The Speckled Monster (29 page)

That was it: if they would not gather themselves, he would herd them together, urge them on like recalcitrant children. No time to be lost. After some careful thought, he addressed the letter to Dr. Nathanael Williams, at the eye of the storm in School Street. At the bottom, he added a particular request that it might be forwarded to Drs. Douglass and Clark, along with all the others Dr. Williams saw fit. Then he blotted it, sanded it, sent it away.

 

Even as the letter sped across town, the
Seahorse
sailed back into shore. The governor had declined to countermand the captain's decision regarding the location of the ship's anchorage. Out there in the shadow of Bird Island, she seemed to have been far luckier than the town. The heavy work of bringing three immense pyramids of rigging down, repairing them, hauling them back up, had been completed, all hands healthy and helping. Or at least most hands: one more man was discharged June 1, branded “unserviceable.” On June 7, the
Seahorse
was grudgingly allowed to return to Long Wharf. With the strict provision, of course, that no one was to have liberty ashore without leave from both a selectman and the captain. Demurely, she began taking on biscuit and beer: not so demurely, Captain Durell made it clear to everyone that he was more than ready to pound a pirate or two, so soon as the rest of his company should be released from Spectacle Island.

So the days crept by, everyone on shore and ship watching one another for the least sign of fever: a bright eye, a flush, a shiver that might not be fear, or anxiety, or merely the memory of the cold, wet, disastrous month of May.

5

DEMONIC WINGS

To and fro through the second week of June, Dr. William Douglass paced the length of his rooms upstairs at the sign of the Green Dragon, at the southwestern end of the North End, between Hanover Street and the reedy shore of the Mill Pond. Admirably plush rooms, he thought—yes, quite admirably so—yet not satisfactory, not really, because only rooms, even though rooms in the most elegant bachelors' quarters in town. Still, not as yet the grand achievement of a private house. But soon, soon, no doubt, that would come.

For—not quite thirty—he was about to make his mark on the world. He was certain of it.

He was anxious for it, too, which was why he was wearing a groove into the floorboards, listening intently for the clatter of a carriage, of horse hooves, of the service bell below. Listening for desperate pounding at the door.

Having passed safely through two weeks with no further cases of small-pox, the selectmen were already breathing sighs of relief.
Daft pack of ninnies,
snarled Dr. Douglass.

Only that morning his friends had teased that he was reckoning the city's chances with a particularly Scottish sense of gloom. He had responded as a true son of Scotland, with argument: “The span of time between the first patient's eruption into the telltale rash on May 7, and the eruptions of the second parcel of eight patients on May 25, amounts to eighteen days,” he had said. “It stands to reason, doesn't it, then, that we ought to get through eighteen rashless days before congratulating ourselves with having escaped? For even in disease nature is a precisely tooled machine, mind you, aye running in regular rhythms, down smooth paths. In short, if the smallpox took eighteen days to spread itself the first time, might it not be expected to take eighteen the second time around?”

So irascible was his temper that his companions had tiptoed away, leaving him to glower and pace, pace and glower, alone.

Tomorrow would be June 12, by God, the day Dr. Douglass had set his sights upon as the very day, give or take one or two, when Boston would either pull back from the edge, or leap headlong into epidemic. To say “Boston,” though, he objected to himself, conjured up a lone figure hesitating at some brink. By his calculation, checked and rechecked, seven or eight thousand people huddled in the disease's direct line of fire: totally vulnerable. And though Boston abounded with upwards of fourteen medical practitioners, there was only one legitimate physician among them. Himself.

He spun on one heel, heading back the other direction.

Not that the town had, in the past two years and odd months in which he had made his home here, recognized his worth. Quite the reverse: his practice still consisted mostly of strangers rather than local citizens. Which is not to say that he didna have a right comfortable practice: there were many long-term and well-to-do “strangers” here, mostly Englishmen from London and Bristol, kept company by not a few of his own countrymen. A fair smattering of French Huguenots, Germans, Dutch, Danes, Russians, even a Spaniard or two. Enough for him to live handsomely on the income of his practice, with a black servant in livery and a coach and four.

His fellow foreigners, at least, knew how to pay him: kept him on a retainer of five pounds per annum for advice, sick or well, and then paid fees by the case when they needed more serious attendance, as was proper. The New Englanders, on the other hand, would only pay by the visit, requiring him to tot up every charge to the last groat in endless itemized lists that made him feel more like a shopkeeper than a physician.

Still, he wished to crack the smooth, taunting egg of Boston's ruling caste, the Cookes and Clarks, Bromfields and Bronsdons, the Foxcrofts, Olivers, Sewalls, and Hutchinsons. He envied John Clark's position, in other words, as the most prestigious medical man in town. Was owed that position, was he not? After years of medical study at the universities of Edinburgh, Leiden, and Paris, culminating in an M.D. from Utrecht? After slaving to learn the latest advances under the mentorship of such men as Dr. Hermann Boerhaave in Holland and Dr. Archibald Pitcairne in Scotland? Whereas Mr. Clark—he would
not
grant him the title of doctor—had a paltry few years reading out-of-date theory at no better place than the small local college Bostonians were all so unaccountably impressed with.
Harvard!
He stopped in his tracks and snorted.

At least Clark could claim study of some kind, Dr. Douglass told himself, leaning into his pacing once more. Most of the others were quacks—Zabdiel Boylston, for instance—no better than surgeons, mere barbers, or worse, apothecaries, pretending to the profession of physician and the title of doctor on no foundations whatsoever. Not that any of them had the least notion of what that august title indicated. Not a single proper dose of decorum among them. Even Clark operated as his own apothecary.
Shopkeepers, the lot of them
.

And provincial, myopic Boston could not, would not, be made to see the difference between the mountebanks and the real article, a genuine M.D., dedicated, talented, living right here under their uppity noses. They called everyone who had once tripped into a cure “doctor.”

All this was about to change. In the upcoming epidemic, they would need him: they would need him, all right. Eight thousand divided by fourteen does not yield a pleasing number, in terms of proportioning patients to doctors in time of crisis. Five hundred seventy-one and almost one half to one, to be exact. Not pleasing, no, and certainly not comfortable, yet Dr. Douglass happily acknowledged, at least to himself, that it would be useful, fair useful indeed. Had to clasp his hands behind his back at times, to keep from rubbing them together with glee, which of course would not be seemly, even when alone.

That self-satisfied, inward-looking egg of Boston society was about to feel a tap that would send a thousand cracks spidering through its walls. The hammer of smallpox would make him—he would make himself—both desirable and necessary. In the panic and the chaos, Bostonians would take what help they could get, and he would see that as many as possible, especially among the quality, got him. He was not afraid of hard work, nasty work. He welcomed it. They would see his skill, and having seen it, they would develop a taste—no—a need for it.

But it was not just Boston's attention he wanted. This coming epidemic, he had decided, would make his name in the medical community, perhaps the entire learned community throughout the civilized world. For he would conduct three studies, which he had been planning nonstop now for two weeks: a bit of an Atlas-proud undertaking, no doubt, but he knew he could shoulder it.

First, he would observe the course of the epidemic in detail: had indeed already begun, by noting the exact span of time it took for decumbents, as he called the rash-ridden patients, to cross into different stages of the disease. It might reveal much about how it spread. He would face little threat of competition: it was a study that couldna be done in the more cosmopolitan cities of London or Paris, where the distemper was always skulking about, so that the source of infection was never clearly demarcated. Boston's isolation—the very isolation that he had for so long heartily despised—made it a near-perfect laboratory, a whole city kept separate by the sea, scoured clean by salt air.

“Pox in a box,” one of his rummier companions had chortled the previous evening at a meeting of the Scots Charitable Society. In regards to one of his experiments, Dr. Douglass had not found such half-drunken flippancy funny.

Second, he would insist that his patients rigorously follow Sydenham's cold regimen, so that he might determine, definitively, its strengths and weaknesses. It was the best available treatment, sure, but he was not entirely satisfied that it was incapable of being made substantially better. He meant to find out how.

Third and most important was the study that was to be his triumph: he would investigate the cases the common people called the purples, the black pox, the flat pox. Ignorant housewives and apothecaries still often confused the bleeding smallpox with scarlet fever or measles. But he, Dr. Douglass, knew otherwise. After this epidemic—which would surely be large enough to offer enough of these admittedly rare cases for study—he hoped to be able to give a more precise description of hemorrhagic small-pox than had previously been offered to the world. He would explain how and why it developed, advise how to avoid it, and how best to treat it. Perhaps, just perhaps, future physicians might look at once hopeless cases and confidently prescribe the Douglass regimen.

His reverie was cut short by the beat of a horse approaching at speed. Was that a clatter of dismounting in the yard below? Footsteps, the bell—
yes
. It was so hard not to run to the window that he white-knuckled a chair-back to anchor himself into dignified place.

There was a knock on his door, and his servant, a grizzled black man in blue livery, entered bearing a letter on a salver. Dr. Douglass did not like possessing a servant taller than himself, but he had not been able to purchase one of suitable shortness who matched his other requirements for well-spoken English and an unflappable adherence to correct manners.

“Dr. Nathanael Williams's compliments, sir, and your pardon is to be begged for tardy forwarding of this letter from Dr. Cotton Mather, Dr. Williams having been so busy with the smallpox outbreak in School Street.” Dr. Douglass snatched the missive up from the tray, as Pompey's voice rolled on in the monotone that was both impeccably polite and irritatingly patronizing. “He trusts that you, being a fellow physician, will understand, no doubt being equally occupied with a sudden flurry of business. And he begs that you will take upon you the responsibility to forward the whole as you see fit.”

“Out,” snapped Dr. Douglass, shoving Pompey from the room with his foot. “Tell
Mr
. Williams's man to wait on answer,” he added as the door swept shut. Williams was another popular Harvard man who fancied himself a polymath. It was not enough that he was a schoolteacher and a preacher, but he must claim the triple role of physician, surgeon, and apothecary as well. And Boston happily granted it. No doubt he had enjoyed that snide comment about business, thought Dr. Douglass as he crossed to the long rectangle of light streaming in the window. And Pompey, knowing the lack of business as yet, had enjoyed delivering it. He would beat him later, for insolence.

He tore open the seal. As he read, the hand holding the letter began to quiver. His cheeks, then his temples, then the back of his neck flushed, mottled beet-red.
“Meddling muck-brained minister!”
he roared, tossing the letter down. Cotton Mather had not only stolen the contents from the books he had lent him, he had gone and publicized them without so much as a by-your-leave or a thank-you. No public attribution of his source whatsoever. It was an outrage.

To make matters worse, the topic he had chosen to gabble on about was that Turkish flumgummerie about inoculation that the Royal Society had tossed around a few years ago. Mather had actually called upon Boston's physicians to convene, in order to read and discuss the two articles in question. He, Dr. Douglass, was not only supposed to read this drivel, he was supposed to pass it on, as if he condoned it.
Ha!

Did every American who had learned his letters think he could waltz into the practice of medicine as he chose?

Suddenly, he felt a centipede of suspicion crawling up through his insides. Perhaps Mather, so jealous of his place as the most learned man in the province, was now pushing for honors in medicine. Perhaps he meant to be the first to try some newfangled notion in medicine, and had lit upon this one. Dr. Pitcairne himself, after all, had been rather fond of the idea of inoculation. Dr. Pitcairne, however, had never been able to bring himself to attempt it, because Dr. Pitcairne was neither a fool nor crazy.

Mather, in Douglass's opinion, could be both. Besides, what other possible reason could the man have for stirring things up just now?

Standing in full sun, Dr. Douglass went cold and began to splutter. Mather had influence. If he yapped long and loud enough, he might well sweep aside all the interest that ought to be focused on Dr. Douglass's carefully planned studies. Worse, he might muddy the waters, so to speak, if he actually got people to try it. Might dirty the clean, closed arena that Boston now presented to the natural spread of the smallpox. Might ruin, in short, Dr. Douglass's experiments.