Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits - Donoghue [12]
The Fox on the Line
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