Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits - Donoghue [1]
The Last Rabbit
We were at home in Godalming, though some call it Godlyman, and I can't tell which is right, I say it the same way my mother said it. I was pregnant again, and cutting up a rabbit for our dinner. I don't know what sort of whim took hold of me to give a scare to my husband, that is Joshua Toft. When he came in from his day's work at Will Parson the stockinger's, I leant on the stool and huffed like a bellows. "Tis my time come early, Joshua," I told him.
Now, he was all set to run for his sister but I reached up and grabbed hold of his shoulders and bore down with a great groan that must have woken the children behind the wall. Then I reached under my skirt and what did I pull out but the skinned rabbit, with the dust of the floor stuck to it in places?
Joshua staggered till his back hit the wall. I thought he might spew up his breakfast.
Then I took pity on the man and started to laugh. I laughed more than I had in many a year.
We amused ourselves very much with talking of it till we went to bed. Joshua said I was a clever one and no mistake. When his sister came in the day after to borrow a drop of milk, we told her all about it and she laughed very hearty too. She is a midwife, like her mother, and has often said no man could bear what women must.
I miscarried of that baby some weeks after, while I was shovelling dung on the common. It was just as well, Joshua said, as in these times we were hard put to it to feed the two we had got already. The cloth trade was gone quite slack, and Joshua had no work nor any prospects.
"Mary," my sister Toft (Joshua's sister, that is) said to me, "look at that rabbit."
She and I were out in the hop field off the Ockford Road, weeding at tuppence a day; I was still bleeding, but stronger in myself. There was a fat rabbit watching us. "Too far off to catch," I said.
"Mind that trick you played on poor Joshua, though."
I straightened up and smiled a little.
"Think how it would be if it was true," she said. "If you was the first woman in the world to give birth to a rabbit. Wouldn't that be a fine thing?" She had let her trowel fall on the clods. "If it was true, Alary, would you not soon be famous? Would people not pay to see you? We would all be in the way of getting a very good livelihood, and not have to scratch it out of the ground."
My husband's sister is a good woman, but given to mad notions. "How could it be true, though?" I said, bending to the weeds again.
Her eyes were shining now. "Weren't there a child born a few years back with dog's feet, because the woman was frighted by a dog in her sixth month? And another only last year born with all its organs on the outside, that I myself paid a penny for a look of?"
I tried to speak but there was no stopping her.
"And if who can tell what's true and what's not in these times, Alary, why then mayn't this rabbit story be as true as anything else?"
I do not think as quick as my sister Toft but I come to the point in the end. "I'll not go round to fairs, but," I told her.
"No need, no need," she said, picking up her trowel again. "The folks will come to you."
It was said of Mr. Howard the man-midwife that he'd drop his breeches in the High Street of Guildford if it would increase his fame. Before he put his hand up my petticoat to see was I big enough for the trick we were planning, I sent the children to stand outside, though it was raining. The doctor's hands were as cold as carrots, but Joshua bade me hold still. Air. Howard said it was all to the good that I still bled, off and on, after miscarrying, and had a drop of milk in my breasts; it would be more lifelike, that way. If all went well and I won some fame, he said, the King might give me a pension in the end.
Now, I couldn't see why I'd get a pension for bringing forth rabbits, when the country was full of them already, but Air. Howard was an educated man.
Joshua got some dead rabbits from Ned Costen and some from Alary Peytoe and some from John Sweetapple the Quaker, all at thruppence a head; no more than three