The Speckled Monster (56 page)

“What have you done?”
he said again, as if he might turn in her first answer for another.

“Crossed the Rubicon, sir. Waded right on out into trouble without bothering to take my shoes and stockings off first, as my father used to say. I know the dangers—”

“You most certainly do not.”

“I know the dangers as well as one might who has not spent time in smallpox sickrooms. Fanny Webb was one of my girlhood friends,” she said quietly. “Against that, I have seen the results of your operation: the Melvilles are my niece and nephew; Sammy Mather is a cousin by marriage.”

“I am of age, sir. It is my risk to take. It is equally your choice to help me, or not. But you will not stop me from taking the gamble.”

Zabdiel found he was breathing as if he had been racing. “Sit down,” he ordered. “Don't move.”

Jerusha, Jack, and Moll were suspiciously busy in the kitchen, a little too carefully not glancing up as he went by into the shop and emerged a few moments later with his lancet and some bandages. He knew, as he climbed the stairs again, that they would be quietly celebrating in the kitchen.

 

The next morning he returned to a full practice, though he still held off from inoculating. Picking his way through the catcalls and jeers, he could not have said precisely what made him return, except that anger seemed to have scythed through the despair. The despair was not gone: but there was now a narrow path through it.

What a week I must look for!
Dr. Mather wrote wearily on the eighth of October. The week before, he had thought the epidemic had reached its screaming peak when he had 130 parishioners sick. But in one week that number had more than doubled, to 315.
Surely,
he groaned,
surely the contagion cannot grow thicker than this
.

 

One evening a few days later, Zabdiel put his paper down and said, “Daniel Loring wishes me to inoculate his family.”

“What did you tell him?” asked Jerusha, without slowing her stitching.

“That I will give him an answer tomorrow.”

In and out, up and down, went Jerusha's needle. “Susanna Loring is my cousin,” she said.

 

“My eldest son—Daniel, my namesake—is living in safety in the country,” said Mr. Loring in the shop next morning, fiddling with various instruments on the shelves. “He is at Harvard, and doing well. Knows your boy, I hear. I sent him two weeks ago, you know, to stay with my wife and some of her younger children. But the distemper has broken out in Roxbury.”

He stood in half shadows, but Zabdiel could feel his eyes. “You know what it is like,” Mr. Loring continued. “I cannot bear that they should suffer through it.”

Zabdiel sighed. “If the crowds will let me through, I will operate.”

 

As if they could smell the new matter hung around his neck, the crowds congealed and penned him in the house till well past dark, chanting
Raw
Head and Bloody Bones
. The man with the sailor's gait and the noose was back; others swung steaming buckets of tar and old feather pillows.

Next morning, early, Zabdiel slipped through streets splattered with unused tar and feathers. Most of the Lorings were huddled together weeping in the parlor just off the front door.

“Mr. Loring, sir, is upstairs with Dan,” said a young woman, curtsying even as she sniffled. “He begs you to come up, so soon as ever you arrive.” She plucked at Zabdiel's sleeve. “Sir,” she whispered, “Dan came home just yesterday evening to be inoculated, but in the night as we waited for you, he was taken all of a sudden-like with sweating and shivering, vomiting, and backache. We are worried he might already have caught the distemper, in the natural way.”

“Let us hope he has not,” said Zabdiel.

But quite unmistakably, he had.

Zabdiel inoculated Mr. Loring's twelve-year-old younger son, Nathaniel, at once, as well as the anxious girl, his sixteen-year-old step-daughter, Hannah Breck. That afternoon, young Daniel broke out in his rash; by nightfall, Zabdiel saw grimly that it would be confluent: even at the rash stage, when they should have been well-spaced small flecks, they were packed so tightly that his rash was more like a flush.

On his way home, he went by to see Eunice Willard; she was sitting up in a chair, reading a book of sermons and tapping one toe against the floor. Her face was a little pale, but her fever had been light, and there had been no nausea. “I am waiting as patiently as I can for my rash,” she said.

 

The following morning, the Honorable Thomas Fitch's carriage rolled up to the door, and a footman descended. “If you please, sir, my master would have a consultation with you, as soon as convenient.”

Zabdiel's heart raced. He had inoculated Mr. Fitch's son the day before Mrs. Dixwell died. He had sped through the distemper nicely: had he now had a relapse?

“Now is convenient,” he said, his mouth dry. He ducked into the carriage, leaning forward at the edge of his seat, as if it would make the horses pull faster. He did not wait for the footman to open the door, but leapt out himself as the wheels came to a stop and raced up the steps. Mr. Fitch, likewise eager, opened the door himself.

“How is the boy?” gasped Zabdiel

“Fine, fine,” said Mr. Fitch heartily, shaking his hand and ushering him inside. “So fine, Doctor, that I must beg of you to inoculate my daughters, Martha and Mary. My wife cannot abide another day without knowing them safe.”

“No,” said Zabdiel. “It is not safe.”

“Because you have had one death and two confluent cases?” The councilor waved off Zabdiel's protest. “Piffle, man. The whole world knows Mrs. Dixwell came by it through her own children. Dix says so himself to any who asks. And Mrs. Webb and Mrs. Nichols are no different—though I must say, bad luck for the Webbs.” Mr. Fitch steered Zabdiel upstairs and down a long passageway.

Just outside a door, he stopped and lowered his voice. “I mean no disrespect to your concerns, of course. But you hear the bells every evening same as me, for all Dr. Douglass touts the strength of his cold method of treatment. Any fool with ears can tell you: inoculation's the better risk.”

Zabdiel sighed and inoculated the Fitch girls.

He stopped in to see Eunice Willard on his way home; she had erupted into a lovely light scattering of pocks. She felt fine, she said. Laying her book aside, she insisted that he stop long enough to drink a glass of wine with her.

 

From the North Battery down to the Neck, the death toll kept rising. Funerals were pared to the barest essentials of prayer, so that all of them could be accommodated in the churches. The bells gave death a deep voice every evening; in the morning, said some, you could trace death's tracks by hearkening to bursts of weeping, and in the afternoon you needed no bloodhound to follow the stench. The grass of the burial grounds was pocked with fresh mounds of dirt, and the gravediggers wondered morosely where they would put all the bodies. “Dying keeps on as it is,” said one, “sooner or later, we'll be burning 'em in pits, like they's doin' in France.”

In daydreams, in prayers, and in nightmares, Cotton Mather was haunted by his vision of the Angel of Death looming high over the city, brandishing God's firebrand, casting the stars from the sky and spilling them across the land, where they burned and bled. Behind the Angel, the Great Adversary, Satan himself, breathed dark fire into the mobs.

 

On the eighteenth of October, Madam Checkley, the wife of town clerk and Cooke ally Colonel Checkley, died. Up near Salutation Alley, Selectman William Clark's brother-in-law Mr. Bronsdon lost three children in the space of one week; Bill Merchant lost two. The mistress of the charity school, Mrs. Martha Cotes, was buried, along with many of her pupils.

Bethiah Nichols survived.

More noticeable still, the Boylstons, Webbs, Adams, and Langdons, Mr. Cheever and Mr. Helyer, Mrs. Pierce, Mrs. Willard, and young Mrs. Dodge—all his inoculees who could not be suspected of having taken the disease before the operation—walked through the contagion unharmed.

At the Loring house, Zabdiel watched young Nathaniel and Hannah break into light shivering on the nineteenth, as Daniel's skin bubbled and frothed, and fever ground away at his mind.

Not far away, Eunice Willard shed the last of her scabs. Zabdiel gave her leave to care for her cousins, and she gave him a firm handshake and matter-of-fact thanks.

“It is I who owe you thanks,” said Zabdiel.

 

Very early in the morning on the twentieth, a heavy, wet snow blanketed the ground, following a drenching rain the night before that had sent the last of the leaves shivering from the trees. Without much food and precious little firewood, hunger and cold crept into town in the shadow of death—and it was not just the chronically poor who suffered. With trade at a standstill and heads of families dying, the ranks of the needy were swelling with people who had never thought to find themselves hushing children whose bellies ached with emptiness.

On the twenty-first, Nathaniel Loring and Hannah Breck both erupted. In the following days, they careened through stages their brother was inching through in agony. By the morning of the twenty-third, their blisters were already ripening. Daniel's had spread into what seemed to be one livid pustule that covered most of his body; he had swelled to near twice his size.

Mr. Loring quietly pulled Zabdiel into the parlor. “He is not doing well, is he?”

“I am sorry,” said Zabdiel. “He is not.”

Mr. Loring had paced for a moment, and Zabdiel had looked away. Presently, Loring blew his nose loudly.

“I should like to read you something.”

Zabdiel steeled himself to hear a Biblical passage, a prayer: relatives of the dying, especially parents, often had a desperate need to share some faint shadow of their grief.

Mr. Loring cleared his throat. “It is from this morning's
Gazette
.”

 

Mr. Loring looked up. “Did you know of these experiments?”

Zabdiel was startled speechless; all he could do was shake his head. Mr. Loring set the paper in his hand, and he read it twice through, his mouth moving as he read.

“I would say you—perhaps I might be permitted to say we—are running in very high company,” said Mr. Loring with a wan smile. “The very highest.”

It was true—if the article could be trusted. Zabdiel was not alone: the practice whose merit seemed so clear upstairs, but so muddied out in the streets, had drawn royal attention—not yet approval, perhaps, but enough attention to merit experiment.
At Newgate,
said an arch little voice in his head.
Among felons
.

“And the lowest,” said Zabdiel.

He hurried to the post office, to purchase his own copy. At the door, Mr. Musgrave, postmaster and proprietor of the
Boston Gazette,
hailed him with the heartiness he reserved for people from whom he wished to wheedle something.

It was as Zabdiel expected; the postmaster had a whole pile of
Mercury
s, and knew perfectly well what came next. He winked at Zabdiel. “Sometimes, you have to dole out excitement in mere drams, like opium, eh? Keep 'em coming back for more.”

It was all Zabdiel could do to keep from leaping over the counter and seizing him by the collar.
“What came of the experiment?”

“Not so hasty, not so hasty,” said Mr. Musgrave, pulling out a bottle of Madeira and two glasses. “I must ask a favor in return. Fair's fair, you know, and I owe both Mr. Campbell and especially Mr. Franklin a drubbing in the matter of sales.”

Forty-five minutes later, Zabdiel departed only a little unsteadily, leaving behind a promise and carrying with him a copy of the day's paper and, even better, knowledge that made him so giddy he thought he might float.

“Look,” said Zabdiel, setting the paper down on the parlor table as the family gathered for prayers just before dinner.

Tommy scanned through the ship notices and the advertisements, and looked up with shining eyes. “Papa! A camel!” He ran his finger along the page word by word, reading carefully,
“Just arrived from Africa, being above seven foot in height and twelve foot long.”

“I am not talking about the camel, child,” said Zabdiel.

Young Jerusha and John snatched the paper to their end of the table. Tommy shrugged and ducked under the table, which made a good treasure cave.

“Operation of inoculating,”
read John carefully, and then his eyebrows rose.
“Newgate!”
he blurted. A sharp rap came from under the table; Tommy reappeared, rubbing his head.
“Felons . . . experiment . . .”
continued John.

“The Prince and Princess of Wales,”
breathed his sister, looking up at her father in awe.

Peering over their shoulders, Zabdiel junior read the article aloud from beginning to end.

There was such a commotion of shouting and laughter that no one heard Tom ride up; his face just suddenly appeared, floating pale and staring in the doorway. Jerusha took one look at him and sent the children downstairs to Moll. They obeyed in stricken silence.