She was his twelfth child to die; around her, death was mowing down his neighbors, his friends, his family, and his flock by the hundred. Dr. Mather was far beyond tears. At home, he added one sentence to his diary: A long and hard Death was the Thing appointed for her.
Dr. Mather threw himself back into his work. His Account of the Method and Success of Inoculating the Small-Pox, in Boston in New-England had been finished and dated three weeks before, in gratitude for Sammy’s recovery. Nibby’s long, scraping death had pushed it aside. At last, he sent it winging away within the wooden walls of a ship named Friendship, with a request that the captain deliver Dr. Mather’s papers personally to Jeremiah Dummer, Esq., agent in London for the province of Massachusetts.
The Fellows of the Royal Society had not shouldered the burden of testing inoculation: but they should know that one of their number in Boston had dared to roam where they had feared to tread. They should know that it worked.
But that knowledge could no longer remain confined to them. He meant to publish his treatise to the world.
As Dr. Mather’s confidence rose, Zabdiel’s sank. Across the next two weeks, the trees flamed through their autumn glory; at night, the stars burned ever brighter as the harvest moon waned. Somehow, the world’s extravagant beauty only made Zabdiel feel worse. Bethiah Nichols had lost a child, and now she was losing her sight.
The rash oozed into her eyes, swelling them tightly shut. Not until too late did he realize that the swelling was not just around the eyes; pocks had grown up inside them. Then one of them burst, taking the eye with it. There was no telling whether the other might follow suit; there was nothing to do but wait.
Save for slinking to the Nicholses’ at odd hours, Zabdiel stopped trying to go out. A few patients braved the screaming crowds to duck into his shop and beg advice or medicine; he gave it with a grave smile, but his heart held nothing but sawdust. Even Cheever could not rouse him to more than a flicker of a smile. For the most part, he let Jack run the shop, while he retreated to the parlor, where he read everything on the smallpox that Jack could scour up, and he reread everything he had already memorized, as if somewhere an answer, an explanation, an absolution, must be lurking.
He ate when Jerusha required it, but tasted nothing. He slept when she directed, but did not wake refreshed.
“You are fading to a ghost,” she said quietly one evening. “The very bogeyman the mobs threaten you with. Raw Head and Bloody Bones.”
“Raw hands and bloody bones,” he said absently, holding his hands before him. “You don’t know what I have done, Jerusha.”
“No, but I know what you are doing: you are giving up. You have a gift, Zabdiel, and you are giving up.”
He shook his head. “Thou shalt not kill.” He looked into her eyes. “I had a gift. It is gone.”
On October 2, Captain Paxton advertised a £5 reward for the return of Hector, alive.
“He is not coming back, Father,” said Captain Paxton’s elder son, Roger, begging to join the ship’s company in Hector’s place.
Much against his will, Captain Paxton swallowed his pride and agreed. His boy in the place of a slave. But with trade stagnant, every halfpenny counted. Roger’s enlistment meant one more set of wages trickling in to the office, and one less mouth to feed at home.
He tried to ignore the voice in his head that mocked, two less.
Tom Boylston began to cross Dock Square to join his brother’s family for dinner every afternoon. “Zabdiel needs you,” said Jerusha quietly. “The children need you.” To herself, she clucked, “And you need the food.” When was the last time a Boylston had not been able to afford enough to eat? Tom’s nieces and nephews did not seem to notice that he had grown gaunt. Whenever he appeared, they skidded across the room and threw themselves at their favorite uncle; Tommy climbed him like a tree. Top heavy with children and laden with laughter, he would lumber into the garden and wear them out until it was time to say grace. Which was just as well, sighed Jerusha to herself; for Zabdiel had forgotten how to play.
On the sixth of October, the selectmen again sent men scurrying from house to house, counting the sick and the dead. In two weeks, they reported, the death toll had nearly doubled, from 110 to 203. In all, 2,757—a quarter of the city—had fallen ill with the smallpox. At the Old North Church alone, prayers were requested for 202 people sick; in one day, Dr. Mather had prayed with 130 of them. Surely, he thought as he dragged himself home near midnight, the epidemic has reached its height.
The doctors were no better off, driving from one patient to the next with the horses at a gallop, when they were not inching door to door. And still, untreated multitudes cried out through windows, stretched thin grasping hands from foul doorways, and hobbled breathless and howling after them through the lanes. Other doctors were visiting eighty or a hundred patients each day, but Zabdiel sat in the parlor, reading.
That afternoon, Mrs. Eunice Willard skirted the shop and the house and knocked at the kitchen door. “Wait, Jack,” said Jerusha, as she heard him turning her away. “Let me talk to her.”
She heard young Mrs. Willard out in the kitchen and then ushered her upstairs to Zabdiel. “I cannot say what he will do,” she said quietly on the stairs, “but I wish you luck.”
Zabdiel looked up from his page and opened his mouth to refuse the caller, but Jerusha was already shutting the door behind her.
Reluctantly, he rose and bowed. “Mrs. Willard.”
She curtsied. “Dr. Boylston.”
“To what do I owe the pleasure of this visit?” Her brother Josiah Willard was the secretary of the province. The official mouthpiece, in other words, of the governor and Council. Surely, the government would not stoop to apprehending him through the offices of a woman.
She held both hands, still gloved, clasped in front of her; her dress was noticeably simple, though made well and worn neatly. “I would be inoculated, if you please.”
“I am no longer performing that operation,” he said.
“Then you must begin again.”
Had she said what he thought he heard? He focused on her face. She was plain. Homely, to be honest. But her eyes gleamed with intelligence.
She drew herself as tall as she could. “I am a woman, sir, but I am not cut out for life as a wife and mother. I love my nieces and nephews, but that is enough. Thankfully, I have been well enough provided for by my father’s will to make such a decision without fear of poverty. But I would like to do some good in this world, beyond needlework. I am told I have a reputation for learning, but the ministry and medicine are both closed to me. I have no aptitude for children not related to me, and sometimes, not even those: I would make a poor schoolmistress. However, I find I am quite patient with the sick.”
She said all this without rancor or bitterness: just a cool assessment of the way the world was, untainted by sorrow or anger over how it ought to be. “I would become a nurse, and there are no nurses in more dire need now, sir, than smallpox nurses. But you see, I have not had the smallpox.”
“For which you should be thankful.”
“There we disagree.”
“What does your brother say?”
“It is not his affair.”
“It will be, when you bring the smallpox into the family. In any case, I am no longer inoculating.” He turned his back on her abruptly and walked to a side window.
She sighed. “Then I must take matters into my own hands.”
He looked at her sharply. “You will do no such thing.”
“I am sorry, Dr. Boylston, but I must. You see, I assumed that you were not likely to have a supply of fresh matter.” She tugged on a chain around her neck, and pulled a vial out from her bosom. A small bit of dull yellow matter clung to the side of the glass.
He strode over and yanked the vial from the chain around her neck. She did not flinch, even as the chain flew off against the wall.
“What have you done?”
She held his gaze calmly. “Collec
ted my own this morning. From a nephew just at the stage described in Timonius. A boy of clean living, now doing as well as can be expected under the distinct pox. Except that he could do with more nursing. As could all my family. My family, as you know, is rather large. So you see, my plan is not so altruistic as I have represented.”
“What have you done?” he said again, as if he might turn in her first answer for another.
“Crossed the Rubicon, sir. Waded right on out into trouble without bothering to take my shoes and stockings off first, as my father used to say. I know the dangers—”
“You most certainly do not.”
“I know the dangers as well as one might who has not spent time in smallpox sickrooms. Fanny Webb was one of my girlhood friends,” she said quietly. “Against that, I have seen the results of your operation: the Melvilles are my niece and nephew; Sammy Mather is a cousin by marriage.”
“No.”
“I am of age, sir. It is my risk to take. It is equally your choice to help me, or not. But you will not stop me from taking the gamble.”
Zabdiel found he was breathing as if he had been racing. “Sit down,” he ordered. “Don’t move.”
Jerusha, Jack, and Moll were suspiciously busy in the kitchen, a little too carefully not glancing up as he went by into the shop and emerged a few moments later with his lancet and some bandages. He knew, as he climbed the stairs again, that they would be quietly celebrating in the kitchen.
The next morning he returned to a full practice, though he still held off from inoculating. Picking his way through the catcalls and jeers, he could not have said precisely what made him return, except that anger seemed to have scythed through the despair. The despair was not gone: but there was now a narrow path through it.
What a week I must look for! Dr. Mather wrote wearily on the eighth of October. The week before, he had thought the epidemic had reached its screaming peak when he had 130 parishioners sick. But in one week that number had more than doubled, to 315. Surely, he groaned, surely the contagion cannot grow thicker than this.
One evening a few days later, Zabdiel put his paper down and said, “Daniel Loring wishes me to inoculate his family.”
“What did you tell him?” asked Jerusha, without slowing her stitching.
“That I will give him an answer tomorrow.”
In and out, up and down, went Jerusha’s needle. “Susanna Loring is my cousin,” she said.
“My eldest son—Daniel, my namesake—is living in safety in the country,” said Mr. Loring in the shop next morning, fiddling with various instruments on the shelves. “He is at Harvard, and doing well. Knows your boy, I hear. I sent him two weeks ago, you know, to stay with my wife and some of her younger children. But the distemper has broken out in Roxbury.”
He stood in half shadows, but Zabdiel could feel his eyes. “You know what it is like,” Mr. Loring continued. “I cannot bear that they should suffer through it.”
Zabdiel sighed. “If the crowds will let me through, I will operate.”
As if they could smell the new matter hung around his neck, the crowds congealed and penned him in the house till well past dark, chanting Raw Head and Bloody Bones. The man with the sailor’s gait and the noose was back; others swung steaming buckets of tar and old feather pillows.
Next morning, early, Zabdiel slipped through streets splattered with unused tar and feathers. Most of the Lorings were huddled together weeping in the parlor just off the front door.
“Mr. Loring, sir, is upstairs with Dan,” said a young woman, curtsying even as she sniffled. “He begs you to come up, so soon as ever you arrive.” She plucked at Zabdiel’s sleeve. “Sir,” she whispered, “Dan came home just yesterday evening to be inoculated, but in the night as we waited for you, he was taken all of a sudden-like with sweating and shivering, vomiting, and backache. We are worried he might already have caught the distemper, in the natural way.”
“Let us hope he has not,” said Zabdiel.
But quite unmistakably, he had.
Zabdiel inoculated Mr. Loring’s twelve-year-old younger son, Nathaniel, at once, as well as the anxious girl, his sixteen-year-old step-daughter, Hannah Breck. That afternoon, young Daniel broke out in his rash; by nightfall, Zabdiel saw grimly that it would be confluent: even at the rash stage, when they should have been well-spaced small flecks, they were packed so tightly that his rash was more like a flush.
On his way home, he went by to see Eunice Willard; she was sitting up in a chair, reading a book of sermons and tapping one toe against the floor. Her face was a little pale, but her fever had been light, and there had been no nausea. “I am waiting as patiently as I can for my rash,” she said.
The following morning, the Honorable Thomas Fitch’s carriage rolled up to the door, and a footman descended. “If you please, sir, my master would have a consultation with you, as soon as convenient.”
Zabdiel’s heart raced. He had inoculated Mr. Fitch’s son the day before Mrs. Dixwell died. He had sped through the distemper nicely: had he now had a relapse?
“Now is convenient,” he said, his mouth dry. He ducked into the carriage, leaning forward at the edge of his seat, as if it would make the horses pull faster. He did not wait for the footman to open the door, but leapt out himself as the wheels came to a stop and raced up the steps. Mr. Fitch, likewise eager, opened the door himself.
“How is the boy?” gasped Zabdiel
“Fine, fine,” said Mr. Fitch heartily, shaking his hand and ushering him inside. “So fine, Doctor, that I must beg of you to inoculate my daughters, Martha and Mary. My wife cannot abide another day without knowing them safe.”
“No,” said Zabdiel. “It is not safe.”
“Because you have had one death and two confluent cases?” The councilor waved off Zabdiel’s protest. “Piffle, man. The whole world knows Mrs. Dixwell came by it through her own children. Dix says so himself to any who asks. And Mrs. Webb and Mrs. Nichols are no different—though I must say, bad luck for the Webbs.” Mr. Fitch steered Zabdiel upstairs and down a long passageway.
Just outside a door, he stopped and lowered his voice. “I mean no disrespect to your concerns, of course. But you hear the bells every evening same as me, for all Dr. Douglass touts the strength of his cold method of treatment. Any fool with ears can tell you: inoculation’s the better risk.”
Zabdiel sighed and inoculated the Fitch girls.
He stopped in to see Eunice Willard on his way home; she had erupted into a lovely light scattering of pocks. She felt fine, she said. Laying her book aside, she insisted that he stop long enough to drink a glass of wine with her.
From the North Battery down to the Neck, the death toll kept rising. Funerals were pared to the barest essentials of prayer, so that all of them could be accommodated in the churches. The bells gave death a deep voice every evening; in the morning, said some, you could trace death’s tracks by hearkening to bursts of weeping, and in the afternoon you needed no bloodhound to follow the stench. The grass of the burial grounds was pocked with fresh mounds of dirt, and the gravediggers wondered morosely where they would put all the bodies. “Dying keeps on as it is,” said one, “sooner or later, we’ll be burning ’em in pits, like they’s doin’ in France.”
In daydreams, in prayers, and in nightmares, Cotton Mather was haunted by his vision of the Angel of Death looming high over the city, brandishing God’s firebrand, casting the stars from the sky and spilling them across the land, where they burned and bled. Behind the Angel, the Great Adversary, Satan himself, breathed dark fire into the mobs.
On the eighteenth of October, Madam Checkley, the wife of town clerk and Cooke ally Colonel Checkley, died. Up near Salutation Alley, Selectman William Clark’s brother-in-law Mr. Bronsdon lost three children in the space of one week; Bill Merchant lost two. The mistress of the charity school, Mrs. Martha Cotes, was buried, along with many of her pupils.
Bethiah Nichols survived.
More noticeable still, the Boylst
ons, Webbs, Adams, and Langdons, Mr. Cheever and Mr. Helyer, Mrs. Pierce, Mrs. Willard, and young Mrs. Dodge—all his inoculees who could not be suspected of having taken the disease before the operation—walked through the contagion unharmed.
At the Loring house, Zabdiel watched young Nathaniel and Hannah break into light shivering on the nineteenth, as Daniel’s skin bubbled and frothed, and fever ground away at his mind.
Not far away, Eunice Willard shed the last of her scabs. Zabdiel gave her leave to care for her cousins, and she gave him a firm handshake and matter-of-fact thanks.
“It is I who owe you thanks,” said Zabdiel.
Very early in the morning on the twentieth, a heavy, wet snow blanketed the ground, following a drenching rain the night before that had sent the last of the leaves shivering from the trees. Without much food and precious little firewood, hunger and cold crept into town in the shadow of death—and it was not just the chronically poor who suffered. With trade at a standstill and heads of families dying, the ranks of the needy were swelling with people who had never thought to find themselves hushing children whose bellies ached with emptiness.
On the twenty-first, Nathaniel Loring and Hannah Breck both erupted. In the following days, they careened through stages their brother was inching through in agony. By the morning of the twenty-third, their blisters were already ripening. Daniel’s had spread into what seemed to be one livid pustule that covered most of his body; he had swelled to near twice his size.
Mr. Loring quietly pulled Zabdiel into the parlor. “He is not doing well, is he?”
“I am sorry,” said Zabdiel. “He is not.”
Mr. Loring had paced for a moment, and Zabdiel had looked away. Presently, Loring blew his nose loudly.
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