The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits (17 page)

Margaret knelt up on the moving steps as the page fell open to that word again; her legs shook and her belly-rumbles echoed under the whalebone.
Tribad
meant if she let the badness take her, she would grow and grow. Already she was taller than anyone in the house except her mother. The book said she would grow down there until she became a hermaphrodite shown for pennies at the fair, or ran away in her brothers breeches (but she had no brother) and married a Dutch widow. The change was coming already. When the girl lay in bed on hot mornings the bit between her legs stirred and leapt like a minnow.

One noon she limped into the bedchamber, phantom blows from her mothers rod still landing on her calves. Dot was sweeping the cold floor, her broom trailing now as she gazed into the frontispiece of a book of travels.

"Give it," said Margaret.

Dot regarded her, then stared at the book again, at its pages flattened by the gray morning light. She looked back at the girl as if trying to remember her name. Seizing the besom, Margaret threaded her fingers between the twigs, and set to bludgeoning the maid's thick body with the handle. The coarse petticoats dulled the impact; it sounded like a rug being beaten. She pursued Dot to the window with a constant hiss of phrases, from "idle ignoramus" to "tell my mother" to "dirty goodfornothing inch of life." Dot broke into a wail at last, expressive less of pain than of a willingness to get it over and done with. She stood in the corner, hunched over to protect her curves. Tears plummeted to the floorboards.

"Beg pardon," Margaret instructed. Her ribs heaved and sank under the creaking corset.

"Beg pardon, Miss," Dot repeated, her tone neutral.

The broom was lowered but the eyes held.

Margaret had made it to the door before, with a lurch, she found herself sorry. She turned to see Dot industriously brushing her tears onto the floor. She was so sorry it swamped her, left her feeble. Was there any comfort to give? A lump in one of the unmade beds reminded her, and she scrabbled under the coverlet. The doll she pulled out was missing one eye, but her pink damask slippers were good as new. The girl walked up behind Dot and tapped her on the shoulder with the doll's powdered head. "Take her," she said graciously, "and leave off crying."

Dot turned a face that was almost dry. "What am I to do with that, Miss?"

Margaret was disconcerted. Play with her, she could have said, but when? Dress her up, but in what? A shaky, benevolent smile. "Perhaps you could beat her when you are angry."

Weary, Dot considered the two faces. "Get away out of that, miss," she remarked at last, and walked from the room, trailing her broom behind her.

It was in the corner of the bedchamber that the governess found the girl a little later, her fingers dividing and dividing the doll's hair. She lifted Margaret's hands away gently. "Girl, you harass my spirits. You are too old for your sisters' dolls, and what need has a healthy girl of wax toys when there is the wide world to play in?" If she noticed the stiffness in Margaret's legs, as they strolled in the orchard, she said nothing. They spoke of birds' nests, and poetry, and unrest among the French.

Mistress Mary had taken to writing a story in the bright July evenings. What was it about? "Disappointment," she murmured, and would tell no more. Feeling neglected, Margaret became clumsier, tripping over shoes and toppling an inkstand. The governess forgave her everything. One morning Margaret found a double cherry hung over the handle of her wardrobe. She knew she had the power now. It brought her no joy.

"I govern her completely," Mistress Mary wrote to her sister. "She is a fine girl, and it only takes a cherry to win a smile from her. Her violence of temper remains deplorable, but I myself never feel the effects of it. She is wax in my hands. The truth is, this girl is the only consolation of my life in this backwater. How I look forward to my brief i" escape!

Nobody remembered to tell the children that their governess was spending two days with acquaintances in Tralee. Distracted by the details of mail coaches and hats, Mistress Mary was gone before breakfast. Dot, passing the girl on the back staircase, had only time to whisper that the governess was gone.

Margaret stood in the middle of the empty bedchamber. Sure enough, Mistress Mary's travelling cloak was missing for the first time since October. Margaret was oddly calm. Her mind was busy wondering what she had done wrong, what brief immodesty or careless phrase would make her governess punish her so, by leaving without a word. She noticed that the writing case had been left behind. No reason not to, now: she wrenched it open and took a handful of pages. "Pity is one of my prevailing passions," she read, and "this world is a desert to me" at the top of another leaf. For a few moments the girl stood, savouring the grandeur of the phrases. But then they were dust in her mouth. All these words, and not an inch of warm skin left. As if Mistress Mary, who had never seemed too fond of having a body, had escaped in the form of a bird or a cloud.

The words were building up behind her tongue, making her gag. Nine months she has been living behind my hair, thought Margaret; that is as long as a baby. She parted her lips to breathe and a howl split her open.

After that she remembered nothing until her mother was standing over her.

"Stop this fuss," her Ladyship advised. "You are making a grand calamity out of nothing at all. Recollect yourself. Who are you?"

"I don't know."

"You are Margaret King, of...?"

"I don't remember."

The girl stood, at the rod's pleasure. It beat and beat and could not touch her.

Due to the excessive regret the girl had shown at the briefest of partings with her governess, her Ladyship explained to the household, she had decided that Mistress Mary would not be coming back. The black trunk was sent off before breakfast.

By August, Margaret was bleeding inside. Feeling herself seep away, she was not surprised. But Dot saw the red path down the girl's stocking; she took her into a closet and explained the business of the rags. Margaret nodded but did not believe her. She knew it was the first sign of the change. Blood had to trickle as the growth sped and the new freakish flesh pushed through. When she was three inches long, she would run away to Galway fair and show herself for sixpences. The pretend families would come with her, riding in the ropes of her hair.

A republican in 1798, Margaret would spit at bailiffs. An adulteress in Italy, she would meet her governess's daughter, who never knew her mother, and would tell her, "I knew your mother."

One of the puzzled of Mary Wollstonecraft's early career is her lading her job as governeds with the Kingsborough family in Cork. For "Words for Things," I have drawn on her
Collected Letters (
1979), but aldo her
Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (
1787),
Mary, A Fiction (
1788), and
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (
1792). The character of "Mademoiselle
"
wad
inspired by Mary Rusdell Mitford's
"
Early Recollections: The French Teacher" in
Our Village (
1826).

Wollstonecraft's pupil became Margaret King Moore on her marriage to the second Earl of Mount Cashell, to whom she bore eight children. The British Library had a letter from Bishop Percy to his wife in 1798 that mentions Margaret's
vigorous defence of her former
governess
when Wollstonecraft was accused of being a bad influence on her charges. In 1805, Margaret eloped from her husband and children with George William Tighe; in Italy, they became friends with the daughter Wollstonecraft died giving birth to, Mary Shelley.

Breathing hardly seems worth the trouble today. Elizabeth lets out her shallow mouthful of air. Her shoulders subside; her head sinks back against the obelisk. She stares up at the tapering stone, but the sight dizzies her. Her eye-lids fall. Fur is soft against her cheekbones.

There, between the breaths, is peace. A little more air seeps away between her withered lips. The forest inside her ribs is emptying. No sound, nothing stirring, no fear, nor inclination. How the end will come. This winter, surely. Perhaps this very month. Could it be today?

This is all she has to do, thinks Elizabeth with a sudden inspiration. No vulgar act of self-destruction is called for; nothing to trouble her conscience or her taste. It is necessary only to relinquish: the daily effort, the stale cold air.

Her whole self hisses away through the crack of her mouth. Her stomach gives a startling rumble. She feels it fold in on itself. Soon she will be quite hollowed out. The weight on her chest grows, but she tells herself not to tremble, not to resist, not to bother with another breath.

"Elizabeth?"

The voice of love is a noose. It keeps you dangling between two worlds.

Her lungs suck in a huge mouthful of air. Her stays crack mightily, like a ship turning into the wind. How this worthless body fights for life. She turns to see her friend's anxious face, cooped up in a silk bonnet. Dark eyes, a high forehead traced like paper. By the world's standards, a plain woman, twenty years past her best. "I am only resting, my dear," Elizabeth murmurs.

"Do you feel a little better in yourself today?" suggests Frances.

"Indeed," faintly.

The only thing one can do in Bath that one did not do the day before is die.
This is the undisputed bon mot of the season of 1759. Airs. Montagu's words will be misquoted long after these swarms of visitors have dispersed to their respective altars and graves.

Every year more yellowstone houses seize their share of tawny light. Every day more carriages scurry across the valley. Each duke married off is replaced by another five; every beggar arrested leaves room for fifty more. What was once a gracious maiden of a town has become a bloated dowager.

Bath is known for social rules and hard drinking, exquisite refinement and filthy jokes. Money is the air it breathes. Half a guinea to the Bellringers to herald your arrival, another to the City Waits for the obligatory serenade, then two guineas' subscription to Harrison's Rooms, where the tea is only ever lukewarm. People come to Bath to take the waters, but also to take the air in the Orange Grove, to take heart at the sight of a handsome face. They take their turns at scandal and glory, pleasure and spleen; they take their time about living and dying. The town is full of sound lungs proclaiming their sickness, old men insisting on their youth, married women whispering their unhappiness.

"That's Miss Pennington," the gossips say; "she does not dance." Which, in Bath code, means: spare your breath. Her partner is bony and invisible. The lady's not for marrying.

Miss Elizabeth Pennington is a fortune, past twenty-five and still a spinster. Friends blame her health. Enemies blame her finickiness. She has come to Bath in the care of a humble companion, Mrs. Sheridan. ("Wife to the theatre man, don't you know, with a houseful of children left at home.") Both ladies are vicars daughters, but there the resemblance ends. The younger has all the money, it is said, and the elder all the wit.

What the gossips don't know is that a year ago, Elizabeth turned up on her friend's doorstep in Covent Garden without a word of warning. "I am come to take up my abode with you," she stuttered, absurdly Biblical. Words memorised in the hired carriage, sentences stiff with anticipated disappointment.

"I find it impossible to live without you."

She strained for a breath.

"You may shut your doors against me—"

The doors swung open.

She lived all that year with Frances and her Air. Sherry and her children. Elizabeth taught the smaller ones Aesop's fables, poured tea for Sherry's visitors, and could always be relied upon to have read their latest works. When the new baby came, the Sheridans named her Betsy, in Elizabeth's honour.

She made sure to make herself indispensable. Sherry joked that his wife had no need of his company anymore; he stayed out late with poets and ballet-masters. In letters from home, the Reverend Pennington asked his daughter with increasing querulousness how long her friend would require her. Elizabeth answered only with remarks on the weather.

She picked at her food, and fed the best bits to the baby. Whenever she was taken by a coughing fit, that long winter, she covered her mouth with one of her two dozen handkerchiefs, each of them trimmed with the best Bruges lace.

Frances refused to be alarmed by her friend's husky voice, the violet tinge about her eyes. All her darling Elizabeth needed was a trip to Bath: taking the waters and seeing the sights would restore anyone to perfect health. Especially one so young. Especially one so worthy of all life held in store.

And what could Sherry do but agree? What husband could object, except a brute? What could any man say, who had the slightest sense of the exquisite force of female friendship?

They promised to write to him weekly. They left the baby with a good clean nurse.

Before dawn Elizabeth is shaken awake by the rattle of carts, the bawling of muffin-men.

"I declare," yawns Frances beside her in a perfect imitation of Lady Danebury, "this is such a
fatigating
life, I scarce have strength to rise!"

This town was designed by the sick; every hour a different amusement keeps death at bay. At sunrise they go to the Bath in sedan chairs; the chair-men's puffing breaths leave white trails on the air. The first time Elizabeth saw a bathing costume, she was so appalled she laughed out loud, but now she pulls on the yellow canvas jacket and petticoat and thinks nothing of it. What she shrinks from is the moment of ducking under the arch and wading out into the basin, under the gray sky. The water scalds, even on the coldest mornings. Elizabeth cannot help imagining that she is being boiled down to the bone, rendered into soup.

Oblivious to the heat that flushes their cheeks, ladies stand and gossip with their necessaries laid out on little floating trays: snuffboxes, pomanders, nosegays wilting fast. Clouds of yellow steam fill the air. In a far corner, Frances has her bad leg pumped on. She chats with the pump-man as if he were family; she lacks any sense of the gulf between herself and the lower orders. Elizabeth can always make out her friend's voice in a crowd; still full of Dublin, after all these years.