“And they are so certain that Patience and I are false—some kind of dishonest illusion. I can feel their rage when it happens—a heat on my face, as if I’ve opened a stove’s door to look in on the flames.”
“The curtain that separates us is as much for us as it is for them, you see,” said Patience. “It is hard enough to have someone doubt your very existence when you cannot make out his face so clearly—without that, it would be worse.”
“To be doubted so strongly leads you to doubt yourself,” said Grace, “but when we are alone together, we can count the things that tell us we are real—our own voices; our own skin; our own heart; our own breath. We can do this service for each other, as sisters—breathe life into each other.”
“But I don’t know what we would do if we were one instead of two,” said Patience, and she turned her head to look at Mary with genuine pity.
“Vanish, I suppose,” Patience said. “Float away on the wind.”
* * *
*
The next morning, one of the two constables who’d brought Grace and Patience in the night before unlocked the door to Mary’s cell and beckoned to her. “Your case has been dismissed. You’re free to go,” he said simply, and though surprised at this—she imagined that at the least there’d be some sort of trial, that she wouldn’t get out into the world again so easily—she came to her feet.
“We wish you the best of luck,” said Grace, and she and Patience folded Mary in a long and warm embrace.
“Isn’t this lovely,” the constable said. “I find myself wiping a tear away.”
* * *
*
“Speaking for myself, I find what you did revolting,” the constable said to Mary as he led her past the cells of still sleeping women, through the dark maze of Bridewell’s halls that led to the exit. “But your body is yours to do with as you wish—there appears to be no statute preventing women from desecrating their bodies in such a particular and peculiar manner. And it is difficult to say that you truly defrauded someone, since you didn’t speak a lie—you merely did as you wished, and let the surgeons who tended to you draw their own conclusions.
“Besides,” he said as they approached the wide double doors of this prison that, in a century past, had been a palace, “it appears that enough people of station would prefer this tale be forgotten to ensure a lack of will to revisit it in a court of law; any further punishment you receive would be more than matched by the lash of the satirist’s pen, directed at those you duped. And so you are free.”
He slid back the large iron bolt of the heavy double doors before him and pushed. With a groan of old hinges, they swung open, revealing a crack of light beyond and the noise and stink of a London street.
“What shall I do?” Mary said.
“I don’t know,” the constable replied, “but you can’t stay here.”
He’d pushed the doors open just wide enough for her to pass through. She took one tentative step and then another, and she heard the slam of the doors behind her and the shooting of the bolt, and she was free with the sky above her, the city before her.
I don’t know what we would do if we were one instead of two. Vanish, I suppose.
She drew her arms around herself in the January cold and thought of Joshua, that innocent victim of her notorious and vile hoax (though was there something that she was forgetting, or willing herself not to know? No—there was not). It was reasonable to think that a man would resent being so ill-used by his wife, so publicly embarrassed, but they were bound by love, and by their family, and by their need to use each other’s faces as mirrors, and she knew, if she returned to him, that he would be able to find it in his heart to forgive.
* * *
*
So she set off alone into the great city, to try to make it home before she faded.
Acknowledgments
My thanks to my editor, Edward Kastenmeier, and my agent, Susan Golomb, for their support and enthusiasm for this somewhat unusual project. Thanks also to Caitlin Landuyt, Edward’s assistant; to Rose Cronin-Jackman, my publicist; and to Janet Hansen for her jacket design.
Certain elements of this narrative resulted from conversations with Micaela Baranello, Stephanie Harves, and Jessica Terekhov.
Thanks to Ann Laver and the librarians at the Godalming Museum for steering me in the right direction at the beginning of my research.
Special thanks to a few people who made the time to read and comment on an early draft of this novel: Brett Douville, Maria Purves, and Drew Purves.
I first encountered the tale of Mary Toft in the fall of 1996, in a class in graduate school at Princeton University taught by Jonathan Lamb (“Representation of the Improbable”). It’s been rattling around in my head ever since, and I’m glad I at last found something to do with it.
For a couple of years now my friends have dreaded what happens when a stranger approaches me at a party and says, “You’re working on a novel? What’s it about?” Thanks for your patience, everyone.
And thanks, as always, to my family, who have supported my writing career from the beginning and continue to do so.
—DEXTER PALMER
February 6, 2016
May 6, 2019
Princeton, New Jersey
Bibliography
It will be clear to anyone who reads this novel that I’ve taken a novelist’s liberties with its subject matter: I’ve condensed and invented characters and freely rendered their thoughts; rearranged locations (most notably moving John Howard’s residence from Guilford to Godalming); altered history and created new situations; and imported one event in particular that didn’t take place during the exact time period (the “Chelsea Cat-Eater” did not perform the act that earned him his title until 1790; see Jane Moore and John Strachan, Key Concepts in Romantic Literature [New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010], p. 60). For a strictly historically accurate version of the Mary Toft story, I refer readers in particular to Dennis Todd’s invaluable book Imagining Monsters: Miscreations of the Self in the Eighteenth Century (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995), and to S. A. Seligman’s article “Mary Toft—The Rabbit Breeder,” Medical History 5, no. 4 (October 1961): 349–60. In addition, Dennis Todd’s transcript of Mary Toft’s three confessions (originally recorded by Dr. James Douglas in December 1726) is available, as of the time of this writing, at https://tofts3confessions.wordpress.com/.
Chapter V incorporates material from Aristotle’s Compleat Master-Piece, in Three Parts: Displaying the Secrets of Nature in the Generation of Man: Regularly Digested into Chapters and Sections, Rendering It Far More Useful Than Any Yet Extant: To Which Is Added, A Treasure of Health, Or, The Family Physician: Being Choice and Approved Remedies for All the Distempers Incident to Human Bodies (London: Printed and sold by the booksellers, 1728).
The first half of the retelling of “The King and the Three Impostors” in Chapter XIII is a heavy rewrite of the version of the tale that appears in Count Lucanor; Or, The Fifty Pleasant Stories of Patronio, Written by the Prince Don Juan Manuel and First Done into English by James York, M.D., 1868. The second half is my own invention.
Chapter XXI incorporates material from Nathanael St. André, A Short Narrative of an Extraordinary Delivery of Rabbets, Perform’d by Mr. John Howard, Surgeon at Guilford (London: John Clarke, 1727, second edition). All writing attributed to St. André, Ahlers, and Manningham elsewhere in the novel is my own invention.
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A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dexter Palmer is the author of two previous novels: Version Control, which was selected as one of the best novels of 2016 by GQ, the San Francisco Chronicle, and other publications, and The Dr
eam of Perpetual Motion, which was selected as one of the best fiction debuts of 2010 by Kirkus Reviews. He lives in Princeton, New Jersey.
www.dexterpalmer.com
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Mary Toft; or, the Rabbit Queen Page 32