The Speckled Monster (63 page)

Two people had been
murdered,
she raged. Not by the operation, but by the physicians: by their “preparations” that weakened bodies just when they needed all their strength to fight off infection, by the miserable gashes they slashed through their patients' arms, and by the vast quantities of purulent matter they pasted into the wounds by the tankardful. She scratched through her conclusion without pause, sanded it, and rang for a glass of wine. All that was left was figuring exactly how to circulate it so that everyone should know it was hers, but no one would be able to prove it.

 

The physicians and surgeons among her friends were not amused; Dr. Arbuthnot, Dr. Mead, Sir Hans, and Mr. Maitland called upon her in a grand unsmiling delegation. She received them in an impeccably English drawing room.

“Surely, my lady, you can see that physicians per se are not your enemies?” Sir Hans began gruffly.

“Whose enemies?” she asked.

“Drop the masquerade, if you please, my lady,” said Mr. Maitland. “Such subterfuge does not become you.”

“And stubbornness does not become you, gentlemen.”

“Will you not see that the inoculators are not your enemies?” pleaded Dr. Arbuthnot. “I must tell you, Lady Mary: you have flung down the word
murder,
but the two who died most certainly did not die from inoculation, no matter what you want to argue about incision length. Young Spencer was well through the distemper, and Lord Bathurst's servant had caught it in the natural way, before being inoculated—though to be sure, he may well have caught it from the inoculated children, or from being sent to the smallpox house. A niggling point, you may say, as you might still like to lay those deaths at medicine's door: but they did not come about through inoculation.”

“I do not know why you feel the need to lecture me on this point, gentlemen, but seeing that you are, perhaps you will allow me to engage you. I hear what you have said about the deaths, Dr. Arbuthnot, and I must say your reasoning is convincing. But I tell you, I agree with this Turkey merchant: by your changes, you are making the operation far more severe and dangerous than necessary.” She turned to Mr. Maitland. “Surely
you
can see that?”

“What I see most clearly, my lady, is that those of us who support inoculation would do well to stick together just now. The opposition screams with the fury of a storm from the sea.”

She looked at them all, one by one, and then she rose. They hurried to stand in her wake. “If it comes to a battle for inoculation's survival, gentlemen, you can count on my support.”

It did come to that, and soon. All summer long, jeering mobs followed the inoculators through the streets, and slurs began winging through the press. “Mr. Maitland is grubbing for money and patronage,” sneered some.

“A new way to murder with impunity!” screeched others. “Guardians will poison their wards in order to come to rich estates.”

“An artificial way of depopulating a whole country,” shouted still others.

The most resounding thunder among the physicians came from Dr. William Wagstaffe, who had been reading certain pamphlets from the colonies quite carefully. Inoculation does not and cannot communicate smallpox, he argued. Inoculation produces something much closer to chicken pox: so how can it be expected to give protection from smallpox? Infusing the blood with such malignant matter, he argued in the next breath, may lay the foundation for many more terrible diseases.

But what really riled Dr. Wagstaffe was the absurdity of learned men listening to women and foreigners:
Physicians at least, who of all men ought to be guided in their judgments chiefly by experience, should not be over hasty in encouraging a practice, which does not seem as yet sufficiently supported either by reason, or by fact,
he roared on paper.
Posterity will scarcely be brought to believe that an experiment practiced only by a few ignorant women amongst an illiterate and unthinking people should on a sudden—and upon a slender Experience—so far obtain in one of the politest nations in the world as to be received into the Royal Palace
.

The Reverend Edmund Massey made pulpits ring with almost as much condemnation as the presses, working himself and his congregation into a froth of righteous hatred.
So went Satan forth from the Presence of the Lord, and smote Job with sore boils, from the sole of his Foot unto his Crown,
he thundered, proving that the devil himself was the first Inoculator.

 

Against the paranoia and the prejudice, the Royal Society—or most of it—called for patient reasoning. Dr. Arbuthnot and Dr. James Jurin, the society's secretary, listened to the arguments of a country doctor from York, and set a move underfoot to apply the cool precision of mathematics to the question of whether or not inoculation worked. Dr. Jurin began to peruse London's official bills of mortality, and to beg surgeons for their inoculation records.

Someone—Lady Mary never discovered who—leaked her Turkey merchant's letter to the press. In September, the
Flying-Post: or, Post-Master
printed a heavily edited version. Two weeks later: Isaac Massey, apothecary of Christ's and Reverend Massey's nephew, railed at it as “a sham Turkey Merchant's letter”—but though he sensed a mask, he could not see behind the disguise.

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

 

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 two 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.