Dr. Douglass had guaranteed both.
They had pulled it off in just over a week. The New-England Courant was not merely to be a list of official proclamations and a list of the comings and goings of ships, however. They dreamed grander dreams. The Courant was to be full of opinion and essays both humorous and educational; their model was nothing less than London’s Spectator. Instead of the ghostly spectator who gave Addison and Steele’s paper its name, the persona of this American paper was to be Jack-of-All-Trades.
So far, thought Ben, this Jack appeared to excel at only one trade— crushing inoculation—but surely there would be others with time. Meanwhile, this one gave wide scope for virulent cleverness.
Dr. Douglass had provided the first essay: “A Continuation of the History of Inoculation in Boston by a Society of the Practitioners in Physick.” To be truthful, there wasn’t much in it that hadn’t already appeared in the Philanthropos essay the Boston News-Letter had published; the sniping was nearly identical. But then, Dr. Douglass had written that piece too.
“Infatuation,” he concluded in the Courant’s lead essay, “is like to be as Epidemic a distemper of the mind as at present the smallpox is of the natural body.”
Ben had his doubts. But he liked this new project for lightening James’s temper.
Nothing about the Courant lightened Dr. Mather’s temper. There were further hurried conferences among the clergy, deciding upon who should next take up the pen.
In fact, there was a needling flurry of feathers all over town as everyone who could wield a quill, it seemed, sat down to write somebody else in high dudgeon. The ministers, though, deemed it unseemly to answer such puppies themselves. Increase Mather solved the issue, declaring that his grandson Thomas Walter possessed just the combination of graceful wit, youth, and proper loyalty to the ministers (he was one) that was required. He would pen an Anti-Courant; they would hire Mr. Franklin to print it as well.
Mr. Walter was happy to oblige. So was Mr. Franklin, even as the anti-inoculators gathered at his printing house at the top of Queen Street, preparing to score their second blow.
Meanwhile, John Campbell wrote a rebuttal to the charge that his Boston News-Letter was stodgy. And up at the Salutation Inn, Joshua Cheever, John Helyer, and John and Joseph Webb gathered to defend Dr. Boylston: Desperate diseases require desperate remedies, they wrote. Mr. Musgrave snapped it up for his Boston Gazette.
On the eighth of August, Esther Webb’s rash began erupting; by the ninth, it had thickened into the confluent smallpox. Not until the tenth did fever ripple through the rest of her fellow inoculees: just at the expected time. Dr. Mather had half hoped Dr. Boylston would begin scooping smallpox into hordes daily, but he was disappointed. Worried about Esther’s fate, the doctor would not be hurried.
Nor would Sammy stop following his father with reproachful eyes. His friend Will Charnock was dying. Dr. Mather’s own father didn’t help; you’ve lost the one boy—my namesake—to dancing and whoring, he said. Will you lose the other to death?
On the thirteenth, still on cue, Esther Webbs’s luckier fellows erupted. Still, Dr. Boylston would not be hurried.
Over cakes and ale in Mr. Franklin’s printing house in Queen Street, the anti-inoculation club concocted a delicious satire.
Dr. Boylston was to be commissioned as the major general in command of the Indian-fighting troops being gathered to crush the Abenaki up in Maine. His weapon would be inoculation, with which he would wantonly sow smallpox among the Indians. The doctors roared with laughter, as Ben kept their tankards full and passed the tobacco. It was too perfect, chortled Dr. Douglass: what better place for a doctor who insisted upon riding his rounds, rather than decently being driven about in a carriage?
Ben had even dared a suggestion or two himself, though ever so quietly, in the ear of one gentleman or another, when his brother wasn’t listening. James did not like him to be clever. But his cleverness always found a way out. Why not arm the inoculator with something specific? A lancet and nutshell perhaps? Soon that was zipping around the circle, and had been included. Instead of a bandage box, add Pandora’s box, he whispered in another ear. That, too, was incorporated.
It was Dr. Douglass, though, who proclaimed that General Inoculator and his illiterate soldiers would be allowed £10 bounty for every infected Indian who spread the disease to others; £5 would be granted for those Indians who died too soon to make themselves party to killing their fellows.
To this piece, Dr. Stewart added his first column, a filigree of horror about the plague in France.
At the time, Ben enjoyed both the fellowship and, above all, the clever argument. Delivering the paper on the fourteenth, though, he also saw confusion, distaste, and downright disgust on many readers’ faces.
A tiny, prematurely wizened voice whispered in his ear that such overeagerness for argument was a bad habit. So much contradiction soured conversation—and he could already see that it also produced enmity, where there might have been friendship. Men of sense, he noted quietly to himself, seldom fell into it—except, he observed, for lawyers, university men, and men of all sorts that had been bred in Edinburgh.
On the evening of August 15, Cotton Mather sauntered north up Ship Street with his son, peering through glimmering mist and fog to look in shop windows. At the shop of Edward Langdon, barber and periwigmaker, the bow window was lined with faceless heads piled high with hair: chestnut, blond, gray, white. They paused for a desultory glance, and stepped inside.
Nothing could be more natural, nothing could be more innocent, thought Dr. Mather, than for a man and his son to duck out of a light rain into their accustomed barber shop, warm with musk-scented steam. The shelves were lined with still more wigs, along with tins of powder in various colors and scents, wig ties and ribbons, and stacks of stands and cases. Several comfortable chairs lined one wall, near a long table holding a gleaming array of basins and razors.
It was perhaps not so natural and ordinary for Mr. Langdon to whisk the two of them upstairs to the family parlor, but as no one else was in the shop, no one else was privy to that information.
Enthroned in Mr. Langdon’s best armchair, Increase Mather was impatiently tapping his fingers together in a pyramid in front of his nose. He inclined his head slightly in greeting and beckoned all three of them to his chair. Dr. Mather, Sammy Mather, and Edward Langdon gathered in a tight circle around him, joining their hands in prayer.
They broke up with a hasty amen as they heard Dr. Boylston greet the servant at the door and make his way up the stairs. Increase pointed his grandson to a chair, though Sammy could hardly sit still; Cotton stalked solemnly about the room. Mr. Langdon stood by the window, as if the room had suddenly become suffocating.
Dr. Boylston registered a flash of curiosity when he walked in, but not yet suspicion. Even for a doctor accustomed to working with ministers, thought Cotton anxiously, three generations of Mathers might seem overkill for anything less than a governor’s deathbed. The doctor made no comment, however, inoculating Mr. Langdon so quickly and deftly that Sammy barely had time to pale as he watched.
Dr. Boylston had already tucked his vial of poison back into his shirt and was packing up the rest of his instruments when Sammy darted out of his seat. Snatching Dr. Boylston’s arm, he blurted, “Wait, sir, please.”
Dr. Boylston froze; so did everyone else. Cotton did not dare glance at his father, who was no doubt pinched with displeasure at the boy’s interference.
“Please, sir,” said Sammy, “inoculate me.”
Dr. Boylston looked to Cotton and Increase. “What do your father and grandfather say?”
Cotton began to reply, but his father cut through his stammer. “I have been hoping sir, that such an opportunity might present itself,” said Increase. “There is not a moment to be lost.”
Dr. Boylston’s whole face radiated with sudden pleasure. He bowed. “I am honored, Reverend, by your trust. And I cannot tell you what a relief your support will b
e, to me and to all those who have braved the operation, and who are considering it.”
His words fell like pebbles into a deep well of silence.
Mr. Langdon cleared his throat. “The Mathers, Doctor, are in an unusual position, due to their ministry. I am sure you will understand that they require an unusual degree of discretion.”
Surprise blanked Dr. Boylston’s face, followed by consternation and a flash of anger, quickly controlled. “Surely you cannot mean that you wish me to inoculate the boy in secret?”
Anxiety knotted around Cotton Mather’s heart. Again he opened his mouth, and again his father stole the speech from his throat.
“Discretion, sir, is paramount,” the elder minister pronounced.
Dr. Boylston resumed putting his things away. “I do not operate in the dark,” he said. “For anyone.”
Sammy dropped to his knees; his eyes were huge and dark. “Please, sir.” His voice sank to a harsh whisper. “My best friend died this morning.”
Dr. Boylston glared down at the boy. Cotton Mather started forward, but his father held up a hand, and he stopped.
After a long moment, Dr. Boylston looked back up, not at Increase, but at Cotton. “I will do it for the boy’s sake, Reverend. As I did with my son, you must put him at grave risk daily by your visiting so many rooms thick with the contagion’s poison.” He shifted his eyes to Increase. “Do not ask this of me again.”
Increase nodded, and Dr. Boylston drew the poison out once more, and wiped his lancet clean.
For all his desire, Sammy was not a good patient. At the first scratch of the skin, he went white and began to tremble. Watching his son, Dr. Mather, too, began to quiver. Dr. Boylston worked fast, but not fast enough. Just after he had bound up the wound on Sammy’s arm, the boy fainted dead away, and his father staggered back into a chair.
“He is a delicate child,” said Increase as Dr. Boylston and Mr. Langdon lifted his grandson onto the sofa. “One cut will do.”
“I cannot answer for that,” said Dr. Boylston tersely, waving smelling salts under the boy’s nose. “If you will not follow the procedure properly, I cannot say it will work.”
“It is enough,” declared the elder Mather as the boy came to, moaning.
Dr. Boylston bowed. “I will send my bill in the morning,” he said as he gathered up his things and took his leave; Mr. Langdon showed him out.
The two elder Mathers pretended they did not hear the voices raised in the passage as the doctor told his host exactly what he thought of that evening’s subterfuge.
G.D. Cotton Mather wrote later that night. My dear Sammy is now under the Operation of receiving the Small-Pox in the way of Transplantation. The Success of the Experiment among my Neighbours as well as abroad in the World and the urgent Calls of his Grandfather for it have made me think that I could not answer it unto God if I neglected it. At this critical Time, how much is all Piety to be press’d upon the Child!
And it may be hoped with the more Efficacy because his dearest Companion (and his Chamber-fellow at the College) dies this Day of the Small-Pox taken in the common Way.
If only Dr. Clark would allow him to bring Lizzy into this fellowship of safety, he would rest easy. But Dr. Clark had made it clear that she would suffer no such operation while living under his roof. And with Lydia’s glittering eyes following his every move, Dr. Mather knew he could not have his daughter back in the house. Lydia would not dare to touch Sammy, but the girls she would torment night and day.
Dr. Douglass conferred with Dr. Clark, and Dr. Clark conferred with his brother and the rest of the selectmen. After being threatened with a felony indictment, Dr. Boylston had now tested them not once but twice. They would be a laughingstock if he walked away from such threats unscathed.
“We will get an indictment,” said Mr. Cooke. “And then we will get a conviction.”
For the first few days, as the disease burrowed into Sammy, Dr. Mather hovered at his door, full of generosity and nervous energy. He would press his many terrified kinsmen to undertake the wonderful operation, he thought. For the sake of the world at large, he would write a treatise for the London press—especially apropos, now that he could lay claim to notable experience. For the sake of his own humble corner of the world, he would recommend the insertion of some edifying passages into Mr. Campbell’s News-Letter.
The twentieth—the sixth day, the usual time for the first fever to bloom in inoculated smallpox—came and went, leaving Sammy cool. The next day, the tiresome Courant struck again: and again, the lead column was anonymous but obviously by Dr. Douglass. At the Mather house, the day crawled by, and both father and son began to fret. Dr. Boylston promised a blooding on the eighth day, if no fever appeared.
The morning of August 22 hunched into the afternoon. Minutes before the doctor arrived, headache hammered through Sammy’s skull; his skin was soon clammy with sweat. Obadiah must have given Dr. Boylston the news out in the yard, thought Dr. Mather; the doctor was humming as he stomped up the stairs.
“You are cheerful today,” he said acidly, as the doctor was shown into Sammy’s chamber.
“You will never guess who I inoculated this morning,” answered Dr. Boylston.
Dr. Mather gave up with a quick frown. He did not care; he cared only about Sammy.
“Samuel Valentine,” crowed Dr. Boylston.
Dr. Mather’s heart rose in his throat, spilling over with sweet relief and not a little sour-green envy. For he knew as well as anyone what that meant.
“Bloody hell!” swore Elisha Cooke when Dr. Clark delivered that same news to the select men in their customary room upstairs at the Bunch of Grapes Tavern. “Bloody hell,” he said again, as it sunk in. The news was surely worth two such epithets, possibly more: for young Valentine’s father was John Valentine—no inconsequential ally of the governor’s, but His Majesty’s advocate general for the provinces of the Massachusetts Bay and New Hampshire, and the colony of Rhode Island. He was, in short, the crown’s chief lawyer in New England. To make matters worse—as if they needed to be made worse—the boy’s mother was Mary Lynde, daughter of old Judge Samuel Lynde, and niece of the present judge and councilor Benjamin Lynde.
With Mr. Valentine party to the operation, there would be no indictment on a charge of felony murder, or felony anything else for that matter. The governor, Council, and all the highest legal apparatus of the province might as well have sent trumpeters on white horses clanging through the streets, proclaiming inoculation to be right, good, and necessary.
“Dr. Boylston must be stopped,” insisted Dr. Clark.
“Oh, he will be stopped,” said Mr. Cooke. “They will all be stopped.”
The next day, Dr. Boylston inoculated his own eldest son and namesake, Zabdiel junior, who rushed home after finding that he had lain in an infected chamber two nights running. One of the college friends he had been bunking with for the summer break had broken into the dread fever just that morning. That same day, Dr. Boylston inoculated three more Langdons: Edward’s much younger brother and sister, Nathaniel and Margaret, and his niece Joanna Syms along with Ebenezer Thornton’s new bride, Elizabeth, just nineteen. A neighbor of the Langdons, Mr. Thornton was one of the wealthiest men in the North End.
At the opposite end of Boston’s world, out on the Neck at the Roxbury line, the General Court descended upon the George Inn. The country men had absolutely refused to set foot in the cloud of contagion that enveloped the city. Even the governor had recognized that to demand a meeting in the Town House was futile.
Owned by Jerusha Boylston’s uncle, Stephen Minot, the rambling old inn was known far and wide as a jolly place to break the long ride—and even longer walk—between Boston and Roxbury. With the entire General Court squeezed inside, not to mention regular wanderers and a small army of serving girls handing out beer, strong Madeira wine, rum punch, and gin, though, the huge open common room that took up almost the entire ground floor no longer seemed so spacious. In fact, it seemed hair-ra
isingly cramped and fetid. It was impossible not to draw breath that reeked of having already been breathed by someone else in the midst of drinking and smoking. Hoping to bake, sting, or drown the invisible contagion and render it harmless, most of the men smoked and drank all the harder. Now and again, they looked at each other askance, and went silent or stepped outside for a breath of the hot, humid air of late summer. In such a crowd, thought Dr. Clark as he gazed around the room, the angel of death had only to hover over one man and breathe through his breath to spew death over a multitude.
Mr. Cooke began agitating for a move to Cambridge. The urgency of that move, however, was soon lost as the House began squabbling with the governor and council upstairs over who had the right to send what kind of messages to whom and when. The minutes ticked away.
In town, word of Sammy Mather’s inoculation leaked out; crowds now followed Dr. Mather everywhere. He had forgotten his promise to help Dr. Boylston. The following day, however, the twenty-fifth of August, the doctor gently recalled it for him as they stood together, watching the rash that had at last begun to flow across his son.
G.D., Dr. Mather wrote after the doctor had departed. I will assist my Physician in giving to the Public some Accounts about relieving the Small-Pox in the way of Transplantation, which may be of great Consequence! Odd, he thought, how quickly Dr. Boylston has become “my” physician. He skimmed a few pages back: yes, only a few weeks ago, he was a stranger: “the” physician. Dr. Mather bit the inside of his lip and hoped tightly that the shift would turn out to have been a good one. Sammy’s fever had not gone off as he thought it should. Dr. Boylston, however, was not at all properly distressed. Indeed, the doctor went so far as to look pleased. Pleased! No matter how hard Dr. Mather suggested that his son’s case surely ought to be declared hazardous, Dr. Boylston remained implacably and most irritatingly sanguine.
The Speckled Monster Page 35
