The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits (2 page)

Now I could feel Mr. Howard reaching under my skirt in the shadows, and taking the limp rabbit from my pocket that dangled inside my hoop. He kept talking as if to soothe me while he nudged my legs apart and pushed the creature into me. I slid forward on my stool to help him; tears were falling down into my stays. It felt like cold cheese, till a little bone scraped me.

Then Mr. Howard had me walk about the room again, to bring on the birth. I kept my steps small, so it would not slide out. Mr. St. Andre's eyes were on me no matter which way I turned, and I felt like a tumbler who has used up all her tricks. I tried to remember what it was like, the times my real children were born. I leaned on the back of a chair, squalling and roaring and twisting my body from side to side. I told Mr. Howard I thought I might be ready, but he frowned and had me lay down on the bed for another while. My sister Toft wiped my face with vinegar.

The two doctors passed the time by means of jokes. When Mr. Howard told a good one about a sow I couldn't help but join in the laughing. Mr. St. Andre looked at me oddly and I shut my mouth, "Ah, women of Mary's station are hardy as beasts, sir," Mr. Howard told him. "They don't recall a hurt when it's over."

At that I began to roar again, as if the pains were doubled. The doctors ran to the bed. I pushed and pushed so my eyes bulged; I could feel the mangled rabbit beginning to slide out.

"There," said Mr. Howard, "can't you hear its little bones crack?"

The men listened, not meeting each other's eyes.

Mr. St. Andre shook back his three rows of lace to the elbow before he reached into me. The rabbit came out on the first tug. It lay in his hand, the skin hanging loose. We all stared at it. My sister Toft muttered something like a prayer. It was diy and bloodless. It didn't look much like a rabbit.

"In the cases of several of the others, also," Mr. Howard said very fast, "the pubic bone crushed the foetus and the skin was pulled off in its passage through the
os uteri
"

Mr. St. Andre's wig had slipped sideways. He adjusted it, and wrote everything down in his little memorandum book. Prompted by Mr. Howard, I told him how my sister Toft and I had been weeding in the fields one day, and I saw rabbits and had a great desire for them, and tried to catch them for my pot, but could not, and that night dreamed I had rabbits in my lap. (And indeed, by now, it was true, I did dream of rabbits most nights.)

"What is the pain like, Mrs. Toft?" he asked.

I thought back to the birth of my boy, two years past. "As if very coarse brown paper is tearing inside me, sir."

He kept feeling my pulse, looking at my tongue, even examining the water in my pot for stains. He did all this without ever saying if he believed a word of our story. He took three of the pickled rabbits away with him, to dissect in front of the King.

I heard Mr. Howard standing by the carriage, reminding Mr. St. Andre to tell the King what pains he, Mr. Howard, had taken with this poor woman, and how he did not debar her from eating anything she fancied, no matter what it cost. And it was true, I supposed, that when there were no visitors I was free as any woman to sit by the fire and eat salt beef and drink strong beer as good as the doctor himself. The one thing I might not do was go home to my children, though I didn't trust my husband's relative to feed them. Mr. Howard shouted that he had staked his whole reputation on that magical womb of mine, and I was to get back to bed.

In the days after, a Air. D'Anteny came down from London, and a Mr. Ahlers and a Mr. Molyneux and a Mr. Brand, and other doctors whose names I forgot as soon as I heard them. They all carried three-cornered hats that would never fit over their wigs. There was much nodding and bowing to each other, but anyone could have guessed they were not friends.

They watched me like owls. I am not a handsome woman; all my features are bigger than they need be for a body so small. But these gentlemen looked at me if I was made of gold, and by now I was so brazen I could look right back. One wiped his hand on his satin breeches and said he had discovered an enormous great tumour in the woman's—meaning my—stomach, but Mr. Howard informed him that it was simply the neck of the womb. He didn't like that, to have his ignorance made a show of.

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.

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.