The Speckled Monster

by Jennifer Lee Carrell

  Throughout the year, the squabbling whirled on in the press, crossing the Atlantic, and the Channel as well.

  But the issue was decided slowly and steadily, below the chatter. It was decided by numbers.

  In a quick assessment of London’s official bills of mortality, Dr. Arbuthnot figured that living in London gave one a 1 in 9 chance of succumbing to smallpox. Dr. Jurin’s more careful long-term study of both natural and inoculated smallpox—presented to the Royal Society in January 1723—concluded that 2 of every 17 Londoners died from smallpox. During epidemics, 1 in every 5 or 6 of those who fell ill died. In comparison, by the end of 1722, 15 inoculators throughout England had operated on 182 people, mostly children, and only 2 had died. Against the 1 in 6 chances offered by natural smallpox, inoculation’s 1 in 91 risk of death looked inviting.

  Numbers decided the case, but it was the sound of feet that reinforced it: the echoing footsteps of ranks of footmen running before carriages to send for inoculators, the light kid whisper of Lady Mary’s slippers rising gracefully up grand staircases, the step of surgeons in the halls, and the patter of children in nurseries. People voted with their feet, and staked their children’s lives upon their decisions.

  The high and mighty were particular: they wanted Sergeant Amyand or Mr. Maitland to make the incisions, but they wanted Lady Mary in the room. Many of these were Lady Mary’s friends, or currying favor with the Princess of Wales.

  Others lived for nothing more than to make the inoculators’ lives a sojourn of groaning, jeering, and gnashing of teeth.

  And so the controversy went, tumbling into the next year, tattered with screaming and with pleas.

  On the morning of thirteenth of May, 1723, a brilliant company gathered at Leicester House. The great names in the Prince and Princess of Wales’s household, of course: dukes and duchesses, earls and countesses, lords and ladies aplenty. Mrs. Howard (the prince’s mistress) and Mrs. Clayton (power-monger). Lord Townshend and many of the council, deputed from the king. Sir Robert Walpole and several others deputed from Parliament.

  They could open Parliament, quipped someone among the prince’s ushers, if Parliament only had papist leanings enough to worship a Madonna and child, rather than priding itself in bickering with kings.

  For the center of attention, seated on a chair little less ornate than a throne, were the Princess of Wales, with Prince William Augustus on her knee. “They do look rather Raphael,” remarked someone else.

  “What is so amusing in that corner?” demanded the princess.

  The chortling disappeared beneath deep bobbing bows.

  “Leave ’em alone, woman,” said the prince. “Look at old Amyand there, preparing to do battle with his lancet. St. George jousting with the speckled monster.” He puffed with such obvious pleasure at his own jest that courtiers hurried to feed him with laughter.

  The princess held her son close, drawing in the scent of his hair. All boy, he loved nothing so much as his hobby horse and was impatient to be off her lap, until he caught the gleam of the small knife.

  “Be my brave, little general,” whispered the princess, but Prince William did not appear to hear. Fascinated by the lancet, he watched the whole operation in silence.

  “That all?” said someone in the back when it was over. “Why ain’t every last body in the kingdom clamoring for it?”

  A short distance away, in the Piazza of Covent Garden, a crowd surged forward, hooting and jeering as the doors to the Wortley Montagu house opened to reveal a phalanx of footmen surrounding Lady Mary and her small daughter. The shouting mounted, and a few turnips and a rotten egg or two arced over the carriage, splattering Lady’s Mary’s skirts as she disappeared into the waiting coach.

  The mob trailed her coach all the way to Lincoln’s Inn Fields, though blessedly, at the duchess of Ancaster’s gate, she left everything but their noise behind.

  “Oh, Mary, there you are,” cried the duchess from the top of the grand staircase. “What is that horrid din?”

  “My admirers,” said Lady Mary. “Do you suppose I could borrow your maid?”

  “Oh, my dear, what have they done?” said the duchess, arriving breathless at Lady Mary’s side. “There is quite half an eggshell perched atop your wig, as if it has just hatched.”

  “Is there?” Taking her small daughter’s hand, Lady Mary allowed herself to be steered toward the duchess’s dressing room. “I only noticed the turnips.” They sped up the hall, the servants impassive, but looking askance as they passed. Unnatural, hissed one or two, but Lady Mary affected not to notice.

  The maid straightened her hair, removing a few foreign objects, and brushed out her skirts, while the duchess glared out the window. “Is it always like this?”

  “Not always, no. They always seem to know, though, when I am headed toward an inoculation.”

  “Don’t they recognize an angel when they see one? I was telling Ancaster only this morning that you are nothing if not an angel.”

  “They believe they see a devil, my dear. Or perhaps the Scarlet Whore of Babylon.” She looked ruefully at her skirts. “They do have a penchant for tossing cherries in season, which unfortunately necessitates the wearing of red.” Suddenly, she was very tired. If I had foreseen the tenth part of the vexation, the persecution, and the obloquy heaped upon me day to day, she told herself, I would never have attempted to bring this operation into fashion.

  “If they had only known my poor Meg,” said the duchess, stamping her foot. She turned and plopped down on the window seat. “Do you remember those days, when we used to peep over the garden wall at each other, Brownlows and Pierreponts?” She sighed. “It’s a strange world, Mary, isn’t it? I am so happy with Ancaster, you know—it is not all bad, to be a duchess. But it could not have happened but for poor Margaret’s terrible death. I say a prayer for her every day, I do. Such a monstrous distemper, the smallpox. Took your Will, didn’t it? And it nearly took you, too, poor dear. Sometimes in the night I cannot sleep, wondering when it will pounce upon my Louisa. She looks so much like Meg—even talks like her. It is quite eerie, at times.” Tear welled in her eyes. “I could not bear it. I could not.”

  “Nor shall you,” said Lady Mary. “I expect Sergeant Amyand will be here any moment, with his load of precious poison. Just think: Lady Louisa will have no less than a royal dose of the smallpox—same as Prince William.”

  The duchess sniffled and smiled, and Lady Mary took her arm.

  “Let us go and find your pretty child.”

  “Lady Albina, my niece—her cousin—only, that goes without saying, doesn’t it? Ancaster is always telling me I say things four times, when I need only say them once. Where was I? Oh, yes. Lady Albina is to be inoculated today as well. And Miss Selwyn—her mother, you know, is one of the princess’s women of the bedchamber, and her father is something to the prince, I can’t recall what.”

  Lady Louisa’s inoculation went by in a twinkling. In a chattering, thought Lady Mary: Jane did love to talk.

  As soon as was polite, Lady Mary and her daughter headed for the door. The duchess accompanied them, clasping Lady Mary’s arm. “Are you quite sure you will be safe, my dear?”

  “I do not think anyone has yet been killed by a rain of elderly vegetables, Jane.”

  “Is there nothing I can do for you?” insisted the duchess.

  Lady Mary nodded and the footmen opened the door. “Admire the heroism in the heart of your friend,” she said, and stepped into the screaming.

  After math

  1

  MEETINGS AND PARTINGS

  The Boston Neck

  July 26, 1723

  ZABDIEL took Tommy and rode south across the Neck to race through wheeling clouds of birds far out into the salt marshes at low tide. It was a form of worship, he thought, this exhilaration in God’s glories of wind, wings, and horses, though he knew neither Jerusha nor the Reverend Mr. Colman would agree. But it was how he liked to give thanks to the Lord for His delivery of Tommy t
wo years ago.

  When they returned home bright eyed and glowing, Jerusha smiled and said, “There is a letter for you in the parlor. From London.”

  He retrieved it and went out to the garden, to sit on a bench where he could watch his favorite mare nuzzling her new foal.

  The letter sat lightly in his hand, as if it were a bird that would presently fly off. But it went nowhere, not even floating on a breeze, though dandelion gossamer skimmed about in the late afternoon light. Eventually he slit the seal and opened it.

  Pleased to have the honour . . . Royal Society . . . a grateful world . . . Superior person . . . Your devoted servant, Sir Hans Sloane.

  He looked across the garden. The gooseberry and currant bushes were bending under their loads; roses and lavender were sighing their scent into the soft air. Most people would brandish such a letter aloft in triumph. Why, then, did he want nothing more than to curl up beneath this tree and sink into sleep?

  After Mrs. Dixwell’s death—could that already be nearly two years ago?— he had reluctantly taken up his lancet again, only to find a grateful world suddenly clamoring for his services. It had by no means spelled the end of all difficulty, though. Difficulty! He scoffed at himself. A fine, mincing euphemism for death. For there had been more deaths: five more, to be exact. He had grieved sorely for every one of them, though he knew that most were probably due to the infection taken naturally before he had inoculated. The few that he reckoned were the result of poor doctoring, he bore as scars on his soul: but unlike Mrs. Dixwell’s death, they had not paralyzed him.

  Nor had they stilled the tumult in the streets; after the General Court had scattered in panic, the mob’s frenzy for stopping him had transformed—overnight, it seemed—into an equally tireless enthusiasm to hound him into operating. His learned opposition, on the other hand, had relished each new death. In the press, the shouting dived gleefully into libel and even doggerel. Through it all, Zabdiel had done his best to keep his head down and his tongue silent; very little of the shouting deserved the dignity of a reply.

  In any case, the demon disease had soon folded up its scaly wings and slunk out of Boston to terrorize neighboring Roxbury, Cambridge, and Charlestown. From December on, most of his inoculations had taken place in those towns. In Roxbury, people flocked to him after ten of the first thirteen head-of-household men to contract it had died; the place had thereafter been largely passed over by the angel of death. Cambridge, too, had clamored for his services, but in Dr. Robie, that town soon had an experienced inoculator of its own. In Charlestown, though, where people were more suspicious, they died in shoals. The Charlestown Boylstons and Webbs, along with their relations and trusting friends, had been conspicuous exceptions.

  Meanwhile, in Boston, the urgency to inoculate had faded in the wake of the disease’s disappearance. Dr. Douglass had ignored this connection, preferring to compare the waning interest in inoculation with the sudden dissolution of the witchcraft furor thirty years earlier. Massachusetts, he sneered, had at last shaken itself awake from yet another Mather-induced nightmare. Under Mr. Cooke’s direction, the House of Representatives had tried to outlaw the operation, but the bill had died a swift, silent death upon being sent up to the Council.

  In April and May, there had been one last stutter of excitement, as those who had fled drifted back into town, and a few more cases of small-pox flared up. Just as trade was returning to normal, it had shuddered and paused once again, as country towns heard rumors that the smallpox was back in Boston. Zabdiel took up the lancet once again, and inoculated six more people.

  The selectmen promptly banished all six to Spectacle Island, while Dr. Douglass railed that the operation was once again crawling abroad, like serpents waking in summer. As the inoculees were Sewalls and Alfords, Zabdiel knew the blow had been struck as much in retaliation against the Council as against him. But it riled him, even in memory, when he thought of poor Joanna Alford dragged from her own house, her husband pinned helpless against the wall by five men.

  Mr. Cooke and the rest of his selectmen had hauled Zabdiel before a meeting—again. This time, however, it was a full town meeting. They had demanded his word that he would stop. The danger was virtually past; wishing for nothing more than a cessation of the infernal, uncivil squabbling, he agreed.

  In public, Dr. Douglass kept right on spitting rage. But in private, he had been heard, once or twice, to admit grudgingly that the smallpox “seems to be somewhat more favorably received by inoculation than received in the natural way.”

  The numbers were grim enough: in May 1721, 2 men had walked down the gangplank of a single ship, sick, into a bustling town of about 11,000 people. So far as could be figured in the ensuing chaos, 6,689 of those who did not flee had not had the smallpox before. By the end of January 1722, 5,989 of them had caught it. Only 700 people known to be vulnerable—just over one in ten—had escaped unscathed. Among their less fortunate fellows, no fewer than 844 had died—nearly half of those in the single dark month of October. There was no accurate count of the other casualties: the blindness in one or both eyes, the scarred faces, the miscarriages, the long-lasting boils, ulcers, and arthritic aches—but Zabdiel put those in the hundreds as well.

  Against those numbers, he could set his own: he had inoculated 247 people, and had lost 6. All but one or two of those—along with most of his serious complications—he strongly suspected had taken the infection before he operated. At their best, then, his numbers suggested that inoculation offered better than a 1-in-100 chance of dying. Even taking his numbers at their worst, the risk of death looked to be only 1 in 41. Natural smallpox, on the other hand, threatened 1 in 7. “Somewhat more favorable,” indeed.

  By June 1722, his last patients were trickling back from Spectacle Island, having all recovered nicely under the care of Dr. Robie. Zabdiel had not been allowed to visit them with so much as a note—for fear, he supposed, that he might scrape out a pock and store up some matter with which to continue.

  Finally, the press had let go and moved on to juicier topics: not necessarily to the press’s benefit. For printing a satire suggesting that the government was collaborating with pirates, James Franklin got himself tossed into jail by order of the Council. His father, Josiah, had come hat in hand to Zabdiel. His son’s imprisonment, he thought, might be—in some measure—belated punishment for his publishing of so many anti-inoculation columns. Josiah had tried to reason with the boy, he said, his voice cracking. He had once or twice succeeded in getting him to quash a really rank piece—but, for the most part, James had been imperviously coated with the stubbornness of the young. Money was not the problem; Josiah’s younger son Ben could run the press. But the stone dungeon in which James had been shackled was a pit of darkness. He was like to lose his life of jail fever or the bloody flux before he ever saw the light of day again.

  That afternoon, Zabdiel delivered to the Council a terse letter pronouncing it paramount that James Franklin be allowed freedom of the Press Yard, for the sake of his health.

  Mr. Franklin was duly transferred, and eventually released the first week in July.

  By that time, Zabdiel was consumed elsewhere, for his mother was dying. She passed on July 8, firm in the belief that her middle child could do anything. Later that month, full-scale war broke out with the Abenaki Indians up in Maine; closer to home, the petty war between Governor Shute on one hand and Mr. Cook and Dr. Clark on the other rattled on.

  In September, Zabdiel had kinder news. At noon on Sunday the sixteenth, one year to the day after he had inoculated Mrs. Adams, she gave birth to a son named Samuel. “He looks to thrive,” said the infant’s startled father, who had not yet seen a son born healthy enough to survive. “He has a lusty yell, I can tell you that. Mary and I have great hopes for him.”

  In the Town House, the mood had not been so glad. All that long autumn, the governor exasperated even those who were disposed to support him for the sake of the office, if for nothing else. In the face of increasing
ly open hatred, Governor Shute secretly boarded HMS Seahorse one night in December and absconded for London.

  “Zabdiel?”

  He started. Jerusha was standing before him, hands on her hips, smiling at him as if he were a wayward child. He handed her the letter, watching her tip it toward the fading light, squinting to see.

  “London,” she said with hushed wonder, as if it were an earthly Eden and Canaan, Sodom and Gomorrah, flowing with milk, honey, and abomination all at once.

  He made room for her on the bench.

  “It is a great honor, Zabdiel.”

  “Curious, Jer. I have wanted to see London for many years. But now that this place is slipping back into civility, I find I don’t want to leave.”

  “I am not sure you have a choice,” she said quietly. “I suppose you had better ask Mr. Colman or Dr. Mather, but surely Sir Hans Sloane’s reference to ‘a superior person’ means royalty.”

  “I was afraid of that.” He stood up and held out his hand to her, drawing her up beside him. “If I must go, my dear, may I hope that will you come with me?”

  She looked slowly about the garden. Its color was draining, but its scents were ripening into sensuous riot. “My place is here, Zabdiel. So is yours. If you must go, I will stay here with the children.” She smiled up at him. “That way, you will be sure to come back.”

  In the morning, Mr. Colman confirmed his fears. “No doubt about it,” he said cheerfully, clapping him on the back. “Sir Hans has issued the invitation, but the force behind it is royal. While you may delay, I am afraid you may not refuse.”