The Speckled Monster (10 page)

She acquired an invitation to hear a private reading by a poet her father favored—the rising poet of the age, some said. Having achieved quick fame for his
Pastorals
and a mock epic called
The Rape of the Lock,
Alexander Pope had taken up the greatest of literary dares: He had begun translating into English rhyme the sixteen thousand ancient Greek lines of the greatest of all classics, the
Iliad
.

Lady Mary admired his verse for its muscular symmetry, but the man who stood up to read in the leather-and-gilt hush of Lord Halifax's library was as far from that description as possible. A slender four and a half feet tall, with a back twisted and humped, Pope was a victim of Pott's disease, or tuberculosis of the bone. His detractors snarled that he was a venomous and impotent hunchbacked toad; he mocked himself as “that little Alexander that women laugh at.” He was edgy and his forehead was furrowed from chronic pain, but his large eyes snapped with glee.

Lady Mary knew why, for Mr. Congreve and Dr. Garth had let her in on a jest in progress. The previous fall, at Pope's first reading-in-progress of the
Iliad,
Lord Halifax had interrupted the poet several times to proclaim, “I beg your pardon, Mr. Pope, but there is something in that passage that does not quite please. Be so good as to mark the place and consider it a little at your leisure. I am sure you can give it a better turn.” Afterward, Dr. Garth had dared the fuming poet to read the same passages over a few months hence, only pretending to have changed them.

Now Mr. Pope bowed awkwardly to Lord Halifax. “I hope Your Lordship will find your objections to these passages removed,” he said, and proceeded to read them exactly as he had the first time.

There was a brief, expectant pause. “Nothing can be better!” Halifax exclaimed. “Now they are perfectly right!”

The smothered merriment that burst out later at the postreading celebration in the studio of Pope's friend, the portrait painter Charles Jervas, whirled Lady Mary into the heart of London's literary and artistic elite. Soon, at the challenge of Pope and “Johnny” Gay, she undertook to write a series of seven town eclogues, one for each day of the week, satirizing high society. Peccadilloes in the bedroom, vanity at the dressing table, and folly at the card table: she relished the absurdity of wealthy London's minor sins.

Poets and artists did not occupy all her time: she was also in demand in the highest circles at court. At fifty-five, the king was a handsome man with china-blue eyes, long, fine fingers, and a long nose. As a monarch, he was conscientious and demanding, though not brilliant. As a man, he was a quiet, domestic sort who liked to spend time with family and close friends; he was also a deft storyteller who liked a good, earthy joke. He did not, however, speak more than about ten words of English, and never attempted to learn. For him, German and French were enough.

In part because she could join in the French raillery, Lady Mary soon became one of very few English ladies regularly invited to the intimate supper parties hosted by the two ladies known as “the king's women”: his tall, angular, and slightly gawky forty-eight-year-old mistress, Melusine von der Schulenberg, and his portly half-sister, Sophie Charlotte von Kielmansegg. The Maypole and the Elephant, as they were known to the more irreverent wits frisking about the palace.

Though Lady Mary was duly grateful for the weight of the king's eyes upon her, the parties that seemed so relaxed and homely to him seemed to her excruciatingly brittle and dull. One evening, as the Maypole made the king chuckle by snipping caricatures of his courtiers out of paper and the Elephant sparred over some obscure phrase in Mr. Locke's philosophy, Lady Mary had to clench her jaw to keep from screaming with boredom. Her only partner in small high-jinks was thirty-year-old James Craggs, fast rising in the ranks of power due to formidable talent in the council room and an equally formidable talent, it was rumored, in the bedroom. Tonight, he was late; as a result, Lady Mary had been marooned at a card table with three Germans so staid they might as well have been stuffed. Half an hour later, she gave up on Mr. Craggs and dared to contrive an escape.

“C'est injuste,”
complained the king in his heavily German-accented French as La Schulenberg delivered Lady Mary's request to withdraw early, along with an indulgent recommendation to grant the young lady mercy.
“Absolument perfide,”
he added, gazing down at Lady Mary's black hair and creamy décolletage as she sank into a curtsy. “It is unfair, absolutely perfidious, my lady, that you should cheat me of so charming a presence in such a disloyal manner.” It amused him to tease her, engaging her in inventing ever more rococo apologies. Not until he saw that she was no longer certain whether he was teasing—perhaps she had really irritated him—did he allow her to depart. Or desert, as he maintained.

Released, she flew with quick pattering steps down the grand marble staircase of Kensington Palace, her gown billowing behind like wings, brushing against the dark curlicues and leaves of the wrought-iron balustrade. She was glancing over her shoulder, as if pages even now might be chasing after her to call her back, when she ran hard into someone at the foot of the stairs.

“What's the matter?” cried a deep voice as two hands seized her. “Is the company put off?”

“Oh, Mr. Craggs,” she gasped. “No. It is just that I have had prodigious trouble in coaxing the king to let me go.” Up this close, he was even more handsome than generally allowed, though some affected to scorn his broad-chested exuberance as more proper to a porter than to the whipcord beauty of the ideal courtier.

“The king particularly wished you to stay?” he asked; in reply, she gave him a sly little smile.

Suddenly Mr. Craggs tossed her over his shoulder and leapt upward two and three stairs at a time. No amount of pounding on his back slowed him even a jot; in any case, she was giggling too much to do any real damage. At the arched entryway to the king's apartment, he set her down, ostentatiously kissed both hands, and disappeared without a word. Before she could so much as shake out her crumpled skirts and smooth her hair, the bewildered royal pages flung open the doors and reannounced her.

“Ah!”
cried the king with obvious pleasure.
“La revoilà!”
She has returned!

There was nothing for it but to curtsy and rejoin the party. “Lord, sir!” she exclaimed as the king raised her up. “I have been so frightened!” Laughing breathlessly, she regaled the company with a lively rendition of Mr. Craggs's prank. Amusement played around La Schulenberg's lips, but the king's older friends gravely shook their heads; the young British were not merely undignified, they were altogether hooligans.

Just then, the pages threw open the doors yet again and announced Mr. Craggs.

“Mais comment donc, Monsieur Craggs,”
bristled the king, laying a possessive hand on Lady Mary's shoulder,
“est-ce que c'est l'usage de ce pays de porter des belles dames comme un sac de froment?”
Is it the custom in this country to haul fair ladies about like a sack of wheat?

For an instant, Craggs was struck dumb, his expression frozen blank. Recovering, he bowed particularly low. “There is nothing I would not do for Your Majesty's satisfaction,” he said smoothly.

The king decided to be pleased; after commending Mr. Craggs's courage in daring to appear ungallant for the sake of still greater gallantry, he turned away again.

“Bloody hell!”
Craggs swore in Lady Mary's ear. “Do you possess so much as a single drop of discretion?” He had done her a great favor, he made it bitterly clear, keeping her in the king's favor; in return, she had painted him to the king as a rival.

Lady Mary colored, but said nothing.
I dared not resent it,
she wailed to her diary later that night,
for I drew it upon myself, and indeed I am heartily vexed at my own imprudence
.

 

The king, thought Lady Mary, was a bit of a blockhead, but she liked him for all that. His son was another matter. George, Prince of Wales, she deemed a mean-spirited prig. “He looks on all the men and women he sees as creatures he might kick or kiss—for his diversion,” she sniffed to her sister. Soon, however, Lady Mary was drawing the prince's eyes as well as the king's.

One evening, the prince called his wife away from the card table to see how charmingly Lady Mary was dressed. Caroline of Ansbach, Princess of Wales, came as called, but failed to share his raptures. “Lady Mary always dresses well,” she observed dryly, returning abruptly to her cards. Soon after, the prince was made aware of Lady Mary's regular attendance at his father's supper parties. Directly, despite all her fine dressing, his ardor not only cooled but curdled; he could no longer see her without taunting her as a deserter gone over to the enemy's camp: throughout the eighteenth century, Britain's kings and their heirs competed jealously for power, splendor, loyalty, and sometimes women.

As her husband soured, the princess grew noticeably more friendly.

 

On the ninth of August, the day after Lady Mary's sister Frances—now the countess of Mar—gave birth to their first child, the earl her husband disappeared, leaving her without money or any notion of where he might be going. On the tenth, Lady Mary's father was promoted yet again, reaching the pinnacle of the peerage as the first duke of Kingston.

Frances was sworn by her husband's family not to discuss any of her difficulties with her father, but, reduced to selling jewels, plate, gowns—everything of value—she had obviously been left penniless. The earl of Mar soon turned out to be far worse than a wayward husband: he had absconded for Scotland to head the Jacobite armies of the Pretender. The rebellion that had been festering since Queen Anne's death at last broke into the open, and the new duke of Kingston found that instead of acquiring political insurance in the form of a Tory son-in-law, he had saddled the family with one of the chief Jacobite traitors.

In mid-November, Jacobite and loyalist armies clashed in Scotland at the Battle of Sheriffmuir. The Hanoverians claimed victory, but for all its ferocious slaughter, the battle was indecisive. Inept even in treason, Mar unintentionally helped his Hanoverian foes by failing to seize any of the many advantages his army had been left with. In the following weeks, however, the Pretender himself was expected to land any day and galvanize the rebel army into a far more dangerous force. All Britain hushed and hunched down, poised to leap into the carnage of another civil war.

The anxiety of it all exhausted Lady Mary. One afternoon in mid-December, she withdrew early to her chamber. Lying in her stately four-poster bed, canopied and draped in embroidered brocade, she was unable to sleep. The chambermaid must have stoked the fire with enough coal to heat all of Sweden. Tossing and turning, she kicked the bedclothes off. Directly, she shivered and pulled them back up. At last, her head pounding and her skin burning, she rose to drink in cold air at the window, but when she stood up, the room spun. She could barely stagger to the washbasin before she began vomiting.

Still reeling, she called her maid and had young Edward and his nurse packed out of the house without waiting for daylight. By morning, her fever had dipped a little, but her back throbbed dully and her headache intensified until she thought the front of her skull must be clapping open and closed like a loose shutter in a storm. As the sun climbed in the sky, her fever turned around and soared ever higher.

Richard Mead and Samuel Garth, both royal physicians and members of the Royal Society—and Dr. Garth a longtime friend in the bargain—were sent for. But Lady Mary guessed what was wrong long before she heard their coaches halt at her door. After all her running, the demon smallpox had finally caught up with her—as it happened, very close to the same day that it had caught Queen Mary, twenty-one years before.

The two doctors tended toward agreement, though they would confirm no diagnosis before the telltale rash. They ordered her bled, to which she submitted though she detested it, and prescribed both a “gentle” vomit to empty her stomach, and a purge, or laxative, to empty her bowels. Four times a day, they poured down her throat a medicine only a half-step away from magic: two parts powdered bezoar—or ground-up “stones” of calcified hair and fiber found in animal stomachs and valued since ancient times as an antidote to poison—and one part niter, or saltpeter—one of the chief ingredients of black gunpowder. This mixture, Dr. Mead intoned, leaning on his golden-headed cane, was “to keep the inflammation of the blood within due bounds, and at the same time to assist the expulsion of the morbific matter through the skin.”

Snow already blanketed the cobblestones of Duke Street below her window, but grooms padded them further with straw. Smallpox, Dr. Mead announced outside her door, was a dangerous effervescence of the blood. Lady Mary, advised Dr. Garth, his eyes fixed upon Wortley, was therefore to be kept from any commotion, confabulation, and passion—whether grief, love, or fear—that might further stir up the poison boiling inside her.

“How is my little boy?” she begged everyone who drew near. “He is well,” came the unvaried reply.

Despite the hushed tiptoeing around her bed, her mind grew restless with a strange, brilliant clarity, as if she had previously been imprisoned in a cloudy crystal ball that some unseen hand had suddenly wiped clean. She could not sleep, but the doctors refused her any opiates, so she chattered through the night, the nurses nodding off as the candles guttered in the darkness.

The next morning, the fever began to fall, though her skin was still hot to the touch. Soon, tiny red flecks no bigger than pinheads and smooth with the surface of her skin sprinkled across her forehead. Hour by hour, they flowed down her body from the top of her head to the tips of her toes, as if some fiery-eyed destroying angel stood caught out of time behind her bed, the hot wind from his wings blowing a slow-motion storm of red sand across her. Even as the flecks drifted downward, those that had appeared first began to rise into hard little bumps. They neither itched nor hurt, but when she rubbed them, they rolled like shot scattered beneath her skin. This time, no diagnosis of measles would rescue her. She most certainly had the smallpox; the only question was what kind.