The Speckled Monster (38 page)

He knew, too, with a strong sense of exaltation, the right response: he would turn the other cheek.
My Conformity to my SAVIOUR in this Thing fills me with Joy unspeakable and full of Glory
.

 

On Monday morning, Zabdiel summoned John home from his uncle Tom's house; when he arrived, Zabdiel inoculated his second son. Visiting Cheever a little later, he found him lightly feverish. His incisions, however, were drying up; perhaps they would not run like the boys' had—though those, too, were finally beginning to heal.

That afternoon, Zabdiel's letter appeared in the
Gazette,
to do battle with the second half of Dr. Mead's treatise on the plague in the
Boston News-Letter
. He got a peculiar and quite unexpected satisfaction from reading his words in print, though they also made him squirm; he instantly saw several places where his prose could have been much tighter.

 

That was a mouthful, he realized, about four sentences in one. Very orderly, very clear, to be sure, but on reflection it made him sound a little rushed, a little too anxious. A little too tied up in knots, he told himself with a short laugh.

 

Officially, Boston's seven selectmen met that same morning. Behind firmly closed doors, they met once again after dinner, joined by the irate speaker of the temporarily adjourned House, who slapped several copies of the
Gazette
down before them.

“We have already failed to contain the disease once,” he said, glaring at Elisha Cooke. “The very least we can do is to prevent Boylston—
a doctor,
no less—from spreading it still farther.”

“I agree,” said Mr. Hutchinson darkly. “This fooling with inoculation must be stopped.”

“And if he refuses to cooperate?” asked Mr. Cooke. Like most of the others, he had had a long, informative talk with Dr. Douglass. He had no intention of dissenting; he was just taking the measure of the passions in the room.

“Then,” growled Dr. Clark, “I hope you will call him to public account. I have warned him once already. Unofficially, of course,” he added as several backs bristled. “I'd be happy to serve you again as a more official messenger,” he continued, “but tomorrow morning, as you know, the General Court reconvenes in Cambridge.”

“Leave it to me,” said the doctor's brother, William Clark. This time, he told himself, no further means of spreading infection would escape his vigilance.

He delivered an official warning, in person, that very afternoon.

 

Walking by Dr. Boylston's place the next day, Dr. Mather gazed with barely veiled envy at the doctors' boys playing in the yard. But when he tried to cross the street, a crowd skittered out of nowhere, drawing so close that they jostled him. They were possessed, he thought, the very instrument of the devil who was tormenting him by dangling the success of inoculation before his eyes while preventing him from saving the lives of his own children. The press began to terrify him; they would tear him like Bacchus from limb to limb. His heart pounding in his throat, he turned homeward.

 

On the nineteenth, both Moll and Mr. Helyer were a little shivery with fever. Cheever's temperature, on the other hand, had gone off, and his incisions had almost entirely dried up. As Zabdiel was leaving Cheever's front gate, John and Joseph Webb, brother brewers and distillers who supplied the Salutation, fell in beside him, insisting that he join them at the tavern to taste their latest batch of ale. He had had no more than two sips when they came to the real point, begging him to inoculate their two families.

Zabdiel tried to dissuade them. John, especially—he was getting on in years. They listened politely, and then begged him again. The smallpox was devastating whole families in the area. Reluctantly, Zabiel agreed on a compromise. First he would inoculate the adults: the two brothers and Joseph's wife Deborah. Not till three or four days later would he inoculate the children; that way, while the adults were sickest, Joe's eldest daughter Esther could nurse them. When she, in turn, was sick, they stood at least a chance of being well enough to care for her and the littler ones.

Once they had reached an agreement, the Webbs wanted to waste no time; he stopped in at their place on his way home and performed the operation.

The news did not take long to spread. The next morning as he emerged from the Cheevers' place, it was William Clark who lay in wait; as the alley was too narrow to admit a carriage, he had strolled up with two man-servants.
“Dr. Boylston,”
he said, “as you have repeatedly disregarded warnings of a more friendly nature, it now falls to me to request your presence at the Town House this Friday morning at ten o'clock, for the purpose of a selectmen's meeting to consider the hazards of inoculation.”

“Will you also be considering the benefits?” asked Zabdiel, unhitching his big old gelding and mounting.

“I have brought a summons, Dr. Boylston, not an invitation to converse at a tea party.”

“I will be there, Mr. Clark,” said Zabdiel. “I will be there.” Before he could say anything he would regret, he rode quickly away.

 

Moll's fever went off the next day, just as Jack's had, without ever producing a rash. Also like Jack, her incisions were already drying up.

“You've had smallpox before too,” Zabdiel told her.

“Don't know 'bout that,” replied Moll. “But I've had 'em now.”

Cheever, too, seemed to have shaken off the inoculation, but he was certain he had never had the smallpox. By Thursday, though, he was feeling so well that he and Boylston both concluded that the operation had not taken. Perhaps he was naturally immune. Sarah, on the other hand, was grossly, terrifyingly ill; never mind inoculation, in caring for her, he had had every opportunity to contract the distemper.

That night, a fire broke out in a chimney up the street, and Cheever ran to help put it out before it could leap to neighboring roofs. By the time the brigade assembled, the flames had eaten well into one house; roaring and spitting, they were fingering greedily at its neighbors. It was not a roof or a house or even a neighborhood that was at risk. Every man there knew that if the fire tore loose, it would surge into a citywide conflagration: other than smallpox, fire was the worst calamity Boston knew. By the time they wrestled it under control and Cheever finally returned home, he was drenched with water and sweat. It was only after he shed his filthy clothing and washed off the soot that he found he could not dry himself off. It was fever, not the fire brigade's water that was keeping him wet. Even as he realized this, his head and back exploded with pain.

At dawn, he finally let his servant rouse Dr. Boylston. Zabdiel arrived to find Cheever's temperature high, his pulse hard and quick, his skin dry and inflamed, and his whole body brimming with pain. Either the inoculation had taken after all, or Sarah, close to death in the inner room, had given him the natural smallpox. Either way, it looked grim. Zabdiel shed his coat and went to work, battling through the early morning hours for Cheever's life. Unlike Tommy at the height of his fever, Cheever was still strong, so Zabdiel bled him, blistered him, and gave him a stringent antimonial vomit, hoping against hope to draw the poison up to a boil at the surface of his skin.

As he worked, Zabdiel told Cheever about the meeting scheduled later that morning. “It's an opportunity,” he said.

“It's more likely to be another witch-hunt,” said Cheever through chattering teeth. “Listen, you sweet fool of a physician: The selectmen made a mighty blunder in the matter of the
Seahorse
. They'll be wanting to redirect blame for loosing this hellfire plague toward somebody else. You probably look like manna from heaven . . . Daniel walking straight into the lions' mouths, never mind the den.”

“You're mixing up your stories,” said Zabdiel.

Cheever merely grunted. Zabdiel's problem intrigued him; it was something he could think his way through, whereas his own discomfort was mere animal pain. Also, it took his mind off Sarah, whose misery threatened to turn him inside out with grief. So even as Zabdiel drew several pints of blood and painted his back with a caustic ointment that drew blisters bubbling to the surface, Cheever badgered him into planning strategies and preparing arguments, as if he were headed into a trial for his life. He was by no means satisfied with Zabdiel's answers when his own symptoms went off, only a few hours later.

Zabdiel lingered, hoping beyond hope that the rash would dust Cheever with no more than ten or twenty specks and then march off again. It all depended on whether he had had come down with inoculated or natural smallpox. Meanwhile, Cheever went on drilling Zabdiel. His skin was still maddeningly clear when ten o'clock veered close and Zabdiel reluctantly began packing up to leave.

“Take the offensive,” said Cheever once more, still lying on his stomach.

“I'll be fine,” said Zabdiel. “I'll be back at dinner to tell you all about it.”

“Just try not to
be
offensive,” Cheever yelled after him.

2

PRYING MULTITUDES

 

WELL past midnight, hour dragged by hour up in the nursery. Lady Mary longed to slip up to the bed and hold a lantern over her daughter's sleeping face—like Psyche peering down at Cupid, she thought. She shuddered and gripped the arms of the chair as she rocked, holding herself forcibly in her seat.

Psyche's reckless curiosity had been a mistake. The moment she had seen the truth—that her husband was no monster, after all, but a young golden god—she had trembled with catastrophic relief. A single drop of burning oil spilled from her lamp and splashed her beloved. Startled awake, he had cast one glance of loving reproach her way, and disappeared. To get him back, she had had to brave the dark hollow whispering of Hades—or was that Orpheus and Eurydice? Lady's Mary's mind was thick with exhaustion, and she could not pull the strands of story apart, or make them lie still.

The fire flickered, and she drowsed. Slowly, her grip on the chair relaxed. Sometime later, she watched herself rise, drift to the bed, and draw aside the curtains. Her daughter was encrusted with pearls, tears, roses, and stars. Lady Mary gasped, and all at once they rose from the child's skin in a swarm, sailed about the room in a long shining ribbon like a comet's tail, and then poured themselves onto the floor at her feet.

Sort them by morning, or she will die,
intoned a deep voice Lady Mary could neither place nor disobey. She knelt in terror, sweeping at the glimmering heap. But the more frantically she plucked at the tears and the stars, the more nimbly they scattered from her fingers, shivering with high-pitched laughter. Her stomach had drilled a hole deep into despair when the nightingales of Constantinople swooped in to help.

Lady Mary became aware of the sun shining in her lap. Birds were singing, but they were not nightingales. She blinked and found that dawn had slipped in through the windows while she dreamed. She stumbled to the bed and flung back the curtains. Among lace pillows and lacier dolls, little Mary lay fast asleep, her mouth parted in easy breath. On her face burned five—no, six—red flecks.

As promised, the eruption had begun.

Gingerly, Lady Mary reached out to touch her daughter's cheek. It was cool.

She drew in a breath so deep it might have been a sob. Below her, her daughter sighed and stretched; her eyes fluttered, and then she sank back into sleep.

Lady Mary let herself touch her daughter once more, smoothing her fine dark fringe of curls. She was a demure little creature, sometimes tending toward prim. Already motherly—in some ways, more motherly than Lady Mary—and touchingly eager to please. Lady Mary had no notion how she could possibly have produced such a daughter.

Reluctantly, she drew away her hand and went to be dressed. As soon as she was presentable, she would carry the news to Mr. Wortley herself.