The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits (19 page)

"Quadrille!" cries Lord Humphry.

"Ombre," contradicts his sister.

Now the ladies look on, and fan themselves; the rooms are airless. Elizabeth watches Frances out of the corner of her eye. She knows there are limits to what a friend may ask, even the dearest of friends. She knows their stay was never meant to last so long. Any day now, Elizabeth must let Frances go home to her family, to the baby she will barely recognise. This is where the story ends.

When the gaming is over, there is an auction at which an Ethiopian girl sells for five guineas. "Vastly amusing," shrieks her new owner. Elizabeth meets the small milky eyes of the child and feels all at once that she may faint. Blackness covers her like a cloth thrown over a birdcage.

Frances rushes her home at once, with a link-boy stumbling ahead with his torch. They pass two women in bleached aprons. "Harlots," whispers Frances in her friend's ear. Elizabeth clings to her arm. Her breath echoes in the narrow street.

In, out, so regular, so unstoppable. Elizabeth tries to match her own breathing to her friend's. She turns painfully on her side and watches Frances's face in the moonlight that leaks through the window, across the pillow. Soft lines score the lofty forehead: a face worn out with feeling. Who does Frances love? Her spendthrift Sherry, her big Tom, her Charlie-boy, her Dick the Dunce, her pretty Lissy, her baby Betsy ... How can she have any love left? Yet it seems to come as easy as sweat. She even manages to love Elizabeth, this diy husk of womanhood lying beside her, bitter, unsleeping.
Sister of my heart,
she calls her, sometimes.

But the latest letter from Sherry is under the pillow. Elizabeth read it by candlelight while Frances was downstairs shouting at the chambermaid to fetch a compress for Miss Pennington's chest. Her hand shook as she opened the letter; she almost set the edge on fire. One word told her all she needed: "Dublin."

The friends have had their season.

I find it impossible to live without you.
If Frances were to wake now, this minute, and ask her, look her in the eye and ask, "What is the matter with you?"—that is all Elizabeth could say, like a child repeating her one lesson.

I find it impossible to live.

She cannot remember how she got through the days before Bath, before London, how she bore the weight of her short life without Frances to share it. And still less can she conceive of how she is to live, in a week or a month or two at most, when Frances and her family will go back to Dublin.

Impossible.

A rough sea, a universe away.

She coughs, stifling it in the pillow. Then she lets herself cough louder. If she sounds bad enough, the older woman will wake from her shallow sleep and tend to her. She will stroke her friends forehead, cluck over her tenderly. If Elizabeth coughs hard enough to wet the pillow, Frances will surely kiss her face. If she stays awake all night, she will look even paler in the morning, and Frances will scold her and coddle her and bring her hot wine. If she cannot breathe, in the bad time before dawn, Frances will lift her in her own arms and count her breaths for her.

As long as she keeps getting worse, Frances will stay.

Such thoughts, such weakness. Is it her body that's diseased or her mind? In the dark, Elizabeth cannot remember how to be good. How do they endure, those heroines of novels? A tear burns its way through her lashes.

Today she is weaker than yesterday, when she was weaker than the day before. She's eaten nothing to speak of for a fortnight. Sitting in the Abbey at noon, Elizabeth's eyes drift up the walls, across the floor. Every inch is inscribed; the place is crowded with names, packed tight like a gala ball for the dead.

She glides out of her stiff body, slips through the stained glass windows, soars up into the aromatic streets. She hovers round the Abbey, grips with one white smoky hand the stone ladder that the blunt-toed angels are climbing. She watches, she waits. How will it be?

She sees Frances roaming the streets, the ribbons of her bonnet hanging loose. Forgetful of her family, red-eyed for a year, heartsore for the rest of her life. Frances, transformed into a greedy girl on the doorstep of Heaven, knocking furiously, ready to make her demands.

Even within the dream, Elizabeth feels the implausibility of this. Suddenly she can see another Frances, a gray-haired Frances, revisiting Bath, only a little melancholy when she glances down South Parade to the stone bench where she used to sit with "poor Miss Pennington." And all around the visitor, the barrows and stalls and colliding sedan chairs, the essentials of Bath life going on just as ever, oblivious to the words etched on marble in the Abbey.

Elizabeth comes back to the present, to a warm hand wrapping itself around hers. This is what it comes down to: a firm grip that banishes past and future.

Feeling a tickle in her lungs she withdraws her fingers apologetically, searching for her handkerchief. No one turns a head; racking coughs are no novelty in Bath. But Elizabeth stares into her snowy handkerchief at the bold red flag death has planted there.

She folds it over and over till only white shows.

Not yet. Please. I did not mean, I did not know, I thought—

Impossible.

Down the aisle, her heels resounding. Scandalised whispers on every side. "What ill-breeding, to run off from church."

I am only twenty-five.

She bursts through the great double doors of the Abbey as if they were veils. Out in the watery sunshine, she takes a great breath. And another.

Frances is at her elbow.

Elizabeth presses her fingers against her friends hot mouth before she can say a word. "We have so little time," she whispers.

Tonight, Miss Pennington will dance.

"
How a Lady Dies " is about Elizabeth Pennington, born in 1732 or 1734, a wealthy vicar's daughter who wrote poetry, most of which has been lost. Her closest friend was the writer Frances Sheridan (1724–66). Sometime in the 1750s Elizabeth turned up on Frances's doorstep to say she could not live without her, as recorded in Alice Lefanu,
Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Mrs. Frances Sheridan (
1824). I have drawn on a Utter by Frances in John Wat kins's
Memoirs of the Public and Private Life of the Right Honourable Richard Brinsley Sheridan (
1817), as well as her comedy
A Journey to Bath (
written in 1764).

On their return from Bath to London, Elizabeth died in Frances's arms.

Formed in her mother's belly, dark filigree: the watermark of the bones.

The birth was easy. She glided out easy as a minnow into the slipstream of life. The midwife crossed herself. The mother wept with gratitude for this Thumbelina, this daughter of her mind's eye, embodied on the bloody sheet. The father wept with dread to see what he had spawned. Seven inches long, one pound in weight.

Hold it. Linger on the picture. Here, before poverty and ambition began to pose their questions, before strangers started knocking on the door, before the beginning of the uneasy vigil that would last four years. Here for one moment, silence in the small hot room in Cork: a private wonder.

Mr. and Mrs. Crackham named their daughter Kitty.

She could not be said to have had a childhood. Her whole life was lived in proportion to her body—that is, in miniature; infancy, youth, and adulthood passed as rapidly as clouds across the sun. She was never exactly strong, in her body or her head; she was never exactly well. But Kitty Crackham did have pleasures to match her pains; she liked bright colours, and fine clothes, and if she heard music she would tap the floor with her infinitesimal foot.

At three years old she was one foot seven inches tall, and seemed to have given up growing. She never spoke, and the cough shook her like a dog. Doctor Gilligan assured the Crackhams that the air of England was much more healthful to children than that of Ireland, especially in tubercular cases such as little Kitty's. He offered to take her over the sea himself. He mentioned, only in passing, the possibility of introducing the child to certain men of science and ladies of quality. A select audience; the highest motives: to further the cause of physiological knowledge. It might help somewhat to defray the costs of her keep, he added.

Such kindness from a virtual stranger!

The Crackhams packed their daughter's tiny bag and sent her off with Doctor Gilligan, but not before he'd given them three months' rent.

Later they wished they'd said no. Later still, they wished they'd asked for twice as much. They had four other children, all full-size, all hungry.

The child was silent on the coach to Dublin, and on the ship too, even when the waves stood up like walls. The Doctor couldn't tell if she was weak-witted, or struck dumb by loss. Certainly, she was no ordinary girl. Their fellow travellers gasped and pointed as the Doctor carried Kitty Crackham along the deck in the crook of his arm. He pulled up her hood; it irked him that all these gawkers were getting a good look for free.

After dinner, when he'd thrown up the last of his lamb chops, his mind cleared. It struck him that the girl's tininess would seem even more extraordinary if she were, say, nine years old instead of three. To explain her speechlessness, he could present her as an exotic foreigner. By the time they docked, he'd taught her to stagger towards him whenever he called
Caroline.

It was Caroline Crachami, the Dwarf from Palermo, who landed at Liverpool in the year 1823: "the smallest of all persons mentioned in the records of littleness," the Doctors pamphlet boasted. In a fanciful touch he was rather proud of, the pamphlet suggested that her growth had been blighted in the womb by a monkey that had bitten Signora Crachami's finger.

The first exhibition, at Liverpool, drew barely a trickle of punters, but Doctor Gilligan forced himself to be patient. On to Birmingham, where the crowd began to swell, then Oxford. Town after town, room after room, month after month. Each of the child's days was crammed with strangers so big they could have crushed her with an accidental step. Such excitement in the eyes of these Brobdingnagians, now their Gulliver had come at last. Some called her
she;
others,
it.
Doctor Gilligan took to wearing a Sicilian moustache and calling her
my darling daughter.

She made her audiences doubt their senses and cry out in delight. How strong she made them feel—but also, how clumsy. They could hardly bear to think of a child being so small and brittle, so they called her the Sicilian Fairy. As if a newborn baby had risen magically from her cradle and dressed herself to parade before them; as if her powers were in inverse proportion to her size, and she could fly out of any danger! She was the doll they had always wished would come to life.

In London Doctor Gilligan tested the weight of his moneybags and hired an exhibition room in Bond Street. He provided his
darling daughter
with a tiny ring, thimble-cup, and bed. She sat on a tea caddy that served her for a throne. He taught her to take a bit of biscuit from his hand, then rub her stomach and say "Good, good." He was delighted when after a week or two she began to talk a little more, as it increased the entertainment. "Papa," she called him, without much prompting. She had a faint high voice, not of this world, and visitors had to stoop to hear her; the Doctor repeated everything she said, adding a few touches of his own.

For a foreign child, people said, she was a quick learner of English. She put her hand over her mouth when she felt a cough coming, and she tottered across the deep carpets as if always about to drop. She was seen to express emotions of various kinds, such as gratitude, irritation, mirth, and panic.

The Doctor was less pleased when his measurements showed that she had grown a quarter of an inch.

***

Caroline Crachami was now one foot eight inches tall—still, by a good thirteen inches, the smallest female on record. The papers called her the Nations Darling, the Wonder of Wonders. The King took her hand between his finger and thumb, and declared himself immensely pleased to make her acquaintance. He sat her on his footstool and had her thimble filled with a drop of his best port. She coughed and whooped and all the ladies laughed.

After that the crowds swelled and multiplied. Three hundred of the nobility visited her, three thousand of the quality, and as many of the lower sort as could beg, borrow, or steal the price of admission. Gentlemen adored Miss Crachami. Ladies grew jealous, began to call her powdery and withered.

For an extra shilling Miss Crachami could be handled. When sceptical Grub Street men came in, Doctor Gilligan invited them to handle her for free. One gentleman with a stubbled chin picked her up in one hand—she weighed only five pounds—and kissed her. She was seen to wriggle away and wipe her face. He got a highly amusing article out of the episode. Readers were assured that there was every probability of this Progeny of Nature living to an advanced age.

But nothing about Caroline Crachami took long, and her death was particularly quick. That Thursday in June she received more than two hundred visitors. A little langour was noted, and was only to be expected; a little rattle when she coughed. In the coach on the way back to their Duke Street lodgings, while Doctor Gilligan was looking out the window, she dropped soundlessly to the floor and died.

He assumed she was only in a faint. He couldn't believe it was all over.

Given the Doctor's commitment to the furthering of physiological knowledge, what came next was no surprise. He carried the body round to all the anatomists and finally sold it to the Royal College of Surgeons.

Doctor Clift was not the kind of doctor who offered cures. He was an articulator; a butcher in the service of science, or even art. His job was to draw grace and knowledge out of putridity. He needed a delicate touch in this case, as the carcass was so small.

First he cut it open, and learned what he could from the spotted lungs and shrunken organs. Then he chopped the body into convenient and logical sections, just like jointing a hen or a rabbit, and boiled it down. For several days he stirred this human soup and let it stew; finally he poured it away, leaving only the greasy bones. He'd got inured to the smell thirty years ago.