The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits (4 page)

He appealed to the attorney, who recited sonorously,

Do phósfainn-se gan feoirling thú
Is nl iarrfainn ba ná spré

"Beautiful," sighed Knox.

"Is that Gaelic? What does it mean?" asked the captain, bewildered.

"
I'd wed you without a farthing, and ask no cow nor dowry,
" Knox translated. "Such a noble and timeless sentiment! Tell you what," he added suddenly, "tell you what I'll do, I'll pay the marriage dues out of my own pocket this minute."

"That's very handsome of you, Knox, " said the parson.

"No bother. Sure don't I love the girl like my own? Start up now, Reverend, now's as good a time as any.
Do you,
etc...."

At a gesture from her uncle, Miss Knox stood up. The captain clambered to his feet beside her. He couldn't stop giggling; his cheeks were hot. He had never thought to be married before tonight. It was all so fast, so funny, so unexpected, and yet, as the apothecary said, so clearly destined by Providence.

The parson said no more than a few fluent lines. The groom hiccuped in the middle of his
I do,
but the words came out clearly enough. The bride murmured her answer without moving her lips. He was too drunk and excited to read the contract; it looked well enough. Their signatures on the bottom of the page almost touched.

"I give you a toast, now," Knox roared, when the brief ceremony was over. "To a most glorious union between two young persons, two families, two nations under God!"

In the morning light the young captain thought his head would crack open. He was lying in a strange room, sunken into a very bad mattress. There was a dark shape, a woman sitting on the edge of the bed, with her back to him. He remembered now. He leaned the other way, tugged the chamber pot towards him, and threw up violently, spattering the floor. "Pray excuse me," he gasped. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. And remembered the rest of it.

She turned her white face to him, and it was traced with faint lines around the eyes, around the down-turned mouth.

"You're no twenty-three." In his wretchedness, it was all he could think to say.

"I am thirty-four years old." Her voice was low, but clear.

"What's your name? I don't know your name, even!"

She watched him coolly.

"I was drunk. I was poisoned with that foul poteen," he ranted. "I didn't know what I was doing. I only rode over from Ballina yesterday for some medicine." He bent and scrabbled for his clothes on the floor. "That was no valid wedding!"

"You gave your consent. There was a parson," she added, "and an attorney."

"Oh, how damnably convenient! Does your uncle invite that pair to dinner every night, just in case a suitor for his spinster niece might ride by?" And then as the young captain heard himself say those words, the truth hit him. He looked into her pale eyes. "It was a trap."

She did not deny it.

"Knox only sent for his friends once he knew I was staying for dinner. An innocent stranger who might be tricked into taking a burden off his hands! The parson to wed us and the attorney to call it legal. You were all in league against me from the first mouthful of soup."

"Not I," she said austerely.

He slammed his hand on the mattress. "What in hell d'ye mean,
not I?
"

"I was not party to the plan."

"Weren't you desperate to get your claws into me the minute I rode up to the door? Isn't every spinster hungry for a Husband?"

She narrowed her eyes to slits. "I'd have to be a deal hungrier before I'd take you. If you think," she spat, "that I'd give a farthing for a pox-ridden Englishman—"

He blinked at her. "What? It's not—"

"It's syphilis you've got," she told him flatly. "If Knox told you not to worry, he was lying. In the end, it'll rot your balls, and then your brain."

He wanted to throw up again, but he was empty.

"Maybe your brain's rotted already. You still don't understand, do you?" She spoke with a cold impatience. "The only reason I took part in that charade of a ceremony was because my uncle told me this was me last chance, and if I refused, I'd never sleep another night under his roof."

The captain took a moment to absorb this. "You could have said no, even so," he raged at her. "Surely you could always find work—spinning, even—"

"Tuppence." Her arms were folded. "Tuppence a day, that's what a woman makes by spinning. So don't tell me what I should or shouldn't have done, Captain."

He stared at his bride for some time. Finally he spoke in a hoarse whisper. "What have we done?"

One of her faint eyebrows lifted. "Nothing much," she said.

"I absolve you of blame," he told her. "I admit you're as much your uncle's victim as I am."

Her eyes were cool.

"If I've, if it turns out that I've infected you, I beg your pardon," he said, knowing he sounded like a boy. Then a dreadful thought occurred to him. "And if there should be other consequences—a child—I'll make provision—"

For a moment her face relaxed, and sweetened, and she laughed.

The young captain blinked at her.

"There'll be no consequences," she told him. "Nothing happened, if that's what's woriying you. I sat here all night and listened to your snoring. We've never so much as shaken hands."

He should have felt relieved. He got off the bed. As he was pulling on his regimentals, he wondered why a weight still hung on him. "I'll go, then."

She nodded, indifferent.

"I expect to be posted back home shortly."

She nodded again.

"I'll never speak of this to anyone," he said, tugging on his boots. "And 111 make this bargain with you"—turning to her—"if you agree never to claim me as your husband—never kick up any fuss, or come to England—"

"What would take me to England?"

"Well, if you promise not to, I'll send you an allowance every year. Not much, now," he added nervously, "but perhaps enough to give you a little independence."

Miss Knox considered the matter, her eyes lidded. "I'll be a sort of widow," she said at last.

"That's right. Only, if you should ever wish to remarry—"

"I won't." Her face was as set as a statue's.

He didn't understand this woman, but on an impulse he held out his hand. "Until we meet again?"

"I think we never will." His hand was starting to tremble by the time she shook it.

Downstairs, the servants claimed that Mr. Knox was out attending to a dying man in Killala, and wouldn't be home all day. This time the young captain knew he was being lied to; he thought he would always recognise the sound of it from now on. He got on his horse and set off back to Ballina. His head pounded like a drum in battle. He looked over his shoulder once, at the window of the room where he had spent the night, but there was no face at the glass.

"
Acts of Union" is based on an anecdote about two unnamed people—a niece of an Ardnaree apothecary called Mr. Knox and a visiting stranger—in
Elizabeth Ham, by Herself, 1783–1820 (
written in the 1840s, published 1945). Elizabeth Ham, an English writer, was living in Ardnaree around 1810 when she saw Knox's niece and recorded the gossip about her. According to Ham, the husband went on to become Aide-de-Camp to a Royal Duke, and never saw his bride again.

Any other June, we would be in Hengwrt by now. I would be waking up with the white-topped mountains ringed around me. Cader Idris, where the giant once sat, would raise its stony shoulder between me and all harm. Sitting under the snowy cherry tree I would keep one ear cocked for the brook that sounds so much like a woman singing, you have to lay down your book and go and see.

But we are trapped in London, waiting to make history.

Keeping a diary is a monstrous waste of rime. But I cannot seem to help it. Without words, we move through life as mute as the animals. Of course I burn these jottings at the end of each year. What I should keep instead is a daily memorandum of my dearest Fá and all her works. Posterity will not interest itself in me; I am only her friend. Her Mary.

On the first of June 1876, then, our Society commenced business with a General Meeting at the Westminister Palace Hotel, Lord Shaftesbury presiding, myself (Miss Mary Lloyd) taking minutes. Cardinal Manning defied the Pope and spoke in our favour. Fá (Miss Frances Power Cobbe, I should say) eloquently proposed a resolution in support of our Bill, which was passed with the utmost enthusiasm.

I break off here to remark that it cannot go on—the evil, I mean. We spill their blood like water. There is so much we could learn from them: devotion, patience, the fidelity that asks no questions. The men of science say they pick only the useless ones, but who is to decide that? And what are we to think, we old maids who have so often heard ourselves called
surplus?

It stands to reason that those who assault nature will suffer at her hands in the end. I read these stories every other day in the
Timed.
A boy was beating a plough-horse with the stock of his gun. The gun backfired and took his arm off.

Do I sound uncharitable?

It has been a long year.

Every week, our Bill creeps a little further through the House, progressing like a pilgrim under the flag of Lord Carnarvon. I try to steady my heart. I work a little every morning in my sculpture studio at the bottom of the garden. My hopes shoot up and down like a barometer. But we walk by the Thames when the sky has begun to cool, and Fit ends each evening by convincing me all over again. The great sacrifice she made last year, when she laid down all her other causes and writings, will be rewarded at last. Every newspaper supports our Bill. The Queen is reported to be most impressed by its wording.

In the veterinary schools they reckon on sixty operations for each horse before it is used up or dies of its own accord. The professors set students to do things that have been done a thousand times before, that could as easily be done on corpses. They practice finding nerves. They burn the living horses, make them breathe smoke and drink spirits, pull out their guts, carve off their hooves, pluck out their eyes, peel back their skin. Still living. If that can be called living. My hand shakes on the chisel when I think of it.

Fá has on her bedroom wall a text that her great-grandfather the magistrate had on his.
Deliver him that is oppressed from the hand of the adversary.

I am attempting a cocker spaniel in brown marble. My master when I trained in Rome was John Gibson—a Welshman, but a Greek in soul. He always encouraged me to be mythological, and I did once try a Niobe, but the swell of her marble breast disconcerted me. I cannot believe in anything I have not seen. All I make these days are dogs and horses.

Kitty brings the letters to me as soon as they arrive, so I can remove the hateful ones. I can tell by the handwriting. They call Fá a stirrer-up of sentimental old women, despite the fact that there are rational people of both sexes in our campaign. If they only knew how little of an extremist she is; she laughs at faddy vegetarians and hunt protestors. All she means to do is control a necessary evil—to minimise pain, to make the men of science accountable. They call her a squeamish coward, but where is the courage in what the vivisectors do? Boys pulling wings off flies.

The day our Bill becomes law, no experiment whatsoever may be performed on a living cat, dog, horse, ass, or mule, nor on any other animal except (in almost all cases) under conditions of complete anaesthesia from beginning to end. The reign of terror is almost over.

I wish we were in Wales. It is easier to believe in a state of nature there.

No news.

Last year Fá and I passed through the Vale of Llan-gollen and visited the pretty house where the Ladies lived. It is said the two of them never slept a night away from home. Nothing parted them; nothing disturbed them. They supported no causes. They took no part in public life. They did nothing; they were ladies in the old sense. They looked no farther than the ends of their aristocratic noses.

Shall I confess? Sometimes I long for such a life. A narrow, private existence, as Fáwould call it; a limited life. House and hearth and daily bread. Like Rosa Bonheur and her friend, when we visited, with their horses, goats, sheep, monkeys, donkeys, lapwings, and hoopoes! I can imagine us at Hengwrt with our animals around us, well fed and tended, and no thought of all the others. No memory of all the viciousness of the world.

Fifteen years ago we made our bargain. A trip to Wales every summer, but Kensington all the rest of the year. Meetings, dinners, petitions, debates, dinners, appeals, circulars, dinners, calls, printings, meetings, dinners. There are things to be said on platforms; things to be said at tea-tables. And things not to be said at all.

A lady lion-tamer put her head in a lion's mouth last week, and he bit it off. If a lion attempted to put his head in my mouth I expect I would do the same.

Lord Carnarvon has been called away from London to his dying mother. She lingers; he has been gone for a fortnight now. Meanwhile our Bill lacks a midwife to see it through the House. Fa rages at Carnarvon for what she calls his dereliction of duty. But how is the poor man to choose? On one side, the muffled cries of hundreds of thousands of creatures; on the other, his mother. It would drive anybody mad.

The slightest things set us ajitter, at this eleventh hour. On the way home from chapel I panicked at the bray of an ass. Yesterday I snapped at Fa over the grocer's bill. She asked if I would prefer her to earn a thousand a year or do God's work on earth?

If we cannot love each other through times like these, then what we thought a rock beneath us is turned to shifting sands.

She was on crutches when I met her. Summer in Rome; I was working on a model of my little Arab horse when Charlotte Cushman was announced, with a visitor. To think of a time when it was not familiar, that warm bulk, lurching across the room! An Irish lady of honourable birth, Miss Frances Power Cobbe. She told me very cheerfully about the doctor who had left her crippled. I asked her to come riding on the Campagna. I was merely being polite; I never thought she would come.