The Speckled Monster (12 page)

She would not look like that, anymore. “It would make a man weep to see what she was then, and what she is like to be, by people's discourse, now”: so the diarist Samuel Pepys had mourned in 1668, standing before two portraits of Frances Stewart, duchess of Richmond and breathtakingly beautiful mistress of King Charles II. He had gone in his coach to stare at the paintings four days after the whispers had scuttled through London that Richmond—like Lady Mary more recently—was “mighty full” with the smallpox. The duchess would live, they murmured, but “wholly spoiled.”

Only a little more than a month ago, another king had been casting his eye upon Lady Mary, and the whole world seemed to lie in raptures at her feet. From what she had gleaned lately, that would no longer be the case. When she asked Dr. Garth about her face, he had set aside his frown and pronounced with forced cheer that she would again be fair, but she hadn't trusted him since her brother died. Others who had clustered around her bed, clucking sympathetically, had been more circumspect.

She slipped off the mask and twirled the mirror around.

The face she saw was unrecognizable. Though the swelling had gone down since the worst of the crisis, her fine, long nose was still bottle shaped, her lips thickened and cracked. Her eyelids were puffy and her eyelashes had all fallen out. The last time she had glanced in a mirror, her skin had glowed like translucent ivory; now she saw deep, twisted craters stained a splotchy reddish brown, as if someone had slapped over the face she knew a thick, poorly modeled mask of discolored, clotted papier-mâché. At least Mr. Wortley, she thought bitterly, would be satisfied. Once, he had wished she might lose her complexion so that she might also lose some of her admirers; smallpox had finally granted his wish.

She called her maid back and handed her the mirror. “Take that picture out of my sight,” she said, nodding at the Kneller.
Before I tear it,
she thought—though, really, it would take a full-fledged knife-throwing brawl to make the face once again match its disfigured original. As the maid staggered away with the painting, Lady Mary did what she always did in distress: she rose, crossed to her desk, and picked up a pen.

 

For almost a hundred rhyming lines, a new eclogue spilled through her pen, full of self-mockery. Once, she had spent hours at her dressing table, deep in happy debate about the fall of curls and the exact placement of beauty patches. Opera tickets, perfume, Japanese lacquer, and flowers had all been strewn at her feet. Statesmen, soldiers, beaus, wits, gamblers, and country squires had vied for a kind glance; she had herself paused on her way out the door, to appreciate the figure in her mirror. But “now,” sighed Lady Mary, “beauty's fled, and lovers are no more.”

But it was not just that admirers had fled, she mused; her enemies were stepping out of the shadows to take their place. When it was thought she would die, someone showed another of her eclogues to the Princess of Wales, whose court it lampooned. As it became clear that Lady Mary would live, her enemies crowed over what this impolitic bit of poetry might do to whatever shreds were left of her court career. “She will be pitted but not pitied,” tittered the many ladies who despised her.

Her friends had carried these insults to her like some foully titillating bouquet, expecting her to hurl sharp quills of revenge, but Lady Mary was less concerned about Caroline than the king: the face she had seen in the mirror was no delicacy to delight a monarch. Titles, offices, lands, and palaces: these were sugarplums that fell into the laps of kings' playfellows, all now slipping away like the white silk remnants of a dream. . . . Wortley would not be pleased about that, at least. But he would not be the only one watching either. She winced, knowing that the snake den of London society—friends and enemies alike—would stare in fascination as the king's attraction for her went slack and began to feather elsewhere.
Pitted, but not pitied,
indeed. Her pen began to scratch across the paper once more:

 

Her reverie was interrupted by the arrival of Dorothy, Lady Townshend—as innocent, imprudent, and flittering as her brother Sir Robert Walpole was careful and cunning, and long one of Lady Mary's closest confidantes.

Dolly caught her breath as Lady Mary turned unmasked toward the door. “Oh, Mary,” she cried, crossing the room to take her friend's hand. “You have lost more loveliness than I ever saw in another face.”

Lady Mary sighed, set down her pen, and rang for tea. At least Dolly was honest. “'Tis certain, dearest Dolly, that I have lost what beauty I had—just when I was beginning to realize its advantages.”

4

BIDDING THE WORLD ADIEU

“THERE is no species of fever,” announced Dr. Mead, “which requires the body to be thoroughly cleared of the remains of the disease more than the smallpox.” So Lady Mary's blood was let yet again, and she was purged several more times. After that, recovery called for drinking deep drafts of both asses' milk and fresh air.

It was a bitterly cold winter: the Thames froze solid enough to hold a frost fair on its strangely solid, opaque surface. Wrapped in furs, with hot stones tucked beneath her feet on the coach floor and her face protected from snow glare and curious stares alike by the silken mask she never shed, Lady Mary ventured out to share in the carnival games, puppet shows, roast apples, and fortune telling. She also began once more to entertain a chosen few of her old admirers in the safe warmth of her home: Mr. Jervas, Mr. Pope, and Johnny Gay were not allowed to see the ruin of her face, but she welcomed their undiminished adoration of her mind.

Early in February, the Pretender scuttled back to France; the earl of Mar went with him. As the fever of rebellion fizzled out, the nation, too, began to recover. In London, a few Jacobite prisoners were executed, but the king exhibited remarkable leniency for the period. Even as Parliament attainted Mar, the crown granted his wife not only safety but an income. The loyalty and goodwill of Frances's family were not to be trifled with.

Even now, Lady Mary managed to get herself into more trouble than her sister—and to do so in rhyme. The Princess of Wales had digested her acidic poem in silence, but the rest of the world could not let it go. Late in March, the disreputable pirate-publisher Edmund Curll printed it along with a few others, hinting that they were by Pope, Gay, or “a lady of quality,” by which everyone understood Lady Mary. Deeming this attribution to be more scandal-mongering advertisement than discreet disguise, Pope determined to take revenge. Two days later, he arranged to meet Mr. Curll at the shop of his own publisher, Bernard Lintot. After first scolding Curll as a knave, Pope reluctantly made a peace offering of a glass of wine. It was a ruse: Pope doctored Curll's drink, and the printer spent the rest of the day and night vomiting.

Lady Mary snickered until Pope published his schoolboy prank in grotesque detail in a pamphlet titled
Full and True Account of a Horrid and Barbarous Revenge by Poison, on the Body of Mr. Edm. Curll
. Abruptly, Lady Mary stopped laughing. Though her name never actually showed up in print in connection with this fiasco, it might as well have proclaimed it with a flourish of trumpets. She did not find the cost to her reputation pleasing; Wortley was even less amused.

They did not have to face this absurd disgrace for long. On the seventh of April, the newspapers named Edward Wortley Montagu as the next British ambassador extraordinary to the Ottoman Empire—or Porte, as the empire's government, perched at the other end of Europe in Constantinople, was then called. He had accepted the next-to-impossible job of brokering peace between the Holy Roman and the Ottoman empires, just when the emperor and the sultan were glaring daggers at each other, preparing once more to unleash their dogs of war.

“Forsake mankind, and bid the world adieu,”
Lady Mary murmured to herself. To her friends' uncomprehending horror, she announced that both she and baby Edward would go along.

 

Preparing for her journey, Lady Mary regained her old strength and spirit, but she kept her face hidden behind the silken mask.

“You must take it off sometime, my dear,” said Dolly.

“Never,” said Lady Mary. Friends, admirers—even acquaintances who had glimpsed her once across the theater, she sighed in exasperation—sent remedies to erase the smallpox scars. “All marked infallible,” she said, rifling through the jars, bottles, and powder papers piled higgledy-piggledy on a table in her sitting room, “which is true, so long as you are discussing failure.” She picked up a few and read their labels.
Lemon juice and salt to bleach the brown stains. A syrup of white wine steeped with sheep's dung
.

“I thought that was a preventative,” said Dolly.

“Prevents good taste,” said Lady Mary. “Before, during, and after.” She dropped the bottle back on the table and moved on.
Ointment of almond oil, chicken grease, goat tallow, and gold. Alternating face-washes of vinegar and bran-water. A jelly of camphor and calves' feet
. Snatching up a scrap of paper, she stared at it in silence for a moment, and then sank into a chair in helpless wonder. “From Mrs. Brownlow,” she said, tossing it to Dolly. “Her recipe for boiling cream to an oil, with directions to anoint it with a feather. She would have sent the feather, too, but after Meg died the servants burned it.”

“At least that one worked,” said Dolly with a shiver. “Skulls don't have scars, leastways, not that kind of scar. I think you should investigate the Balm of Mecca. Sounds so exotic, and has nothing to do with, well—”

“Excrement,” said Lady Mary. “No—it is said to be made from tears wept by a tree more aromatic than frankincense. Unfortunately, it is also as rare as the phoenix, and as dear. Half an ounce is said to be worth a whole kingdom. Mr. W will never pay.”

“Kingdoms come cheap in Constantinople,” sniffed Dolly.

 

The strangest story of all, though, came from Dr. Garth, his coach hurtling up to Lady Mary's door after a meeting of the Royal Society. Presided over by Sir Isaac Newton, the Royal Society was one of Europe's most elite gatherings of scientifically interested men, so voracious for information about the natural world that they had begun soliciting news from every nook and cranny across the globe. Two and a half years earlier, in October of 1713, reported Dr. Garth, a preposterous tale had trickled west. The Turks, it was said, protected themselves from smallpox by inserting the scab of someone else's pock into a small incision in their own skin.

Lady Mary shuddered and laughed.

“Precisely,” said Dr. Garth with a nod. But several months later, the Fellows had heard the absurd story again, this time in more detail from one of their own members, Dr. Emanuel Timonius, then practicing medicine in Constantinople. “Foreign, you know,” shrugged Dr. Garth. “Italian. But is a Fellow, with a degree from Oxford as well, so was deemed to merit at least passing attention.” Dr. Timonius not only repeated the tale, but claimed miraculous success for “engrafting,” as he called this practice of transferring the disease from one person to another. Still dubious, Sir Hans Sloane began canvassing other sources, particularly Dr. William Sherard, British consul in Smyrna. They had just heard back from Dr. Sherard, said Dr. Garth. Engrafting, or inoculation, was not practiced in Smyrna, but Sherard had heard of it.

Lady Mary leaned forward. “Heard what?”

“That is all he said,” reported Dr. Garth. “Though he promised to endeavor to find out more.”

 

At the end of May, at a glittering farewell party given in Lady Mary's honor by Lord and Lady Townshend, Dr. Garth made a beeline through the poets and the painters toward the guest of honor, still masked. Tossing aside some superfluous conversation on drama, or verse form, or possibly architecture, like so much kindling, he announced that the Royal Society had at last received Dr. Sherard's final report on engrafting.

“Engrafting!”
protested a young poet. “What will we care about tending orchards, once we have lost the very flower of British wit?”

“A great deal, I imagine,” said Lady Mary, “when you discover that this engrafting claims to prevent the flowering of the smallpox.”

Around them, the crowd quieted and drew closer.

“Dr. Sherard,” said Dr. Garth, “has confirmed Dr. Timonius's account, and forwarded a paper by a certain Dr. Jacopo Pylarinus of Venice, who has also practiced medicine in Constantinople.”

Lady Mary cocked her head, and Dr. Garth bowed and proceeded. Both Timonius and Pylarinus, he said, claimed that an old hag would prick a patient's arm with a needle; into the blood that appeared, she would mix a tiny bit of “matter” or pus from the pock of some unfortunate sufferer of full-blown smallpox. The recipient soon contracted a mild form of the disease, suffering no more than a brief, low fever and a few shallow pocks that quickly dried up and fell off, leaving no scars. The operation was said to have originated among the Circassians, he said with a mischievous glance at the mooning young poet, whose daughters were the most exquisite of the hothouse flowers to be found in Turkish harems.

Lady Mary cut his jest short. “Why haven't we tried it?” she cried. “Why haven't
you
tried it? The Royal Society? The Royal College of Physicians?”