Colleen McCullough - The Independence of Miss Mary Bennet

To the surprise of everybody save Angus, Mary bore her labour pains with patience, tranquillity and copious notes she wrote in a diary between contractions. Twelve hours later she produced a long, slender boy child with a magnificent pair of lungs; he screamed the house down until shown the purpose of a nipple, then mercifully shut up. Mary was following the dictates of her German bible still, and nursing him herself. Luckily she was brimful of milk, whereas the more buxomly endowed Elizabeth was dry.

“God has been very good to us,” she said to Angus, who was a ghost of himself after twelve hours spent pacing up and down the Great Library with Fitz and Charlie for company. “What do you wish to call him?”

“Have you no suggestions?” he asked.

“None, my dearest friend. You may name the boys, I will name the girls.”

“Well, with a head of hair that would set a haystack on fire, it will have to be a Scots name, my wanton wench. Hamish Duncan.”

“What colour other than carrots could his hair have been?” she asked, stroking the baby’s thick ginger fluff. “A dear wee man! I must arrange for Dr. Marshall to circumcise him.”

“Circumcise? I’ll have no son of mine circumcised!”

“Of course you will,” she said, unperturbed. “All manner of horrid substances collect beneath an intact foreskin, including a natural exudate called smegma that looks like cottage cheese. The foreskin is removed by all semitic peoples-Jews, Arabs-as hygienic principle. I imagine that if grains of sand got under it they would hurt dreadfully, so one can see why desert peoples originated it. Graf von Tielschaft-Hohendorner-Gцterund-Schunck says that the wall paintings in Egyptian tombs reveal that the ancient Egyptians circumcised. He recommends that all male children be circumcised irrespective of their ancestry. I have followed his advice to the letter, had an easy pregnancy and delivery in my forty-first year, and so must defer to him in this too.”

“Mary, I forbid it! What will they say of him at school?”

“No, you don’t forbid it,” she said comfortably. “You will consent because it is the right thing to do. By the time he goes to school, I will have taught him how to argue more successfully than a clutch of Privy Councillors.”

“The laddie’s doomed,” said Hamish’s father morosely. “Our son will be branded an eccentric long before he goes to school.”

“There is merit in that,” said Hamish’s mother thoughtfully. “He will have his own niche. Nor, with us as parents, will he be brought up too narrow, as I was.”

“Certainly he won’t lack character, or be a shrinking violet. But, Mary, I absolutely forbid circumcision!”

Mary squealed with delight. “Oh, Angus, look! He is smiling ! Diddlums, tiddlums, coochy-coo, smile for Papa, Hamish! Show him how much you are looking forward to being circumcised!”

COLLEEN MCCULLOUGH WAS born in western New South Wales in 1937. A neuroscientist by training, she worked in various Sydney and English hospitals before settling into ten years of research and teaching in the Department of Neurology at the Yale Medical School in the United States. In 1974 her first novel, Tim , was published in New York, followed by the bestselling The Thorn Birds in 1977 and a string of successful novels, including the acclaimed Masters of Rome series. In 1980 she settled in Norfolk Island, where she lives with her husband, Ric Robinson, and a cat named Shady.