The Speckled Monster (54 page)

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.

Sarah Moss began to relax. One day, she offered to teach Lizzy her alphabet and her numbers.

Lizzy practiced as long as there was daylight. Real nurses must be able to read the doctor's instructions, after all.

 

She did not see Mr. Maitland again for some time. When she did, she was surprised at how haggard he looked.

“What's 'appened at the 'Eaths'?” she asked.

“Heaths'?” he asked absently from the window. “Oh. Both boys at last recovered . . . I did not think it was catching,” he said, dropping into a chair. “So much of the arguing, you see, has centered on whether or not inoculation produces a true smallpox or a spurious one—the chicken pox.”

He shook his head and dropped it in his hands. “You'd have thought, given my position, I would have foreseen this. But I was as lulled into false understanding by the lightness of inoculated cases as Dr. Wagstaffe. And now six people are ill, and one of them is dying.”

Mr. Batt, he said, had six domestic servants—four men and two maids—who had all cared for little Mary while she was down with the inoculated smallpox. He shook his head. Even with the pocks full upon her, they had hugged and petted her daily. Two weeks or thereabouts after the height of the girl's rash, they had all been seized at once with the telltale fever, backache, and nausea.

As if that weren't enough, Mrs. Heath's infant, still suckling at her breast, had also caught the natural smallpox—distinct, thank God. And Mrs. Heath, too, who'd had the distemper many years before, had grown several pimply pustules on her face and hands, though without any sickness attending them. “As often happens to smallpox nurses—and even to the laundresses who must wash their linens,” he said. He smiled ruefully. “Just as has happened to you.”

 

It was strange, he said, how different the Batt servants' cases had been, though they had all been infected from the same source—and that a light case of inoculated pox, no less. But the servants had suffered varying degrees of distinct pox, mostly bad, and two had turned confluent, with all its calamities. “But they all did well,” he said. “God be thanked.”

“All?” she asked gently.

“All except one,” he said gruffly. “But she would not be governed.”

He turned his back on that death; there was nothing to be gained by stewing over it. The best he could do was to try and understand it.

It was in talking to Lizzy that he began to order his arguments. Lizzy, of course, was proving that smallpox could not reinfect the inoculated, in the natural way. Inversely, these unforeseen accidents had shown that inoculated smallpox
could
infect the unprotected. What better double-underlined proof could there be that the inoculated smallpox was indeed a true smallpox?

By the beginning of November, Mr. Maitland was sure of his success. He waited impatiently, however, until midmonth, when Lizzy's boy was all but recovered and she was still free of fever and spots, before he sat down to write his official report.

 

There were so many issues, so many questions, findings, scruples, and doubts. How was he to marshal them all into neat soldierly rows? One at a time, he thought, take them one at a time, beginning with the most important. What was the ultimate reason for making this latter experiment?

Following the success of Newgate, he wrote,
I still had one difficulty left, which I took to be the most considerable; and which, if not fully cleared, would render, in my opinion, the whole of the process but trifling and precarious: and that is,
whether everyone who had undergone this operation is really secured against all future danger of catching the smallpox by infection? Were I but well assured of this, I should then, I thought, be at liberty to practice it myself, and likewise with confidence recommend it to others
.

He sighed with satisfaction. He was now in a position to answer his own question, and to answer it strongly.

 

Referring to his notes, he described in detail her trials in the house of Mrs. Moss, nursing the servant maid and the boy. It was all neat and good. More than that, it was incontrovertible.

Even as he thought this, however, he heard in his mind Dr. Wagstaffe scrupling to doubt that so much as a single word was true. The mere memory of the man's voice irritated him.

There's no ground to question these facts,
he scribbled,
being attested by a cloud of witnesses
.

He took a breath and put his aggravation away. He was a surgeon from Aberdeen, and though he was proud of his work, he was an honest man. He knew he did not walk among the great geniuses of the age. He had played his part well, he hoped, but he had not sought it out. He had even sought to avoid it. The discovery had tapped him on the shoulder; he had not, like Sir Isaac Newton, dared to run along the shore of some vast ocean of truth, chasing down a particular shell. Nevertheless, it had fallen to him to call forth the trumpets. He must somehow rise like a poet, a prophet, and declare the Truth.

He closed his eyes and thought of a falcon he had once seen, winging over the heather at home; he thought of another he had seen soaring below him, and beyond that, the flower-strewn plain of Turkey, as he descended from the crags of the Bulgarian mountains. Then he leaned forward, biting his lip as he wrote.

He drummed his fingers on the table. That was good, that was accurate and rational, but it did not have a heart-sweeping wheel and swoop.

 

He tossed down the pen, caught up his coat, hat, and walking stick, and went out for a long winter walk.

9

RAW HEAD AND BLOODY BONES

 

JERUSHA found Zabdiel sitting in the parlor the next morning, his head in his hands. He looked up blearily as she came in. “Mary Dixwell died last night.”

She crossed the room and knelt by his side.

“I don't think I killed her, Jerusha. But I cannot stand before my Maker and swear I did not.”

 

Dr. Douglass rubbed his hands with glee, and sat down to write a letter to Dr. Alexander Stuart of the Royal Society.
The smallpox rages here epidemically: about a thousand persons are decumbent with the disease. Above sixty persons of all ages, sexes, and conditions have been inoculated, of which several had the confluent sort, and I am sorry to say, one
—and here he paused. Mrs. Dixwell's death he was sure of. But the number might be considerably worse. Might double, in fact. From what he heard, Mrs. Nichols was not doing well at all. She might very well die herself in the next week or two. He did not, however, wish to hold his letter that long. Lord knew when another ship might sail for London.

He smiled and dipped his quill in the ink once more.
I am sorry to say, one or two have died
.

 

HMS
Seahorse
returned from her northern voyage; this time, nobody congregated to see the plume of her sails. A few anxious wives and parents slipped down to the Long Wharf, handkerchiefs to noses, averting their eyes from each other to avoid exchanging greetings that might also exchange contagion.

With the rolling gait of a sailor and the confidence of a man, Charles Paxton strode down the gangplank.

“Where is Hector?” asked Captain Paxton as his son stepped onto the dock.

Charles was taken aback. “Why, with you, Father. Where should he be?”

Captain Paxton's grip on his walking stick tightened. “I am in no mood for banter.”

“But he never rejoined the ship.”

“Never—?”

“He met Captain Durell himself the morning we left, and showed him a letter from you, requesting him to be discharged—”

Captain Paxton did not hear the rest. His face and neck purple with rage, he pushed past his son and stormed aboard.

If there were one or two hearts about the ship that lifted and one or two minds that thought,
May you be far away, with a fair wind behind,
they kept their eyes down and their smiles shadowed.

 

As the sun rose over Dock Square, crowds surged through the streets, flinging themselves in ragged bands at Zabdiel's house.
“Raw Head and Bloody Bones!”
they screamed, peppering their cries with pebbles, rotten fruit, and eggs.
Murderer! Devil take you, murdering fiend! Go to hell!

Zabdiel did not show so much as his shadow at a window, though most of the mob melted into soft shadows of dusk. “Hiding like a snail in his shell,” he said bitterly as Jerusha came to bed and blew out the candle.

 

At midnight, a knocking on the chamber door sent him shooting back out of the bed. Jerusha sat bolt upright, clutching the sheet to her chin.

“Not meanin' to fright you, Doctor,” said Jack quietly, his face flickering in the light of a candle at the door, “but Mr. Nichols's man is downstairs.”

“What's wrong?”

“Don't know. I expect it's the missus. At least he had enough sense to be quiet-like. Came and scratched at the kitchen window.”

Zabdiel threw on a dressing gown and went downstairs. The man rose, tall and black, gripping his hat in front of him.

“I'm to beg you to come quickly, sir. She's flooding.”

Zabdiel ran back up the stairs and dressed. Jerusha sat, gripping her knees, her eyes huge in the moonlight. He drew to the bedside and took her hand.

She turned her eyes slowly to his. “Don't go,” she whispered. “Zabdiel, please don't.”

He smoothed down a few wisps of hair that had escaped her nightcap. “Beth Nichols is losing a child, Jerusha. What would you be saying if she were one of our girls?”