The Speckled Monster (19 page)

That afternoon, bells pealed all over the city: the Princess of Wales had given birth to a son. Wine flowed in streets crowded with dancing and cheering.

Late that night, the new nurse appeared at Lady Mary's door, frightened out of her wits. The child had grown warm, though still not hot. She was restless and fretful, though, and crying out for her old nurse, or her mamma. Lady Mary, for once, was glad to indulge the child.

The fever was not so high as to be terrifying. Nonetheless, it was a smallpox fever, and rising. She sent for old Mr. Brown, the ancient apothecary who had apparently been serving the neighborhood since the last visit of Caesar.

He was none too pleased to be hauled out of bed at midnight, though his way across the square had been well lit by celebratory bonfires and cheered on by happily drunk crowds. He was horrified to discover that the child had been
given
the smallpox.

He turned reproachful eyes upon Lady Mary. “There is nothing to be done now, my lady, but let Madam Nature take her course. If she behaves, the fever will go off of its own accord by morning.”

Somehow, Lady Mary ground out thanks as the man left, and settled down in the nursery rocking chair to wait. To her mind, Madam Nature did not deserve much in the way of trust.

PART TWO

Boston

1

ZABDIEL AND JERUSHA

 

ZABDIEL Boylston flattened himself across his horse's back, sunlight flitting like butterflies, like bright bats through the gloom as his body rolled with the rhythm of the beating hooves. He ducked and bobbed, sweeping aside the claws of trees that tried to rake him from the horse. Was it a book he had been holding only a moment ago in the clearing, when the buck had appeared at the far edge, pale and silent as a curl of the mists that sometimes wound through the forest? No—it was blue steel, the pistol that his father had carried through battles against the Indians. Far ahead, he caught another glimpse of the deer, heard it crashing through the brush—heard, so he thought, the gasp of its breath and the thump of its trumpeting heart.

They burst into a sun-shot clearing, and his quarry crumpled into the grass, though he could not remember having taken a shot. He dismounted at a run and then pulled up short. The body at his feet was not a buck, but his father.

Zabdiel clenched the knife in his hand, turning it over and over. As he stood there, his father's leg began to swell, turned black and green; a sweet stench of rotting slid upward. What was he to do?

In his hand, the blade frizzled and stretched into a saw.

Papa
? He heard his voice say.
Papa, I must take it off
. At that, his father quite calmly turned over and sat up. Sadly, he shook his head.
Too late, my boy,
he said, heaving himself to a stand.
Too timid, too slow, too late
. Then he turned and limped into the trees.

Zabdiel started, felt the ooze of sweat dampening skin on fire, the salt stinging cracked and swollen sores, the wetness failing to touch the thirst lodged like thick, fetid swamp-mud in his throat. His eyes would not open, so he groped blindly for memory. He was not in the woods that pressed around the thinly settled fields of Muddy River, which in any case had thickened, grown orderly, renamed itself Brookline. He had been dreaming, or caught in the net of delirium more likely, judging by the heat pluming within his body. He listened, and heard the ring and clop of streets. A bit farther off, a wet slapping, snap of canvas, creak of wood, and seabirds calling. Wharves.

He remembered: he was in Boston, a north-south strip of town on a peninsula anchored to the mainland by no more than a ribbon of sandy marsh known as the Neck, which disappeared altogether in high seas. A north-south strip of town perched tiptoe between the Atlantic and the high three-peaked hill of the Tremount, like a lady marooned on a stepping-stone in a puddle, holding her skirts out of reach of the wild land behind her and water lapping all around. Having edged as far eastward as she could without getting wet, she peered coyly, anxiously, toward England and home.

He was in Boston, in a year of the smallpox, 1702. Which meant his father was dead. Had been dead a long time. Seven years.

Back in the summer of 1695, Zabdiel had been only fifteen. After shadowing his surgeon father since he could walk, working beside him as an apprentice for a few years, he had been chafing to enter Harvard that autumn when disaster had struck. Had it been the fall of a tree, the poisoned prick of a buzzing snake, the swipe of a scythe? The kick of a horse, crush of an iron-clad wheel, slip of a plow? On a farm, there were a thousand things that could hurl death at even a careful man, even a man as wise in the ways of medicine as Thomas Boylston, gentleman farmer, horse breeder, and surgeon. A thousand things that his son, still a novice, could neither fight nor fix.

Zabdiel's mind had wrapped his father's death in shadow, but could not keep guilt from smoldering through. It had never occurred to anyone else to blame him, but the fifteen-year-old heart still wrapped small and furious somewhere inside his twenty-two-year-old soul would not relinquish that death to the inscrutable decrees of Providence, as the church told him he should. If only he had been faster, better, more daring, the youth grated at his adult self, his father would still be alive. He had worked, ever since, to pluck every splinter of hesitancy from his soul.

After Dr. Boylston's death, Zabdiel's dream of college fast dwindled to dust. His elder brothers Edward and Richard were tradesmen with their own families to worry about—Edward a tailor in Boston and Richard a cordwainer, or shoemaker and leatherworker, across the estuary in Charlestown. Peter, already promised in marriage, had walked into the yoke and the pride of the family farm—or estate, as he insisted on calling it. It was heavy enough for the three adult brothers to shoulder responsibility for their mother, six sisters, and his two little brothers, Dudley, who was eight, and Tommy, only two. The money to send Zabdiel to college suddenly seemed extravagant, impossible.

Still, their father had clearly intended to establish his middle son in the profession of medicine. To honor that intention as well as Zabdiel's obvious aptitude, the family had pooled the money for him to complete his apprenticeship with their father's colleague, Dr. John Cutler, surgeon of Boston.

So Zabdiel had left the fields, woods, and secret glades, the streams and rivers, the horses, his mother, his sisters and little brothers—the hardest good-bye had been Tommy—had traveled north, letting Cambridge and college recede to his left, to arrive among the clamor and crowds of Boston. Under the meticulous Dutch eyes of Dr. Cutler, he had learned anatomy and advanced surgery—which mostly meant cutting things off. He had learned to mix medicines and measure dosages of febrifuges to cool fevers and cordials to heat cold, sluggish blood. He had learned phlebotomy, or bloodletting, had learned how and when to blister, to administer enemas, purges, vomits, and diuretics.

In New England, doctors were expected to master all three branches of the art, to be physician (or diagnostic theorist), surgeon, and apothecary all in one, and he had duly learned all the skills that would make him a real doctor in the eyes of his neighbors. Useful, in their way, he admitted. But to his mind—and the not infrequent exasperation of Dr. Cutler—he had already learned most of what was really useful from his father.

Four short lessons: Do as little as possible. Be clean. When surgery is absolutely necessary—be decisive, precise, and lightning quick. Above all, take knowledge wherever you find it. By which his father had meant
pay attention to the Indians
. Those who are left.

Long before, Thomas Boylston had gone over the sea to England, to be apprenticed in the apothecary shop of a relative in London: where, by law and long tradition, physicians, surgeons, and apothecaries kept rigidly separate. He had learned many things about mixing medicines, but many more about the dangers of blindly accepting the dictums of books—and of tradition. Upon his return, his neighbors had insisted on believing that he carried hidden somewhere about his person the trophy of an M.D. from Oxford. He tried disabusing them of this conviction, but they would not be budged; every cure rooted it more firmly in their minds.

To Zabdiel, though, he acknowledged a rather different source for much of his physic: the Narragansett, the Wampanoag, the last tattered remnants of the Pequod, the Massachusetts, the Cohasset. People his neighbors thought of as savage killers—and God knew, they could be, when pressed to it—but Thomas Boylston, chirurgeon of Muddy River, preferred to know them as skilled healers.

In 1675, the massacres that set off King Philip's War had induced him, briefly, to think otherwise. Heavy of heart, he had ridden to join Captain Thomas Prentice's mounted troopers. A few months later, however, Dr. Boylston had ridden home again from the blood and fire of the Mt. Hope campaign, and had never offered either himself or his horses again; had never suffered his sons to join the fighting.
I can see—just—city fools from Boston mistaking one tribe for another, attacking a peaceful tribe for a warring one,
he would say grimly into a tankard of beer.
But even a fool from Boston should be able to distinguish between battling warriors and barbecuing women and children alive in their homes
.

At the end of the war, there had been a free-for-all, as the settlers rounded up what Indians were left and sold them off to slavery in the West Indies, keeping a few of the likeliest for heavy work at home. To his neighbors' chagrin, Dr. Boylston let a few families live as they chose on his land in return for intermittent tutorials on the medical secrets of the wild plants in the woods and swamp marshes, and a few weeks' heavy work each year during planting and harvest. So, trailing after his father, Zabdiel had learned the secrets of the green life always curling and uncurling in the woods, learned the Indian names and uses for plants that the English blasted as weeds, if they saw them at all.

That knowledge, though uncommonly useful in practice, had proved little or no help in winning him paying patients in Boston. Zabdiel's apprenticeship with Dr. Cutler, on the other hand, gave him cachet. He was just on the verge of setting up a separate practice, when the smallpox had returned, as it did every twelve years, like some vicious clockwork made of hot knives and oiled with pus and with blood.

Dr. Cutler had summoned Zabdiel into his presence. Upon discovering that his assistant had never had the disease, Dr. Cutler had twisted his lips in dismay and looked off into the distance, as if gazing right through the walls and clear across the world to Holland. “You can leave, and hope to outrun it,” he said. “Or you can stay, and almost surely contract it.”

“What good will I be if I leave?”

“None, to your patients, or to me. But you will be alive, which may be of use to you.”

“I want to be of use as a doctor,” Zabdiel had said quietly.

So he had trailed Dr. Cutler through his rounds as the epidemic thickened, his stomach rising, his skin prickling, as he bent to cross into every sickroom. It had taken only two weeks until he had shifted places, from assistant to patient.

At first, he had taken notes, right through the first fever and the up-welling of the pocks, comparing what was happening to what various authorities said would happen. It looked, he thought with curious detachment while staring at his forearm, to be confluent. Dr. Cutler, with less equanimity, had agreed.

Within a week, the agony of the still-swelling sores splitting his skin had made further note-taking impossible. The pocks swelled his eyes shut and rattled the air in his throat. He remembered, he thought, chasing his breath, lumbering after it, trying to find it by listening for it. After that, he could remember nothing but agony, all thought compressed into a thin, dark line as he set himself, from minute to minute, to the grim task of surviving. Until now.

“Three days ago, I would not have given you one chance in ten,” said Dr. Cutler's voice somewhere above him, the clipped Dutch accent spiking out, as it did whenever the doctor was in the grip of exhaustion or euphoria. “But now I think you will live to be a fine physician. Not a pretty one, maybe. But a fine one.”

“Why?” He had not known a word could hurt so badly, cracking the inside of his mouth, scraping it raw. Almost, in the gasp of pain, he missed the answer. Would have, he realized later, had Dr. Cutler not taken time searching about for the right words.

“There is nothing, my boy, to spark compassion like a sojourn in hell.”

 

In autumn 1705, in the heart of Boston, Jerusha Minot ducks inside a shop, and the din and rough smells of Dock Square—the shout and laughter of men, the harsh screams of seagulls, creak of leather and wood, all laced with the rough smells of tar, salt, fish, rum, and tobacco—disappear. The shop, though small, is thankfully open; the last two she tried were shut up. In place of the noise and the smells outside, a thick, twining scent, more luxurious than any silk, envelops her.

Chinese pagodas and island jungles bloom in her mind; she senses red-feathered birds flashing in the sun and tigers stalking through the shadows. It is a green-and-gold vision, hot and insistent with life, woven from bright threads that do not grow in the chill of New England: boxes of lemons and oranges, neatly stacked pyramids of sugar loaves, white and brown, suitable for the finest confectionary or the roughest rum. She senses chocolate, coffee, and green and black Bohea tea. A tease of snuff prickles the air—
to suit any fancy,
a placard proclaims,
whether for Brazil, Barcelona, or Spanish, perfumed or plain
. She catches tangled whiffs of salty anchovies, bitter capers, and sweet oils; plain walnuts and sugared almonds. Pungent jars of pepper, ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, and aniseed. Musk, bergamot, and vanilla.