The Speckled Monster (50 page)

The next day, the men took their second purge; and on the first of September, the women swallowed theirs.

For all intents and purposes—save the all important papers of pardon—the experiment was over.

 

That evening at home, Mr. Maitland sat down to draft the report that Sir Hans Sloane would take to the Princess of Wales, and then to the king himself. The papers, at any rate, had said the king had demanded an accounting.

The experiment has perfectly answered Dr. Timonius's account of this practice, and also the experience of all who have seen it in Turkey,
he wrote. A doodle grew into a turkey cock; he shook his head and scratched it out. He had to focus on the here and now. On London, not Constantinople. On Newgate. He began again.
Considering the subjects' age, habit of body, and circumstances
. . . He stopped again. He had to be precise, but he did not like sounding so ichie nor ochie. Wavery-quavery, Lady Mary would have said. He especially did not like Sir Hans frittering on about still more tests.

He threw down the pen and sat back in his chair. After a few moments, he drove himself forward to the edge of his seat. He dipped the pen firmly in the ink. At the bottom of the page, he dashed off one more sentence in uncharacteristically large letters, sweeping back beneath it in a flourishing underline:

It has been successful far beyond my expectation
.

7

AN HOUR OF MOURNING

 

ZABDIEL unwrapped the unbound proof sheets of his new book—
his book!
—and looked at them lying heavy and solid on the parlor table with a curious satisfaction and a pride that startled him. He had hurried that morning, inoculating Reverend Mr. Colman's nephew as promised and visiting all his other patients, both natural and inoculated, in time to snatch one hour for dinner—and savor the new wonder of authorship. He was lifting the sheets from their wrapping when he heard a high-pitched bellowing below. He glanced out the window and saw Mary Dixwell puffing up the street, wailing and blubbering. He stepped quickly back, but it wouldn't have mattered. Without bothering to look up, she rushed right up to the shop door and began rapping in desperation, pausing only to press her nose against the curving glass of his bay window. Surely she could see that the shop was shut up for the dinner hour?

She began rapping again, her wails rising in intensity. Zabdiel sighed, laid the book back down, and made his way downstairs, nodding to Jack to let Mary in.

She nearly tumbled inside as the door opened. He helped her, heaving and out of breath, to a seat. She was a big boned and pleasantly fat woman who looked strong as an ox, but for all her bulk she had the delicate constitution of a consumptive. “Now, Mrs. Dixwell,” he said, “what's the matter?”

“Oh, Dr. Boylston,” she moaned, fanning herself, her chest heaving so that the gold chains around her neck glinted in the afternoon sun, “I've had such a fright, you don't know.”

She was certainly trembling all over. “Have the children taken a turn for the worse?” he asked quickly. All four of them were down with small-pox. At his recommendation, Mary had turned their care over to a nurse, but she had balked at either sending them away or removing herself. She had merely confined them to the upper floor, where she could at least hear her babies, and they could hear her, singing them lullabies.

“No.”
She shook her head and took a deep shuddering breath. “No. It's old Mr. Johnson, two doors down from our house. I pass his place every day. He's a bit of an invalid, you know, and we hadn't seen him for a week, so Mrs. Franklin and I, we put together a basket and went to check that he was all right. We knocked but heard no answer, none at all, so we opened the door.” She clutched at Zabdiel. “Oh, Dr. Boylston,” she whispered, “he rolled right out atop us, though we leapt back, you can be sure. . . . Dead at least a week, and halfway rotted before that with the confluent pox. He looked to have died trying to crawl out his own door. The stench was loathsome.” Her throat moved convulsively, and she was turning green.

Jack handed her a glass of water. She gave him a grateful look and took one sip, but then stopped. A sob welled up from deep within. “There—there were—there were maggots.” The last word rose and twisted into a shapeless wail.

He sat down by her and took her hand. “Mary, hush now.”

“No, no, no,” she shrilled.
“Inoculate me.”

“I cannot recommend that, my dear,” he said with a firm calm that reached her more clearly than his words. “You have had a great fright, and you know you are not strong. The Turkish doctors recommend a preparation of a thin, cool diet and a calm mind.”

She tightened her grip on his arm. “Today.
Now
.”

Hysteria rippled through her in waves. This time Jack brought a glass of wine. Zabdiel stirred in a good strong dose of laudanum and sent Jack for Mr. Dixwell.

Mrs. Dixwell's husband John was a puzzle. A sternly ascetic Puritan with regard to himself, he was also a goldsmith who had grown rich spinning gold into jeweled treasures that would have delighted the Queen of Sheba; he prized his wife as an obedient, pious, and decorative pet. Surprisingly, he sided with her in the matter of inoculation, even after having the dangers of her agitation pointed out. “There are those,” he said, “who argue that inoculation trespasses on the prerogative of Providence. But sometimes one must surely marshal the world into place, to make way for Providence.”

“You have been listening to Reverend Webb,” said Zabdiel, as he cleaned his lancet with a sinking heart. Desperately embracing inoculation was no more rational than despising it unseen, and possibly far more dangerous: but how could he say no to those who knew the risks? Who weighed them against a real and known threat of smallpox, and begged for a chance for deliverance?

Mr. Dixwell, a ruling elder of Mr. Webb's New North Church, nodded. “I have. And no doubt the minister would agree, though too late, it would seem, for his own family—his wife, I have heard, has been taken sorely ill with the distemper.”

Zabdiel knew that—he had seen Fanny Webb just that morning, after visiting her husband's cousin Esther, who was slowly recovering, and her sister-in-law Abigail Webb, old John's daughter, who was not. Abigail had chosen not to be inoculated, and now hovered very near death. But he said nothing.

Mr. Dixwell paused only briefly; when it became apparent that Dr. Boylston was not going to discuss the Webbs, he pressed on. “That particular lesson, though, is a teaching from my father.”

A formidable family, thought Zabdiel. Proud enough to make the marshaling of Providence an earth-shaking habit: John Dixwell's father, of the same name, had been one of the fifty-nine men who'd signed the death warrant of King Charles I at the end of the Civil War. For a while, he had been hailed as a hero. But when England's experiment as a kingless republic had foundered, the Restoration of King Charles II transformed him from hero to assassin.
Regicide,
hissed cruel shadows at his heels, and the whole family had slipped into hiding in America, under the name of Davis. John Davis's son, however, was not a man to hide from man, law, or God; he seemed never to have tasted either fear or doubt, thought Zabdiel, uncorking his vial of smallpox. As an adult, Mr. Dixwell had moved to Boston and resumed his father's rightful name.

“Whenever you are ready,” said Zabdiel. The Dixwells clasped hands and prayed for an outcome pleasing to the Lord, and then Mary Dixwell rolled up her sleeves, and took the infection into her blood.

 

Dr. Mather stopped himself just outside the door to his son's chamber. He said a brief prayer to calm himself, and then he pushed open the door.

Sammy was shivering with a fever as high as ever. “Let me be bled, Father,” he said through chattering teeth.

Where God does not appoint a clear path, men must struggle as best they can through the darkness, Dr. Mather told himself. Aloud, he sent a maid running for Dr. Boylston.

 

Dr. Mather crowded so close behind Obadiah as he opened the door that Zabdiel had a brief image of a two-headed footman, one head black and close cropped and one white with towering, feathery hair. Dr. Mather reached around to fairly pull Zabdiel inside. “Sammy has fallen into an unpacifiable Passion to have a Vein breathed,” he said, dispensing with the niceties of greeting.

“Qu-quite unpacifiable,” Dr. Mather continued. “I beg, Doctor, that you will gratify him.”

Zabdiel ran lightly up the stairs three at a time. He liked to at least glimpse the boy before the father smothered all possibility of an objective interview. Just that morning, the boy's fever had been brisk, as it had been for two days, but unless something drastic had changed, it was moderate. By no means dangerous, and certainly not the worst-ever smallpox fever—not even the worst-ever inoculation fever, as Dr. Mather, in his proud need for his family always to be best or most, had hinted he wanted Zabdiel to say. On the days he came to the Mathers from Esther Webb's bedside, Zabdiel had sometimes found it difficult to keep his temper in the face of Dr. Mather's tangle of morbid fears and desires.

Now, striding into Sammy's chamber, Zabdiel shook his head. For once, it was worse than the boy's father had said. Sammy was curled in a corner of his bed, weeping and shaking, plucking at the bedclothes and muttering. The moment he saw Dr. Boylston, he scrabbled toward him, crying, “I am burning up, I am burning to death. Let me be bled, oh, let me be bled!”

What the boy has fallen into is hysterics,
thought Zabdiel.
Maybe that will be our next epidemic
. He took hold of the boy's wrist with one hand and felt his forehead with the other. The fever remained brisk, but it was not appreciably different from before. His pulse, though, was rapid and jittery. What was starkly different was his fear.

Dr. Mather arrived huffing behind Zabdiel. “An impression of such violence, you see, as if it came from some superior Original, I am sure of it.”

Zabdiel threw a sharp look over his shoulder. The last thing he needed was for Dr. Mather to be divining medical directions from angels. It was the last thing Sammy needed too. Zabdiel did not like to be overly skeptical on the subject of the heavenly host; angels no doubt abounded. He hoped there might be several breathing the light of God into the room right at this moment. But really, on the subject of divining superior but invisible forces, Dr. Mather had been misled badly in the past.

On the other hand, a light bleeding could do no harm to the boy at this point, since the eruption was well out. And it might do some good.

He let a few ounces and added to the boys' self-prescription another small glass of wine laced with laudanum. Soon afterward, the boy slid into a sweet sleep.

“And now, sir,” said Zabdiel, as they left him, “if you have a moment, I should like to show you the fruits of our labor.” They went upstairs to Dr. Mather's library, and Zabdiel pulled his book from a pocket and opened it to the title page:

 

They celebrated over their own glasses of wine, minus the laudanum. For it was the work of both men, though Dr. Mather had withheld his name: it set forth his transcriptions of the Royal Society's inoculation papers, followed by Zabdiel's carefully polished rebuttals of Dr. Douglass's and Dr. Dalhonde's arguments against the operation, as well as forthright rejection of the
Courant's
nattering. It finished with a few of Dr. Mather's learned musings on inoculation's lawfulness with respect to piety and Providence.

“A trifle, a trifle,” said Dr. Mather with a bow, as Zabdiel thanked him for his help. But the minister was obviously gratified. “Let us hope it may move men to consider the subject rationally.”

 

At dawn a few days later, Zabdiel saddled up Prince for a long morning ride. Except for the weather, which was miserably wet to the point of threatening to rot the crops in the fields, he dared to hope that things were looking up as they trotted out of town and the stallion stretched into a canter. Esther Webb had survived, and all the people who really mattered—herself and her parents, most of all—believed strongly that her case of confluent smallpox had not been caused by the inoculation, but by nursing her parents while they were under inoculation.

It did not, by any means, lessen Zabdiel's guilt for his part in causing her suffering and her ruined face, but it did both exonerate and implicate inoculation quite usefully. Inoculation had not produced any more than a light case of distinct pocks in any of the patients who undertook it. On the other hand, those who would argue that their cases were so light as to not count as smallpox at all were handily contradicted by Esther's experience. For if her parents' inoculated pocks were not true smallpox, then how did Esther come to catch it from nursing them?

Then there was the issue of trust. The morning after he'd inoculated Mrs. Dixwell and bled Sammy Mather, Mr. Samuel Jones had asked him to stop by his smithy and inoculate him—a family man, in the prime of his life—and a blacksmith too. Not likely that he'd calmly take such a step if he thought he might die—or that ulcers would rot his arms to the core, laming him for life. Most importantly for Zabdiel, Mr. Jones had married into the tight-knit Webb-Adams clan. He was an emissary of sorts; his inoculation served as a quiet shout to the world:
We believe in Dr. Boylston
.