The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits: Stories Read online

  The births we performed late in the afternoon, when it was too dark to see clearly but not so dark that the candles had been brought in. Mr. Ahlers pulled out the fifteenth rabbit like a child digging for treasure. "Did I hurt you?" he asked.

  "Yes, sir."

  And he wrote it down in his book, and gave me a guinea, for my misfortunes.

  Air. Howard laughed, later, and said he'd wager I never got a guinea for a rabbit before. But his voice was high in his throat, and his hands were restless; I could tell he was fretting.

  The visitors would not deny this rabbit miracle, nor swear to it. Two of the doctors spoke foreign gibberish; the others only hummed and hawed, and refused to make so bold, and could not positively say, and deferred to their learned friends' opinions. The day I produced my eighteenth rabbit, I suddenly saw what my sister Toft held meant, when she told me how impossibilities might as easily be believed as not.

  I was sore inside from strainings and pokings, and bled more than I had before. I couldn't sleep at night for visions of fields full of rabbits. One day the lodging-keeper tried serving me one for dinner, and I spat it out. She complained that her larder was choked with rabbits, and the same throughout the country, as no one was willing to eat what might have come from between a woman's legs. My sister Toft roared laughing and told me I was famous.

  I couldn't laugh. Did I know, by then, that our luck was running dry?

  All I remember is that when the maid announced Sir Richard Manningham the next day, the first sight of him filled me with dread. He was a man-midwife, they said, who knew more about childbirth than anyone living.

  "The os uteri is so tightly shut," he murmured as he pulled his smooth hand out of me, "that it would not admit so much as a bodkin."

  I shrank from him.

  Sir Richard pointed out that my belly was flat, and said the leaping motion was merely a muscular spasm. I lay still, panting. I knew his dark eyes could see right through me. My sister Toft gave me sneezing powder, to dislodge the rabbits, she said. I sneezed till my nose bled. Sir Richard lent me a handkerchief. I started to cry.

  "Why do you weep?" Sir Richard asked me, not unkindly.

  My sister Toft told him it was no wonder the poor woman cried, when he had as good as called her a liar in front of the whole company.

  The room grew hotter; sweat ran down my sides. The air was thick with breathing. I asked for a window to be opened, but Air. Howard said night air would be fatal in my condition. Instead he let me have some more beer. I began to hate him.

  I tried to remember if childbirth itself was as bad as this mockery of it. With my last boy I was three days in labour, but at least I knew there was a real child to bring forth, not like this hollowness, this straining over nothing.

  The doctors spent hours in the inn; I could hear their quarrel from across the road.

  The end of it was, I had to go to London with Sir Richard Manningham. I never thought of going to London before; folk said it was full of rogues that'd steal the skin off your feet. But I was not given a choice. So I took my guinea that Mr. Ahlers gave me, though Joshua would have rathered I left it at home, and my sister Toft said I should not forget she was entitled to her cut of the guinea and the pension too, after I met the King. I was terrified when I heard that Mr. Howard was not to come to London with myself and my sister Toft and Sir Richard, but he did lean in the carriage window and tell me my reward could not be far off. He seemed so full of the story, now, he almost believed it.

  We lodged at a sort of bath house in Leicester-Fields. I was locked in my room at all times, and kept without my shoes, and nursed by a stranger with a flat face. When I asked for my sister Toft, Sir Richard said she was kept downstairs, and there she must stay.

  One might have thought Sir Richard was my father, or my lover, so tirelessly did he sit up all night watching over me, and writing down everything I said or did. I complained of the most peculiar pains; I fell into fits. My acting grew more desperate, like a strolling player trying to be heard over a crowd. I curled up my fingers, rolled my eyes, and whined like something dying in a trap.

  All the time my mind was sniffing out ways of getting hold of a rabbit. Just one more, that's all I needed. Just a part of one even, as little as a furry foot, for luck.

  One day when Sir Richard had stepped out for a moment's air, the porter came in with some mutton for my dinner. I talked sweetly to him, and mentioned I had an aversion to mutton, and begged him to tell my sister Toft in the kitchen to send up a rabbit for my dinner.

  The porter let out a great guffaw and asked what he would get for it. I had no change, so I had to give him my guinea.

  Sir Richard stalked in later. I could tell by his face the porter had betrayed me to him.

  I sobbed. I said, "I had such a strange craving to eat rabbit, sir, because I am big with one still."

  He was staring at me, and I could not tell if it was with triumph or disappointment. "You are big with nothing but lies," he said, very low. He examined me once more. His hands on my legs were so familiar, they almost felt safe. But then he said to me, "Mary Toft, I have prevailed upon the Justice not to send you to prison yet, but to keep you in custody here, until the full story emerges, that we can only see the tip of now."

  I groaned and clawed at the bed like a woman in the throes of death. Sir Richard's eyes were sad. I realised then that, for all his suspicions, he half wanted to be wrong. I would have been so glad to have brought out one last rabbit, to let it fall like a holy miracle into his fine hands.

  Towards evening I fell into a real fit and lost all consciousness of who or where I was. When I woke up my face was as hot as a coal and there were cramps in my belly like the grip of fingernails. My lies had infected me, I supposed. My counterfeit pains had come true.

  Sir Richard came in, then, with a case under his arm.

  "I have a fever," I told him, very hoarsely.

  He ignored that. He opened his case so I could see what was inside. There was a scissors, forceps, a hook, a crotchet, a small noose, a saw, and various knives, with other instruments I didn't know the names of. The points and blades caught the firelight.

  I thought I was going to vomit.

  "I have come to the conclusion, Mary Toft, that you are a fraud." Sir Richard spoke in a soft voice, almost gentle. "Either you make a full confession of how you have imposed upon the whole medical establishment of England with your motions and your pains—in which case I will attempt to have your sentence reduced—or else I must here and now put you to a painful experiment to see how you are made different from other women, that you have managed to convey into your uterus what should not be there."

  The fever had dried up my voice; it came out as a croak. "Sir, for mercy's sake, give me one more night."

  He rubbed his eyes wearily. He spoke more like an ordinary man. "What, girl, can the conjurer at every fair bring a rabbit out of a hat, and you cannot produce one more from between your legs, when you claim to have brought forth so many already?"

  I clutched my belly. "It is there, sir. I feel it stir and press, but it can't find its way out." And then I put my face in my hands and it felt like a burning thing. "Sir," I said, "I won't stay here any longer. I'd sooner hang myself."

  Sir Richard said he would give me one more hour to consider the state of my soul. Then he locked the door on me.

  But for a month I had been nothing but a body. Though I believed that every body had a soul, as my mother taught me, I held no idea where it might reside. How could there be anything hiding in me that had not been turned inside out already?

  The crack of the bolts. Not Sir Richard, but the unsmiling nurse, with a leg of chicken for my supper.

  I gave her one great shove and ran past her, out the door and down one corridor and then another.

  My breath ran out soon enough; my head hammered like an army. I had to stop and lean against a wall for weakness. I hadn't my guinea anymore, I remembered, nor my shoes even; what would become of me?


  I heard laughter from one of the chambers. The door was open a crack, and I peered in. There was a sofa, and a girl lying on it, with her skirts up to her shoulders, and an old man kneeling between her legs, his back heaving as he thrust. Now I knew what kind of a place this so-called bath house was. I couldn't help but watch for a moment. I never saw a man and a woman do what they are born to do, except for Joshua and myself, and that I never looked at from outside. The girl's eyes were shut; I could tell she was used to it. It came to me then that it is the way of the world for a woman's legs to be open, whether for begetting or bearing or the finding out of secrets.

  I looked up the corridor, then down. I knew I would never find the way out on my own. So I turned and walked back to the room where Sir Richard was waiting for my story.

  Note

  For "The Last Rabbit," which was inspired by William Hogarth's famous engraving of Mary Toft (1703–63) giving birth, I have drawn on many contradictory medical treatises, witness statements, pamphlets, and poems, including Nathaniel St. Andre, A Short Narrative of an Extraordinary Delivery of Rabbets (1726); Dr. Cyriacus Ahlers, Some Observations Concerning the Woman of Godlyman in Surrey (1726); Sir Richard Manningham, An Exact Diary, of what was Observ'd during a Close Attendance upon Mary Toft (1726); The Several Depositions of Edward Costen, Richard Stedman, John Sweetapple, Mary Peytoe, Elizabeth Mason and Mary Costen (1727); and "Lemuel Gulliver" [pseud.], The Anatomist Dissected (1727).

  Dr. Howard was charged with conspiracy, and Mary Toft was sent to the Bridewell jail as a "Notorious and Vile Cheat," but she was released after a few months, probably to save the prominent Londoners taken in by the hoax from further embarrassment. Back in Godalming with her husband, Mary had another baby in 1728 ("the first child after her pretended rabbett-breeding," according to the parish register), and was occasionally shown off as a novelty at local dinners. In 1740 she was charged with and acquitted of receiving stolen fowl, and she lived to the age of sixty.

  Acts of Union

  The young captain was stationed in Ballina, in that part of Mayo where the French invaders and the Irish rebels had triumphed so briefly during the recent troubles of 1798. These days, ever since the Act of Union had come into law, the countryside was quiet enough. All that was troubling the young captain, as he rode over the narrow bridge to Ardnaree, was a nasty sore.

  "Its on my, ah, manhood," he muttered to the apothecary, whose name was Knox. "My membrum virile, don't you know."

  "We call a prick a prick in this country, sir," said Knox pleasantly. "A rash too, all over? Yes, yes, I've seen this many a time before. And what part of England did you say you hail from?"

  The captain hadn't said; but he did now. It was hard to refuse information to a man who was holding one's penis between finger and thumb, and peering at it through greasy spectacles. The captain told the whole short story of his career to date, and when he had finished the apothecary gave him an old claret bottle full of black liquid, stoppered with a rag. "Nothing to worry about," said Knox. "Three swigs of that every morning, and wash yourself in the same stuff at night."

  The bill, scribbled on the back of an old militia notice, staggered the young captain.

  "Why, but I'm not charging you a farthing for my own humble services; it's the medicine that costs, my boy," Knox told him. "I admit it, you'd be cheaper dipping your wick in frankincense and myrrh! Though I venture to predict they wouldn't do the trick in the case of this little problem like my patent mercurial tincture will. Good air, regular sleep and evacuations, and riding too," he added. "You'll be your own man again by the time you get back to your good lady in England."

  The captain was not married.

  "Is that so?" asked Knox, and invited him to stay for dinner and try a fine pink salmon caught in the Moy, "off the very bridge you crossed this morning. Famous for its fish, our river, if I say it as shouldn't."

  They ate in a parlour of such smoky darkness that the captain could barely distinguish his plate. With the soup ladle, Knox proudly pointed out a framed license from the Worshipful Company of Apothecaries up in Dublin, but the captain could hardly make out a word of the spidery print. "I'm no mere druggist, you understand, sir," Knox assured him. "My profession is a genteel one, no matter what some high-and-mighty physician might tell you. I'm the best you'll find in this part of Mayo for bleedings, purgings, plasters, or any other cure. Yet some of my ignorant countrymen take their ails to the farrier instead, can you credit it?"

  The visitor laughed politely, and tried not to scratch his rash.

  The other guests were a skinny little parson and an attorney from Ballina. They talked politics from the start—meaning to impress him, he could tell.

  "Oh, we suffered in Mayo during the late troubles, let me tell you, Captain," sighed Knox through his soup.

  The attorney was nodding along. "Those craven Wexfordmen, they hadn't half as much to bear. The rebels stole a flitch of bacon from my own kitchen!"

  "And then the crown soldiers confiscated my whole stock of bandages and fill my French brandy besides," complained Knox.

  "There was a rumour going round, at the time," said the parson in a thrilling voice, "that every man, woman, and child of us would be gutted with a pike if we didn't convert to Rome."

  "Aye, we were in fear of our lives, all through the fighting. Blood flowed down the streets of Ballina," said the attorney.

  "And Ardnaree," murmured Knox.

  "It did not," said the attorney, helping himself to more port.

  "It did so."

  "The battle took place in Ballina," raged the attorney. "Isn't that right, Reverend? Wasn't it through the streets of Ballina that the Frog soldiers and their papist traitor underlings pursued us with pistol and sword?"

  The parson nodded, speechless as he gnawed on a rabbit bone he had found in his soup.

  "Nobody pursued you anywhere, sir," said Knox; "you were locked up safe in your parlour."

  The attorney ignored that remark. "So how, may I ask, did those rivers of good Protestant blood cross the bridge to Ardnaree and flow up the street, contrary to the law of gravity?"

  "It's a figure of speech." Knox rolled his eyes. "You should have stayed longer in school."

  The young captain laughed nervously, and coughed on a piece of gristle, and choked. Knox ran round the table to thump him on the back. When the captain could breathe again, his host beamed down at him and told him he was a lucky fellow not to lie dead in his plate. "And I won't charge you a penny for that little service, either 1"

  The fish was brought in and carved by a woman to whom nobody seemed to pay much attention. The captain found himself glancing sideways at her, every now and then; despite the dark fug of the room, he could see that she had pale hair in a tight bun, pale eyes, and shadowy crescents under them. Finally she drew up a stool.

  The fish was sweet, flaking in his mouth. "Most excellent salmon, may I say," the captain told the woman, and she gave a brief nod.

  The attorney was expounding on the multitudinous benefits of the late Union. "Ireland now shelters in the protective embrace of Britain, to their great mutual advantage."

  "If only every Irishman saw it that way," sighed the parson.

  "I was told—," said the young captain, stopping to clear his throat, "my superiors informed me on arrival, that is—that the rebels had been quite put down in this part of the country?"

  "Well, yes," said Knox blandly, "but there'll always be troublemakers."

  "Those who protest at paying tithes to God's own Established Church," complained the parson.

  "And the occasioned hamstringing of cattle, as a consequence of evictions. Secret societies, and the like," contributed the attorney.

  "I see," said the captain, pushing a bit of fish-skin round his plate in a disconcerted manner.

  "As a crown soldier, you should mind your back on dark nights, hereabouts," said the parson with relish.

  "And your throat!" Knox went off in a long guffaw.
r />   The captain met the eyes of the woman, who shook her head a little as if to say they were only teasing him. She seemed weary, listless; her shoulders sloped, hiding her body from view.

  "You like the look of my niece, young sir?" Knox called down the table.

  The captain flinched, and looked away.

  "You're not the first, nor will you be the last."

  "Oh, aye?" said the attorney, with a titter.

  The host gave his friend a belt on the shoulder. "Shush, you. How're your piles these days, by the way?"

  "Very bad," said the attorney, sheepish.

  "I'll roll you some more pills. And laudanum, that's your only man for the pain."

  "I need another few bottles too, for my stomach," the parson put in.

  "I'll send them over with Seán in the morning. But as you were saying, Captain, my niece is a treasure," he said, turning back to the visitor, "a prize beyond price, beyond rubies, as they say in the Good Book."

  Miss Knox's eyes never lifted from the platter of roast beef that she was carving. Her fingers were very slim.

  "Helps my lady wife run the household, so she does, not to mention sewing and spinning and all manner of feminine accomplishments, isn't that right, lassie?"

  She gave her uncle a brief, unreadable look.

  "You'll put her to the blush," said the parson.

  "Oh, nonsense," said Knox, "the dear girl must know her own worth."

  "I do," she said, very quietly, and the young captain almost jumped in his seat to hear her speak at last.

  "Twenty-three years old, merely, and the wisdom of a grandmother!" boasted her uncle.

  The captain said he did not doubt it.