Officially, Boston’s seven selectmen met that same morning. Behind firmly closed doors, they met once again after dinner, joined by the irate speaker of the temporarily adjourned House, who slapped several copies of the Gazette down before them.
“We have already failed to contain the disease once,” he said, glaring at Elisha Cooke. “The very least we can do is to prevent Boylston—a doctor, no less—from spreading it still farther.”
“I agree,” said Mr. Hutchinson darkly. “This fooling with inoculation must be stopped.”
“And if he refuses to cooperate?” asked Mr. Cooke. Like most of the others, he had had a long, informative talk with Dr. Douglass. He had no intention of dissenting; he was just taking the measure of the passions in the room.
“Then,” growled Dr. Clark, “I hope you will call him to public account. I have warned him once already. Unofficially, of course,” he added as several backs bristled. “I’d be happy to serve you again as a more official messenger,” he continued, “but tomorrow morning, as you know, the General Court reconvenes in Cambridge.”
“Leave it to me,” said the doctor’s brother, William Clark. This time, he told himself, no further means of spreading infection would escape his vigilance.
He delivered an official warning, in person, that very afternoon.
Walking by Dr. Boylston’s place the next day, Dr. Mather gazed with barely veiled envy at the doctors’ boys playing in the yard. But when he tried to cross the street, a crowd skittered out of nowhere, drawing so close that they jostled him. They were possessed, he thought, the very instrument of the devil who was tormenting him by dangling the success of inoculation before his eyes while preventing him from saving the lives of his own children. The press began to terrify him; they would tear him like Bacchus from limb to limb. His heart pounding in his throat, he turned homeward.
On the nineteenth, both Moll and Mr. Helyer were a little shivery with fever. Cheever’s temperature, on the other hand, had gone off, and his incisions had almost entirely dried up. As Zabdiel was leaving Cheever’s front gate, John and Joseph Webb, brother brewers and distillers who supplied the Salutation, fell in beside him, insisting that he join them at the tavern to taste their latest batch of ale. He had had no more than two sips when they came to the real point, begging him to inoculate their two families.
Zabdiel tried to dissuade them. John, especially—he was getting on in years. They listened politely, and then begged him again. The smallpox was devastating whole families in the area. Reluctantly, Zabiel agreed on a compromise. First he would inoculate the adults: the two brothers and Joseph’s wife Deborah. Not till three or four days later would he inoculate the children; that way, while the adults were sickest, Joe’s eldest daughter Esther could nurse them. When she, in turn, was sick, they stood at least a chance of being well enough to care for her and the littler ones.
Once they had reached an agreement, the Webbs wanted to waste no time; he stopped in at their place on his way home and performed the operation.
The news did not take long to spread. The next morning as he emerged from the Cheevers’ place, it was William Clark who lay in wait; as the alley was too narrow to admit a carriage, he had strolled up with two man-servants. “Dr. Boylston,” he said, “as you have repeatedly disregarded warnings of a more friendly nature, it now falls to me to request your presence at the Town House this Friday morning at ten o’clock, for the purpose of a selectmen’s meeting to consider the hazards of inoculation.”
“Will you also be considering the benefits?” asked Zabdiel, unhitching his big old gelding and mounting.
“I have brought a summons, Dr. Boylston, not an invitation to converse at a tea party.”
“I will be there, Mr. Clark,” said Zabdiel. “I will be there.” Before he could say anything he would regret, he rode quickly away.
Moll’s fever went off the next day, just as Jack’s had, without ever producing a rash. Also like Jack, her incisions were already drying up.
“You’ve had smallpox before too,” Zabdiel told her.
“Don’t know ’bout that,” replied Moll. “But I’ve had ’em now.”
Cheever, too, seemed to have shaken off the inoculation, but he was certain he had never had the smallpox. By Thursday, though, he was feeling so well that he and Boylston both concluded that the operation had not taken. Perhaps he was naturally immune. Sarah, on the other hand, was grossly, terrifyingly ill; never mind inoculation, in caring for her, he had had every opportunity to contract the distemper.
That night, a fire broke out in a chimney up the street, and Cheever ran to help put it out before it could leap to neighboring roofs. By the time the brigade assembled, the flames had eaten well into one house; roaring and spitting, they were fingering greedily at its neighbors. It was not a roof or a house or even a neighborhood that was at risk. Every man there knew that if the fire tore loose, it would surge into a citywide conflagration: other than smallpox, fire was the worst calamity Boston knew. By the time they wrestled it under control and Cheever finally returned home, he was drenched with water and sweat. It was only after he shed his filthy clothing and washed off the soot that he found he could not dry himself off. It was fever, not the fire brigade’s water that was keeping him wet. Even as he realized this, his head and back exploded with pain.
At dawn, he finally let his servant rouse Dr. Boylston. Zabdiel arrived to find Cheever’s temperature high, his pulse hard and quick, his skin dry and inflamed, and his whole body brimming with pain. Either the inoculation had taken after all, or Sarah, close to death in the inner room, had given him the natural smallpox. Either way, it looked grim. Zabdiel shed his coat and went to work, battling through the early morning hours for Cheever’s life. Unlike Tommy at the height of his fever, Cheever was still strong, so Zabdiel bled him, blistered him, and gave him a stringent antimonial vomit, hoping against hope to draw the poison up to a boil at the surface of his skin.
As he worked, Zabdiel told Cheever about the meeting scheduled later that morning. “It’s an opportunity,” he said.
“It’s more likely to be another witch-hunt,” said Cheever through chattering teeth. “Listen, you sweet fool of a physician: The selectmen made a mighty blunder in the matter of the Seahorse. They’ll be wanting to redirect blame for loosing this hellfire plague toward somebody else. You probably look like manna from heaven . . . Daniel walking straight into the lions’ mouths, never mind the den.”
“You’re mixing up your stories,” said Zabdiel.
Cheever merely grunted. Zabdiel’s problem intrigued him; it was something he could think his way through, whereas his own discomfort was mere animal pain. Also, it took his mind off Sarah, whose misery threatened to turn him inside out with grief. So even as Zabdiel drew several pints of blood and painted his back with a caustic ointment that drew blisters bubbling to the surface, Cheever badgered him into planning strategies and preparing arguments, as if he were headed into a trial for his life. He was by no means satisfied with Zabdiel’s answers when his own symptoms went off, only a few hours later.
Zabdiel lingered, hoping beyond hope that the rash would dust Cheever with no more than ten or twenty specks and then march off again. It all depended on whether he had had come down with inoculated or natural smallpox. Meanwhile, Cheever went on drilling Zabdiel. His skin was still maddeningly clear when ten o’clock veered close and Zabdiel reluctantly began packing up to leave.
“Take the offensive,” said Cheever once more, still lying on his stomach.
“I’ll be fine,” said Zabdiel. “I’ll be back at dinner to tell you all about it.”
“Just try not to be offensive,” Cheever yelled after him.
2
PRYING MULTITUDES
Covent Garden, London
April 1721
WELL past midnight, hour dragged by hour up in the nursery. Lady Mary longed to slip up to the bed and hold a lantern over her daughter’s sleeping face—like Psyche peering down at
Cupid, she thought. She shuddered and gripped the arms of the chair as she rocked, holding herself forcibly in her seat.
Psyche’s reckless curiosity had been a mistake. The moment she had seen the truth—that her husband was no monster, after all, but a young golden god—she had trembled with catastrophic relief. A single drop of burning oil spilled from her lamp and splashed her beloved. Startled awake, he had cast one glance of loving reproach her way, and disappeared. To get him back, she had had to brave the dark hollow whispering of Hades—or was that Orpheus and Eurydice? Lady’s Mary’s mind was thick with exhaustion, and she could not pull the strands of story apart, or make them lie still.
The fire flickered, and she drowsed. Slowly, her grip on the chair relaxed. Sometime later, she watched herself rise, drift to the bed, and draw aside the curtains. Her daughter was encrusted with pearls, tears, roses, and stars. Lady Mary gasped, and all at once they rose from the child’s skin in a swarm, sailed about the room in a long shining ribbon like a comet’s tail, and then poured themselves onto the floor at her feet.
Sort them by morning, or she will die, intoned a deep voice Lady Mary could neither place nor disobey. She knelt in terror, sweeping at the glimmering heap. But the more frantically she plucked at the tears and the stars, the more nimbly they scattered from her fingers, shivering with high-pitched laughter. Her stomach had drilled a hole deep into despair when the nightingales of Constantinople swooped in to help.
Lady Mary became aware of the sun shining in her lap. Birds were singing, but they were not nightingales. She blinked and found that dawn had slipped in through the windows while she dreamed. She stumbled to the bed and flung back the curtains. Among lace pillows and lacier dolls, little Mary lay fast asleep, her mouth parted in easy breath. On her face burned five—no, six—red flecks.
As promised, the eruption had begun.
Gingerly, Lady Mary reached out to touch her daughter’s cheek. It was cool.
She drew in a breath so deep it might have been a sob. Below her, her daughter sighed and stretched; her eyes fluttered, and then she sank back into sleep.
Lady Mary let herself touch her daughter once more, smoothing her fine dark fringe of curls. She was a demure little creature, sometimes tending toward prim. Already motherly—in some ways, more motherly than Lady Mary—and touchingly eager to please. Lady Mary had no notion how she could possibly have produced such a daughter.
Reluctantly, she drew away her hand and went to be dressed. As soon as she was presentable, she would carry the news to Mr. Wortley herself.
By the time Lady Mary retired, this time to her own bed, the six speckles on the child’s face had doubled to twelve. An equally small number had sowed themselves across her body. Most wonderfully, they appeared to have stopped spreading in numbers, and were now growing in size instead.
The next morning, Lady Mary ran to her daughter’s bed directly upon waking. The rash had not increased by so much as a single speck in the night; the two dozen or so she had were already blistering.
“Looks to be a right light case,” confirmed Mr. Maitland a few hours later. Privately, he worried that it might prove too light: however much of a relief it might be at present, surely a mere two dozen pocks could not possibly weave a very strong web of future protection? And what was this dare for, if not that? For the time being, though, he kept his doubts to himself.
By midmorning, the parade of handpicked witnesses began to drift, one at a time, through the nursery. At the far end of the room, Miss Mary Wortley sat on the floor in a patch of hyacinth-scented sunlight and played with her dolls.
“Ignoring the prying multitudes,” said Lady Mary.
The girl certainly did not revel in the attention, as her mother surely would have, Mr. Maitland supposed, at her age. At any age, for that matter. On the other hand, the girl did not hide in her new nurse’s skirts either. “You invited half the multitude yourself,” he countered comfortably.
“I do not count Dr. Mead and Dr. Arbuthnot,” sniffed Lady Mary. Her own personal physicians had already arrived and departed. She missed Dr. Garth, she said, now more than ever since he had died two years earlier. He would be down on the floor teasing Mary into peals of laughter, not looking her over like a vulture.
The first of the vultures to be admitted was Dr. James Keith, Mr. Maitland’s mentor and fellow Aberdonian. He was, however, as different from Mr. Maitland as it was possible to be (and also from vultures, for that matter, as she had to admit): ebullient, cheerful, given to mysticism and seeing the glories of the Lord everywhere.
He made the child smile, at least. Conferring with Maitland, however, his face was grave enough to give Lady Mary alarm.
But Mr. Maitland had only pity for the doctor. “He has lost several of his own children to the worst sort of smallpox,” he said.
Dr. Keith was followed by Dr. Walter Harris. On the subject of acute diseases of childhood, among which smallpox was such an eminent foe, he was London’s most venerated authority, explained Mr. Maitland.
“You mean he’s ancient,” whispered Lady Mary behind her fan, as he was announced.
“Antediluvian,” agreed Mr. Maitland with irritating calm. Dr. Harris had been one of the nine physicians who had stood helplessly about that bed in Kensington Palace so many years ago, watching Queen Mary die. Since then, he had watched the same disease kill hordes of children. If he seemed reticent, perhaps even reluctant to believe that in inoculation they had discovered a workable shield, it was for no more complicated reason than protection against severe disappointment. Against smallpox, Dr. Harris was accustomed to conceding defeat. “He will not rejoice until he is sure,” Mr. Maitland observed to Lady Mary as Dr. Harris departed, “but then he will rejoice indeed. If we can convince him, we will prove the best of allies.”
Finally, Sir Hans Sloane, M.D. twice over (once from the dubious Dutch University of Orange, and again from Oxford), Fellow of the Royal Society, Member of the College of Physicians of Edinburgh, President of the Royal College of Physicians in London, and personal physician to King George, was announced. Voracious for knowledge but a stickler for evidence, he had been ferreting out reports of inoculation from all over the Levant for years now. He could not quite decide whether he was miffed or relieved to find a bona fide experiment proceeding right under his nose— though nearly without him—in the heart of London. It would have been more convenient, certainly, if the persons involved had been slightly less august, and so more subject to his control.
Lady Mary might have enjoyed the curiosity and caution chasing each other across his face, had he not, at his elbow, been towing a second, uninvited guest. Sir Hans bowed deeply, and presented the Hanoverian Dr. Johann Georg Steigerthal.
As it was, she went white with rage, but there was nothing she could do about it. She could not very well send the king’s two favorite physicians packing from her house. As Mr. Maitland meekly put it to her in a pill both sweet and sour, this visit amounted, more or less, to a sickroom visit by the king himself.
Sir Hans proved quite interested in the incisions, and wished for a closer view. With a curt little nod, Lady Mary marched across the room before him. During the whole inspection, she stood over her child like a lioness.
The two men were gentle, but they spoke of Mary as if she were as inanimate as one of her dolls. The blisters, noted Dr. Steigerthal somewhat dubiously, looked more like chicken pox than anything else. The matter within them, agreed Dr. Sloane, looked to be too light and thin to be the true smallpox.
Never mind that Dr. Harris had made the same observations. Lady Mary regarded their doubt as a personal affront. After no more than ten minutes, Mr. Maitland hurried the two men out.
“They might at least pretend,” she shrilled as he returned, “not to expect that they’re practicing for her funeral procession.”
Across the next two days, Mary’s pocks filled as much as they ever would, which was not much. Truthfully, they gave Mr. Maitland pangs of concern to the point
that he found himself in the strange position of rooting for a case of the smallpox to get worse. Slightly, he emphasized to himself.
Had he done something wrong? he wondered. Countless times, he reviewed the inoculation in his head, as if he could have forgotten a step, though he knew this was impossible. In the end, he accounted for the lightness of her case by regarding the difference between the climates of London and Constantinople. Perhaps the pocks would not ripen so fully in the chillier air of England, especially during a spring that had been more than usually dank. This explanation had the added bonus of easing his mind about the operation’s effectiveness too. The Circassians of the Caucasus practiced inoculation to astonishingly beautiful effect, as did other peoples along the banks of the Caspian Sea, in climates much colder than that of Constantinople. Much colder than that of England and Scotland, too, for that matter. Manifestly, they made it work: did their daughters not stock the finest harems in all Turkey?
Lady Mary did not share Mr. Maitland’s caution or the physicians’ doubts. As soon as Mary’s blisters thickened into pustules, and it was clear that no more new pocks would appear, she gathered her daughter in her arms, and wept. It is over, she thought.
It was not over.
No sooner had she dried her eyes, and let her daughter wriggle free, than a line of curious friends and powerful connections appeared at the nursery door. At least, that is what it soon began to seem like.
Lord and Lady Townshend came several times: Dolly because she was a child at heart and loved little Mary almost as much as she loved her mother, and Lord T because he loved to see Dolly happily at play with babies. Also, he quite liked Lady Mary in her own right. Damned fine woman, he rumbled to himself. Startlingly intelligent. Can actually talk political sense. Besides, he owed her an infinite debt for bringing a once-reluctant Dolly around to the point of marrying him. As a result, he was permanently on the lookout for indirect means by which to repay her.
The Speckled Monster Page 29
