t have been able to handle anyway: he felt light-headed, and the good cheer he usually associated with alcohol was muted by a shame that might not have been so potent if he’d been sober). Laurence and Anne continued to compare their impressions of the gin, a conversation that threatened to become interminable, due in no small part to Zachary’s intoxication. It seemed to Zachary as if, for Anne and Laurence, drinking gin was like having a story told to one’s tongue, with flavors in the place of words. To Zachary (and, Zachary suspected, to most of the other people in the pub) gin was a means to an end, not an end in itself, but Keith probably did not retrieve the special bottle on the top shelf for those people (and again, he felt a stab of shame at having wasted a gift that he had failed to recognize as one). He wondered if this was some kind of trick or delusion—if Anne and Laurence were genuinely tasting all the things they said they were, or were just fooling themselves or, worse, lying—but each description of the drink by one was met with enthusiasm by the other, and their impressions appeared to agree.

  As Anne collected the glasses and handed them back to the publican, she asked for something “a little more ordinary” (and Zachary felt a final irritation at the reminder of his faux pas, for she seemed to imply that, if not for uncouth present company, she might have preferred to continue on with drinks that tasted like parades of herbs and flowers). Keith retrieved a bottle from a lower shelf, smudged and half empty, less august than the first, and refilled the glasses: “These are courtesy of the establishment,” he said, his tone tinged with apology, as if someone who could discern the hint of cardamom in the first sample he’d offered should not have to pay good money for mediocrity, even if they’d requested it.

  What sort of person Anne’s age would be knowledgeable about such a subject? How strange this woman was; how strange the place in which this woman lived. Zachary took a small sip from his newly filled glass, which tasted more or less exactly like the first to him. “This is fine,” Anne said after a taste. “This is fine,” Laurence agreed; then in unison, the two of them tossed the shots back, Laurence grimacing while Anne shivered like a wet dog.

  And then Zachary did not know what to do. He tried a method of drinking that he intended to be a cross between sipping and gulping, which resulted only in splashing some of the gin on his shirt, and was regretting that he’d even set foot in this place—the dram shop patrons in his immediate vicinity were making a big show of not looking at him, which made him feel even worse than if they had looked at him—when he turned toward the door and saw a most astonishing sight.

  There, at the entrance, coming toward the bar, approaching Zachary, was a black person.

  It took him a moment to realize it: at first, he was just startled. Almost all the images of black people he’d seen in life had been in monochrome, in engravings and the illustrations of books, and the heavy lines of woodcuts could not capture the true hue of the skin—a dark, rich brown that colored his face and the backs of his hands. He was dressed in unusual finery—his velvet coat was slim-fitting and trimmed with golden lace, and strapped to his hip was a sword, the blade polished to a shine, its point sheared off so that it seemed to signal that its owner was a gentleman, but not one prepared to do violence. In his hand he carried a trumpet, slender and long, made of bronze. He seemed not to fear that someone would try to take it; it appeared to be an emblem of some kind of power, if only the power to make music, or to herald an important man’s arrival.

  He passed through the crowd of drinkers, smiling and nodding at those he recognized, and as he reached the bar Keith poured him a glass of gin from a bottle that, Zachary gathered, was his regular choice. He drank it while carrying on a conversation with Michael, whom he seemed to know, and Laurence sidled over to Zachary. “You’re staring,” he hissed.

  Zachary shook his head as if he’d been slapped. The black man finished the glass, placed it on the counter, made a show of digging in his pocket (which cued Keith to say, “Your money’s no good here, friend”: this, too, seemed like a regular ritual), and then, saying goodbye to a few people on the way out, left the way he came.

  Once the door had shut, Keith erupted in a loud series of chortles. “You should have seen this fellow,” he chuckled, pointing at Zachary with one of his thick, short fingers. “Fellow from the country, never saw a black before. Eyes about to fall out of his head. Asking himself what magic is this?”

  “World’s full of wonders,” Michael chimed in, as Zachary blushed still more.

  “I’ll need to pour you another drink to get over that, it looks like,” Keith said. “That, my friend, was William Douglas, the Black Prince. One of the King’s Trumpeters. One of the kindest men you’ll ever meet as well.”

  “I like the blacks!” Michael proclaimed cheerfully. “Both that one, and the other one who comes in here sometimes—never caught his name.”

  “The blacks are good people,” Keith said, passing the glass to Zachary, who felt obligated to take it and drink it even though he’d had more than enough alcohol at this point. “Neither papists nor Christ-killers: if they come here of their own free will, they try to fit in. Might get called smoke Othello once or twice, walking down the street, and that can’t be pleasant. But they try to fit in; they try to make a go of it. Even marry one of ours and have those kids you don’t know what to make of, looking at them: pretty girls and handsome boys, but you can’t tell where they come from—”

  “Ha—have you heard the stories about that crazy woman holed up in a Covent Garden whorehouse?” said Michael. “Brought here from some village? Rumor has it she had congress with one of the fellows, and it’s afflicted her with all sorts of unheard-of maladies—”

  “Nonsense,” Keith pronounced. “Lies spread by ignorant people afraid of what they don’t understand. I tell you that fellow who came in here has the same blood in his veins as the rest of us. And he tries to fit in. Now, if one of them brought ninety-nine brothers and sisters over from one of those hotter lands, and they started speaking some other language to each other instead of English, then I expect we’d have a problem—something would have to be done.”

  “But they don’t do that,” Michael said. “They’re smart about it. Not like the Jews: soon as the ban was lifted they poured into London, they set up shop, they started moneylending and selling rags and bones.”

  The conversation had taken a strange turn and, drunk as he now was—the drunkest he’d ever been—Zachary still thought he detected something dark lying beneath Keith and Michael’s seeming joviality. They seemed to mean harm to no one, or at least they thought they did not, and yet he felt himself on edge, as if the possibility of harm was in the air, or was already being done unwittingly. Anne and Laurence had quickly become friends, as people do who find they s
hare a private language, and they had, for the moment, cut him out of the conversation—indeed, they were both huddled together and diligently trying not to see the publican and the man at the bar, in a similar way to the men who sometimes made a studious pretense of not seeing Anne, and this bothered Zachary. This dram shop had become a place of unveiling, and he did not like it. If you started to see that worms lurked behind the eyes of everyone you saw, it was only reasonable to deduce that they’d made a home behind your own, living in their little tunnels in the mind, silently altering what you see and how you see it.

  Michael caught Anne’s eye and offered her a friendly smile, and she uttered a skittish, nervous laugh, turning at last to Zachary. “I don’t have room for another glass in me, and we ought to arrive early to get the best seats for the performance,” she said. “Shall we go?”

  “Yes, let’s,” he and Laurence said together, a little too quickly, and they turned and made their way out, through a crowd of men that seemed to press a little tighter, through air that had become a little heavier.

  Once out into the street, the light having become dimmer in the brief time they’d been inside, his head felt slightly clearer. It hadn’t all been a bad experience—the part where he’d seen a black person had been interesting. It was so strange how he took himself for granted, as if he thought the only thing that made him unusual in the eyes of others was the regalia he wore and not the skin beneath it. Though he lived in his own skin daily and, most likely, no longer found it fascinating, if indeed he ever had. In the bath he probably looked down at his own body with indifference. It was almost, Zachary thought, disappointing.

  * * *

  *

  If he had not been able to retain his sense of direction when Anne led him through London’s streets sober, he surely would not be able to do so now, and he trusted himself to merely follow in the path of the woman in sapphire who flew ahead of him. An errant footstep splashed something nasty on his trouser leg, and he felt London accreting on him like another layer of clothing or a film on his skin, a patina mixed from smoke and ash and stink and shit. He thought they were heading west, and eventually they found themselves in a wide street again, Haymarket, lined with theaters and cafés, along with a few bagnios with tackily ornamented facades, much like the one in which Mary Toft was being lodged in Covent Garden.

  For some reason Zachary felt anger in the air, more intense than the mild impression of aversion he’d felt in the dram shop, an unrest that made the hair on his arms stand on end. And indeed, in front of the entrance to the King’s Theater were assembled two groups of people, facing each other and taking turns screaming an indecipherable chant, apparently waiting for a final catalyst to send them over the edge into riot. The groups had about two hundred people each, and together they had almost entirely stopped traffic through the street. They wore tokens that indicated their allegiance to whoever had inflamed them, or who had honor in need of protection—half had red ribbons or buttons or scraps of fabric pinned to their chests, the other half green. About a third of the people on both sides were women, and they seemed just as enraged as the men, if not more so.

  “We’re just going to have to push through them,” Anne turned to shout behind her, and she dove into a huddle of incipient rioters bearing green badges, somehow growing extra elbows and knees, the better to shove people aside. “Stay close behind,” she yelled. Zachary obeyed, close enough to keep his hand on her back (and she seemed, subtly, to lean backward into it, to welcome the touch, though he may have been reading an interpretation into it that couldn’t be fully supported). He felt Laurence’s hand between his own shoulder blades in turn, the answering press of his palm as he was unexpectedly shoved backward, keeping him steady.

  The two groups, red and green, seemed to be engaged in a series of chants that responded to each other in turns, which would have been cheering were it not so clearly hostile. In the distance Zachary could hear the shouted name “Bordoni”; then, all around him a few moments later, the deafening cheer “Cuzzoni!” Some of the people near seemed to sing the name rather than speak it, and so the violent declamation had a pleasing harmony beneath it nonetheless.

  “Bordoni!”

  “Cuzzoni!”

  “Bordoni!”

  “Cuzzoni!”

  “Opera fanatics,” Anne yelled back to Zachary and Laurence, as if that explained everything.

  As they pushed their way through the crowd of Cuzzoni loyalists in front of the King’s Theater, the press of bodies grew tighter, the crowd more agitated. The people around Zachary seemed to be having a discussion about opera, and though the matter they were discussing was trivial—something about whether Bordoni or Cuzzoni had given a better performance during the recent run of an opera, Alessandro, whose composer lived in the city—they were going at it with the seriousness of people who thought those who opposed them had committed a grave crime, or were guilty of a heinous moral failure. It was important that those people who wore red tokens come to understand that Bordoni was not fit to empty Cuzzoni’s chamber pot—it would have been self-evident if those lovestruck fools would take a moment to clear the wax out of their ears—and if fists rather than words had to be the method of convincing them of the truth of the matter, that would be regrettable, but the end (the proper glory of Cuzzoni) would justify the means (a few bruises; some loosened teeth).

  Slowly, he felt a fog creep into his thoughts; he felt the boundaries of his self becoming porous, as if he were sharing some room in his mind with those around him, while borrowing some space in theirs in turn. To his drunken puzzlement he found himself caring about Cuzzoni, despite never having heard about her ten minutes ago, and never having attended an opera; he was certain, beyond doubt, that Bordoni was not merely an untalented singer who had somehow tricked her way onto the King’s Theater stage to torture listeners with squawks like those of a wounded chicken. The woman was worse than incompetent: she was actually evil, capable of all manner of malice in the service of besmirching Cuzzoni’s hard-earned and well-deserved good name. Even a newborn babe could tell that there was no reason for Bordoni to perform in a world where Cuzzoni existed; if an opera required two sopranos, better to have Cuzzoni take both parts than to have to hear Bordoni at all. Something needed to be done about her tin-eared, deluded supporters; by God, something needed to be done about her—

  The three of them broke through into a narrow no-man’s-land between the armies of red and green, and Zachary turned around to see undiluted, wild-eyed panic on Laurence’s face. The chants were equally loud in this space, their tempo quickening—“Bordoni! Cuzzoni! Bordoni! Cuzzoni!”—and on either side of the otherwise empty strip of street in which they found themselves, the men were squaring their shoulders and glaring across at each other, while some of the women turned over rocks in their fists that they’d picked up off the ground.

  Anne turned back to look at Zachary and Laurence, and her eyes shone with delight. “London, eh!” she shouted, pounding Zachary on the shoulder. Then she pointed gaily at the wall of red ahead of her. “Through!”

  She pushed ahead. Zachary thought they probably had Anne’s serendipitous choice to wear blue, rather than red or green, to thank for their lives this afternoon. For a moment he felt traitorous or as if he had something to hide, as if his love of Cuzzoni, already fading, had tattooed the soprano’s name across his forehead. “Bordoni!” a woman near him shrieked, tears running down her face. “Cuzzoni!” came the answering echo, smeared as it traveled to his ears.

  The blue dress chased ahead of him through the tumultuous sea of red badges, and he did his best to follow, his hand outstretched to stay near the woman, grasping, clutching, missing. Suddenly, he felt that fog again, sensed himself turning stupid and angry as his mind once more became strangely porous. He found himself becoming outraged, on Bordoni’s behalf; he had the vaguest, flimsiest memory of a time long past when he would have stepped
in front of a pistol’s barrel for Cuzzoni, but the fever that lit up his head would not even let him fully recall it. Which was a mercy: what person with two ears to hear could not plainly discern the superiority of Bordoni’s voice compared to the unholy squeal of Cuzzoni’s? The farts from Bordoni’s arse would make for better music than the howls that tore their way out of Cuzzoni’s gullet—anyone who’d heard both the singers in Alessandro would know that for sure. Those fools with green tokens of love pinned to their chests were obviously mad, or deaf, or under some kind of fiendish spell; if it took a few broken bones to relieve them of their misapprehensions, then the pleasure of having the deliciously agonizing beauty of Bordoni’s voice unveiled before them would more than compensate them for the pain they suffered—

  The crowd became easier to move through as they approached its edge, and Zachary suddenly inhaled deeply—he hadn’t been aware until then that he’d been holding his breath, and had no idea how long he’d been doing so. The rapid hammering of his heart slowed, and the mist lifted from his mind as the fire cooled in his lungs. He felt no affection for either Bordoni or Cuzzoni—he had no opinion of their talent, having never heard either of them onstage and knowing nothing about opera to boot, but he figured that if he had to listen to them sing while he was blindfolded, he wouldn’t be able to tell them apart. Were both those mobs of people out of their minds? How could they possibly care so much about something so trivial?