Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits - Donoghue [4]
In the days after, a Air. D'Anteny came down from London, and a Mr. Ahlers and a Mr. Molyneux and a Mr. Brand, and other doctors whose names I forgot as soon as I heard them. They all carried three-cornered hats that would never fit over their wigs. There was much nodding and bowing to each other, but anyone could have guessed they were not friends.
They watched me like owls. I am not a handsome woman; all my features are bigger than they need be for a body so small. But these gentlemen looked at me if I was made of gold, and by now I was so brazen I could look right back. One wiped his hand on his satin breeches and said he had discovered an enormous great tumour in the woman's—meaning my—stomach, but Mr. Howard informed him that it was simply the neck of the womb. He didn't like that, to have his ignorance made a show of.
The births we performed late in the afternoon, when it was too dark to see clearly but not so dark that the candles had been brought in. Mr. Ahlers pulled out the fifteenth rabbit like a child digging for treasure. "Did I hurt you?" he asked.
"Yes, sir."
And he wrote it down in his book, and gave me a guinea, for my misfortunes.
Air. Howard laughed, later, and said he'd wager I never got a guinea for a rabbit before. But his voice was high in his throat, and his hands were restless; I could tell he was fretting.
The visitors would not deny this rabbit miracle, nor swear to it. Two of the doctors spoke foreign gibberish; the others only hummed and hawed, and refused to make so bold, and could not positively say, and deferred to their learned friends' opinions. The day I produced my eighteenth rabbit, I suddenly saw what my sister Toft held meant, when she told me how impossibilities might as easily be believed as not.
I was sore inside from strainings and pokings, and bled more than I had before. I couldn't sleep at night for visions of fields full of rabbits. One day the lodging-keeper tried serving me one for dinner, and I spat it out. She complained that her larder was choked with rabbits, and the same throughout the country, as no one was willing to eat what might have come from between a woman's legs. My sister Toft roared laughing and told me I was famous.
I couldn't laugh. Did I know, by then, that our luck was running dry?
All I remember is that when the maid announced Sir Richard Manningham the next day, the first sight of him filled me with dread. He was a man-midwife, they said, who knew more about childbirth than anyone living.
"The os uteri is so tightly shut," he murmured as he pulled his smooth hand out of me, "that it would not admit so much as a bodkin."
I shrank from him.
Sir Richard pointed out that my belly was flat, and said the leaping motion was merely a muscular spasm. I lay still, panting. I knew his dark eyes could see right through me. My sister Toft gave me sneezing powder, to dislodge the rabbits, she said. I sneezed till my nose bled. Sir Richard lent me a handkerchief. I started to cry.
"Why do you weep?" Sir Richard asked me, not unkindly.
My sister Toft told him it was no wonder the poor woman cried, when he had as good as called her a liar in front of the whole company.
The room grew hotter; sweat ran down my sides. The air was thick with breathing. I asked for a window to be opened, but Air. Howard said night air would be fatal in my condition. Instead he let me have some more beer. I began to hate him.
I tried to remember if childbirth itself was as bad as this mockery of it. With my last boy I was three days in labour, but at least I knew there was a real child to bring forth, not like this hollowness, this straining over nothing.
The doctors spent hours in the