The Speckled Monster

by Jennifer Lee Carrell

  He fears it will get worse, oh yes, he fears it. His favorite, Katharine, his Katy, twenty-five and lovely, a Lamb inexpressibly dear, is not only a fine cook, exquisite needleworker, and songbird, but his companion in study. Fluent in Hebrew and Latin, a composer of pious poetry, she is his secretary and scribe. She survived the measles, but for two months now she has been declining daily into a consumption—she is succumbing, in other words, to tuberculosis.

  He wrenches his mind back to the smallpox.

  The last time it came into the town, in 1702, he writes, he urged the physicians to try Dr. Sydenham’s cool regimen, which he had seen discussed in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. He is satisfied, he adds, that through his urgings, many lives were saved.

  He flows on with his description of the treatment, forgetting utterly that he got it from the Royal Society in the first place, so the Fellows’ need for a rehash is presumably minimal. He has fallen in love, as he so often does, with the very act of writing: with the way that words flow from him in a glory of speed, the thoughts bending, curling, curving at will, stretching to their utmost, but never breaking. So different from the torture of speaking, of smoothing through the stutter that once tempted him, so strongly, to deny the ministry and follow medicine. But he had proved strong enough—with the Lord’s help—to deny the lure of ease and pleasure, to take the thorny path of righteousness.

  All that I shall now add [he sums up] will be my thanks to you, for communicating to the public in the Philosophical Transactions, the account which you had from Dr. Timonius at Constantinople: the method of obtaining and procuring the Small-Pox by incision, which I perceive also by some in my neighbourhood lately come from thence, has been for some time successfully practiced there. I am willing to confirm you, in a favourable opinion of Dr. Timonius’s communication; and therefore, I do assure you, that many months before I met with any intimations of treating the Small-Pox with the method of inoculation, anywhere in Europe; I had from a servant of my own, an account of its being practiced in Africa.

  Enquiring of my Negro-man Onesimus, who is a pretty intelligent fellow, whether he ever had the Small-Pox; he answered, both Yes and No; and then told me, that he had undergone an operation which had given him something of the Small-Pox and would forever preserve him from it; adding that it was often used among the Guramantese, and whoever had the courage to use it, was forever free from the fear of the contagion. He described the operation to me, and shew’d me in his arm the scar which it had left upon him; and his description of it, made it the same that afterwards I found related unto you by your Timonius.

  Onesimus, Mather sighs to himself, scratching himself with his quill, leaving a faint scribbling of ink on his chin. He will have to do something about Onesimus. He has tried reasoning, cajoling, and beating his servant, and has returned once again to reasoning. But still, the man exhibits some actions of a thievish aspect: he will take small things when he wants them—needs them, as he says. Beads from a broken bracelet. Buttons. A chicken. Herbs from the garden. Bits of bright-colored cloth. This, even though he is allowed to work for himself outside the Mather home, and to keep his earnings, too, so long as some of them are put to pious purposes.

  But then, his piety, it must be said, at times appears shockingly—yes, quite shockingly—lax. He still cannot, for instance, be made to see the blessing of losing his small son Onesimulus to the bosom of the Lord last March, before the wicked world had a real chance to corrupt the boy. Furthermore, he is proving a great disappointment as a servant. Growing useless, frorward, disobedient, rebellious. What is the word he seeks? Mather can sense it hiding there, peeping out behind some veil of darkness in his mind. He waits, with the cunning of a cat, and then pounces. Immorigerous.

  Perhaps he should dispose of Onesimus and supply his family with a better servant. He frowns, bites his lip. Such a grave matter requires Caution, he thinks, much Prayer, much Humiliation before the Lord. Meantime, he has another project to finish.

  He turns back to his letter. To the problem of smallpox. The mystery of inoculation. It works, of that he is certain. What he would like to know is, what does the Royal Society intend to do about it?

  This cannot but expire in a wonder and in a request unto my Dr. Woodward. How does it come to pass that no more is done to bring this operation into experiment and into fashion—in England? When there are so many thousands of people that would give many thousands of pounds to have the danger and horror of this frightful disease well over with them? I beseech you, Sir, to move it and save more lives than Dr. Sydenham. For my own part, if I should live to see the Small-Pox again enter into our city, I would immediately procure a consult of our physicians, to introduce a practice, which may be of so very happy a tendency. But could we hear that you have done it before us, how much would that embolden us!

  Sir,

  Your most sincere servant

  Cotton Mather, D.D., F.R.S.

  3

  THE BEAUTY OF THE SEA

  THE ship was sighted homeward bound on October 28, 1720: two snowy pyramids of sail skimming over the cold, gray horizon, threading through the scattered islands of Boston’s outer harbor.

  Boston watched with mounting excitement. Eight weeks out from London, she was not only expected, but longed for. The North Atlantic would soon shroud itself in winter, making transoceanic voyages all but impossible; she would be one of the last ships in from London until spring.

  With a population hovering between eleven and twelve thousand, Boston was not only the largest port but by far the largest town in North America. Philadelphia was behind by several thousand, and New York was just over half her size. She was, in fact, one of the largest towns in the British Empire, home ports included.

  It was her ships, her deep-water harbor, and her dour Puritan work ethic that had catapulted Boston to greatness: transformed her, quite suddenly, from a small haven of godliness to a queen of the sea, a trade hub of national if not yet world-class importance. Proud of her success, she draped herself in satin and silk, enjoyed strong Madeira wine and fast horses, and sipped coffee, tea, and chocolate poured from china and silver by black slaves in fancy livery. Deep in her old Puritan soul, she was also dismayed with herself: with her hunger for finery, for rum, for carnal riot. She was falling headlong from grace into giddy luxury, and she knew it. She just didn’t know whether to weep or sing.

  In the case of a ship from London, she usually chose to sing, and sometimes to dance as well.

  This ship, like most in from the capital, would be carrying all the luxuries the town craved. Even better, if more fleeting, she would also be carrying news. In well-thumbed sheets of roughly printed flimsy paper and in stage-whispered gossip, Bostonians would soon learn who was in and out at court and in Parliament. They would trace the downward spiral of the stock market in the wake of the South Sea Company’s spectacular, scandalous crash. They would devour news about wars and peace and devious political maneuverings the world over: Paris, Hanover, Vienna, Madrid, Moscow, Constantinople. They would flutter over the latest fashions in dress, hairstyles, and comportment, the very latest in music and books. For it was not just material wealth for which the city yearned: it was sophistication. And ships from London were her chief source.

  This ship—properly a merchant brig—was all the more welcome for being commanded with a lively grace by Captain John Gore. Harvard College class of ’02, member of the Brattle Street Church, mariner, scientific navigator, collector of fine books, and friend of many, he was only thirty-eight, but already coming to the fore as one of the city’s favorite sons.

  So Boston fairly craned her collective neck, watching the brig skim in toward shore. Beautifully made and beautifully sailed, the citizens congratulated each other—for they all laid claim to the fine ships that called this harbor home. And beautifully furling her sails, noted some doubting Thomas, with a frown. The town stood on tiptoe to see.

  It was just so. Unaccountably, she was slowing�
�no, dropping anchor some distance from the wharves. The boat skidding merrily out to greet her veered aside into the wind. Then the town saw what the boat had seen: a flutter of yellow toiling up her mainmast. She was running up the yellow jack, the flag that warned “disease on board.”

  Pulling oars, the boat drew in close enough to hear the shouted news, far enough off to escape contagion. After a few minutes, the boat drew back toward the town dock; a little while later it returned with one extra passenger, skirts whipping in the wind. Rebecca Gore. After a brief exchange of shouts, she blew her husband a kiss and stepped back, throwing a cloak over her face and turning again toward shore. The boat returned with Madam Gore and a tale to freeze the heart.

  Soon after leaving London, Captain Gore had discovered he was in command of a coffin ship: after one sailor erupted into the smallpox, the captain had interviewed every last man and woman on board. He was lucky; they were all lucky. There were no more than seven more people aboard who had not yet had the disease. By the time they reached Boston, six of them had caught it. Again, they were lucky: only one body had slipped, canvas-wrapped, into the sea.

  As they glided into the outer harbor, Captain Gore made it clear to his passengers and crew that no one would go ashore anywhere but into quarantine on Spectacle Island until they knew the fate of the eighth man, and beyond that, until the last scab had dropped from the last survivor. He had sailed in so close only to deliver this news and to catch one glimpse of home—not just the town, but the tall brick house high on the slopes of Beacon Hill, where Rebecca awaited him. That Rebecca herself sailed out as near as possible to him had been at once a surprise and a relief: it was just like her.

  Soon after, the ship drew away eastward, mooring off the quarantine island named for its resemblance to a pair of spectacles through which the ocean could peer up at the skies. The sick were taken ashore to the Province Hospital, clean and new built for the purpose just three years before, and John Gore settled down in his cabin to wait out the fate of the eighth man: himself.

  He did not have to wait long. The following day his temperature soared. Three days later, on All Hallow’s Eve, the telltale rash sputtered across his skin, growing thicker by the hour. For a week, he clung to life, to the cool, smooth-skinned dream of his wife, but his luck had run out. On November 7, he died. The following evening he was consigned to a grave scooped from the windswept sand of the quarantine island.

  Officially, this was not news. It was a secret, kept out of the papers, whirring in hushed whispers. It spread through town, of course, like fire in a dry midwinter wind. The memorial service, a week later, filled the Brattle Street Church to overflowing—not for the man, though he was widely liked, but for the martyr: the captain with the courage to die in sight of home, yet in exile, for the sake of a city.

  “Captain Gore was truly an ornament to his country, to the college, to the town, and to our church,” Mr. William Cooper preached at the funeral, his voice ringing out over hushed weeping, his eyes held with kindness on Rebecca. “Very much the honor of his order among us, a glory to his profession, the beauty of the sea.”

  “Ships!” shouted six-year-old Tommy Boylston, dashing into his father’s apothecary shop, as Saturday afternoon dipped toward sundown and the Sabbath on the twenty-second of April 1721.

  He was Zabdiel Boylston’s favorite among his six surviving children, in spite of his effort not to have favorites. At fourteen, Zabby—his namesake—had reached an age when even the best of sons would clash all too easily with his father, and Zabby was wild, though Dr. Boylston hoped not irretrievably spoiled. John, thirteen, was on the other hand alarmingly earnest and good. As for the girls, nine-year-old Jerusha and eight-year-old Mary already twittered like little ladies. Lizzy, the baby at four, was thankfully as fat, firm, and jolly as her elder sister of the same name, lost to death before this Lizzy’s birth, had once been frail. But Tommy—he was all imp. Just like his uncle, Zabdiel’s brother Tom, after whom young Tommy took his name (or half of it, as Tom said; the boy’s grandfather had to be allowed his fair share). Tommy—little thief—had also taken Tom’s walk, Tom’s talk, and Tom’s laugh, as well as the same rock-solid certainty in Zabdiel’s invincibility that Tom had possessed as a child. Like his uncle before him, he yearned to grow up to be just like Zabdiel. How could such antics and adoration not fill one with delight?

  “Ships!” Tommy repeated breathlessly, all other words having evaporated.

  There were always ships in Boston Harbor, of course. It would surely take more than a ship or two, thought Dr. Boylston, to produce quite the thrum of excitement streaming through the town’s streets. He dropped pestle into mortar and let his son tug him out the door of the shop. The lilacs in his spacious garden would burst any day now, filling the whole street with their sweet lavender foam, but as yet the damp prickle of salt from the harbor still reigned supreme. A few yards down, father and son rounded a corner into the open space of Dock Square at the working heart of the city: and stopped short, eyes and mouths round with awe.

  From end to end, the outer harbor was scattered with the plume and puff of sails—twenty, thirty, forty ships—all bearing down on the town like a flock of gigantic white-winged swans chasing day out of the thickening east.

  It was the Saltertudas fleet in from the West Indies, ushered home by the sleek power of His Majesty’s Ship Seahorse. She was a warship, though not one of the behemoth ships-of-the-line meant to spout half a ton of fiery death at France with each thundering breath. In the eternal shifting dance between strength and speed, her makers had turned into the wind, letting it streamline their very dreams, not to mention their plans and their planing tools. She was no lightweight—she carried twenty six-pound guns and so could throw sixty pounds of fire and steel with one roar—but she was built for speed, and speed she had. Zabdiel was no seaman, not by a long shot, but to his eye she was lithe, lissome, and lovely.

  The beauty of the sea. How that phrase from John Gore’s funeral sermon hung on the mind.

  Boston, it had to be said, was overdue for some beauty. Between the ravages of pirates and a scarcity of currency, trade had very nearly ground to a halt. At least the navy was attempting to fix the part of the problem it could reach: assigning ships like Seahorse to escort merchant fleets in convoys, sending others in heavily armed squadrons to scour pirate-infested waters from Surinam to Nova Scotia. The provincial government, by contrast, had proved worse than useless in solving the currency crisis.

  Within days of arriving, the new governor, Samuel Shute—a bit of a pompous ass, admittedly—had tripped into a petty personal feud with Elisha Cooke, Esq. That gentleman was known as a hard-drinking boor: once, while too drunk to stand, he had been heard to call the governor a blockhead. But he was also the wealthiest and most powerful man in New England, the boss who ran Boston’s political machine—and through it, the province’s elected house of representatives. These two men, both crucial to the smooth running of any government, had mishandled each other colossally; their mutual contempt had quickly seeped through their circles of friends, which had hardened into factions. By now, the parties were far more interested in thwarting each other than in governing.

  Still, Zabdiel reflected, these irritations seemed easy enough to sort into some kind of order—enough to comprehend them, at any rate, if not to fix them. The private troubles that had haunted his family through the autumn and winter were more amorphous, as hard to grasp as sea fog at midnight, impossible to control.

  In July, Jerusha—at forty-one, old enough to make pregnancy frighteningly dangerous—had borne their eighth child, a son she named for her brother Josiah. Jerusha, thank the Lord, had survived, but little Jo had not. His first pink bloom gradually, inexorably, faded to blue-gray. All too soon, they had laid him to rest in the churchyard next to their first Elizabeth.

  Helpless to cure his wife’s hollow-eyed grief, Zabdiel awoke one morning in October to find a professional squabble forced upon him. Not in the open, b
ut in a sly campaign waged in whispers over tea tables and punch bowls, screamed silently in advertisements in the newspapers:

  Dr. Sharp of London being arrived here at Boston, in his return from Jamaica to England, gives notice that he is to be advised with at the Widow Leblond’s in Tremount Street, Boston, he intending to stay but a few weeks in this country. If any are troubled with cancered breasts, or any other cancerous or scrophulous tumours, whether in the throat, or any part of the body, the King’s Evil, leprosy, scurvy, rheumatisms, or any sort of stinking rotten ulcers, proceeding from what cause soever: and because he is a stranger, and to prevent the calumny of designing men, the doctor promises where he miscarries of curing (if such a thing should happen) that he will take no money.

  This proclamation was not, for all its air of proud innocence, a lone voice of salvation crying in the wilderness: it was a salvo of heavy artillery. There were upwards of fifteen doctors practicing in Boston—but this boast was aimed with precision at Dr. Boylston’s fame throughout the province as a high-risk surgeon skilled in cutting away cancers as well as excising bladder stones. Almost, it had the flavor of the conniving malice of that young Scottish snake, Dr. William Douglass—except that Douglass would not admit the merits of Dr. Sharp any more than he would admit those of Dr. Boylston.

  The part that really grated was the postscript: N.B. he gives his advice to the poor gratis. Boylston did not give advice to anyone gratis: which is not to say that he was heartless in the matter of caring for the poor. Jerusha teased that they had traded places: he had become as sentimental as the maiden aunt she used to be. Time and again, he took hopeless cases into their home, nursing them around the clock for months, doing his best to alleviate advanced syphilis, or patch together whatever ribbons and shards were left after knife fights or savage wife-beatings.