The Speckled Monster

by Jennifer Lee Carrell

  “You are not dressed for riding,” said Zabdiel one morning.

  “The quarry has shifted from foxes to deer,” sighed Lady Mary. “The riding has gone beyond my ladylike skill.”

  “Then your skill must improve, my lady,” said Zabdiel. “I might be of some help, if you would allow it.”

  All that summer, they chased deer through the green-gold glimmer of sunlight dancing through trees, pausing to let their horses drink at laughing streams while whip-thin dogs flowed on through the grass like white-and-dun water determined to roll to the sea. Sometimes, the princess called Zabdiel to take refreshment with her in some open glade, to tell his tale until her eyes glittered with tears, and her ladies wept openly. At other times the horns and the baying of hounds pulled the company into an ecstasy of flight, skimming together and apart like swallows whittering low over the earth.

  When they were not hunting, Twickenham offered them other delights. Not far from the Wortley Montagu’s house stood Mr. Pope’s palladian villa, where the laughter of Lord Bathurst, Dr. Arbuthnot, Mr. Richardson, and Mr. Cheselden was joined at times that summer by that of Dr. Boylston and Lady Mary.

  August 1725

  Dear Sister,

  I pass many hours on horseback, and I’ll assure you, I ride stag hunting, which I know you’ll stare to hear of! I have arriv’d to vast courage and skill that way, and am as well pleased with it as with the acquisition of a new sense. His Royal Highness hunts in Richmond Park, and I make one of the beau monde in his train.

  I desire you after this account not to name the word old woman to me anymore; I approach fifteen nearer than I did ten years ago, and am in hopes to improve every year in health and vivacity.

  “We have had riding enough,” said the Princess of Wales as the weather snapped cold, and the beau monde trooped back toward London. “I should like to see some writing, if you please.”

  “Writing, Your Highness?” replied Zabdiel.

  “Your experiment with inoculation, Doctor, is not just a tale to make ladies weep happily in the sun. Dr. Jurin, I am sure, will want the numbers. The details, sir, are what matter. They must find their way into print.”

  “She wants a book,” he groaned later to a small gathering in Mr. Pope’s grotto, artfully arranged on a bank sloping down to the Thames. “What am I to do?”

  “Write,” said Dr. Mead.

  “Writing is a skill I have never pretended to.”

  “Then your skill, Doctor, must improve,” said Lady Mary with a small smile. “I might be of some help, if you would allow it.”

  “By all means, the conquest of smallpox must be immortalized,” pronounced Mr. Richardson, as Mr. Pope caught his eye.

  “It is not a conquest,” Zabdiel protested. “Not yet.”

  “False modesty, Doctor, will get you nowhere,” teased Lady Mary.

  Zabdiel turned on her. “If I must tell my story, my lady, then surely you must tell yours.”

  In this, the whole party warmly agreed.

  Lady Mary had long been at work arranging and editing her Embassy Letters with their salacious gossip and their sublime descriptions of distant towns, lands, and people. That fall, as Zabdiel labored to transform his notes into a book, she turned her hand to polishing the deeply embedded jewel of her smallpox letter.

  Back in London that winter, Zabdiel sloshed through heavy wet snow up to Lincoln’s Inn’s Fields, to the house Mr. Cheselden had specified; at his nod, Jackey rapped on the door, which was answered by an Irish girl, her green eyes widening to see a small black boy on the step.

  They were ushered upstairs into a room filled with the scents of new-sawn wood and paint. Its edges were a dark riot of color and shadow, strewn with bare canvas and frames and unfinished paintings of figures stepping from gray nothingness. But the center of the room was clear, lit by a single slanted shaft of light dancing with bright motes.

  In its midst stood Lady Mary, glowing as if from within, in a golden robe with a cloak of blue brocade and ermine draped like a soft stretch of sky around her shoulders.

  “Ah, Dr. Boylston,” said Mr. Richardson, stepping from the shadows palette, in hand. “May I present my son-in-law and principal assistant, Mr. Thomas Hudson? You know Cheselden and Arbuthnot.”

  Zabdiel bowed to them all in turn.

  “Richardson,” explained Mr. Cheselden, “has been charged with a commission to commemorate the battle against smallpox. We could not proceed, of course, without you.”

  “I am honoured,” said Zabdiel with a nod to Lady Mary, “to watch such splendor transferred to canvas.”

  Mr. Cheselden glanced to the other men and back. “Your double battle, sir.”

  Zabdiel felt heat flush his face. “You surely cannot be suggesting that you wish to put me in your picture,” he said, turning to the painter.

  Mr. Richardson bowed. “Posterity will wish to look on the faces of its saviors. I only hope I may do you some justice.”

  “Justice!” exclaimed Zabdiel, shaking his head. “I must disappoint you, sir. I will not disgrace any canvas with this face. Especially not one that is to hold Lady Mary.”

  “False modesty, Doctor,” she chided from the middle of the room.

  “No, my lady,” he said firmly.

  For a moment, no one moved, and the afternoon hovered on the edge of disappointment.

  Mr. Richardson stepped forward, addressing everyone in turn. “Might I suggest, gentlemen, a symbolic alternative? The origin of your discovery, my lady, is to be represented by your Turkish costume. I understand that the doctor learned from Africans. Perhaps, sir, we could borrow the boy.”

  “Borrow the boy?”

  “Paint him, sir, in your place,” said Mr. Richardson, pointing to Jackey, who was peering at the canvases as if they were doors to other worlds.

  Zabdiel began to laugh. “You have no idea, sir, how fitting your suggestion is. He is the first fruit of the operation, being one of the first three people I inoculated, along with his father and my youngest son. I would be happy to agree, if it would please Lady Mary.”

  “The lady will make the best of it,” she said, shifting the gleaming blue fall of her cloak.

  So Jackey was pulled to a costume rack and put into a fur-lined red coat—far too large, but Mr. Richardson thought it looked properly exotic—and red boots, ditto, and given a parasol to hold. As a final touch, Mr. Hudson clattered through a chest and came up with a silver collar.

  “No,” said Zabdiel. “That is preposterous.”

  “It is preposterous that you claim to own him,” shot Lady Mary.

  Zabdiel opened his mouth to protest, and closed it again. Jackey stood stone-faced as Mr. Hudson snapped on the collar.

  All that morning and into the afternoon, Zabdiel stood with his friends and watched the image of Lady Mary bloom upon Mr. Richardson’s canvas, as the painter captured the uptilt of her shoes, the light that skated like gold wine from the falls of her caftan, the jewels winking at her waist and cascading over one ear. Most amazingly, Mr. Richardson caught the glitter of her eyes fixed on them all with challenge and with pride. Behind her, in the shadow of his parasol, Jackey peered up at her with much the same intensity, his almond eyes fusing awe and fury.

  Lady Mary saw little of Dr. Boylston that spring. He had other projects as well as the book to keep him busy. With Mr. Cheselden, he studied the new method of cutting for the stone. He spent long, happy hours with Doctors Jurin and Arbuthnot, discussing the implications of applying the mathematics to the analysis of disease and its treatment. He visited every relative he could find in the vicinity of the capital, and then traveled north to see more in Birmingham. And still, he inched his way through his book.

  Of Mr. Pope, on the other hand, Lady Mary saw more than she wished, for on the afternoon that Mr. Richardson’s painting was delivered, he went down on one knee—he was already only knee-high—and declared his grand passion for her. It was so gloriously absurd that Lady Mary laughed aloud, and saw, too late, t
hat he had not spoken in jest.

  Having finished her Embassy Letters, she began writing a long, winding tale of hopeless love. If her friends noticed her quarrelsome and sad, they said nothing. She had many reasons for low spirits, after all. Her son was already proving himself a young rake; he ran away from school again. Her sister was slipping into madness, and in March, the duke of Kingston quite suddenly died. That, her family could neither have predicted nor stopped—though the ensuing squabble over the young heirs and their money was predictable enough. But Lady Mary railed against the unnecessary deaths of Lady Townshend and her old Sister in Affliction, Philippa Mundy, from smallpox. Lady Townshend—Dolly—had inoculated most of her family, but had ignored herself; poor dear timid Phil had never summoned the courage to put herself through the operation.

  Early in April, just after Easter, Jack laid a letter from home on Zabdiel’s breakfast table. The paper was marked with the wind, weather, and rough handling of an Atlantic crossing, but for all that, it was nearly blank. Only four words crossed the page: Come home to me.

  “I must go soon, my lady,” said Zabdiel when he met Lady Mary again.

  “Go?” she teased. “You have only just arrived.”

  “I am not talking about this instant,” he said. “I must go home, my lady.”

  “To America?” she protested. “But you have interest at court, you have friends, you are building a reputation. Why will you not make your home here? In Boston, what will you be?”

  There was a silence broken only by a tumble of coals in the grate. “A surgeon, my lady,” he said gently. “I belong there. My family is there, and my duty.”

  “Your duty is to finish your book.”

  “That is what I came to tell you,” he said. “I have finished.”

  “You must forgive me,” she said ruefully. “I do not have friendships to spare just now. I would not lose yours without a fight.”

  “I finished a book,” he said. “I did not say I finished a friendship.”

  At the beginning of May, Zabdiel’s book came back, warm and damp from the printer. In the middle of the month, he was given leave to make a formal presentation of his book to the Princess of Wales, and received the triple gift of a royal blessing, a royal reward, and a royal dismissal.

  On the nineteenth, he was invited once more to the Royal Society, where he presented the Fellows with another fine copy. They asked him, as was usual, to give them a short account of what was in it. He had not prepared for this, and momentarily froze. But he forced himself to his feet, recalling their kind reception of his ambergris paper, and took a deep breath. Calmly, concisely, he told them the story, from its beginning in Dr. Mather’s letters, to his investigations among the town’s Africans, to his terrifying experiment on his youngest son and two slaves. Pitilessly, he laid out before them the shortcomings of both the treatment and his usage of it: Esther Webb’s infection from her inoculated parents, Bethiah Nichols’s loss of both an eye and an unborn child, Mrs. Dixwell’s suffering and death.

  But he also gave them—as he had learned from Dr. Jurin, Dr. Arbuthnot, and the other mathematically inclined fellows—the numbers. Numbers that marched in line with Dr. Jurin’s calculations for London: inoculation offered somewhere between a one-in-fifty and a one-in-a-hundred chance of dying, depending on how sanguine or skeptical you were about the deaths surrounding the practice. Natural smallpox forced a one-in-six or -seven chance upon its victims.

  His audience, he noticed with surprise, was straining forward to catch every word. He cautioned them. It was not a victory: he could not in honesty tell them that. Smallpox still lived and breathed, scattering its terrible spotted death on large numbers of people. And yet—and yet—for the first time in history, it had become possible to say following. He opened his book to a passage he had marked and read: It is and shall be acknowledged to the praise and glory of God! By this happy discovery of transplantation, also called inoculation, a most wild, cruel, and violent distemper which has destroyed millions of lives is now become tractable, safe, and gentle.

  He looked back up. “So you see, gentlemen, we have tamed the small-pox.”

  For a moment, no one said anything. Then Dr. Jurin rose to his feet, followed by Sir Hans, Dr. Steigerthal, Dr. Mead, Dr. Arbuthnot, and Mr. Cheselden. On and on around the room, his new friends and acquaintances rose, until Sir Isaac Newton himself rose tottering from the president’s chair to join in the stamping and cheering of the standing ovation, while Dr. Boylston watched in utter amazement.

  A week later, Dr. Steigerthal nominated him as a Fellow, and he was duly elected. On July 7, 1726, to general approbation, beaming, and applause, a still astonished Dr. Zabdiel Boylston was installed as the newest Fellow of the Royal Society. In the ensuing weeks, he lectured there and at the Royal College of Physicians, the new F.R.S. flapping proud and tall at the end of his name.

  He sent a third fine presentation copy to a certain house in the Piazza, Covent Garden.

  “I have found but one fault in your book, Doctor,” said Lady Mary with a wry smile, as Zabdiel called to take his leave. “False modesty.”

  A few weeks later, Dr. Zabdiel Boylston, F.R.S., and his two black slaves took ship for Boston and home.

  Alone in her sitting room, Lady Mary penned the last sentence of her tale of torn love: Abandoning the views he had of making his fortune, his interest at court, his friends, and reputation, she wrote of her hero, he left the kingdom as soon as possible and went to finish his life in the solitudes of America, where some of his relations were established, secure of less barbarity amongst the savages than (he thought) he had met with in the fairest princess of France.

  To Sir Hans Sloane

  Boston, December 14, 1726

  Much Honored and Worthy

  Sir,

  A sense of gratitude for the many obligations you have laid me under will not suffer me any longer to rest in silence. After a long and expensive voyage, I am safe arrived to my family, friends, and country, from whom I have received a hearty welcome. I shall always acknowledge the honours done me by Sir Hans, and as often as I have opportunity to collect anything worthy of your notice, who are so nice a judge of Nature, I shall think myself in duty and honour bound to present you with it.

  For starters, he was enclosing a five-and-a-half pound stone taken from a gelding’s belly. Had killed the horse, of course. But was hopefully a fine prize for a man so fascinated by bezoars. Perhaps this summer he would conduct some proper experiments on another of their shared interests: rattlesnakes.

  I am

  Dear and honored Sir,

  Your most obliged

  and devoted servant,

  Zabdiel Boylston

  P.S. I have not heard that any one of our anti-inoculators have said any

  thing against the truth of my account given of the practice, and some of my

  friends say there is but one fault in it, and that is that I was too modest in

  debunking the opposers.

  2

  THE PRACTICE

  BOSTON remained free of smallpox until September of 1729, when the speckled monster once again invaded from the sea, as a ship from Ireland disembarked infected passengers. The contagion smoldered until early in 1730, when it exploded once again into an epidemic.

  Boylston immediately republished his Historical Account for the benefit of Bostonians; far more surprisingly, Douglass conceded—however cautiously and ungraciously—that the operation had its merits. Far from apologizing for his slurs against Boylston, however, he remained as churlish as ever toward his old rival, whom he still refused to grant the title of “doctor.” I can but seldom have recourse to Mr. Boylstone’s Accounts, because of their being so jejune, lame, suspected, and only in the nature of Quack bills.

  The town government was not yet ready to encourage inoculation, but resigned itself to the operation’s inevitable popularity; there were no more attempts made to outlaw it. This time, about 4,000 people fell ill and 500 died
. About 400 were inoculated, of whom 12 died—about 1 in 33: as Douglass remarked, these numbers were “not so favourable as in 1721.” They were still considerably better than the 1 in 8 odds of dying after catching smallpox in the natural way, however. Possibly the problems came from inexperience: in addition to Dr. Boylston and Dr. Douglass, many of the town’s other doctors appear to have taken up the practice. Very probably, some of that dip in its success rate was due to European physicians’ tendency to cut deeper and longer, and use more “matter” than was common in the folk practice.

  The 1730 epidemic, however, passed off lightly in comparison to the catastrophe of 1721, and seems to have confirmed in many people’s minds that inoculation was a lifesaver, though the opposers were by no means silenced. Again, the disease passed, and Boston was safe—from both the smallpox and inoculation—for another twenty years.

  Then, on Christmas Eve, 1751, a ship wrecked in Nahant Bay, and the people of the town of Chelsea poured out to the beach to rescue the survivors. In the chaos, the captain did not tell anyone that the smallpox was aboard; within a month many of the rescuers and their families died for their kindness. In Chelsea, somewhere between a fifth and a quarter of the population died.

  Across 1752, the infection whipped through Massachusetts. Of Boston’s 15,684 residents, 1,843 fled. Among those who remained, 5,545 caught smallpox in the natural way, and 539 (about 1 in 10) died; 5,589 were immune, having survived it before. It’s the inoculation numbers that are really notable, though: 2,124 people were inoculated, and only 30 (1 in 70) died. As Dr. Douglass himself admitted, “The Novel Practice of procuring the Small-Pox by Inoculation is a very considerable and most beneficial Improvement in that Article of Medical Practice.”