In 1867, as a result of publishing his book, Baker Brown was expelled from the Obstetrical Society and had to resign from his private clinic, the London Home for Surgical Diseases of Women. I have drawn on Ornella Mosucci's excellent essay, "Clitoridectomy, Circumcision, and the Politics of Sexual Pleasure in Mid-Victorian Britain," in Sexualities in Victorian Britain, edited by Andrew H. Miller and James Eli Adams (1996).
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 with child? Had he no curiosity to see my face? He couldn't have known I was only going to be a daughter."
Bell shrugs again, more sympathetically.
"What I used to dream of at night was even more stirring," says the Countess reflectively. "The Return of the Earls! My father and my uncle, coming back for my sake. What ships they would have mustered, what guns they would have carried, what glories would have returned to Ireland if that pair of drunkards hadn't died of Roman fever in their first year of exile."
"Instead, you grew up like a good traitor's daughter, and followed in their footsteps," Bell points out.
"It was hardly the same."
"Wasn't it an adventure, though, my lady?"
"Our days of youth, you mean?"
"Sneaking round Hampton Court behind the English King's back, hearing Mass in secret, hatching mad plots of escape—"
"Mad they may have been," says the Countess, "but what choice had I? How could my grandmother ever have thought it?"
"What, that you'd many a Protestant at her say-so?"
"That I'd drop the Holy Cross like some limp-wristed ninny, yes," says the Countess severely.
"Well, since you put it that way." Bell is amused. "Your grandmother was no match for you. Though, to give him his due, it was John who hatched the plan of putting us in breeches."
The Countess's face falls at the name. "We never should have leagued with that fellow," she says coldly.
"He was your cousin, after all. The blood of the O'Donnells."
"He was a bastard, with no right to claim the name."
"Come now, the man did get us away from Hampton Court with our heads still on. It was that or the Tower," argues Bell. "Do you remember picking our disguise names?"
"We sat up half the night at it," remembers the Countess; then her eyes flicker as if she is in pain.
"Rodolphe, and Jacques, and Richard," says Bell, like a litany. "We wanted to sound like three ordinary young bucks, setting sail for the Continent."
"No, I wanted to go back to Ireland." Mary Stuart O'Donnell's voice is mutinous.
"Ah, but the winds turned our ship from west to east, three times," Bell reminds her. "You can't argue with your fate."
"Don't tell me what I can't do," snaps the Countess. She squeezes her eyes shut.
"What is it?" asks Bell, serious. "Have the pangs begun?"
The Countess nods once. She picks up a pair of cherries, but cannot eat them; she tosses them to a passing crow. "Some days," she says slowly, "I would gladly trade every ancient marble, every purple hill, every jug of wine in Italy to be back in the County of Kildare."
"I like this place, myself," says Bell, gazing at the olive trees.
"At Poulaphouca waterfall there was a sprite, you know, that took the shape of a horse if you looked into the torrent for long enough. In the castle where I grew up, you had to keep one eye out behind you for the Wizard Earl, who was said to have dabbled in magic until he turned himself into a blackbird. On windy nights you could hear him pounding by on a white horse shod with silver. My nurse promised me that when the horses shoes wore down, the Wizard Earl would come back and free Ireland from English rule."
"Did you picture him as your father?"
"Of course." The pain girds the Countess now; she holds her breath until it lets her go.
"Do you remember, on our flight from England, when the three of us were caught in that storm in the Alps, and
your moustache was washed away?" Even-voiced, Bell is trying to distract her mistress. "And that ostler that called you hermaphrodito!"
But the Countess is frowning. "To come all that way, through Flanders and France and Italy, lauded as an Amazon and a Martyr for the Faith—to be received by the Pope, like my father before me—and end up nothing but John's wife!"
"On the road," Bell reminisces, "you used to warn him, if he got me a great belly you'd put your gun to his head and make him many me!"
The Countess laughs all at once till tears stand out in her eyes. "Somehow I never imagined it would happen to me. I thought I was above the lot of womanhood." She doubles over, now. "Holy Anne be with me, this creature has claws!"
"Oh, I bought you this from a pedlar," says Bell, pulling what looks like a twig out of her pocket. "It's a bit of Saint Anne's own knee bone, the best thing for a birth."
"Shouldn't I rely on the Sacred Name of Jesus?" quibbles the Countess, panting.
Bell shakes her head. "Only the Saint cares to ease women's pain."
The Countess grabs the bit of bone, encloses it in her fist.
Bell scans the horizon in the direction of Genoa. "John might be home by nightfall."
"And sparrows might plough fields," spits his wife. "That man's going to end up drinking himself to death, in the best O'Donnell tradition, before his children are old enough to know his face. And what I cannot reconcile myself to," she says, talking fast and breathing hard, "is that after all my exceptional adventures, I, a hero's daughter, am going to die like any ordinary woman, in a bed of sweat and blood and ¿bit."
"You won't die," said Bell sternly.
"No?"
"Not this time. I know these things."
"Liar." The Countess smiles through gritted teeth.
"Then after your confinement you can invite that Gentileschi woman down from Naples to paint the pair of us."
"As Judith with her maid; that's her speciality."
"Knives dripping blood!"
"Oh, Bell." The Countess stops laughing. She clutches her skirts. The waters have come down, seeping through her petticoats like the Po when it mounts its banks.
"Come in, now, my lady," says Bell. "It's time."
"What about the cherries?" gasps the Countess, distracted.
"Leave them for the birds." She takes her mistress by the sweating hand and leads her in.
Note
"Figures of Speech " was inspired by the Dictionary of National Biography entry on Mary Stuart O'Donnell, Countess Tyrconnel (1607–49) by Richard Bagwell, which mentions an unhappy letter she wrote to Cardinal Barberini in February 1632 when she was pregnant for the second time. A heavily fictionalised Spanish biography of the Countess's early adventures was published by Albert Enriquez in Brussels in 1627; my main source is the French translation by Pierre de Cadenet, published in Paris in 1628 as Resolution courageuse et lovable, de la comtesse de Tirconel, Irlandoise.
Nothing further is known of Mary Stuart O'Donnell, except that she survived this second childbirth and lived another seventeen years.
Words for Things
The day before the governess came was even longer. Over a dish of cooling tea, Margaret watched her mother. Not the eyes, but the stiff powdery sweep of hair. She answered two questions—on the progress of her cross-stitch, and a French proverb—but missed the final one, on the origin of the word October. Swallowing the tea noiselessly, Margaret allowed her eyes to unlatch the window, creep across the lawn. She thought she could smell another thatch singeing.
The next morning woke her breathless; one rib burned under the weight of whalebone. The dark was lifting reluctantly, an inch of wall at a time. Practised at distracting herself, Margaret reached down with one hand. She scrabbled under the mattress edge for the buckled volume. But it was gone, as if absorbed into the feathers. Confiscated on her mother's orders, no doubt. Clamping her eyes shut, Margaret focused on the rib, bending her anger into a manageable line. She lay flat until the room was full of faint light that snagged on the shapes of two small girls in the next bed.
Her belly rumbled. Margaret was hungry for words. None on the walls, except an edifying motto in cross-stitch hung over the ewer. Curling patterns on the curtains could sometimes be suggested into letters and then acrobatic words, but by now the light was too honest. She shut her eyes again, and called up a gray, wavering page with an ornate printer's mark at the top. "The History of the Prim-dingle Family," she spelled out, "Part the Fifth." Once she worked her way into the flow, she no longer needed to imagine the letters into existence one by one; the lines formed themselves, neat and crisp and believable. Her eyes flickered under their lids, scattering punctuation.
The black trunk sat in the hall, its brass worn at the edges. Dot caught her winter petticoat on it as she scuttled by.
The governess was in the parlour, sipping cold tea. Mistress Mary, her employer called her; it was to be understood that the Irish preferred this traditional form of address, and besides, it avoided the outlandish surname. Her Ladyship showed no interest in wages, nor in the little school Mistress Mary used to run in London, nor in her recent treatise on female education. Her Ladyship's questions sounded like statements. She outlined the children's day, hour by hour. They had been let run wild too long, and now it was a race to make the eldest presentable for Dublin Castle in a bare two years. The girl was somewhat perverse, her Ladyship mentioned over the silver teapot, and seemed to be growing larger by the day.
Mistress Mary watched a minute grain of powder from her Ladyship's widow's peak drift down and alight on the surface of the tea. She had been here one hour and felt light with fatigue already. The three children were the kind of hoydens she liked least, the fourteen-year-old Margaret in particular having an unrestrained guffaw certain to set on edge the nerves of any potential suitors. The governess asked herself again why she had exiled herself among the wild Irish rather than scour pots for a living.
"But your mother was a native of this country, was she not, Mistress Mary? You are half one of us, then."
"Oh, your Ladyship, I would not presume."
But that bony voice did remind the governess of her mother's limper tones. Bending her head over the tea, Mistress Mary heard in her gut the usual battle between gall and compassion.
Behind an oak, Margaret was shivering as she nipped her muslin skirts between her knees. If she stood narrow as a sapling she would not be seen. The outraged words of two languages carried across the field, equally indistinguishable. Dot would carry the news later: who said what, which of the usual threats and three-generation curses were made, which fists shaken in which faces. It had to be time for dinner, Margaret thought. She would go when the smoke rose white as feathers from the second thatch.
"Stand up straight," her mother told her. "You have been telling your sisters wicked make-believe once more. How can I persuade you of the difference between what is real and what is not?"
"I do not know, madam."
"You will run mad before the age of sixteen and then I will be spared the trouble of finding a husband for you."
"Yes, madam."
"Have you forgotten who you are, girl?"
"Margaret King of the family of Lord and Lady Kingsborough of Kingsborough Estate."
"Of which county?"
"Of the county of Cork in the kingdom of Ireland in the year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and eighty-six."
"Now go and wash your face so your new governess will not think you a peasant."
In November the evictions were more plentiful, and Margaret wearied of them. The apple trees stooped under their cloaks of rain. Mistress Mary had been here three weeks. She and the girls were kept busy all day from half past six to half past five with a list of nonsensical duties. So-called accomplishments, being in her view those things which were never fully accomplished. Mistress Mary kept biting her soft lips and thinking of Lisbon. The children churned out acres of lace, lists of the tributaries of the Nile, piles o
f netted purses, and an assortment of complaints from violin, flute, and harpsichord. The two small girls could sing five songs in French without understanding any of the words, and frequently did. The harpsichord was often silent, on days when Margaret, blank-faced and docile, slipped away with a message for the cook and was not seen again.
Sometimes, losing herself along windy corridors, her air of calm efficiency beginning to slip, Mistress Mary caught sight of a long booted ankle disappearing round a corner. On the first occasion, the matter was mentioned to her Ladyship. Bruises slowed Margaret's walk for a week, though no one referred to them. After that, Mistress Mary kept silent about her pupils comings and goings. She would conquer the girl with kindness, she promised herself. Tenderness would lead where birch could not drive.
"Need the girl sleep in her stays, your Ladyship? She heaves so alarmingly at night when I look in on her."
"As your Ladyship wishes."
Considering her governess's animated face bent over a letter, Margaret decided that here was one doll worth playing with. She knew how to do it. They always began stiff and proper but soon they went soft over you, and then every smile pulled their strings. Mostly they were lonely, and despised themselves for not being mothers. The Mademoiselle in her last boarding-school was the easiest. Watch for the first signs—vague laughter, fingers against your cheek, a fuzziness about the hairline—and seize on her weakness. Ask her to help you tie the last bow of ribbon on your stomacher. Take her arm in yours while walking, beg to sit next to her at supper, even bring her apples if the case requires it. Mademoiselle, the poor toad, had reached the stage of hiding pears in Margaret's desk.