The Speckled Monster (30 page)

That was unthinkable.

But having thought it, Dr. Douglass found he could not unthink it.

Mather had to be stopped.

Two minutes later he shouted for Pompey, hurling a slipper at the lazy gomeril when he finally appeared—no doubt he had been smoking and probably tippling, too, downstairs with Williams's servant. Dr. Douglass demanded his coach, demanded to be dressed, demanded clean paper, a new quill, and sealing wax, all at once.

With infuriating calm, Pompey said he would call for the coach and be back with the second-best suit, the yellow camlet. Dr. Douglass threw the other slipper at him, too, but it bounced off the door that Pompey had already closed.

 

At Mather's house, he did not wait to be announced, but followed the servant up three flights of stairs—
must the man store himself in his own attic?

He had been in the reverend's library before, of course, but he always forgot just how many books lined the walls—nigh on three thousand. As much as Dr. Douglass loathed to admit it, Mather's library was fine or finer than many universities possessed. Even if one discounted the several hundred volumes authored by Mather himself, it was a collection that would have made most provosts salivate in their sleep. He was pleased to note, therefore, that the curtains were patched and the carpet moth-eaten. The legs of the chairs looked like they had been gnawed by mice who had long since given up hope of cheese.

Mather looked up sharply from his writing, but his annoyance rather oddly melted away as he recognized his guest. To Dr. Douglass's surprise, a sudden burst of pleasure spread over the reverend's face. “Delighted to see you, Doctor,” he said, sweeping a pile of books from a nearby chair. “By all means sit down.”

Dr. Douglass bowed and declined. “Regrettably, sir, I must request the return of the two volumes of the
Philosophical Transactions
which you have borrowed from me.” He had practiced his smile in the looking glass before leaving: stiffly polite, noncommittal.

Mather failed to notice. He leapt up, crossed to the exact spot three quarters of the way down a shelf next to the far left window, and drew them out.

Of course he would know where they were—he had just used them, and rather thoroughly, hadn't he?
Dr. Douglass took a step forward. “I must further request, sir, in light of the extraordinarily free manner in which you have publicized the contents of my possessions, that in future you will not ask to borrow my books.”
There, that silly smile was withdrawn—snapped—from the man's face
.

Mather paused ever so briefly, then continued on his way, not directly, but tracing a finger along a shelf about shoulder high, all the way around the perimeter of the room, so that Dr. Douglass found his eyes traversing the whole of the collection. Having wrapped the room around him like a cloak of books, of deep-voiced knowledge, debate, and intelligence, of the scents of paper and leather, Mather stepped forward and laid the two volumes on a table that now lay between them. “I cannot, sir, conceive of any future necessity to rely upon your library,” he said. He was the master, Dr. Douglass saw, of a smile that has just enough hint of a sneer to make the viewer uncertain of its presence or absence. “As a Fellow of the Royal Society, however, I thank you for the opportunity to peruse information that my Fellows in London have seen fit to publish to the world at large.”

Dr. Douglass tried to display polite indifference to such brazen effrontery. The man was not only refusing to apologize or to recognize Dr. Douglass's proprietary rights to the information in the books he possessed, but was waving his F.R.S. about as if it gave him some prior claim to it. Having almost succeeded in swallowing his own sneer, Dr. Douglass bowed once again and departed.

 

Back at the Green Dragon, Dr. Douglass marched upstairs and flung his stocky frame into a chair. He skimmed the two articles in question, and then clapped the books closed, stood up, and crossed the room. Drawing his watch chain from his waistcoat pocket, he disentangled a key and unlocked the lowest drawer of his desk. Withdrawing the letter that Williams had forwarded earlier that morning, he thrust the books inside, shoved the drawer closed, and locked it once more.

He could honestly say that he had convened the blasted physicians' meeting that Mather had asked for. Every last medical doctor in Boston—namely himself—had attended, had read the articles in question. He let out a single snort of laughter. The consensus, by God, was unanimous: inoculation was a dangerous bit of quackery. An old wives' tale—and an Oriental old wives' tale at that. A conversational curiosity, not medicine. Furthermore, that vain, credulous preacher named Mather should not—
would not
—be allowed to spoil Dr. Douglass's imminent glory.

Despite the fact that it was bright afternoon in the middle of June, he lit a candle. Holding Mather's open letter above the flame, he watched the pages brown and blacken around the cramped writing, until in a whoosh of orange, the letter disappeared into nothingness and gray ash.

 

Late on the twelfth of June, right through the thirteenth and fourteenth, and into the early hours of the fifteenth, demonic wings swept down across the town in a silent arc of terror, sowing the fecund red seeds of the rash through upwards of fifty houses. Within days, the seeds were blossoming foul yellow and white.

This time, no attempt was made to put guards on the newly infected houses; there were too many. Those posted at the first eight houses melted away or were swept away by a fast-rising tide of panic. People began to flee, first in furtive trickles, then in a steady stream. By week's end, wagons, coaches, light two-wheeled chariots, even wheelbarrows clogged the streets in an endless jostling flood heaving its way out of the city.

“Eighteen days,” said Dr. Douglass with satisfaction to his brethren among the Scots Charitable Society, assembled as his guests at the Green Dragon. “Did I not predict eighteen days?”

They had to agree, he had said eighteen days. Often. They raised their glasses to toast the scientific, the orderly, the neat and predictable number of eighteen.

Not that he
wanted
the smallpox to come, Dr. Douglass reassured himself. Only, that if it were to come, as it indeed had, he wanted to understand it.

 

What shall I do?
Cotton Mather wrung his hands as he walked, as he talked, as he prayed, as he scribbled in his diary.
G.D. What shall I do? Oh, What shall I do, that my Family may be prepared, for the Visitation that is now every day to be expected!
His silent wails harmonized with the quavery terror of his two youngest children. Just as smallpox began to spread, Sammy came home from college in Cambridge and refused to go back again. It was spreading there too; he felt safer—or at least more comfortable—at home.

Caught between the Charybdis of Dr. Clark—quite possibly trailing poison from one house to another, she cried to her brother—and the Scylla of her stepmother—barking mad—Lizzy was even more terrified. For her, nowhere seemed either safe or comfortable.

Dr. Mather looked to heaven for direction, but heaven was strangely silent. Meanwhile, he determined to improve, with all the contrivance he could, his children's interests in Piety. To impress upon them the need for subservience to the will of the Lord. To prepare for whatever sacrifices He might demand.

On the night of the thirteenth of June, with the second wave of rashes blooming around them in the warm, moonless dark, Jerusha Boylston waited up late for her husband. He found her standing barefoot in her shift by the window in their bedroom, the casement open wide to the garden in hopes that a breeze might ruffle the close, damp heat of June. She was forty-two; she had borne eight children and buried two, one within the year. She was tired, not as slender as she once had been. Not yet matronly, but she knew with a sigh of amusement that her thickening waist and hips were headed that direction. She still held herself straight and strong, though, like a dare. He thought her more beautiful than ever.

She held out her arms, and he went to her, enfolding her; the top of her head fit right up under his chin. When she drew back a little and looked up, he could see the wisps of crow's feet that edged her eyes and the laugh lines lacing her mouth. She was not laughing tonight. He ran a finger delicately about her face. For a long time, they stood there breathing in each other's musky scent, curled about with the rich sweetness of roses.

They had never discussed what they would do if and when it came to this, for it had been clear to them both: She would leave with the children, and he would stay with the sick.

The question that circled unspoken around them was not what to do, but how to do it, as quickly as possible.

“How long?” she asked after a while.

“A few days yet,” he answered. “Tom rides south beyond the Neck tomorrow, to find a suitable house. We must also hire a coach: Sarah is too far gone with child for a rough ride. It will be better, too, for you and the girls. Pack the—”

“No.” She bit her lip and turned her head to the side, pressing into his shoulder and looking determinedly into the starlight until she trusted her voice not to waver. Then she drew back and looked up into his face. “How long before I will see you again?”

He ran a finger down her cheek and gave her a smile, but his eyes were dark seas of sadness and trouble. “I don't know, sweetheart. If we're lucky, the distemper could burn itself out in a few weeks. But it may be many months.”

“Many months,” she whispered, burying her face once again in the cambric that covered his chest.

He stroked her fine hair, once so blond, now the pale brown of late autumn leaves, of young fawns or panthers. “The children are in more danger from me every day I walk back into this house.”

She shook her head. “Not from you. From the smallpox.”

“It will amount to the same thing soon enough,” he said. “I will be no better than poison to my own children.”

“Never say that,” she whispered.

“Would you have me lie?”

“No,” she said, flinging her head back to answer the glitter in his eyes. For a moment it was hard to say whether they were clinging to each other or pushing each other away. Then a wild, wicked smile no one but Zabdiel had ever seen broke across her face. “I would have you lie with me, though.”

He swept her up and carried her to the bed, where they curved and arched over each other, swimming fiercely toward union and the troubled sleep that lay beyond.

 

The following day, Zabdiel's brother Tom stopped by the house briefly at dawn and then rode away south toward Roxbury. He did not return until late into the night.

Thirteen-year-old John was supposed to be sleeping: his brother Tommy had dropped off hours ago, breathing slow and even beside him. But John could not sleep. He was too aware of the humming tension on the floor below. He knew, without seeing, that his father was pacing in circles around the parlor, while his mother sat rigidly still at its heart, gripping her needle with such ferocity that the square of linen she was skewering might as well be the devil himself. So he heard his uncle ride up, coming straight around to the kitchen door and handing the reins to Jack. He heard their voices, low and indistinct, three stories below. Heard Jack stomp off to the barn, and then silence, as his uncle paused on the doorstep. After a long while, he heard his uncle sniff, and then the door creak open.

He crept out to the landing, to the place where the shadows always lay thick enough to hide in, and peered downstairs. Uncle Tom took the stairs up to the second floor three at a time, as usual, but not with his usual bound: each step was a leaden, deliberate threat. In the parlor, his mother laid her needlework neatly aside and stood up, reaching out for his father, who took her hand in a hard grip.

Tom stopped just inside the doorway, partially blocking John's view.

“Good or bad?” he asked quietly. “Which first?”

“The bad,” said his mother.

Tom shook his head. “Nothing,” he said. “Nothing we can afford.” The words peppered out like angry shot. “Hovels with no drains and a two-mile walk to water are going for rates that would give Mr. Cooke pause.”

“And the good?” asked his father.

Uncle Tom set his shoulders. “Rebecca and William have agreed to take Sarah, my girls, Jerusha and your girls as well as Mary and young Mary.”

Whatever was wrong, thought John, it must have something to do with girls. For his uncle had just named most of the girls in the family. Aunt Rebecca, one of his father's sisters, lived down in Roxbury with his uncle William and all his Abbot cousins; that was who Uncle Tom must have been visiting. Aunt Sarah, Uncle Tom's wife, and their two baby girls. His own mother and sisters, and his father's other sister in town, Aunt Mary and her daughter, cousin Mary Lane. To find any more girls, you'd have to get on the ferry for Charlestown, or ride all the way out to Brookline.

“The boys,”
whispered his mother in a strange harsh voice.

Tom shook his head. “William was quite firm. The women and the girls are all they can manage. More than they can manage in comfort.”

His mother did not weep or wail, or even gasp; she made no sound at all. But a dark wind of despair seemed to pour from her eyes, blowing out all light and warmth, wrenching open a pit at the bottom of John's belly. He had never seen her like this, except once, when they had nailed the lid on his baby brother's coffin. She had not known he was looking then either. As had happened then, her whole body disappeared, wrapped in the strong arms of his father.

Then, the way that his father had held her had reassured John: encased in that grip, the seams of the world would not come apart. This time, the hole in his stomach split wider. For he saw the look that shot from his father to his uncle, over her head.