The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits (15 page)

This time she did manage to spit.

Mr. Baker Brown took out a white handkerchief and wiped his chin. "The day will come when you will get down on your knees to thank me," he said shakily.

She looked at this man, into whose hands she had entrusted herself, and knew all at once that he was not the beloved saviour she had been looking for, nor an omnipotent demon either—only a man. A middle-aged man.

A month is generally required for perfect healing of the wound, at the end of which time it is difficult for the uninformed, or non-medical, to discover any trace of an operation.

Three weeks after the surgery, Miss F. got out of bed. She stood straight, testing her balance, shouldering the old pain. Her back felt much the same but she was changed, in more than one way. She knew what she had to do.

"I understand from Matron that you feel quite well today?" Mr. Baker Brown asked, marching in.

"Yes, sir," she said levelly.

"Have you lost all your old symptoms?"

"I have."

"How are you sleeping?"

"Well."

"How is your appetite?"

"Good."

"How are your spirits?"

"Good."

He looked up from his notebook. "Your manner is still not a cheerful one."

"it never was."

He checked his notes again. "Can you defecate without the slightest uneasiness?"

"I can."

She waited till he had finished writing. She knew it was over. "And Doctor? Sir?" she added, stony-faced.

He glanced up, his eyes wary.

"I'm cured of all my delusions."

He stared back at her. He blinked once, twice. "Matron," he called, "bring in Miss F.'s street clothes."

Jan. 31. Discharged from the Home, cured.

"
Cured" is based on Isaac Baker Brown's brief notes on the case of "P.F." in bis
On the Curability of Certain Forms of Insanity, Epilepsy, Catalepsy, and Hysteria in Females (
1866), and all passages in italics are from that controversial bestseller. Famous as one of the most skillful surgeons in England, Baker Brown (1812—73) began performing clitoridectomies on women, and on girls as young as ten years old, in 1859. His enemies accused him of destroying women's reputations and leaving them frigid by performing a pointless operation without the full knowledge of patients or their families.

In 1867, as a result of publishing his book, Baker Brown was expelled from the Obstetrical Society and had to resign from his private clinic, the London Home for Surgical Diseases of Women. I have drawn on Ornella Mosucci's excellent essay, "Clitoridectomy, Circumcision, and the Politics of Sexual Pleasure in Mid-Victorian Britain," in
Sexualities in Victorian Britain,
edited by Andrew H. Miller and James Eli Adams (1996).

Clitoridectomy never became very well established in British medical practise, soon being replaced by the more fashionable ovariotomy operation—which also had been pioneered by Baker Brown in the 1850s. But in America, clitoridectomy was widely performed until the early twentieth century. (These days, about two thousand female babies a year in the United States undergo surgery to correct "clitorimegaly," which means being born with a clitoris that a doctor thinks looks too big.
)

I, Mary Stuart O'Donnell, Countess Tyrconnell, daughter of Rory the O'Donnell, niece of Red Hugh the O'Neill, bearing the name Stuart as a gift of his Gracious Majesty King James, being of sound mind on this fourteenth day of June Anno Domini 1632 at my villa near Genoa, do hereby make my last will and testament.

The Countess is the shape of a cathedral. Under the dome of her belly lives a prisoner who took sanctuary last winter but now hammers to be let out. The Countess's cheeks are porcelain, glazed and cracked with sweat in the light that slants through the olive trees.

Bell comes out with a bowl of cherries.

"How's the child?" asks the Countess.

"Sleeping," says the lady-in-waiting. "How goes the work?"

The Countess tosses down her quill. She turns the paper over and presses it down, letting the ink stain the little table. "What use is it to make a will," she asks vindictively, "when everything belongs to my damnable husband, who's off whoring his way round Genoa?"

Bell shrugs elegantly. "You should write a history, then."

"A history of what?"

"Yourself."

A snort from the Countess. "That's been done. Don't you remember the Spaniard's book?"

"It was full of lies."

"Ah, but they last longer than the truth, as fruit is better preserved in wine than water." She bites a cherry. "Besides, I've run out of time for storytelling."

"You're only twenty-five!"

"This one means to kill me."

"Nonsense, my lady," says Bell sharply. "You bore your first as easy as a peasant."

"But this time my whole body says
wrong, wrong.
"

"Aren't the Irish famous breeders? We're as known for it as rabbits! You'll live to drop a dozen children or more."

The Countess hoists her brocade skirts to her knees. "Look at these legs, Bell, swollen up like marrows."

"It's the heat."

"The heat doesn't make ordinary women faint twice a day."

"Since when have you been an ordinary woman?"

The Countess smiles grudgingly, spits a cherry stone onto the grass.

"Shall I read to you?" asks the lady-in-waiting, taking a seat.

"Perhaps."

"Dante? Tasso? The poems of Mme. Labé?"

"No. I'm too restless." The Countess arches her back against the hard wood of the chair. The obscene bulge of Her skirt catches the sun. It is as if she is swollen up with memories that will give her no rest until she releases them.

"You should write your family's story, if you won't write your own. That would make a stirring tale." Bell's voice is only faintly mocking. "Who has not heard of the O'Donnell and the O'Neill, the glorious Flight of the Earls?"

"Ha! When I was a child, no one ever told me that was just a figure of speech." To distract herself from the twinge under her ribs, the Countess bites into another cherry; it carries the faintest hint of rot.

"You mean—"

"Yes, I pictured them, my father and my uncle, hand in black-haired chieftain's hand, you know, soaring across the Irish Sea like cannon balls."

Bell lets out a yelp of laughter.

"And really, when you look it in the face," says the Countess, "it was an inglorious business, their so-called Flight. My uncle at least could be said to have been a great lord. But what did my father Rory ever do but rule Ireland for a matter of months in his brother's wake, then scuttle away to the Continent with a hundred men and his baby son?"

"Sometimes courage means knowing when to run," observes Bell.

"Well, he might have risked arrest for my poor mother, at least! Couldn't he have kept his ship waiting a single night for a wife laden down in the saddle, great with child? Had he no curiosity to see my face? He couldn't have known I was only going to be a daughter."

Bell shrugs again, more sympathetically.

"What I used to dream of at night was even more stirring," says the Countess reflectively. "The Return of the Earls! My father and my uncle, coming back for my sake. What ships they would have mustered, what guns they would have carried, what glories would have returned to Ireland if that pair of drunkards hadn't died of Roman fever in their first year of exile."

"Instead, you grew up like a good traitor's daughter, and followed in their footsteps," Bell points out.

"It was hardly the same."

"Wasn't it an adventure, though, my lady?"

"Our days of youth, you mean?"

"Sneaking round Hampton Court behind the English King's back, hearing Mass in secret, hatching mad plots of escape—"

"Mad they may have been," says the Countess, "but what choice had I? How could my grandmother ever have thought it?"

"What, that you'd many a Protestant at her say-so?"

"That I'd drop the Holy Cross like some limp-wristed ninny, yes," says the Countess severely.

"Well, since you put it that way." Bell is amused. "Your grandmother was no match for you. Though, to give him his due, it was John who hatched the plan of putting us in breeches."

The Countess's face falls at the name. "We never should have leagued with that fellow," she says coldly.

"He was your cousin, after all. The blood of the O'Donnells."

"He was a bastard, with no right to claim the name."

"Come now, the man did get us away from Hampton Court with our heads still on. It was that or the Tower," argues Bell. "Do you remember picking our disguise names?"

"We sat up half the night at it," remembers the Countess; then her eyes flicker as if she is in pain.

"Rodolphe, and Jacques, and Richard," says Bell, like a litany. "We wanted to sound like three ordinary young bucks, setting sail for the Continent."

"No, I wanted to go back to Ireland." Mary Stuart O'Donnell's voice is mutinous.

"Ah, but the winds turned our ship from west to east, three times," Bell reminds her. "You can't argue with your fate."

"Don't tell me what I can't do," snaps the Countess. She squeezes her eyes shut.

"What is it?" asks Bell, serious. "Have the pangs begun?"

The Countess nods once. She picks up a pair of cherries, but cannot eat them; she tosses them to a passing crow. "Some days," she says slowly, "I would gladly trade every ancient marble, every purple hill, every jug of wine in Italy to be back in the County of Kildare."

"I like this place, myself," says Bell, gazing at the olive trees.

"At Poulaphouca waterfall there was a sprite, you know, that took the shape of a horse if you looked into the torrent for long enough. In the castle where I grew up, you had to keep one eye out behind you for the Wizard Earl, who was said to have dabbled in magic until he turned himself into a blackbird. On windy nights you could hear him pounding by on a white horse shod with silver. My nurse promised me that when the horses shoes wore down, the Wizard Earl would come back and free Ireland from English rule."

"Did you picture him as your father?"

"Of course." The pain girds the Countess now; she holds her breath until it lets her go.

"Do you remember, on our flight from England, when the three of us were caught in that storm in the Alps, and your moustache was washed away?" Even-voiced, Bell is trying to distract her mistress. "And that ostler that called you
hermaphrodito!
"

But the Countess is frowning. "To come all that way, through Flanders and France and Italy, lauded as an Amazon and a Martyr for the Faith—to be received by the Pope, like my father before me—and end up nothing but John's wife!"

"On the road," Bell reminisces, "you used to warn him, if he got me a great belly you'd put your gun to his head and make him many me!"

The Countess laughs all at once till tears stand out in her eyes. "Somehow I never imagined it would happen to me. I thought I was above the lot of womanhood." She doubles over, now. "Holy Anne be with me, this creature has claws!"

"Oh, I bought you this from a pedlar," says Bell, pulling what looks like a twig out of her pocket. "It's a bit of Saint Anne's own knee bone, the best thing for a birth."

"Shouldn't I rely on the Sacred Name of Jesus?" quibbles the Countess, panting.

Bell shakes her head. "Only the Saint cares to ease women's pain."

The Countess grabs the bit of bone, encloses it in her fist.

Bell scans the horizon in the direction of Genoa. "John might be home by nightfall."

"And sparrows might plough fields," spits his wife. "That man's going to end up drinking himself to death, in the best O'Donnell tradition, before his children are old enough to know his face. And what I cannot reconcile myself to," she says, talking fast and breathing hard, "is that after all my exceptional adventures, I, a hero's daughter, am going to die like any ordinary woman, in a bed of sweat and blood and
¿bit.
"

"You won't die," said Bell sternly.

"No?"

"Not this time. I know these things."

"Liar." The Countess smiles through gritted teeth.

"Then after your confinement you can invite that Gentileschi woman down from Naples to paint the pair of us."

"As Judith with her maid; that's her speciality."

"Knives dripping blood!"

"Oh, Bell." The Countess stops laughing. She clutches her skirts. The waters have come down, seeping through her petticoats like the Po when it mounts its banks.

"Come in, now, my lady," says Bell. "It's time."

"What about the cherries?" gasps the Countess, distracted.

"Leave them for the birds." She takes her mistress by the sweating hand and leads her in.

"
Figures of Speech " was inspired by the
Dictionary of National Biography
entry on Mary Stuart O'Donnell, Countess Tyrconnel (1607–49) by Richard Bagwell, which mentions an unhappy letter she wrote to Cardinal Barberini in February 1632 when she was pregnant for the second time. A heavily fictionalised Spanish biography of the Countess's early adventures was published by Albert Enriquez in Brussels in 1627; my main source is the French translation by Pierre de Cadenet, published in Paris in 1628 as
Resolution courageuse et lovable, de la comtesse de Tirconel, Irlandoise.

Nothing further is known of Mary Stuart O'Donnell, except that she survived this second childbirth and lived another seventeen years.

The day before the governess came was even longer. Over a dish of cooling tea, Margaret watched her mother. Not the eyes, but the stiff powdery sweep of hair. She answered two questions—on the progress of her cross-stitch, and a French proverb—but missed the final one, on the origin of the word
October.
Swallowing the tea noiselessly, Margaret allowed her eyes to unlatch the window, creep across the lawn. She thought she could smell another thatch singeing.

The next morning woke her breathless; one rib burned under the weight of whalebone. The dark was lifting reluctantly, an inch of wall at a time. Practised at distracting herself, Margaret reached down with one hand. She scrabbled under the mattress edge for the buckled volume. But it was gone, as if absorbed into the feathers. Confiscated on her mother's orders, no doubt. Clamping her eyes shut, Margaret focused on the rib, bending her anger into a manageable line. She lay flat until the room was full of faint light that snagged on the shapes of two small girls in the next bed.