Sarah Moss began to relax. One day, she offered to teach Lizzy her alphabet and her numbers.
Lizzy practiced as long as there was daylight. Real nurses must be able to read the doctor’s instructions, after all.
She did not see Mr. Maitland again for some time. When she did, she was surprised at how haggard he looked.
“What’s ’appened at the ’Eaths’?” she asked.
“Heaths’?” he asked absently from the window. “Oh. Both boys at last recovered . . . I did not think it was catching,” he said, dropping into a chair. “So much of the arguing, you see, has centered on whether or not inoculation produces a true smallpox or a spurious one—the chicken pox.”
He shook his head and dropped it in his hands. “You’d have thought, given my position, I would have foreseen this. But I was as lulled into false understanding by the lightness of inoculated cases as Dr. Wagstaffe. And now six people are ill, and one of them is dying.”
Mr. Batt, he said, had six domestic servants—four men and two maids—who had all cared for little Mary while she was down with the inoculated smallpox. He shook his head. Even with the pocks full upon her, they had hugged and petted her daily. Two weeks or thereabouts after the height of the girl’s rash, they had all been seized at once with the telltale fever, backache, and nausea.
As if that weren’t enough, Mrs. Heath’s infant, still suckling at her breast, had also caught the natural smallpox—distinct, thank God. And Mrs. Heath, too, who’d had the distemper many years before, had grown several pimply pustules on her face and hands, though without any sickness attending them. “As often happens to smallpox nurses—and even to the laundresses who must wash their linens,” he said. He smiled ruefully. “Just as has happened to you.”
It was strange, he said, how different the Batt servants’ cases had been, though they had all been infected from the same source—and that a light case of inoculated pox, no less. But the servants had suffered varying degrees of distinct pox, mostly bad, and two had turned confluent, with all its calamities. “But they all did well,” he said. “God be thanked.”
“All?” she asked gently.
“All except one,” he said gruffly. “But she would not be governed.”
He turned his back on that death; there was nothing to be gained by stewing over it. The best he could do was to try and understand it.
It was in talking to Lizzy that he began to order his arguments. Lizzy, of course, was proving that smallpox could not reinfect the inoculated, in the natural way. Inversely, these unforeseen accidents had shown that inoculated smallpox could infect the unprotected. What better double-underlined proof could there be that the inoculated smallpox was indeed a true smallpox?
By the beginning of November, Mr. Maitland was sure of his success. He waited impatiently, however, until midmonth, when Lizzy’s boy was all but recovered and she was still free of fever and spots, before he sat down to write his official report.
Having understood, since my retirement into the country, that the late experiment of inoculating the smallpox at Newgate has been pretty much talked of; and finding withal that the reports of that matter are various and oftentimes contradictory: I thought it became me to give the public a plain and honest account of the truth of facts.
There were so many issues, so many questions, findings, scruples, and doubts. How was he to marshal them all into neat soldierly rows? One at a time, he thought, take them one at a time, beginning with the most important. What was the ultimate reason for making this latter experiment?
Following the success of Newgate, he wrote, I still had one difficulty left, which I took to be the most considerable; and which, if not fully cleared, would render, in my opinion, the whole of the process but trifling and precarious: and that is, whether everyone who had undergone this operation is really secured against all future danger of catching the smallpox by infection? Were I but well assured of this, I should then, I thought, be at liberty to practice it myself, and likewise with confidence recommend it to others.
He sighed with satisfaction. He was now in a position to answer his own question, and to answer it strongly.
I myself have lately made open and repeated trials on one of the six inoculated criminals of Newgate, reserved for that purpose, sufficiently to convince anyone that there’s no danger of their catching the disease by any future infection. This is one Elizabeth Harrison, of about nineteen years of age. Here I must observe to you that this girl had the fewest eruptions upon her of any of the five that were inoculated at Newgate, but had a more than ordinary discharge at the incisions.
Referring to his notes, he described in detail her trials in the house of Mrs. Moss, nursing the servant maid and the boy. It was all neat and good. More than that, it was incontrovertible.
Even as he thought this, however, he heard in his mind Dr. Wagstaffe scrupling to doubt that so much as a single word was true. The mere memory of the man’s voice irritated him.
There’s no ground to question these facts, he scribbled, being attested by a cloud of witnesses.
He took a breath and put his aggravation away. He was a surgeon from Aberdeen, and though he was proud of his work, he was an honest man. He knew he did not walk among the great geniuses of the age. He had played his part well, he hoped, but he had not sought it out. He had even sought to avoid it. The discovery had tapped him on the shoulder; he had not, like Sir Isaac Newton, dared to run along the shore of some vast ocean of truth, chasing down a particular shell. Nevertheless, it had fallen to him to call forth the trumpets. He must somehow rise like a poet, a prophet, and declare the Truth.
He closed his eyes and thought of a falcon he had once seen, winging over the heather at home; he thought of another he had seen soaring below him, and beyond that, the flower-strewn plain of Turkey, as he descended from the crags of the Bulgarian mountains. Then he leaned forward, biting his lip as he wrote.
Hence, if any regard be due to facts, I am persuaded that all impartial people will allow this method to be not only safe, but useful, and highly worthy to be received with esteem and applause.
He drummed his fingers on the table. That was good, that was accurate and rational, but it did not have a heart-sweeping wheel and swoop.
Is it not a matter of the greatest importance to us, to know how to prevent the mighty contagion of the smallpox, and how to preserve our children and families from the violent attacks, and fatal effects of it? What would not tender parents give to secure to them the lives and features of their beloved offspring, when they behold them disfigured by the loathsome disease and struggling with the pains of death? Do not we oftentimes see great families extinguished by it, as by the plague, and their titles and estates thereby transmitted to strangers? And if they have the good fortune to escape with their lives, what an ugly change from what they were before! What pittings, seams, and scars in their faces! What films and fistulas, and sometimes blindness in their eyes! What ulcers and abscesses in their bodies, contractions of the nerves, and even lameness of for life! Again, to avoid the infection, what uneasiness and disquiet of mind, what fears and apprehension do not even grown people labour under, especially the more delicate and tender? Don’t they renounce all commerce with their best friends and dearest relations? And if by chance they meet an object that has but lately recovered, how susceptible then are they of the distemper? And how few thus seized do ever escape?
In short, then, to prevent the havoc made by that mighty disease, which has hitherto seemed to go forth like a destroying angel, subduing all before it and contemning all human means used to stop its career, I may truly venture to affirm that the method here recommended is the safest and, I am sure, far the most infallible.
He tossed down the pen, caught up his coat, hat, and walking stick, and went out for a long winter walk.
9
RAW HEAD AND BLOODY BONES
Boston
September 25, 1721
JERUSHA found Zabdiel sitting in the parlor th
e next morning, his head in his hands. He looked up blearily as she came in. “Mary Dixwell died last night.”
She crossed the room and knelt by his side.
“I don’t think I killed her, Jerusha. But I cannot stand before my Maker and swear I did not.”
Dr. Douglass rubbed his hands with glee, and sat down to write a letter to Dr. Alexander Stuart of the Royal Society. The smallpox rages here epidemically: about a thousand persons are decumbent with the disease. Above sixty persons of all ages, sexes, and conditions have been inoculated, of which several had the confluent sort, and I am sorry to say, one—and here he paused. Mrs. Dixwell’s death he was sure of. But the number might be considerably worse. Might double, in fact. From what he heard, Mrs. Nichols was not doing well at all. She might very well die herself in the next week or two. He did not, however, wish to hold his letter that long. Lord knew when another ship might sail for London.
He smiled and dipped his quill in the ink once more. I am sorry to say, one or two have died.
HMS Seahorse returned from her northern voyage; this time, nobody congregated to see the plume of her sails. A few anxious wives and parents slipped down to the Long Wharf, handkerchiefs to noses, averting their eyes from each other to avoid exchanging greetings that might also exchange contagion.
With the rolling gait of a sailor and the confidence of a man, Charles Paxton strode down the gangplank.
“Where is Hector?” asked Captain Paxton as his son stepped onto the dock.
Charles was taken aback. “Why, with you, Father. Where should he be?”
Captain Paxton’s grip on his walking stick tightened. “I am in no mood for banter.”
“But he never rejoined the ship.”
“Never—?”
“He met Captain Durell himself the morning we left, and showed him a letter from you, requesting him to be discharged—”
Captain Paxton did not hear the rest. His face and neck purple with rage, he pushed past his son and stormed aboard.
If there were one or two hearts about the ship that lifted and one or two minds that thought, May you be far away, with a fair wind behind, they kept their eyes down and their smiles shadowed.
As the sun rose over Dock Square, crowds surged through the streets, flinging themselves in ragged bands at Zabdiel’s house. “Raw Head and Bloody Bones!” they screamed, peppering their cries with pebbles, rotten fruit, and eggs. Murderer! Devil take you, murdering fiend! Go to hell!
Zabdiel did not show so much as his shadow at a window, though most of the mob melted into soft shadows of dusk. “Hiding like a snail in his shell,” he said bitterly as Jerusha came to bed and blew out the candle.
At midnight, a knocking on the chamber door sent him shooting back out of the bed. Jerusha sat bolt upright, clutching the sheet to her chin.
“Not meanin’ to fright you, Doctor,” said Jack quietly, his face flickering in the light of a candle at the door, “but Mr. Nichols’s man is downstairs.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Don’t know. I expect it’s the missus. At least he had enough sense to be quiet-like. Came and scratched at the kitchen window.”
Zabdiel threw on a dressing gown and went downstairs. The man rose, tall and black, gripping his hat in front of him.
“I’m to beg you to come quickly, sir. She’s flooding.”
Zabdiel ran back up the stairs and dressed. Jerusha sat, gripping her knees, her eyes huge in the moonlight. He drew to the bedside and took her hand.
She turned her eyes slowly to his. “Don’t go,” she whispered. “Zabdiel, please don’t.”
He smoothed down a few wisps of hair that had escaped her nightcap. “Beth Nichols is losing a child, Jerusha. What would you be saying if she were one of our girls?”
She bit her lip, swallowed hard, and blinked. “Come back to me.”
“I promise.” He kissed the top of her head and left.
Jack had saddled Prince. He had also saddled his mule. And he had muffled their hooves, in the Indian manner.
“Stay here,” said Zabdiel tersely. “Jerusha and the children need a man in this house.”
His prodigal son stepped out of the barn. “They have one,” said Zabdiel junior. “Though to tell you the truth, I think Mother is easily as good with this thing as I am,” he said, hefting the musket in his hand. Then he looked up and dropped his facetiousness. “God go with you, Father. And also with Jack.”
Their faces muffled in dark cloaks, they rode quickly up to the Nicholses’. No one stirred in the streets, though the moon hung huge and ominous in the sky. A rat or two scuttled at the edge of the sewer channel, and a stray dog slinked along behind for a while. Once a door banged open, and drunken singing spilled into the street, pressing them farther into the shadows on the opposite side. They rode on.
Mrs. Nichols was worse than Zabdiel had dared to imagine. She was clammy and cold. Blood coursed from between her legs while her mind wandered through the visions of Ezekiel and Isaiah.
“Behold waters issued,” she half sang, half sighed. “Waters to ankles, to knees . . . to the loins. A river I could not pass over, waters to swim in.” Her voice trailed off in high girlish giggles. “When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee.”
Seizing her husband’s collar, and pulling him down to her with startling strength, she rasped, “Wilt thou be with me?”
“I am here, Beth,” he said, disentangling her fingers from his throat. “I am here.”
Pocks were scattered thickly over her body: small ones, but ominously close together and flat; they were ringed in livid red. Her eyes were swollen nearly shut, her face gray, and her breath rank. Her pulse was so faint that it was hard to tell by feel that her heart still beat.
Zabdiel had Jack mix up a cordial that would knock a horse back on its feet: laudanum sweetened with sugar and heated with a liberal sprinkling of oil of cinnamon.
Twenty minutes later, her heartbeat had sped up to a light flutter. “Come hither,” she murmured fretfully, “I will show unto thee the judgment of the Great Whore that sitteth upon many Waters.”
“No, Beth,” said her husband, “think of the Spirit of God moving on the waters.”
“God,” she whimpered, curling into a ball as a cramp crossed her belly.
“What can we do?” stammered her terrified husband.
Zabdiel shook his head, and looked at him with pity. “Pray.” Though he had been awake the whole night before, Zabdiel remained at the Nicholses’, nodding in a chair by the bed until Bethiah’s bleeding slowed to a trickle, and then one hour more. Contractions were still rippling across her belly, but nothing other than thin blood had come forth. “There is no more I can do here tonight, Bill,” he said. “I will leave you with some cordial: give her one or two drops, if her pulse weakens. Otherwise, leave her alone to sleep: nature must take care of her now.”
For the nurse, he left other instructions: “Keep the sheets.”
Just before dawn, he returned to his own bed, where Jerusha wrapped herself around him so that he dropped into a leaden sleep in her arms.
Later that morning, he rode out to the Nicholses’ again. Frayed lines of children and beggars whipped around him like tentacles of rage. Raw Head and Bloody Bones! Murderer!
While Mr. Nichols had prayed through the cold hours of dawn, the nurse had dosed Mrs. Nichols with the cordial two more times; each time, they said, she had regained strength for a while, but then drifted farther into twisted dreams. At ten o’clock she was awake but groggy. At least her pulse was normal.
And the flooding had stopped. Zabdiel sent Bill out of the room for a brief rest, and asked the nurse for the sheets. She gave him only one; inside its folds he found the drying placenta and the tiny half-formed child, two inches long and most of it head and huge eyes, curled over itself in permanent sleep, one tiny thumb, as it seemed, in its mouth. It was covered in pocks.
He had seen women die in childbirth; he had cut still-living children
out of just-dead mothers. He had amputated breasts and legs and arms; he had slit into abdomens to pluck out bladder stones. But none of that was as this.
For the first time in many years, he went outside and vomited.
Cotton Mather rose early, slipped away from the still-sleeping Lydia, and went to his study. Two days after losing his newest grandchild, aged one week—during the Sabbath meeting, no less, and only hours before she was to be baptized—the infant’s mother, his dear Abigail, his Abby Nabby Nibby as he had babbled to her as a child, was dying too. G.D. he wrote. To strengthen a dear Child in the Agonies of Death is a sad Work, which I am again called unto.
He had spent so many hours consumed with terror for Sammy and Lizzy, who stood in the way of the smallpox, that he had almost forgotten that the Angel of Death had other weapons. A creeping, malignant fever was slowly fraying Nibby’s life. Even in death, the Lord set the Mathers apart.
Dr. Mather spent the day on his knees before his daughter’s bed, strengthening her grieving husband with prayer. Not until sometime between ten and eleven that evening did the dear child at last let go.
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