The Speckled Monster (16 page)

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In the middle of May, the sultan had once again led his army west to defend Belgrade against the emperor and his Austrians, even as his European ambassadors and their families had been sent in the opposite direction. In August, the sultan's troops charged into battle against the Austrians of Prince Eugene of Savoy; a week later, the city surrendered. The prince gave the place over to his troops, and three days later not a house was left standing, not a person alive. Lady Mary presumed her host Achmet Bey dead, and mourned him.

After the siege, Dr. Timonius returned from attending the sultan in the field, and agreed to attend Lady Mary in her pregnancy—for Mr. W most obligingly retained that Italian of inoculation fame as the family physician. Lady Mary's mood soared and then dived. Dr. Timonius was adamant: under no circumstances would he allow her to inoculate her son while she was pregnant, or visit any of the smallpox parties her friends were arranging. Lady Mary might be safe—
might,
he stressed in Italian, French, and Latin—but the danger to her unborn child was immeasurable.

Caught between terrors, she put the operation off.

Mr. Maitland was relieved: it gave him a chance to study the procedure during at least one inoculation season. With her blessing, he visited several of the parties forbidden to her, and she picked his brain upon every return—though it meant an infernal number of visits to the baths, for him. Once he got used to so much steaming, scrubbing, massaging, and oiling, though, he actually came to like it.

“Well?” she asked, pouring him a tiny cup of thick, sweet coffee as he arrived after his first visit to such a party. “What are the symptoms? Are they as salutary as the reports would have them?”

He folded himself onto the sofa. Come to think of it, he quite liked these flowing caftans the Turks wore. Damned sight more comfortable than breeches. “Both before and after the eruption, my lady, the symptoms are so gentle—so very slight—that, in strictness of speech, I cannot really countenance calling the inoculated smallpox a disease.”

“Specifics, my dear Scot, specifics, if you please.”

In retaliation for that “dear Scot,” he sipped at his coffee slowly until she was very near a scream of vexation, when he smiled and relented. “None of the usual complaints of pain in the back,” he said. “No vomiting, headaches, thirst, or restlessness.” He helped himself to a sweetmeat powdery and sparkling with sugar. “Though the pulse, to be sure, is somewhat fuller and higher than before.”

“And the fever?” she asked sharply.

He waved his hand in dismissal. “Scarcely deserves the name of
febricula
.”

“I am not sure anything or anyone deserves that,” she said dryly. “But is it always so light? Is there never a bad issue?”

“Not one to a thousand, I am repeatedly assured.”

“And the pocks?”

“The pustules, madam, commonly number from ten to a hundred, in rare cases more.” He leaned forward. “But what I may say I am happiest to report is that they never leave any marks or pits behind—except only around the incisions where they graft the stuff into the blood.”

“They are turning you into gardener, too, then?”

He shrugged. “It is a city of gardens, my lady. Why not grow smallpox too? I tell you, if they grow this light kind with any regularity, it will be more valuable than all the pineapples the king can produce in a thousand years.”

“How will you ascertain whether it really secures those who risk it against all future danger of catching the smallpox?”

“Ah,” he sighed. “That is, of course, the great difficulty.” He gave her a sharp look. “And if not fully vindicated, it will render the whole process precarious.”

“It will render the whole process trifling,” she said. “So let us hope that you will clear it.”

“It is not up to me to clear or condemn, my lady. It is my duty to observe the truth.”

 

The next time, he bounded in like a conqueror. “All my inquiries have been fully answered, my lady: I have been assured that there is not one instance known of anyone's being ever infected, who has had any pustules at all, however few have been raised by inoculation.”

“Really?”

“Several people have been engrafted a second time—and others have been confined not only in the same room, but in the same bed as the infected. With no effect whatsoever. No one in these trials has ever felt the least twinge of fever or nausea.” He was pacing so wildly that he kept sweeping out of the long open doors and into the courtyard, and coming back in, so that she lost some of his ranting.

“I cannot forbear admiring the very great sagacity of the men who first invented this method,” he said upon one return.

“What makes you think it was men?” asked Lady Mary, raising an eyebrow.

He stopped in his tracks and stared at her. “I—”

“Men do not practice it. Why should they have invented it?”

In answer, he turned on his heel and swept back out; he did not come back in for some time.

 

Disaster struck through the mails: Just as Wortley's embassy was building momentum, and the sultan was beginning to take notice of his counsels, a letter came announcing an upheaval in the ministry at home. Walpole was out, and Sunderland was in. As a consequence, Mr. Wortley found that he also was to be out, and another ambassador was to be in. And Lady Mary found that she was to go home, much sooner than was either pleasurable or convenient.

But the departure was not too imminent. She was to have one last winter and spring in paradise.

 

Lady Mary grew larger and calmer, and then even placid. Her pen stopped its busy scratching, and she sat in her garden on a slope high above the sea, and for hours at a time watched the city undulating away from her perch.

At Christmas, she received a long letter from Alexander Pope; his imaginings grew preposterously extravagant. He had sent her a new poem, titled
Eloisa to Abelard,
“in which you will find,” he wrote, “one passage, that I can't tell whether to wish you should understand or not?”

It was a lovely poem, really—unusually passionate for him, she thought. But did he really have to liken his long-distance dreaming of her to poor Eloisa in her nunnery cell, yearning for her long-lost mutilated lover? The man would make a fool of himself one day, surely. But his poetry stirred her. On Boxing Day, she sat in her kiosk and coaxed herself from her contented lethargy into nicely regular verse:

 

She pressed herself through a classical lament for the ruins of the Byzantine city upon which the Turks had built their present infidel fairy-land. But she could not for long maintain a proper sense of doom.

 

And endless poetry tires the pregnant mind, she thought with happy sleepiness, letting the quill slip from her hand and watching it float to the ground.

 

On the nineteenth of January, 1718, Lady Mary gave birth to a daughter, whom she named Mary. Three months later, while Mr. W was off with the sultan's retinue, she dismissed the protesting chaplain, sent her maid on a mission to the Greek quarter, and summoned Mr. Maitland to her rooms.

“I have decided to submit the boy to this inoculation next week. I would be much obliged if you would make it your business to find a fit subject from which to take the necessary matter.”

“Yes, my lady.”

“Mr. Maitland.”

“Yes?”

“I should also be obliged if you would have a word with the girl's nurse. She has not had the smallpox, and she is refusing to undergo the inoculation herself.”

“Yes, my lady.”

But the nurse was not to be budged, by reward, wheedling, weeping, pleading, or threats.

On the morning of March 18, 1718, Lady Mary had Edward and Mr. Maitland both summoned to her chamber. Soon afterward, the chief inoculatress of Constantinople arrived, veiled from head to toe in black like the Greek widow she was, though she was a Christian, of course, and left her face showing. A kind old face, seamed with countless wrinkles punctuated by faded old eyes and a toothless smile.

The woman was good with children—that much was clear, though she was hindered somewhat by not speaking English, while Edward did not speak Greek. Unfortunately, it did not matter how good she was; the boy did not wish to be scratched, stuck, or otherwise touched by a needle. He dodged away from the woman and made a dash for the door, but two slaves stood there, impassively. He darted away, and began running about the room, overturning what little furniture was available—all of it made light, in the Turkish manner, and easily thrown about by a half-panicked, half-mischievous, and utterly naughty five-year-old.

The slaves made a move to help, but Lady Mary ordered them back to the door; at least, she panted to Mr. Maitland as she sprinted past him at one point, they would keep the chase confined to one room. There was nowhere to hide, but there were a great number of cushions to toss, small tables to throw, and fountainsful of water to splash.

Mr. Maitland had always suspected Lady Mary of being a bit of an athlete beneath the whalebone stays; relieved of them in her Turkish dress, she proved to have a fine gait and a good set of lungs. The old Greek lady, too, showed herself to be surprisingly nimble. But it took all three of them to corner the child, protecting themselves from flailing arms and feet with large silken pillows. One of them burst, filling the air with a snowy feather-fall. And then it was over: Master Edward suddenly went rigid in their arms, shooting them a perfectly wicked smile as they hauled him, stiff as a length of lumber, back into the sunlight in the center of the room.

Lady Mary stood out of her son's reach, holding the jarful of venom so painstakingly provided by Mr. Maitland. The inoculatress pulled out what looked to be the blunt needle she darned her sons' socks with and drew a short line on the boy's left arm, ripping a slight tear in the skin. He wailed and wriggled, but she held him firm. She flicked her needle into the jar once and smeared a tiny dab of stuff into the two or three tiny rubies that had popped out on the boy's arm.

She motioned to Mr. Maitland to trade places with her, but he felt the boy hunch to spring and shook his head. Instead, he drew out the small lancet he always carried with him, pulled off the cover with his teeth, and before anyone could say yea or nay, cut a neat shallow incision on the boy's right arm.

“My lady, if you please, I would take some of that matter.”

Lady Mary held out the jar, Mr. Maitland dipped his lancet into the venom, and just as the woman had done, he smeared a bit into the blood—though his cut had produced a thin red line, rather than a row of scarlet beads.

Lady Mary herself tied up the bandages.

The operation over, the boy went rag-doll limp, buried his face in his mother's skirts, and wept. She patted his head.

“That's my boy. Fine spirit and courage,” she said.

 

“Why did you whip out your lancet?” she said testily to Mr. Maitland later, after the nurse had mustered the boy off to bed.

“Because he was ready to spring, the moment we loosened our grips, so we couldn't trade places. I had to operate, my lady. And however highly you may regard this Turkish procedure, you must allow me to regard certain standards of my own profession still more highly.” He drew himself up tall. “I do not operate with old rusty needles.” The mere thought of it sent him stalking from the room.

Three days later, bright red spots appeared in Edward's face; a few hours later they disappeared. They bloomed and faded like that for a week.

“When will the illness come on?” Lady Mary asked what seemed like every five minutes.

“Not yet, my lady,” was all Mr. Maitland could say.

 

The following night, the boy's nurse sent slaves skimming through the palace halls for Lady Mary, and Lady Mary sent them in turn on their way to Mr. Maitland's door. Minutes later, they converged in the boy's nursery—removed to the farthest end of the building from the girl's.

Young Edward was a little hot and thirsty; Lady Mary was a whirlwind of pacing and ordering, checking pulses, stroking his hair and his cheek and pacing again, until Mr. Maitland was sorely tempted to dose her rather than the boy—and with more than a little laudanum. She flat-out refused, however, when he recommended a soothing dose. Unless he wanted to slip something in her wine, she was going to remain awake.

The illness did not last long. A few hours later, the rash began to seed itself across his body, and the fever—
febricula!
exclaimed Lady Mary—went off. Across the next day, he bloomed with about a hundred spots that soon grew round and yellow, like those of the more gentle, distinct kind of smallpox. The red spots that had appeared first grew fullest and largest of all. They began to crust over within the week, and then gently died away without leaving a single mark or pit behind them.