The Speckled Monster

by Jennifer Lee Carrell

  Later that day, yet another Webb—Bethiah Nichols, old John’s thirty-year-old daughter—rushed in and begged to go under his poisoned knife. Her youngest sister, Abigail, had died the week before; her sister-in-law Fanny Webb, the reverend’s wife, lay so sick that she was swollen beyond recognition. What with her father and her aunt and uncle inoculated, with Esther, Abigail, and Fanny so ill, and now with her own children sick, Mrs. Nichols wept that she had lived in the way of infection for over a month, haunted by inoculation day by day. Time and again, she had dithered and drawn back just as she told herself she was ready. Now, in hope and fear, she had made herself stay with Esther until he came. Even then, she had come close to fleeing the back way out the house as he entered at the front.

  With his soothing encouragement, she undertook the operation. He left her sitting by Esther’s side with a teary smile on her face.

  On Monday, things began to slip and crack. In Union Street, Mary Dixwell’s rash went on thickening; if it did not stop soon, he would have to concede that the inoculation had failed. No, he told himself. Not failed: she had caught smallpox in the natural way, before the operation.

  Worse was the news that Bethiah Nichols was already feverish. His heart sank. It was only the third day of her inoculation. In her case, there could be little doubt: the operation had come too late. Why the Webbs again, Lord? Why the Webbs?

  It wasn’t, of course, only the Webbs. Funerals had become so frequent that the bells filled the air from morning to night with deep, booming carillons of death. Following a recent resolve passed by the General Court, the selectmen (who had pushed that resolve through the court in the first place) met to regulate funerals. No funeral should toll more than one bell—no more of the full pealing tangles of sound, they decided. And no person should have the chosen bell toll more than twice—or, in the case of Indians, Negroes, and mulattoes, more than once. Furthermore, funerals were to be kept to one hour of mourning, between five and six in the afternoon. It sounded draconian, they told the dubious ministers, but really, how could the doctors urge their patients into cheer when death was sounding incessantly around them?

  On Tuesday, the Reverend Mr. Colman had Zabdiel inoculate his daughter Jane. Mr. Melville, keeper of the prison, and his wife, Mary, scion of the vast Willard clan of the Old South Church, put their son and daughter under the operation. As if the Salutation crowd did not want either the world or Zabdiel himself to doubt their faith in the face of tribulation, still another put himself under the operation: this time it was the baker Grafton Feveryear, another of Edward Langdon’s brothers-in-law.

  That evening the Boylston girls sparked into their fevers. For a few hours Zabdiel and Jerusha held their breath, but unlike Tommy’s, the girls’ fevers were mild.

  On Wednesday morning, September 13, a black servant in silver-lace livery strutted up to the door with a message he stressed was urgent: Would Dr. Boylston be so kind as to attend Mrs. Margaret Salter?

  He very nearly was not. At thirty, she was a weakly hysterical woman who was ill every other day—a perfect physician’s nightmare. Though, to be honest, she was also a physician’s gold mine. Her real attraction at the moment, though, was that she was the niece of Selectman John Marion. By marriage, admittedly—but still, she was family. It might—just might—be a way to force one of the selectmen to witness inoculation, willy-nilly. Unless Mr. Marion planned never again to lay eyes on his niece.

  Stilling a tiny voice of warning, Zabdiel agreed.

  That evening, he somehow found the time to slide into the Salutation to meet Cheever over a pint.

  “Mrs. Dixwell’s pocks fluxed in her face this morning, and Mrs. Nichols’s pocks sprouted in hordes this afternoon,” said Zabdiel. “On only the fifth day. None of her cohort of inoculees have yet felt so much as a feverish twinge.”

  “What do the Webbs say? What does Bill Nichols say?”

  “Good men,” said Zabdiel. “Sat there patiently while I explained the different numbering of days between inoculated and natural smallpox. On top of that, they grasped the point before I explained.”

  “There’s no doubt Bethiah’s is natural?”

  Zabdiel shook his head. “None. Not with her.” He sighed. “Though there are plenty out there who’ll be more than happy to doubt it.”

  “In French and Scottish?” asked Cheever, but got no reply. Behind the house, a horse screamed in terror, the high twisting sound nipped by the deeper shouts of men and the clash of shod hooves kicking against walls. With everyone else, they rushed into the stable yard.

  Someone had tossed hot tar on the horse’s saddle, followed by a scattering of feathers. Some of the tar had dripped down on the horse’s back and belly and no doubt burned it; it was wild with panic that was shaking hot drops of the stuff all over the yard.

  The poor man who owned the horse was nearly as frantic as the animal was, running about, yelling and clutching his hair. After watching him for two minutes, Zabdiel told Cheever to haul the man inside for a drink and had the Langdons clear everyone else out of the yard. Then he and Jack went to work.

  Fifteen minutes later, they had the horse calmed down to a shivering stand, long enough to get the saddle off. After another fifteen minutes of jittery walking, the gelding allowed himself to be led into a stall, trusting them enough to let them put some ointment on its burns. They weren’t bad; thankfully, the poor beast had been more frightened than hurt. Zabdiel left Jack working the rest of the tar out, and keeping an eye on the other horses too.

  When he reentered the pub, Cheever was alone by the big fire.

  Zabdiel looked about for the horse’s owner.

  “Lightweight,” said Cheever, blowing a large ring of smoke. “Two glasses of rum punch and his forehead did a double bounce on the table. Langdon’s treated him to a bed upstairs.” He still had a small row of full glasses lined up in front of him. He slid one across the table at Zabdiel. “He’s a visitor. Says he knows no one in town; he’s just stopped here on his way up to see cousins in Cambridge. So, he asks, why would someone tar and feather his horse?”

  “Why would a man like a mouse have a horse like that?” snorted Zabdiel, tossing the rum down his throat. “That’s a better question. Or at least one with a less obvious answer.” He fixed Cheever’s eye. “Did you get a good look at him?”

  “Two rums’ worth.”

  “No, the horse.”

  “In the dark? With him thrashed about like hurricane?” He slid another rum toward Zabdiel.

  Zabdiel sipped at it. “He looks just like Prince. I might have mistaken him myself. Except, of course, that his pockets have been picked.” He threw back the rest of the rum, and then started to chuckle. “Meant for me, of course. Only, my foe in the dark can’t tell the difference between a horse who’s been castrated and one who has not.” His snickering broke into laughter, and soon he and Cheever were roaring till they cried.

  Eventually, the laughter petered out. “You watch your back,” said Cheever. “Bastard who did that’ll try anything.”

  “I’ll be fine,” said Zabdiel.

  Nonetheless, the Salutation Alley men tightened their knot around him. They gave up all pretense of happening to be riding the same direction; two of them began accompanying him wherever he went.

  “I am not a virgin in distress,” he once said testily to Cheever. “I do not need to have my hand held.”

  “Glad to hear it,” said Cheever. “I don’t think we could manage an escort of eight, plus a chaperone for hand holding.”

  On Thursday the fourteenth of September, Zabdiel’s brother edged into the fever even as his own girls left theirs behind, and headed into the rash. Up in Salutation Alley, Fanny Webb gave her husband one last look of longing and regret, and let go of life.

  Grieving for her, and even more for poor John, who looked pithed for all that he was a minister and must urge proper Christian fortitude in the face of sorrow and death, Jerusha gripped Zabdiel’s hand and held her breath as she watch
ed the rash sow its way over her girls. Before she had even dared to hope, it slowed and ran out of seed. Young Jerusha had no more than forty or fifty quickly ripening flecks; Mary and Lizzy had more than she did on their faces, but they skated lightly on the surface of the skin: they would leave no scars.

  On Saturday afternoon, high thin clouds scudded overhead as the New North Church filled with every Webb and Adams in town for John’s sake, and every Bromfield for Fanny’s. Behind them came the ruling elders and deacons of the New North, out of respect for her husband, their pastor, and all the province’s councilors and judges as well as the governor and the lieutenant governor, out of respect for her father, Councilor Edward Bromfield. Behind that streamed the regular congregation and the Webbs’ friends and neighbors. Every house in Salutation Alley emptied into the church, which soon began spilling people back into the streets. The minister’s young wife had held many a pock-ridden hand in the neighborhood when no one else could or would, without a thought for herself. Her husband and father were respected; she had been loved.

  Like a long-legged bird of doom, the Reverend Dr. Cotton Mather stalked into the pulpit to deliver her funeral sermon. But even as he intoned, This brave and beloved servant of God, Zabdiel’s mind wandered. Fanny was beyond help, but he said his own silent prayers for John, who would be lost without her. And for John’s sister Bethiah Nichols, who might yet be saved, Lord willing. But no longer, he thought, in the absence of the Lord’s concerted help. Zabdiel had visited her on his way to the church; she was full of small, depressed pocks that were already confluent, and still they were spreading. Her throat was dry and sore, and she was racked with a dry cough. Her progress did not look good. In fact, it looked damned poor—He caught himself and glanced about, as if someone might have heard the rough urgency of his thought. Still, she might yet be saved. Where better to hope for that than in a house of God?

  Afterward, as the bearers carried the coffin from the church at a slow march and set it on the hearse, the funeral bell found its bronze voice. It tolled, once and then a second time, fulfilling the legal limit of mourning. But the shipwright and anchorsmith pulling the bell rope with arms thick as oaks cared nothing for the selectmen and their decrees of how many times a bell might be tolled, and when; they grieved for the young woman who had cradled their dying children at the stinking worst of the distemper, when no one else would come near, least of all the selectmen. The bell boomed out again. A murmur of surprise and satisfaction rose and died away, and still the bell tolled.

  “It is expressly flouting the law,” muttered Mr. Cook in a tone he knew would carry to Chief Justice Samuel Sewall, three feet ahead. “Twice only, and once for Negroes.”

  “It is the first public funeral I have seen without the ostentation of scarves and rings,” remarked the judge to his son in clarion tones. “It has a very good character.”

  Mr. Cook scowled, but fell silent. The bell tolled twenty-eight times, once for each year of her too-short life, as Frances Bromfield Webb’s funeral procession wound west up Snow Hill to the burial ground and laid her in ground so sodden that the earth itself seemed to be weeping.

  Later that evening, a carriage drew up at the Boylstons’ door, and a small party of Reverend Webbs’s Adams cousins descended. Mr. Jones had been inoculated two weeks before and had done well; only a few scabs still clung to his skin. Now he and his wife—one of the Adams clan—wanted their five-year-old daughter Mary inoculated. With them was Mrs. Jones’s eldest brother, Samuel, along with his wife and four-year-old daughter, both also named Mary.

  The Adamses had already lost two children to other childhood disasters. “I cannot bear even to think of losing my last little lamb too,” said Mrs. Adams, holding the child tight, as if some dark wind might snatch her away. “But it was hard not to fear it this morning.” She had decided in the midst of the funeral, she said, that she and little Mary should be inoculated without delay. Samuel had agreed so heartily with her scheme that he had driven straight here on the way home, without so much as looking left or right.

  Rolling a hoop with a stick, Tommy went sprinting by the bay window facing the street, and John ran yelling after him. Wild laughter could be heard around the side of the house.

  “Whenever you’re ready,” said Zabdiel, picking up his lancet.

  On the seventeenth, Zabdiel’s brother’s pocks came out; Mrs. Nichols’s rash went on thickening.

  On Monday, September 18, Mrs. Dixwell’s pocks at last began to scab, though her face, more truthfully, could no longer be described as having pocks. It was one vast swollen boil. Her throat was raw and her breathing ragged.

  In her big house in Marlborough Street, surrounded by servants, Mrs. Salter detected a fever. She detected a headache. She demanded laudanum.

  Zabdiel detected impatience, but did his best to quell it.

  In a move of unforgivable pride, Governor Shute proclaimed a Day of Thanksgiving in October, provoking dark muttering all over town. Not that anyone was opposed to giving thanks, when it was merited. But just then, with the epidemic’s furor still rising around them, it seemed dangerously imperious, as if setting a date by which the Almighty must behave. Almost as dangerous a temptation of the wrath of God, muttered some, as inoculation.

  The next morning, the advocate general of the province responded by having his daughter, Elizabeth Valentine, inoculated.

  By Wednesday evening, Mrs. Dixwell’s face had scabbed over completely; bloody pus seeped through cracks in the thick crust. The next day, the scabs on her body began to slough off, and her incisions opened wide, disgorging rivers of poison. Both John Dixwell and Zabdiel clung to hope. She was feeling more comfortable; her breathing had eased, and her fever was still moderate. Maybe the scabs and the incisions would eject the poison from her body.

  That afternoon, Zabdiel allowed Mr. Dixwell to bring their two eldest children—ten-year-old Basil and six-year-old Elizabeth—in for a visit, which gave her great joy and, as they were recovering nicely from their own bouts with smallpox, put them at no danger. John, only three, they kept in the nursery, fearing that he would scream in terror at the figure on the bed, who was not, could not, be the big, warm, cinnamon-scented mother he missed. Surely, such a scene would only upset them both.

  Basil and Elizabeth were charged not to mention their little sister Mary at all; Zabdiel still thought it too dangerous for Mrs. Dixwell to know that her littlest now lay in the earth.

  In the midst of this visit, Zabdiel was called away to see Mrs. Margaret Salter, who had taken a sharp turn for the worse.

  When he saw her, she pointed to three flecks—two on her face, and one on her arm—and wailed. He was inexcusably short with her, he thought glumly afterward. After explaining for the tenth time that the appearance of some rash was to be expected, he abruptly took his leave and returned to Mrs. Dixwell.

  As he rode back to Union Street, the funeral bells began to toll all across the city; it was the mourning hour. Five o’clock.

  Mrs. Dixwell’s windows were all wide open and the air in the room was crisp and cold, cut with the scent of burning leaves outside and cinnamon oil within, though neither masked the thick miasma of her pocks. The children had gone, and she was shaking with hysteria. “My baby,” she wailed, as he walked in. “My Mary, my baby, my Mary.” She could hear her baby’s sweet voice, she said, calling her to heaven. She would die in the night and be eaten by worms.

  “She asked,” said John stonily to Zabdiel’s silent question. “Point-blank.”

  Zabdiel sighed. He dosed Mrs. Dixwell with laudanum and sat with her until the crying and shivering went off, and she drifted into heavy purple dreams.

  The next day, he visited early in the morning. She was groggy, but seemed refreshed and calmer.

  That afternoon he slipped away to see other patients. Mrs. Nichols, thankfully, had held steady for about a week: she hadn’t improved appreciably, but she hadn’t worsened, either, and that, at this point, seemed a gift of grace.
>
  Mrs. Salter was lying back on her pillows, a looking glass lying hopelessly in her hand. She had several pink bumps already filling with clear liquid; about two dozen, he estimated. “Twenty-five,” she snapped. He assured her this was a fine sparse number, but she would have none of it: she had a splitting headache, vapors, and she was dying, she announced.

  He returned to Mrs. Dixwell. She had done well all day, but as the bells boomed out again at five o’clock, she began to shake and wail afresh. Ominously, her fever rose with her hysteria. Zabdiel bled and blistered her, but to no avail; the fever soared higher and higher.

  The next morning, Saturday, September 23, the fever stopped rising, but it clamped around her like a vise, inside which she shivered uncontrollably. Zabdiel drew John aside, and began to prepare him for the worst.

  Later, among the stately houses of the South End, he inoculated the only son and heir of Councilor Thomas Fitch; the powers that be, it seemed, were slowly coming around to inoculation, even as his own faith began to waver.

  In the Town House, the selectmen met to discuss the problem of firewood: supplies were already dangerously low, and there hadn’t even been a cold snap yet, not a real one. But the sloopmen who sailed it down from the forests of the north had no wish to touch at Boston. Dr. Mather had sent them a suggestion, and this time, they admitted it was a good one. The selectmen let it be known that if the sloopmen would moor their sloops at the Castle, the town would bear the cost of hiring crews to run the boats over from the Castle to the Long Wharf, unload them, and return them empty and aired.

  They could not face a smallpox winter without fuel for cooking and for heat.

  On Sunday morning, September 24, Jerusha shepherded Zabdiel and the children to church: it was to be a familial day of Thanksgiving, for the girls had shed the last of their scabs. Everyone in their little family was safe.