The Speckled Monster

by Jennifer Lee Carrell

  The children, she knew, had decided in hushed conference among themselves that they would pray hard for the souls of their papa’s sick people. Jerusha smiled, anticipating their little faces screwed up tight as they pressed their prayers toward heaven. Perhaps those prayers would help; she certainly hoped they might, though she silently asked pardon for her entirely selfish reasons. If Mrs. Dixwell were to die, the simmering mob that trailed her husband night and day might explode. But the mob was not half as harsh as Zabdiel would be on himself.

  She shook off her gloom. Misery might always come tomorrow; it was her duty to the Lord to celebrate His glories as they came. And what glories they were: six fine children, hard pressed to keep from skipping to church, safe once and for all from the smallpox. The angel of death had passed over their door.

  She knew she must look grave, she knew she must join the congregation in begging for mercy for all of Boston. But exaltation and praise bloomed bright in her heart. She was looking forward to the singing.

  For his part, Zabdiel had promised Jerusha that he would focus this morning on thanksgiving, so he had thrust Mrs. Dixwell to the back of his mind. As they crossed the street, he clung to the successes for which he could give thanks: his family’s safe passage through inoculation, Jerusha’s return. Cheever. Helyer. Dr. Mather’s support, however strange and sly it might be. Across town, Mr. Adams and his little girl Mary had begun to erupt and looked to do well. Mrs. Adams was a bit of a concern—she had not yet felt so much as a single flash of fever. But too little sickness was a much nicer problem than too much. Young Mary Jones, too, inoculated the same day as her Adams cousins, had a fine sparse rash of pocks creeping across her.

  And then there was Mrs. Salter. Her pocks had ripened to pustules; though she refused to believe it, she would soon be fine. The sooner, the better.

  Just before they entered the church, someone plucked at his sleeve. He turned, and a black man he did not recognize leaned forward and whispered in his ear the words he had been half dreading all morning. “It’s the missus. I am to beg you to come at once.”

  He turned to Jerusha, but she had heard. Her pale eyes wide, she gave him a quick smile of encouragement and said, “Go. We will pray for you.”

  Zabdiel sighed, though whether it was more relief at being released from false thanksgiving or regret for the summons he had known must come, even he could not say. Jack materialized, behind him, and they headed back for the barn, the other black man in tow. Five minutes later, they were trotting north.

  At Mr. Dixwell’s shop, where Union Street ran into Hanover, Zabdiel was dismounting, when the servant ran up behind and puffed, “Pardon, sir, but may I ask why we are stopping here? I was to beg you, sir, to come straightaway.”

  “Isn’t your mistress Mrs. Dixwell?”

  “No, sir. Mrs. Nichols. She’s begun to bleed. Before her time, if you get my drift.”

  “Mrs. Nichols.” Zabdiel blinked twice, and then tossed himself back in the saddle and leapt into a canter north up Hanover Street, toward Wake-field Alley.

  Bethiah Nichols was weepy, but Zabdiel had no time to coax her out of it. “You told me you were not with child,” he said, a little sharply. “Are you sure?”

  She sniffled and looked away, and presently she nodded and whispered, “Eight or nine weeks gone. I was afraid you would not agree to the operation.”

  Zabdiel’s heart turned over inside him, and pity came back. He took her hand. “I would not have. I am afraid you are losing this baby, my dear,” he said.

  She sobbed in silence, and he let her cry. There was nothing else he could do.

  He stepped out for a breath of air; Jack ducked out with him into the empty streets. “I’ll be fine,” said Zabdiel impatiently. “The good folk of Boston are in church.”

  “Ain’t the good folk I’m worried about,” said Jack.

  On their way home, they stopped in at the Dixwells’. Mary Dixwell’s fever had wrapped her ever tighter in suffocating heat; she was shaking so constantly now that it was hard to tell when the feverish shivering stopped and the convulsions began. Zabdiel remained by her side all that afternoon, praying privately for a miracle, knowing he would not get one. Just before the churches were to let out from afternoon prayer, he sent Jack north to Salutation Alley. Presently he reappeared with Reverend Webb and a phalanx of Mr. Dixwell’s fellow ruling elders and deacons of the New North Church.

  Outside, a crowd of the already mourning, the curious, and the perpetually angry mingled around the house. Some prayed loudly for Mrs. Dixwell’s deliverance; some wished just as fervently, though more quietly, for her death: as just retribution for the poor king done to death by her father-in-law all those years ago, as punishment for her own temptation of Providence. What was the difference, someone wheezed, between her death and suicide? Heads nodded, and eyes slid knowing looks at each other.

  Dr. Douglass drove by in his carriage and eyed the crowd with satisfaction. Pride goeth before a fall, he observed to Mr. Stewart, and drove on.

  Zabdiel remained by Mrs. Dixwell’s side into the evening, fending misery off from her final moments with laudanum, while John Dixwell knelt by the bedside in prayer. Mr. Webb and the men of the New North surrounded him, their voices blending into a strong, deep, comforting river of sound. Through the old-fashioned diamond panes of the windows, the trees smoldered with the fires of autumn, their edges curling gold, bronze, red, orange, peach, mahogany, and yellow. As the sun touched the tip of the three-peaked mountain to the west, the whole world briefly flamed bright. To the east, the tide slid whispering away from the land, and as the light quietly failed, Mrs. Dixwell’s spirit sank with it into death.

  8

  THE KING’S PARDON

  Newgate Prison, London

  September 6, 1721

  THE others had hauled the tapster from bed as the sun rose and were already celebrating their pardons in the taproom, but Lizzy Harrison lingered in her chamber. She ought to celebrate—she ought to—she knew it as well as anybody, but she felt more like crying.

  The gates were to open to them later that morning; king’s pardon in hand, she would be free.

  Lizzy looked about at the empty room with its three rough beds, mismatched chairs, and tipsy tables, its walls decorated with scrawls of charcoal. It was the finest room she had ever lived in. Against all expectation, she had been happy here too. Had felt useful. But as of nine o’clock, she had earned the right to be turned out from it.

  To go where?

  She stared at a small patch of sun sliding across the table, as if she could burn it into her vision. No other room she was ever likely to inhabit would be pierced by so much as one window: London’s tax on windows ensured that. Here she had two. So what if they were barred? So what if she could not read the scrawls on the walls? Hadn’t Mrs. Tompion read most of them to her?

  A jangling of keys shattered her reverie. “As is one of them medical gentlemen wishes a word with you, Lizzy ’Arrison,” leered the jailer, as if to say, And don’t I know exactly what word it is he wants, my Lady Lie-back. He smelled of onions, bad teeth, and gin. “In the small parlor. Doubletime.”

  Her already sinking spirits dropped into the dungeons. She was no green girl, she told herself tightly, as she had so many times before, but now it sounded hollow and sad. The old London was already pulling her back to the old expectation of all she was good for. With one of the doctors, no less.

  She was too proud, though, to let the jailer see her distress. She rose as haughtily as she imagined the Princess of Wales herself might, and sailed out of the room without so much as a glance at the man.

  The parlor looked empty. Perhaps the man, whoever it was, had thought better of himself, and had gone away again. Then she heard a creak, and a dark figure rose from a large leather chair that had been drawn into the sun. Mr. Maitland.

  But he made no move toward her: just stood there regarding her, his hands clasped behind his back, his expression stern.

 
; He cleared his throat. “Now, Mrs. Harrison,” he said, “as you know, the inoculation experiment is over, and you are free to go. I, too, am off. I go to Hertford next week.”

  Without warning, the wail that had been coiled in her stomach all morning sprang long and thin through the parlor, and she burst into tears.

  Mr. Maitland watched Lizzy Harrison with alarm. Where had such sorrow come from? The girl was free to go—full king’s pardon—surely a joyous occasion. He dug through his experience for some likely explanation, but he was a bachelor. Even his servants—at least, those with whom he came into contact—were men. He was a surgeon, of course, to many ladies, but their tears were different. They cried like crocodiles or falcons—or a chimeric combination of both—when they wanted something. Or they cried in pain. But Lizzy was neither maneuvering nor suffering—not bodily, anyway.

  He crossed the room and installed her, still sobbing, into one of the chairs in front of the fireplace. He produced a handkerchief for her, and then paused. What to do next? Best, really, to press on.

  “Now, Lizzy,” he said again, “I hope you will listen carefully. As I said, I’m off to Hertford. The smallpox is very bad there, and they are in dire need of nurses.”

  The weeping stopped as suddenly as it had begun. She hiccuped and blew her nose.

  “You have shown a commendable diligence and willingness to learn in the past month,” he said. “And, I must say, a most admirable talent for nursing.”

  She was watching his every move, her face wary.

  “I serve as surgeon to Christ’s Hospital—a charity school for orphans. If you like, I will secure you a place there as a smallpox nurse.” His throat tightened as he made the offer. How was he to convince such a girl that it was a good idea? He was not so sure himself that it was a good idea, at least not for her.

  The smile that burst across her face took him aback. Like rainbows, or sun suddenly pouring through a break in the clouds. Really, he told himself sharply, you are becoming quite absurdly sentimental.

  “Oh, sir!” she exclaimed. “You would find me a place?”

  He nodded.

  “In the country?”

  “Hertford is not exactly the country,” he cautioned, but she was rattling on. Clearly, to her, anything beyond Cripplegate and Bedlam was the country. “And will there be larks? I’ve always wanted to see larks, sir, though I suppose one ’ears ’em, don’t one? And daffodils—in the ground, like.”

  “Larks I can promise you,” he said. “But not daffodils, at least, not until spring.” What was he doing, promising her flowers and birds? He steered his voice back to gravity. “I must warn you: the engagement is by no means risk free.” She tried to press the smile from her mouth, but did not quite succeed. “It is, in fact, an extension of the experiment you have just passed through. We—Sir Hans Sloane, Dr. Steigerthal, and I—believe you are now safe from the smallpox. But we are not sure.”

  Dr. Sloane and Dr. Steigerthal had not wanted him to be so forthright; they had predicted she would refuse out of hand—and they wanted this experiment badly, as the final seal on their success: the guarantee that inoculation offered reliable protection from acquiring the smallpox in the natural way. So badly, in fact, that they had joined their purses to pay for it.

  But Mr. Maitland had been adamant. Lizzy had made a bargain to risk her life in exchange for a full and free pardon. He would not now try to attach an anchor chain. He would offer her an entirely new agreement, to take or leave as she pleased, or he would make no offer at all. Besides, he had been fairly sure that she would only agree under those circumstances. She had more intelligence than the physicians credited, and could smell deceit from four miles off. He was certain, he had said, that without forthright honesty, she would flee.

  Sir Hans had sniffed. If Mr. Maitland lost her, he said, the Princess of Wales would be disappointed. As would, no doubt, His Majesty the king.

  His Majesty, thought Mr. Maitland grimly, had made a promise.

  In front of him, Lizzy sniffled. “You mean you are not sure, or you mean that prig of a Dr. Droop-staff is not sure?” she said with a spark of her old spirit.

  “Some say that the distemper was not genuine. That it was merely the chicken pox, or some other spurious pox. Or that it was not strong enough to afford you protection. We believe it was. But we are not sure.”

  “And this will make you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  She bit her lip. “I will have a place? Bed and board?”

  He nodded.

  “You will teach me more about nursing?”

  He nodded again, feeling like a feeding duck. “All those things.”

  “And it’ll be proper? No gentlemen?”

  “There will be boys, but not men. Girls too. It is a school.”

  The smile came back. “Then, sir, I’ll go with you to where there’s larks.”

  “You realize you will be risking the smallpox?”

  “I’d be risking worse, to stay ’ere.” Darkness flickered through her eyes, and was gone. “I trusted you before; why should I stop now?”

  Lizzy had thought the Press Yard fine; within twenty minutes, she decided the house of Mrs. Priscilla Moss, matron of Christ’s Hospital in Hertford, was paradise. There were larks, and though it was not the season for their angelic singing in the realms of the moon, still, they sang. There were also sparrows and robins bustling about in their red-feathered waistcoasts. Almost as chattery were the children running or walking in their lines, in their long blue coats flapping up to show yellow skirts beneath. There were no daffodils, but there was more green than she had dreamed the world could hold. And wide skies shifting minute by minute and hour by hour through blue, pink, lavender, silver, sapphire, and velvet black.

  “Don’t breathe so hard, child,” Mrs. Moss had said, catching her at a window her first day. “You’ll faint.”

  But it was hard not to gulp the strong, sharp sweetness of that air.

  Mrs. Moss was kindness and patience itself. Her daughter Sarah was a little less so—she followed Lizzy nervously with her eyes whenever she came downstairs, as if she might nick a bit of silver, but she was less sure of herself than her mother was.

  So it was not perfect—but then Lizzy had never imagined paradise to be perfect either: it had had lying serpents in it, didn’t it? She’d take the work at Christ’s, anyday. Which was not to say that it was easy, or always pleasant. One of Mrs. Moss’s serving girls had broken out in confluent pox; after that first day, Lizzy was set to care for her, and was largely confined to a room in the attic with her. But it was a big room, with three gabled windows that flickered with the dances of leaves: an elm stood just outside. She felt quite like a bird herself sometimes, as if she, too, lived in that tree.

  The food was filling and hot, and could be counted on—right down to the minute. And she quite liked her patient, though for much of the time the poor girl could not talk. Lizzy cared for her as she might have cared for a mewling infant.

  The windows she kept open. Even on the worst stinking days, when the pocks oozed bloody pus over the sheets, the birdsong buoyed Lizzy up, and from time to time little breezes would sweep the room clean.

  Mr. Maitland came every other day, at least as interested in Lizzy’s health as in the maid’s. On the worst of days, when flushes crossed her skin like high, thin clouds on a spring day, and a small crop of pimples sprouted around her incision scars, his concern made her feel that she’d let him down. But the incisions stayed closed, and she felt no pangs of headache or fever, so presently he was pleased again.

  Best of all, he spoke to her of other things, which she much preferred to the topic of herself. At the beginning of October, for instance, he began inoculating again, this time among the Hertford quality. His first patient was the two-and-a-half-year-old daughter of a Quaker at Temple, which he said was about three miles from town. The girl, Mary Batt by name, had passed through the inoculated smallpox just as expected, he said: mild first fe
ver, twenty or so pocks, no second fever at all, and the pocks very quickly drying up and falling away.

  He was so buoyed up that he tried again, on two brothers, seven and three, on October 12, this time right within Hertford. He inoculated them at the same time, with the same matter: but that was where the sameness ended. Young Benjamin Heath, the three-year-old, was eager to please, clean of habit, and easily governed; he had a very gentle case, quite like Mary Batt’s.

  But Joseph—well, he said, shaking his head, “he is a fat, foul, and gluttonous boy.” Lizzy had nearly dropped the pile of clean sheets she had just folded; she had never heard Mr. Maitland say anything so uncomplimentary. He must have surprised himself, for he exclaimed, “I do not exaggerate! The child has a voracious appetite, and is constantly filling his belly with the coarsest food—cheese, fat country pudding, cold boiled beef. He looks like all three, come to think of it, molded into one lump.”

  Lizzy began to laugh.

  “He will not obey the simplest rule, nor will his parents restrain him—not even to keep him indoors in cold, windy, frosty weather; if he wants to go out, then out he goes, or the house resounds with it. I tell you, he once wet his feet in the water!”

  Lizzy had to sit down on the edge of the maid’s bed, she was laughing so hard, though she did not know what was funniest: the fat, foul little boy, Mr. Maitland’s consternation, or the notion that wet feet was a catastrophe.

  “It is not a laughing matter,” he said reproachfully. “The boy is very ill. A high fever before the eruption, and now a great load of small, coherent pocks. Had he taken the disease in the natural way, I doubt a worldful of doctors could save his fat, froward life!”

  Lizzy glanced sharply at Mr. Maitland’s face. So that was the problem. Guilt.

  Lizzy’s servant-maid patient was no sooner getting well than one of the boys in Mrs. Moss’s care came down with ominous symptoms. The servant girl was removed to another room to convalesce, and he was installed in her place. Mr. Maitland expressly directed her to lie in the bed with him every night—but she would’ve done it anyway, without the asking. Poor little tyke. He clung to her for as long as he could, and then, even when it hurt to move or to be touched, still, he would scrape his arm along the sheets and touch her with one finger: just to know that someone was there.