The Speckled Monster (18 page)

As soon as the girl had fallen ill, the king had made quiet arrangements for the Princess of Wales to attend on her sick daughter as much as she liked. This proved to be most of the day and night, except for the hours when the king himself wished to sit and read to his little Annie. He had stood firm, though, on the point of his son's exile from the palace.

Gradually, Caroline had whittled away at his obstinate anger; quite possibly, death's obstinate hover over his grandchildren had also softened him. In any case, it had been in the sitting room just outside Anne's sickroom that delicate negotiations toward a familial peace had been joined. The prince might be too jealous of rank and power to realize that what he really needed was patience, but the princess was a consummate politician. She was quite deft when it came to handling both her husband and her father-in-law, especially when she was allowed to handle them separately, in private.

So she had engineered a tête-à-tête, just the king and herself, in a small chamber next to Anne's, ensuring that no voices would be raised and no tempers lost, if only for the sake of the child only one door away. A few days later, as Anne crept out of danger, the prince himself arrived to make formal submission to the king. All London—indeed, the entire nation—breathed a deep collective sigh of relief.

For courtiers, though, the respite had proved brief. While the king and the prince patched up their differences, the dreaded disease jumped the palace walls. For six months, it tiptoed furtively about the neighborhoods west of the City. Since the New Year, though, it had been cutting swathes of hot agony through the fashionable streets of St. James's and Piccadilly, sending Lady Mary's friends and family blistering and bubbling into heaven or hell.

Lady Mary had been able to ignore it until James Craggs died on the sixteenth of February. Four days later, her sixteen-year-old cousin Lady Hester Feilding succumbed, having shed her precocious beauty almost as fast as she acquired it. Up in Russell Square, the duke of Rutland and two of his daughters had all died within two weeks of each other, leaving Bloomsbury in mourning and mostly empty. All over London, but especially in the west, the whirl of parties and salons had ceased: not knowing who might be exhaling the infection, ladies had grown afraid to face each other across tea tables, and men shunned even old friends at cards. The crowds at the theater had thinned and drooped.

With all amusements off, there was little left to distract her from the smallpox but the crash of South Sea stock. With the help of Mr. Craggs, she had invested heavily. Who could have guessed, she cried at her own walls that such a firm, one of the country's largest trading companies—a financial behemoth big enough to treat with the government in the servicing of the nation's debt—could be a fraud? A collectively dreamed glimmer of soap, bubbling on a breeze? Who was to know that when its fragile film of popularity burst, it would dissolve vast fortunes into thin air?

Her money—a sum sickeningly large, though not bankrupting—had shriveled in a matter of days, but it was not as if she was the only victim. Parliament was sniffing about for a scapegoat; everyone who had made money was suspect. The king himself was looked at askance. Really, it had been just as well that poor beautiful Mr. Craggs had died when he did, for he had been deeply implicated in the scandal. So deeply that his father, un-stricken by smallpox, had committed suicide a few days later. Everyone was dying.

A knock at the library door startled her. “What?” demanded Lady Mary, rising.

“It's nurse,” stammered the maid.

Lady Mary crossed the room and flung open the door so quickly that she nearly tossed the maid against the wall.

 

The nurse's room was off the night nursery, two stories up. Just inside, she lay shivering on her bed, flecks falling in an angry red snow down her body.

“Where is my daughter?” demanded Lady Mary, her mind spinning and her heart trying to pound its way out of her stiffly boned bodice.

“I'm sorry, my lady,” whispered Nurse. “I've tried to be so careful.”

“Downstairs in your own parlor, my lady. She's fine, not ill at all. I sent her down in Charlotte's care, soon as I realized what was happening. Charlotte's a good girl.”

Charlotte,
thought Lady Mary,
is a feather-brained fifteen-year-old. But at least she is already pockmarked
.

The nurse began to cry.

“Hush,” said Lady Mary, crossing the room and giving the woman her hand. The woman did love young Mary, and had been with her since her birth. But it was hard not to notice that none of this would be happening if she hadn't so adamantly refused to be inoculated while in Constantinople.
Inoculated while in Constantinople
. The full force of those words jolted her through her brain.

The nurse had been saying something in between sobs. Lady Mary couldn't make it out. “It will be all right,” she said absently, patting the woman's hand.

Within half an hour, the nurse was bundled up and packed off to a certain house in Swallow Street, down in Piccadilly, where the servants of the aristocracy were sent to suffer through smallpox with kind care, at a safe distance. Footmen had been sent scurrying through the streets with notes inquiring after the availability of suitable short-term nursemaids. And her own carriage had clattered away in search of Mr. Charles Maitland, with orders not to return without him.

 

Two hours later, Mr. Maitland was shown into a sitting room that resembled a pleasure palace straight out of the
Arabian Nights
.

Sitting cross-legged on an ottoman behind a jewel-encrusted coffee set, Lady Mary was resplendent in her flowing Turkish costume, the thin rose damask embroidered with silver flowers and the jeweled cloth-of-gold rustling and clinking softly as she moved.

He bowed low, in the ostentatious manner of the Turkish court. “You must have a djinn at your mercy, my lady,” he said as he straightened. “How else you could have transported such an exquisite corner of Constantinople to Covent Garden, I cannot begin to think.”

“I admire the art and the poetry of the Ottomans,” said Lady Mary with a smile as she poured out the thick coffee. “And I like to think I can offer some poor shadow of their grace in entertaining,” she added, handing him the tiny cup.

He raised the sweet steaming brew to his lips.

“But I fear that in the matter of Turkish medicine I must beg your help,” she added.

He froze, and his eyes met her gaze over the rim of the cup.

“I want you to inoculate little Mary,” she said.

He set the cup down with a click. “I am honored, Lady Mary, by your trust,” he said, stalling.

“Today,” she said, leaning forward.

“In such matters, my lady, it does not pay to be hasty.”

“In the matter of the smallpox,” she countered, “it does not pay to hesitate. In any case, you have had three years to mull over the results of inoculating my son.”

“The season is too cold,” he objected. “In Constantinople, they operate in a warm season.”

“Here, it is a smallpox season,” said Lady Mary, never taking her eyes from him. “Mary's nurse erupted this morning.”

He had of course, surmised what she wanted. Had surmised several months ago that she might want it. If anything, he was surprised the request had taken this long. He knew her well enough to know that when she set her mind to something, she did not take no for an answer. He knew he was not going to win this contest. Nor did he want to, really. He had seen the experiment work with his own eyes; even a remote possibility that it might work here in Britain made it valuable. But he wished to proceed with caution.

He also wished to make certain demands, though perhaps it would be better to say that he wished to put certain protections into place. For this was not Constantinople, though she seemed to want him to think it was. They were in the heart of London. And she was not asking him just to be a witness, as he had been in Turkey, where he'd merely stepped in to clean up a barbarous operation he had not begun. She was asking him to be the sole operator.

He was less sanguine about the outcome than she was. He had no wish to be charged with the murder of the granddaughter of a duke, and the daughter of an ambassador. It was paramount that he not work in secret. But how was he going to convince Lady Mary?

Let her win a lesser battle,
said the voice of instinct. He cleared his throat. “It is not your son I am concerned about, it is your daughter. She must be prepared.”

“She's strong as a horse,” said Lady Mary, waving that notion off. “Her diet is clean and her exercise regular. I will not have you draining her blood and calling it useful.”

He bowed. “Very well,” he conceded.

Her eyes narrowed. “You want something else. What is it?”

Really, she was unnervingly perceptive. As smoothly as possible, he came out with it. “For you, my lady, this operation offers great personal benefit, in exchange for grave personal risk, as you well know. I hope, however, that you will consider sharing that benefit. Will you allow me to choose two physicians to witness the operation, in order to contribute to its credit and reputation, as well as to consult on the health and safety of your daughter?”

She sprang to her feet, her eyes flashing. “Certainly not,” she exclaimed. “Under no circumstances will my daughter be exhibited to curious crowds like a carnival monkey.”

He knew she had no high opinion of physicians, but still, the force of her refusal took him aback. Another, less patient man might have lost his grip on his own patience, and tried to argue with her, but Mr. Maitland knew her better than that. He called her bluff. “Then, my lady,” he said, rising after her, “I must regretfully decline your kind offer to make use of my services.”

Before she could recover, he had bowed and departed.

 

Three days later, she summoned him back again. The nurse's case was not going at all well, and fear was thickening her blood by the hour.

This time, he was shown into a proper English room; in the guise of a proper English lady, Lady Mary was standing by a window, with her back to him. “Two,” she said imperiously, as he walked into the room.

He bowed. “Three,” he countered. There was no need for either of them to specify that it was the number of physician witnesses they were discussing.

“Last time it was two,” she said, glancing over her shoulder.

“Now it is three,” he said.

She turned away again. “One at a time.”

“I agree.”

“And I will be present throughout.” She whirled around. “I will not have physicians corrupting the operation out of sheer malicious rancor, for fear its success will dry up their revenues, along with the town's pocks.”

He let her outburst skid by him. “You will find the city and the nation grateful, my lady. Now if you will excuse me, I will make the necessary preparations.”

“No preparations,” she snapped. “No prior bloodletting, no purges, no vomits. As I said, she's strong as a young horse.”

“Yes, my lady. But that is not the sort of preparation I meant.” It had been, of course, but it would not do to let her yet realize it. He liked her on the defensive. “I must acquire some promising matter.”

“How hard can it be to scrape pus from a pock in London?” she cried. “Why haven't you already done so?”

“With all due respect, my lady, I was not sure we would come to an agreement. Now that we have, I am sure you do not want me to be quite so cavalier in this matter as you suggest. I must find a suitably clean subject, with no other history of disease, at just the right stage of a light, distinct smallpox. You do not want to shield Miss Wortley from smallpox, only to give her the great pox, or a consumption.”

Lady Mary sighed, tapping one foot impatiently. He saw her thinking furiously. “Be quick, then,” was all she said in the end.

As it turned out, he had one week's preparation for himself, and his three witnesses, but only after the fact: they were engaged to see Mary as soon as the rash came out, and not a moment before. And he won no preparation for the girl at all, though he kept lobbying for it right up until the last moment.

 

Lady Mary held her daughter on her lap right through the procedure, kissing the top of her fair downy hair, and singing her favorite songs. The girl wriggled a bit, but not badly: Mr. Maitland was deft and swift, and she had known his voice all her life.

The little girl liked him. To her, he was tall as the clouds and almost as gentle, with a funny way of talking. His
r
's were furry. Or bumpy. She couldn't decide which. Mamma said he sounded that way because he was from a place called Scotland. Considering this mystery, she sat grave and wide-eyed, only turning away and screwed her eyes shut when he drew out his lancet. She knew he was trying to be kind, so she tried to be brave. But as she felt a prick in each arm, one tear squeezed from each eye and trickled down her cheeks.

 

The incisions opened and wept early, growing day by day. Two, three, four, five. On the sixth day, Lady Mary was so restless, she snapped at Cook, reduced the new nurse to tears, and sent old Jenkins, the coachman, fleeing for his life, all within five minutes. Directly, she locked herself in her bedchamber lest she transform into a full-blown dragoness. The sixth day spilled into the seventh, and still no fever appeared. Flushes crept across Mary's porcelain skin, sometimes alarmingly bright, but they were accompanied by no hint of heat. The count of days increased to eight and then nine. On the morning of the tenth day, Lady Mary began to fear that she would begin throwing things.