Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits - Donoghue [49]
Clitoridectomy never became very well established in British medical practise, soon being replaced by the more fashionable ovariotomy operation—which also had been pioneered by Baker Brown in the 1850s. But in America, clitoridectomy was widely performed until the early twentieth century. (These days, about two thousand female babies a year in the United States undergo surgery to correct "clitorimegaly," which means being born with a clitoris that a doctor thinks looks too big.)
Figures of Speech
I, Mary Stuart O'Donnell, Countess Tyrconnell, daughter of Rory the O'Donnell, niece of Red Hugh the O'Neill, bearing the name Stuart as a gift of his Gracious Majesty King James, being of sound mind on this fourteenth day of June Anno Domini 1632 at my villa near Genoa, do hereby make my last will and testament.
The Countess is the shape of a cathedral. Under the dome of her belly lives a prisoner who took sanctuary last winter but now hammers to be let out. The Countess's cheeks are porcelain, glazed and cracked with sweat in the light that slants through the olive trees.
Bell comes out with a bowl of cherries.
"How's the child?" asks the Countess.
"Sleeping," says the lady-in-waiting. "How goes the work?"
The Countess tosses down her quill. She turns the paper over and presses it down, letting the ink stain the little table. "What use is it to make a will," she asks vindictively, "when everything belongs to my damnable husband, who's off whoring his way round Genoa?"
Bell shrugs elegantly. "You should write a history, then."
"A history of what?"
"Yourself."
A snort from the Countess. "That's been done. Don't you remember the Spaniard's book?"
"It was full of lies."
"Ah, but they last longer than the truth, as fruit is better preserved in wine than water." She bites a cherry. "Besides, I've run out of time for storytelling."
"You're only twenty-five!"
"This one means to kill me."
"Nonsense, my lady," says Bell sharply. "You bore your first as easy as a peasant."
"But this time my whole body says wrong, wrong."
"Aren't the Irish famous breeders? We're as known for it as rabbits! You'll live to drop a dozen children or more."
The Countess hoists her brocade skirts to her knees. "Look at these legs, Bell, swollen up like marrows."
"It's the heat."
"The heat doesn't make ordinary women faint twice a day."
"Since when have you been an ordinary woman?"
The Countess smiles grudgingly, spits a cherry stone onto the grass.
"Shall I read to you?" asks the lady-in-waiting, taking a seat.
"Perhaps."
"Dante? Tasso? The poems of Mme. Labé?"
"No. I'm too restless." The Countess arches her back against the hard wood of the chair. The obscene bulge of Her skirt catches the sun. It is as if she is swollen up with memories that will give her no rest until she releases them.
"You should write your family's story, if you won't write your own. That would make a stirring tale." Bell's voice is only faintly mocking. "Who has not heard of the O'Donnell and the O'Neill, the glorious Flight of the Earls?"
"Ha! When I was a child, no one ever told me that was just a figure of speech." To distract herself from the twinge under her ribs, the Countess bites into another cherry; it carries the faintest hint of rot.
"You mean—"
"Yes, I pictured them, my father and my uncle, hand in black-haired chieftain's hand, you know, soaring across the Irish Sea like cannon balls."
Bell lets out a yelp of laughter.
"And really, when you look it in the face," says the Countess, "it was an inglorious business, their so-called Flight. My uncle at least could be said to have been a great lord. But what did my father Rory ever do but rule Ireland for a matter of months in his brother's wake, then scuttle away to the Continent with a hundred men and his baby son?"
"Sometimes courage means knowing when to run," observes Bell.
"Well, he might have risked arrest for my poor mother, at least! Couldn't he have kept his ship waiting a single night for a wife laden down in the saddle, great