The Speckled Monster (64 page)

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.

 

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 increasingly 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.”

“It seems like a dream,” said Zabdiel shaking his head in wonder as he took his leave. “If you don't mind, I would rather not spread the word of this invitation until I know for certain what it produces.”

“All manner of honors, I expect,” said Mr. Colman. “But I shall be as secret as the grave.”

At the beginning of August, Zabdiel advertised in the papers for people to settle their debts with him, as he was designing a voyage to London in a very short time. Meanwhile, he replied to Sir Hans, both to accept the invitation and to apologize for the unavoidable delay in doing so; it would take time—as much as a year, perhaps—to make suitable arrangements for his practice, his shop, and his family.

 

A few weeks later, Jerusha found her husband pacing back and forth in front of his bookshelf in the parlor one evening.

“I have had a word with Captain Barlow,” he said. “I do not know, Jerusha, how we will pay for my passage. . . . I must sell either my books or my horses.”

“The books,” she said without a second thought. “Did you think I would say anything else?” she cried, as relief flooded his face. “Books are replaceable. A fine bloodline such as you have spent years refining is not.” She crossed the room to put her arms around him. “But I do think you ought to consider parting with a few of your horses. Three or four.” Ignoring his dismay, she pattered on. “You must take some with you, Zabdiel. I don't know how it's done, though it must be possible, since horses are shipped this direction.”

“
Take some
—? Have you taken leave of your senses entirely?”

“You must go bearing some American gift worthy of royalty. I am not saying you will need it,” she said, laughing at the consternation on his face. “But surely you must go prepared. I have seen the stock that comes to us from England; we are no provincial backwater in the matter of horse breeding. And I cannot think of anything else we have that might be suitable.”

By October, Zabdiel had caused a small stir among the province's literati, by selling his fine collection of books to a recent graduate from Harvard.

 

Sir Hans replied to Zabdiel's note with a suggestion. Perhaps, during the delay, Dr. Boylston might consider submitting to the Royal Society some paper likely to be of interest to the Fellows?

Zabdiel considered consulting Dr. Mather. Instead, he rode up to the Salutation Inn.

“What the devil can they want?” he grumbled to Cheever. “What could I possibly know that they might find of interest?”

“What do they talk about?”

“Wonders of the natural world, I think. Curiosities like inoculation for the smallpox.”

“How about ambergris? There's a curiosity for you.”

There were always whalers from Nantucket in the Salutation; he began his research that very night, over tankards of the Webbs' best brew.

 

In February 1724, he began advertising for someone to rent two and a quarter acres of his garden, containing gooseberry, currant bushes, fruit trees, and an asparagus bed, among other useful plants. Also on offer was the right to sell its produce—as well as imported drugs—from his shop.

 

That spring, the king dispatched Mr. Maitland to Hanover to inoculate His eighteen-year-old Royal Highness, Prince Frederick, second in line for the throne after his father, the Prince of Wales. As a consequence, Prince Frederick received one light fever, five hundred pustules, and indemnity from the natural smallpox. Mr. Maitland received the lavish sum of £1,000. Inoculation had received the highest commendation the kingdom could offer.

 

Sir Hans retreated to the Repository, the Royal Society's triangular nook of a library—strange but lovely design of Sir Christopher Wren—to open the letter from Boston. That it was not addressed in Dr. Mather's crabbed handwriting had given him particular excitement; perhaps he would at last discover what he yearned to know, after being put off so long.

Dr. Jurin found him there a quarter of an hour later, laughing so hard that tears were streaming down his face. “I wrote to ask Dr. Boylston of Boston whether he might grace us with a paper sure to be of interest to the Fellows, as his voyage has been postponed so long,” he gasped. “He has earnestly obliged.” He slid the paper across to Dr. Jurin.