The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits (20 page)

Odd, he thought, that the same people who would retch at the stench of such a soup would line up to drink in the sight of the same bones, once he had strung them together. Such was his artistry. It was the hardest of jigsaw puzzles. All his years of drawing and copying and assembling more ordinary skeletons had prepared him for this. He needed to recall every one of the two hundred and six bones in the body, and recognise their patterns, even on this miniature scale. His eyes throbbed; his fingers ached. He was going to raise a little girl from the dead, so the living might understand. With only bone and wire and glue he planned to make something that united—in the words of a recently dead poet of a medical persuasion—Beauty and Truth.

Her parents read of her death in the
Cork Inquirer.
Mr. Crackham took the night ferry. In London he banged on doors of parish authorities and magistrates' courts, and toured the hospitals and morgues, but all the bodies he was shown were too big: "This is not my daughter," he repeated.

He never caught up with Doctor Gilligan—who'd absconded from his lodgings owing £25—but he did find his way in the end to Surgeon's Hall in Lincoln's Inn Fields. He got to the laboratory a week late. Doctor Clift was putting the final touches to his masterpiece with a miniature screwdriver.

When the Irishman understood what he was looking at, he let out a roar that was not fully human. He tried to throw his arms around his Kitty, but something halted him.

This tinkling puppet was not his anymore, if she had ever been. Her clean, translucent bones were strung as taut as pearls, and her spine was a metal rod. She stood on her tiny pedestal with her frilled knees together like a nervous dancer, about to curtsey to the world. Her ankles were delicately fettered; her thumbs were wired to the looped ribbons of her hips. Her palms tilted up as if to show she had nothing to hide.

Her head was a white egg, with eye holes like smudges made by a thumb. Nine teeth on the top row, nine on the bottom, crooked as orange pips. She grinned at the man who had been her father like a child at a party, with fear or excitement, he couldn't tell which.

How lovely she was.

It occurred to Doctor Clift then, watching as the porters hauled the child's father off howling and kicking, that Kitty's bones would last longer than his own. She was a fossil, now; she had her niche in history. Shortly she would be placed on show in the Museum Hall between tanks that held a cock with a leg grafted onto its comb and a foetus with veins cast in red wax. She looked like a human house of cards, but nothing could knock her down. She would stand grinning at her baffled visitors until all those who'd ever known her were dust.

The girl known as Caroline Crachami died on 3 June 1824, probably from a combination of tuberculosis and exhaustion. But basic facts about this child's nationality, age, medical history, and life before her arrival in England in 1823 are still disputed.

My inspiration and main source for "A Short Story" was a long and highly original article by Gaby Wood, "The Smallest of All Persons Mentioned in the Records of Littleness, "published in the
London Review of Books,
11 December 1997, and afterwards in volume form by Profile Books. I also drew on Richard Altick's
The Shows of London.
Crachami's skeleton, death mask, limb casts, and accessories are displayed in the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons in Lincoln's Inn Fields, London, next to the remains of the Giant, O'Brien.

I was in the Orangery at Kenwood that June morning, picking plums and grapes. I knew nothing. My name was Dido Bell.

The Orangery smelt of flowers and was warm, as ever; the underfloor was heated with pipes from the bake-house next door. There were orange trees in tubs; they had never borne fruit yet, but my great-aunt and I had hopes for that summer. There were peach trees and myrtles and geraniums, sweet marjoram and lavender. I looked out the long windows, delighting as always in the prospect, the paths of grass and gravel that wound between the ivies and the cedars and the great beeches.

In the Hall, Diana ran along beside her nymphs and hounds; I traced her foot with my fingers. My great-aunt was in her china closet, sorting her collection of Chenise, Derby, Worcester, Sèvres, and Meissen, and not to be disturbed lest she drop something, the housekeeper said. I had nothing particular to occupy myself with that morning, having seen to the dairy and the poultry-yard already. My cousin Elizabeth was out on the terrace, having her portrait painted. A serene, sleepy air hung over the whole house.

My great-uncle was in his Library, peering at a letter, under the overmantel portrait of himself in his long tomato-red baronial robes with a bust of Homer. I tapped on the open door and asked if I should fetch my writing-desk and take down his answer. Lord Mansfield looked over his spectacles a little distractedly and said no, not today.

"Have you been into the Cold Bath yet this morning, sir? The doctor said—"

"I'm perfectly well, Dido, don't fuss."

I turned away, examined the carved letters on the bust by Nollekens. "Remind me.
Uni Aequus Virtuti?
"

He smiled at me indulgently and looked up at his plaster self. "Faithful to Virtue Alone," he translated.

"Why did you pick that as a motto?"

"It means, my dear, that as Lord Chief Justice of England I must never allow personal considerations or whims to sway my judgment: I must follow pure principle. And now what I must do"—the frown creeping over him again—"is finish reading this letter before I go in to the King's Bench."

I thought my great-uncle might change his mind and ask me to take dictation after all—his eyes, like the rest of him, being nearly seventy years old—so I stood quietly in one of the Library's recesses. Beside his coffee tray lay a knot of rosebuds; Mr. French the gardener always picked a nosegay on the summer days when the master had to drive into the stinking city. The Library was all blue and pink, sparkling with gold paint and red damask, and the air was still cool; the chill was delicious on my neck. I looked at the backs of the books, the orange and green and brown glow of their leathers; they would need another dusting soon. I contemplated the allegorical paintings above me. Justice reminded me of my great-uncle; Commerce, of my chickens, who were giving so many eggs this month that it was high time I sent some down to be sold in Hampstead. Navigation: that stood for my father, Rear Admiral John Lindsay of His Majesty's Navy. He had rescued my mother from captivity on a Spanish ship the year before I was born. I wrote him letters, telling him of my daily life at Kenwood with my cousin Elizabeth and our great-uncle and great-aunt, and sometimes when he was not too busy he dictated a reply.

The recess was lined with one of the great pier-glasses: seven and a half feet high, three and a half feet wide, the largest mirrors in England, or so Mr. Chippendale assured my great-uncle. They had been brought from France by road and sea and road again, and not one of them had broken. The glass was not tarnished yet. It gave me back to myself: my hair was dressed very high and frizzy today, and my pointed face was the colour of boiling coffee.

"Dido, are you still here?" Great-uncle Mansfield glanced up from his letter. "I forgot to say, you're wanted on the terrace. I've told Zoffany to put you in Lady Elizabeths portrait."

I grinned at him and seized my basket; went into the Ante-Room, shutting the door softly behind me; stepped out the Venetian windows and onto the grass.

"What a charming property this is, Miss Dido, this ravishing villa of Kenwood," murmured the painter with his foreign
r's,
as he arranged us. My cousin was to be seated on a rustic bench reading
Evelina,
catching my elbow as I rushed by—or pretended to, rather. "Lay down your book, Lady Elizabeth, if you would be so very kind. Reach out and caress your cousin in passing," he told her, "to convey the warmth of familial friendship, but
regardez-moi, hein?
Eyes forward."

Elizabeth was looking her usual loveliness in her new French pink saque, with her late mother's triple rope of pearls around her neck and rosebuds in her hair. I asked should I put on my patterned muslin, but Mr. Zoffany said on the contrary, he had a special costume for me in his trunk. It was a fanciful thing in loose white satin, with a gauze shawl and an ostrich-feathered turban to match. When I came downstairs, transformed, he clipped big gold earrings onto me; it was a most curious sensation. Catching sight of the basket of fresh-picked plums and grapes I had set down on the grass, he thrust it into my arms for a touch of the exotic, as he called it.

I stood as still as I could, in the frozen position he had put me in; I could not help but laugh at such theatricals. Elizabeth was just as bad; she kept her eyes forward in the correct pose, but she tickled my waist whenever the painter was not watching. Mr. Zoffany was staring at me now, with a little frown. "Miss Dido—if you would be so good as to touch your finger to your cheek just here—most becoming." I obeyed. "Exquisite," he murmured. "What contrasts!"

"Mr. Adam, his Lordship's designer, you know, says variety is all," I remarked.

"Very true, very picturesque," said Mr. Zoffany, his hands moving as fast as dragonflies.

"That's why he designed such a little vestibule leading to our Great Stairs," I told him.

"Is it?" murmured Elizabeth, her eyes stealing to her novel.

"He once told me that the large goes with the small, the narrow demands the wide, the bright calls out for the sombre; beauty depends on contrast."

Mr. Zoffany suddenly smiled at me over his canvas, and beckoned me with one finger.

I ran to took over his shoulder at the preliminary marks on the canvas, and suddenly I saw what he meant. It was indeed a study in contrasts. Elizabeth was shown against a great dark bush—how her face and dress would glow like an angel when they were painted in—while my sketched figure stood up as black as the plums I was carrying, black against the pale sky in my white turban, with one black finger pointing to my black face as if to say,
look, look.

I did not know what to say. But the painter, absorbed in his work again, was not asking my opinion, so I went back and stood in position. Elizabeth, peeking at the next page of
Evelina,
rested her hand on my elbow for support. Oddly restless, I looked past the little lakes of our estate, over the ripening fields, the land gently sloping south for miles down towards Greenwich Hospital and the famous cathedral of St. Paul's. I often asked my great-aunt to take me into London, but she always said it was a wearisome place, and not healthful for a girl. If I narrowed my eyes I could just make out the Thames, speckled with traffic. I thought of my mother, who had been part of the cargo of a Spanish ship when my father had boarded it. My earlobes were beginning to ache under their weight of gold.

The housekeeper came out on the terrace to look for me. "There's a visitor here for Lord Mansfield, Miss Dido; I keep telling the fellow the master's out, but he won't go."

"I'll see to him."

I ran up the Back Stairs to change out of my costume first. But when I stepped into the Hall in my blue polonaise, ten minutes later, I stopped short. The stranger was gazing up at the portraits of my great-aunt's ancestors. He was tall, with an unfashionably long, shabby waistcoat, and carried a file of papers. I had never seen a black man before, except in books.

He looked startled to see me too; he bowed a little warily. "Good day, Miss." He had a strange accent; like some of my great-uncle's American visitors, but different. "Would you be Lady Mansfield's ... maid?"

"No," I said a little sharply, "her great-niece."

His eyes bulged white at that. "I understand Lord Mansfield is not at home?"

"That's so."

"I sent him a letter, Miss, Ma'am, I mean,"—he stepped forward, as if to reduce the distance between us, and his face loosened into dark lines—"a letter of great importance, at least to me, and I was wondering if he had received it safely."

"I do not know," I said. His hand was pink underneath, just like mine; I wanted to touch it.

"His Lordship must receive many letters," the man said hoarsely, and swallowed, "but I very much hope—it is of the greatest urgency, not just to me but to thousands of others—that he read it."

"I will be sure to pass on your message on his Lordship's return," I said, too stiffly.

He was turning away when I asked for his name. "I beg your pardon. Somerset," he said, and repeated it doggedly; "my name is Somerset."

After the stranger was gone I stood still for a moment, in the Hall. When I drifted into my great-uncle's Library, the letter he had been reading was still open on the desk, with the rosebuds forgotten and wilting beside it. I thought I would just check the name on the bottom, to see if it said Somerset; then if the man came back, later that day, I would be able to tell him that his letter had been received and read, at least.

My eyes strayed up to the top of the page.

shackles and whipped me like a dog till the skin of my back was in ribbons. When after many years in England I ran away from this devilish master he had me kidnapped and pressed on a ship in the Thames wh was bound for Jamaica. Kind friends secured my release but now my so-called master demands me back and I live every day in periL The matter is in your bands Lord Mansfield sir. I hear that you have on sevl prior occasions ruled that blacks should be returned for resale in the Indies out of respect for the law of property. I ask you now your Lordship if I may be so bold to respect the law of humanity instead.

Your servant (tho no man's slave
),
James Somerset

I dropped the page as if it was on fire. I was shaking all over. I had known that such things happened; I must have known. But I never had cause to think about them, in the course of a day at Kenwood. If I dwelt on such things at all, I supposed they happened far away, to unimaginable people who were used to such things, people for whom nothing could be done. Not here in England. Not to somebody like James Somerset. Like me.