The Speckled Monster
Page 54
It is not clear when or where they met, though they certainly continued to meet through the convenience of seeing Anne. Why Anne died in February 1710 is uncertain, but at the time typhus—London’s other great eighteenth-century scourge—was rampant.
Wortley carefully preserved the squabbling letters that passed back and forth between him and Lady Mary, including the mischief-making note of Betty Laskey, endorsed by Richard Steele. Nothing is known of Laskey beyond this note and Lady Mary’s lamentations about her. In one autobiographical romance, however, Lady Mary made her hero Sebastian (Wortley) incur wrath of the heroine Laetitia (Lady Mary) by falling for just such a trumped-up offer on the part of an orange-woman who had played go-between for the lovers in Hyde Park. I have sketched Betty Laskey from that hint, drawing on contemporary engravings of street hawkers using the cries “Fair Lemons & Oranges” and “Six pence a pound fair Cherryes.”
Wortley’s anxiety about Lady Mary’s possible loss of “colour” or complexion betrays his apprehension about her diagnosis. Given the timing of her illness within the worst smallpox epidemic London had yet known, his fears suggest that he was all too aware of the long-standing confusion between measles and smallpox.
The epidemic of 1710 was at its height from May through July. Using James Jurin’s slightly later statistic that one of every five or six Londoners who came down with small-pox died, I have extrapolated the number of people ill in 1710 from the official figure of 3,138 dead of smallpox that year. The quack bills are adapted from Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague-Year. Defoe’s fictionalized history covers London’s last great epidemic of the bubonic plague in 1665, but within a year of writing it in 1722, he had been eyewitness to the devastations of another disease: the smallpox epidemic of 1721. Though that more recent epidemic was not near so fearsome as the 1665 outbreak of the plague, it also seems to have progressed through the city from west to east. Other details, too, are general enough to fit London’s panic in the face of any epidemic disease.
I have given Wortley encounters with various epidemic scenes, as well as thoughts comparing smallpox to the plague: Creighton documents the general awareness of small-pox as a threat of growing intensity and frequency, such that it began to replace the plague as Britain’s most feared disease in the early eighteenth century. (The plague could and did kill far more people than smallpox within the span of a single epidemic. In London, however, its “visitations” were far fewer, and it was virtually absent between epidemics; after 1665, it also belonged to the past. Smallpox remained a steady killer in that city even in “healthy” years right into the twentieth century; at the beginning of the eighteenth century, fearsome smallpox epidemics began appearing with markedly increasing frequency.)
Margaret Brownlow’s death is the first known instance of smallpox interfering in Lady Mary’s life. Beyond the two facts that Margaret fell ill and died of smallpox while Lady Mary was convalescing from the measles, and that her sister Jane did indeed marry Margaret’s intended husband in June 1711, however, I do not know the details. I have given her the nickname of “Meg” and a standard set of smallpox symptoms. Cream applied with a feather was a traditional regimen for preventing smallpox scarring.
Emperor Joseph and the grand dauphin Louis both died of smallpox as stated. The emperor certainly was given the ancient “hot” treatment; given descriptions of the dauphin’s rooms just after his death, he may well have endured the “cold” treatment (an innovation of the famous seventeenth-century English doctor Thomas Sydenham). I have made Dorchester and his cronies discuss these regimens; they surely discussed the political consequences.
Lady Mary detailed her longing for her unidentified Paradise and her loathing of Skeffington in her many letters to “Dear Phil.” I have condensed and combined a few of them and pulled her dramatic sentence “Limbo is better than Hell” into the place of a conclusion because it crystallizes her tortured choice of Wortley over Skeffington; otherwise, the letters stand as she wrote them, save for modernizing spelling and punctuation.
Lady Mary reported her various interviews with her father, family, and brother on the subject of the match to Skeffington—complete with most of the dialogue presented here—in several detailed letters to Wortley just before the elopement, as she tried to make him see that her father would not easily forgive them and was certainly not going to pony up money. I have added her brother’s unhappiness with his own marriage, on the strength of Lady Mary’s extreme reactions against it, and his own willingness to help her escape a similar fate. I have divided between Lady Frances and Lady Kingston the reactions Lady Mary reported as generally being those of the family. When she gave her father her “final” answer, she first chose the single life, but relented in a letter following her father’s threat to pack her into the country immediately. The threat is Kingston’s as Lady Mary later reported it to Wortley; its presentation in a valise is my way of literalizing the cramped life he was offering her. She gave no indication as to the dates or settings of any of these familial encounters; those are my surmise.
The particulars of her aversion to Skeffington are lost, but surviving letters suggest that it was both primarily physical and inexplicable to others (especially her father). Skeffington’s family were the proud lords of Castle Antrim and other vast estates in Northern Ireland.
Her long bickering courtship with Wortley was Byzantine in its plotting and spying, and their elopement was worse: a two-months’ tangle of aborted attempts, near break-offs, procrastinations, and terrors. I have streamlined both courtship and elopement, but the general arc of events—including the two major breaks—remains accurate. Whether the lovers actually met in the inn on the way to West Dean is unclear, but they certainly passed a flurry of notes that attest Lady Mary’s laughter at Wortley’s “highwayman” getup, her indignation at his inability to provide the “decent conveyance” of a coach, Wortley’s suggestion that they borrow her family’s, and her absolute refusal to implicate her brother—though he was undoubtedly an accomplice.
How Lady Mary received word of her brother’s illness is unclear, though the timing is accurate. I have let her learn from Lady Frances, though a face-to-face meeting would have dared their father’s wrath. It seems to have been Lady Frances who later took it upon herself to keep Lady Mary informed of Will’s progress.
A Destroying Angel
Lady Mary poured her anguish over her brother’s death into her diary and letters; her sorrow and rage made a lasting impression on her granddaughter, reading them many years later.
Wortley’s vengeance in coyly threatening to consign his wife and child to an infected house is taken directly from their letters, though I have reconstructed his first (I have taken a house in Duke Street . . . ) from her reply to it.
Pope’s readings of his Iliad translation before Halifax took place somewhere between October 1714 and May 1715, when Halifax died. I’ve taken the liberty of including Lady Mary at the second gathering, as she was in town and fast becoming a fixture in the literary crowd that Halifax—an old acquaintance and good friend of her father’s—liked to entertain. She was certainly on jesting terms with Pope by the summer of 1715. Pope’s illness and reflections on his own appearance are amply documented.
The “ridiculous adventure” with Craggs is one of the few that Lady Mary’s granddaughter reported in detail from her reading of Lady Mary’s diary. I have supplied Craggs’s rebuke to Lady Mary, reported only as “a bitter reproach with a round oath to enforce it.” In a polite age that enveloped passion in delicate nettings of euphemism, such frank anger carried the force of a slap across the face.
The real distress evident in Craggs’s reaction, as well as the extravagant emphasis that Lady Mary’s granddaughter lavished upon the awfulness of her indiscretion, suggest that Craggs was worried about far more than just being revealed as an impetuous young man—which in any case he was already known to be: such pranks were common among the nobility, even if not often run directly under the kin
g’s nose. I have opted for rivalry as the most likely undercurrent of danger, given the king’s known interest in the lady.
The appearance and habits of King George I, Schulenberg, and Kielmansegg (including their nicknames and La Schulenberg’s pastime of snipping caricatures out of scraps of paper), are all attested by their contemporaries.
Details of Lady Mary’s bout with smallpox are few but richly suggestive. Gossip revealed that Lady Mary was “very full”—i.e., that she had a case of confluent smallpox—and that she was thought to be fighting for her life for two days around Christmas. From these details, I have given her a classic case of confluent smallpox, following Ricketts’s description of “confluent smallpox with severe suppurative fever.” The notion that victims looked weirdly old or young is Ricketts’s, as is the image of the gray caul. Richard Mead, one of Lady Mary’s physicians, wrote a treatise on smallpox published in 1747, though written much closer to the time of Lady Mary’s illness. His words, as well as the details of her treatment, come from this book. The statistics are from the World Health Organization.
In eighteenth-century England, surgeons (who learned from apprenticeship and often did not hold any university degree whatever) were properly titled “Mr.” rather than “Dr.”—the latter being an honorific reserved for physicians (who held medical doctorates). With what is now a bit of reverse snobbery, modern British surgeons retain this ancient distinction of title, going by Mr.—or Miss, Ms., or Mrs.—though they hold medical degrees. In colonial America, where trained doctors were in perennially short supply, strict divisions between physicians, surgeons, and apothecaries collapsed; the title “Dr.” was given to those with proven talent and experience, whether their training came from the university or from apprenticeship.
I have dramatized the scene of Lady Mary’s first look at her ruined face from her eclogue titled:
Satturday
The Small Pox
Flavia.
According to her granddaughter, “she always said she meant the Flavia of her sixth Town-Eclogue for herself, having expressed in that poem what her own sensations were while slowly recovering under the apprehension of being totally disfigured.” From this poem come the details of her reclining on a couch, holding a mirror reversed in her right hand, the identities of her doctors (Mead as Mirmillo with the golden-headed cane, Garth as Machaon wearing a red cloak), Garth’s reassurance about her beauty, and her order to have the Kneller removed from her sight. Her granddaughter attested the loss of Lady Mary’s “very fine eyelashes.” I have supplied the detail of the veiled mirrors; it fits with the general desire to keep her calm, and with her lack of any knowledge about what she looked like well into convalescence.
At the end of this chapter and elsewhere through the book, I have made Lady Townshend stand in for Lady Mary’s wide circle of aristocratic friends. Her comment on Lady Mary’s loss of beauty is adapted from one recorded by Lady Hertford. Lady Mary’s reply comes from her own assessment of her loss of face in “Carabosse”—a personalized version of “Sleeping Beauty,” in which the cursed princess is clearly herself. She probably wrote this French fairy tale years later, but the feelings it records about smallpox echo those of Flavia, and were probably of long standing.
Bidding the World Adieu
From her fascination with “Frost Fairs” to her travels to Turkey, Lady Mary’s life at times bears an uncanny resemblance to Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. Whether Lady Mary attended the frost fair of 1716 is uncertain; given her regret for missing the previous one (when she had been trapped up at Thoresby by impassable roads) and Mead’s prescription for taking fresh air, it seems likely that she would have done her best to see it, even if only from the window of a coach.
Asses’ milk was a standard drink while convalescing from many illnesses; Mead specifically recommended it for smallpox. The scene of Lady Mary and Lady Townshend examining other remedies is my invention; the remedies, however, are drawn from contemporary recipes.
The story of Pope’s revenge on Edmund Curll is unfortunately accurate.
Direct evidence that Lady Mary heard about inoculation before leaving London is lacking; circumstantial evidence, however, is very strong: those who were buzzing about the story abroad were among her closest friends and their families. Given Lady Mary’s imminent journey to Constantinople, her vested interest in smallpox, and her wide-ranging intellectual curiosity, it beggars imagination to think that none of them should have mentioned the story to her. I have therefore created scenes in which Garth and her other friends who knew the rumors gather to tell her. The timing of these rumors’ appearance, however, is accurate.
At some point that spring, Lady Mary satisfied public curiosity and discarded her mask; the particulars are my surmise. Photographs in Ricketts suggest that Lady Mary’s face would have recovered significantly during convalescence: the swelling would eventually have disappeared, and the scars faded a great deal. The “nutmeg grater” image comes from the same source. The total disfigurement that Lady Mary feared did not come to pass, said her granddaughter. Lady Mary’s famed beauty, however, was gone for good. (Pepys reported a similar outcome for the duchess of Richmond.)
While Maitland cannot be specifically linked to Kennedy, London’s learned surgeons were then a tight-knit group; it is far more likely than not that two of their number who were Scottish knew each other at least well enough to discuss such a hot topic, especially when Maitland was soon headed to the source, and Kennedy had been there previously.
Lady Mary wrote an unending stream of letters home about her adventures en route. Wherever possible, I have kept close to her language (or to that of the snippets of gossip about her). Though almost all the originals as well as her own copies have been lost, she later edited these letters into literary gems that run together as an epistolary travel book. As she intended, this was printed after her death. Wortley also kept several pages of her notes recording dates, addressees, and general content lists of her actual letters: these often, but not always, correspond to their edited counterparts.
In Hanover, the king was widely seen to be still fascinated with her, but I have surmised that his interests might have been altered—as hers seem to have been toward him. She had no intention of remaining behind, no matter who might delight in her presence.
Lady Mary’s description of her visit to the Baths of Sofia is one of the gems of her Embassy Letters. I have dramatized the scene from that description; the dialogue, both direct and indirect, is hers. I have assumed that she used, as she did later, a Greek interpretress.
Lady Mary carefully shaped most of her embassy letters to focus on one Turkish custom at a time: dress, poetry, the baths, inoculation. I have made explicit connections she implies by logic and timing. At the baths, she is quite clear that the ladies’ smooth, shining skin is what amazed and delighted her most. Though she does not specifically say that smallpox (or the lack of it) was on her mind, it seems likely that her fascination with their unmarked skin prompted her immediate efforts to figure out how the Ottomans protected themselves from smallpox. Within two weeks, she had ferreted out stories of inoculation and interviewed everyone she could find on the subject. Maitland, it is important to note, was not with her at this point. Whatever she had learned before she left London or along the way, what she discovered at this juncture, she discovered on her own. According to her granddaughter, Lady Mary acknowledged that “former sufferings and mortifications . . . led her to observe the Turkish invention with particular interest.”
My Dear Little Son
Lady Mary wrote at length about her sojourn in Turkey; Maitland wrote somewhat more tersely about his inquiries and experiment with smallpox inoculation. Though neither makes much mention of cooperation, much less debate and discussion, with the other, events suggest that all of that was going on. I have woven their accounts together, and given them life as scenes.
Lady Mary wrote about inoculation to many people; her record of letters sent home includes one to he
r father concerning the smallpox. Sir Hans Sloane later said she also wrote the court and various friends on the subject. The only such letter that survives is the one she included in her Embassy Letters—polished and edited for circulation, and addressed to her girlhood friend Sarah Chiswell (who had, by the time of editing, died uninoculated from smallpox). I quote from it, in the place of the lost letter sent to her father, adding a suitable opening; I have also added the word rendered where some such word seems to be missing.
She described her Turkish dress in detail to her sister while it was still being made. If her later portraits in it (or a modified version of it) are to be trusted, however, she mixed up a few things. I have followed Lady Mary’s written account, “corrected” by what Jean Baptiste Vanmour and Jonathan Richardson seem actually to have seen. (Commissioned by Alexander Pope, Kneller painted another portrait of her in her Turkish robes, but her dress is so shadowed in the reproductions I have seen that it is hard to make out details.)
The disastrous Balm of Mecca experiment comes from a self-mocking letter to the king’s half-sister. Lady Mary pointedly lamented her “mortification” at Wortley’s reproaches, though the specific reproaches are my inventions.
Wortley engaged Dr. Timonius as the family physician in August, and though Lady Mary seems to have decided earlier to have her son inoculated, she missed the first opportunity to join the regular smallpox parties. I have surmised that the expert Dr. Timonius had a hand in preventing her; though she never gives a reason for missing this opportunity, pregnancy was a very good reason to stay as far away from the smallpox as possible.