The Speckled Monster (36 page)

Recounting the battle for his son's life made the events of the last week begin to seem real. As Zabdiel finished, his companions touched off a burst of congratulations and questions, shot through with praise, both of Boylston and the Lord, and quick prayers for continued success. Sensing his exhaustion, though, the men soon trickled off, leaving Boylston and Cheever to work their way through tankards of ale and pipes full of tobacco in comfortable silence.

It was then that George Stewart ducked in to escape the rain, calling for a private room upstairs. He passed them by with no more than a quick nod, but a few steps on he slowed and stopped. He turned back, a quick flash of surprise replaced with oily solemnity, and then he swept off his hat and bowed to Zabdiel. “May I offer my condolences?”

Zabdiel's eyes widened and his face grew flat as it always did when he tried to squelch laughter. “Very kind”—he nodded—“but I'd rather you kept them till I have something to condole about.”

Cheever groaned inwardly. Dr. Stewart was a Scot, another surgeon who'd arrived in town a few years back and in very short order had married the daughter of Zabdiel's old mentor, Dr. John Cutler. When Dr. Cutler had died four years ago, Stewart had been none too pleased to find that most of the man's rather considerable regular practice had drifted to his eldest son, John junior, or to Zabdiel. Since Stewart had to maintain familial bonhomie with John junior, he'd channeled his growling disappointment toward Zabdiel—who made it all the worse by regarding the whole matter with detached amusement. Especially the Scottish growling. Zabdiel could rarely restrain himself from baiting the man.
He's like a snapping turtle,
he'd once said to Cheever.
He and Dr. Douglass. Endlessly fascinating to see what they'll snap at next
. So long as it ain't the nose on your face, Cheever had observed.

“I heard your laddie was at death's door,” Dr. Stewart was saying with a frown.

“Try not to look disappointed, man,” roared Cheever, coming out of his reverie. “It's a boy's life you're moping about.”

Zabdiel waved him off. “His fever was high, far higher than I expected,” he said to Stewart. “I'll admit that. But it's gone off, and he looks to do very well now.”

“From what I hear,” said Stewart, “you stirred up a right bourach such as set your street all tapsal-teerie into the wee hours last night.” He sniffed. “A brave experiment, no doubt, if a bit hasty. Glad to hear it's not been a total hash.”

“Far from it,” said Zabdiel gravely. “I'm still hoping it will prove a total success.”

There was a brief silence. Stewart did, in fact, have a long, leathery turtle's neck and a mouth that sloped down in a point like a beak. He blinked. “You can't mean you're thinking of proceeding?”

Zabdiel tossed his arms wide. “Why not? We might save hundreds, even thousands, of lives.” He said it to annoy Stewart, but suddenly all three of them sensed a strange future glimmering there between them.

Stewart shook the vision off first, drawing himself into a prim punctuation mark of disapproval. “Let me be the first to wish you equal luck with regard to the secondary fever,” he said with a curt nod, and stalked away.

“Ghoul,” said Cheever. “You'd think he wished Tommy dead.”

“I think he wishes me—the whole inoculation experiment—to fail,” said Zabdiel, looking thoughtfully in the direction he had gone. “And he isn't alone.”

Cheever gave him a sharp look. “Has it been bad?”

Zabdiel pulled the pipe from his mouth, and shot his friend a wry grin. “You heard the man: a right tapsal-teerie bourach.” He blew a smoke ring toward the ceiling. “Which translates, close as I can tell, to nearly having the house burned down around me.”

“Rough night, eh?”

Zabdiel stared into the depths of the fireplace, feeling the warmth drain away. “I almost lost him, Joshua.” He turned a haggard face his friend. “You should take Sarah and get out of town.”

But Cheever shook his head. “She won't go without me, and I can't leave the shop. Don't have anyone to leave it to. Besides, we don't have children to worry about.”

Zabdiel nodded. It must make a difference. It must make all the difference.

“You really mean to try it on others?”

“I don't know,” said Zabdiel. “Mostly I just wanted to irritate George.” Cheever caught his eye, and he grew serious. “I'm waiting to see how Tommy and Jackey do, before I even think about anything else. Stewart's a gloomy old tortoise, but he's right about the secondary fever. It's the one that kills.”

Cheever shifted in his chair. “Tommy's tough,” he said.

“He is,” nodded Zabdiel. They returned to their beer and smoking in silence.

 

Across the next three days, the rash sowed itself quickly and lightly across both boys: they had about a hundred bumps each, not counting the tiny pocks that clustered around their incisions. To be sure, it was far more than the ten or twenty pocks that Timonius estimated, but still exponentially fewer than what he and Jack saw day by day in sickrooms all over town: a thousand or even fifteen hundred pocks crowding onto one small body were not uncommon. And those were the patients whose pocks remained distinct enough to count.

Within the first twenty-four hours, the boys' bumps had ballooned into blisters filled with a clear, viscous liquid that clouded to a dull, turgid gray across the next two days. Both their fevers disappeared. The blisters didn't hurt, but they were growing a little itchy. Zabdiel put Tommy in charge of keeping Jackey from scratching himself, arming them with a little calamine lotion and the advice to keep each other busy. Then he and Jack returned to spending all day, dawn to dusk, away from home, running between houses where death was pounding at the door. They returned that first night to find their own transformed into a ship. Briefly, Zabdiel wondered what Jerusha would make of her best sheets rigged as sails, but then he figured that if it would make Tommy scud through the smallpox with ease, she'd rig them herself.

He told himself that he should write to her, but decided against it: not yet. He could not bring himself to put paper to pen until he should know what he would have to tell her.

 

Meanwhile, a few irregular blocks to the north, Dr. Mather went on weeping and prostrating himself in the dust, begging the Lord to spare the lives of his two children. Out in the streets, the clamor receded; the crowds withdrew to a watchful, muttering distance.

For the most part, the doors that were going to close against Zabdiel had already closed. Oddly enough, others began to open. People he had never spoken to before began hailing him in the street, curious for minute-by-minute appraisals of the boys' progress.

For a while, he was happy to give it. Few in number and strangely small, the pocks sat lightly on the top of the skin—more like chicken pox than the deep-set pustules of smallpox. Also, they went on ripening at double speed. As the boys rounded into only the fourth day of the rash, the blisters were already beginning the critical process of congealing into pustules. Zabdiel subsided into tense, prickling quiet. It was toward the end of this third stage, as the pustules matured, that the secondary fever would blow its hot breath through Tommy and Jackey, if it were going to come.

Day crept by day with agonizing slowness but no hint of a fever, though Zabdiel sensed it hovering like a hurricane just beyond the horizon. Scattered like seed pearls across the boys' skin, the pocks grew plump. They were perfect, thought Zabdiel: robust enough to hold the poison at the outer rim of their bodies, but not so big that they'd pop like hot corn, leaving patches of ragged skin and oozing filth behind.

The next morning, just five days since the first appearance of the rash, the boys' pocks began to crust over, transforming from pustules to brown scabs without ever bursting. Gingerly, Zabdiel began exhaling the fear he had stored up inside him.

His attention began returning to other matters. As countless people informed him in urgent undertones, the
Boston News-Letter
had devoted almost the entire issue of July 10 to “pestilential contagion” and the correct methods of preventing it. Anxiety eddied in the streets all day long, but Zabdiel could not pause to read it until he rode home for dinner. In the kitchen with Jack, he took it up, and very nearly tossed it down again in disgust. For the paper failed to point out that the pestilence discussed by Dr. Mead in the treatise it reprinted with such dire flourish was not smallpox. It was plague of the blackest bubonic sort, then ravaging Marseilles and the whole southern coast of France, and it had ignited panic—and a fair amount of latent Francophobia—all across Europe and England. Apparently Mr. John Campbell was keen to strike similar sparks in New England.

“Keen to sell his paper's more like it,” said Jack, stomping here and there around the room, swatting at specks of dust with a towel. “Put fear of plague in, get twopence out. I bet he's sold two, three times the number of papers he usually sells.”

Zabdiel's mind was headed in other directions.
Who had given Mr. Campbell this treatise in the first place?
he mused as he mounted the stairs toward bed. It was too detailed to have come from a dispatch. And far too technically medical in parts to have come from Campbell's own library. Zabdiel wondered briefly, and then he lay back and fell deep asleep.

 

Early the next morning, as Captain Durell paraded down the Long Wharf toward his ship, he was hailed—most irregularly—by one of the Seahorses. Captain Paxton's Indian man. At least he bowed and scraped obsequiously, acknowledging his temerity. Unfortunately, he was also holding out a paper. Two papers.

Two very disagreeable papers, the captain saw as he took them. One was a note from that coxcomb of an ex-captain Paxton, requesting—though the tone was insufferably more like demanding—the release of his slave. The other was a discharge, complete but for Durell's signature.

“So you're begging off, are you, Hector?” he said.

“The captain's request, sir,” said Hector in his soft, vaguely singsong voice. “I just saw Master Charles off at the ship, though,” he added. “Captain says, I was taking his place and now I'm to go back and serve at the house.”

The way the man referred to Paxton as “the” captain irritated Durell. In any case, he did not recall that those were the terms of the agreement; he did recall—it hung on his mind from sunup to sundown—that his ship appeared once again to be hemorrhaging men. He sniffed. Hector was a crack seaman, while young Paxton was no more than a raw boy. It did not even approach a fair exchange. As Captain Paxton had no doubt counted on, however, there was no time now to wrangle. Durell could force the man back aboard, clapping him in irons until they were safely far enough at sea that there was no hope of escape. But Boston was HMS
Seahorse
's home port, and it had been brought home to Captain Durell quite firmly in recent weeks that he needed the town's goodwill. He signed the man's discharge, shoved it at him, and stomped on his way.

He would never have signed it, had he reached the ship first. Another man had died the night before, which Lieutenant Hamilton had wisely kept as quiet as the fact that he had been sick in the first place; Captain Durell agreed that they should go on keeping it quiet until they had reached a proper deep to which they might commit him. That was only a minor irritation, though; the major problem was that the desertion rate was far worse than even his worst projections. Another twenty men had failed to show up this morning. Neither the press crew nor volunteers—few and far between, and heavily pockmarked—had even begun to make up the losses. Word must have oozed out that she was a coffin ship with a demon perched on her prow, digging cruel claws into the neck of the figurehead mare—
You can see the marks for yourself, mate
—his tail flicking spotted death behind him.

Durell swatted a sailor out of his way. “Take that man's name,” he barked to Lieutenant Hamilton, who'd see that the bosun meted out some fit punishment for disturbing the captain.
Disturbed
was an understatement of ludicrous proportion, thought Durell. After deaths, discharges, and previously acknowledged runs, his ship was left a crew of only ninety-three, and that was counting himself. Barely enough men to sail the ship, much less fight her. For a while, he had the ship linger, but when the tide would wait no longer, HMS
Seahorse
slipped her moorings and set sail twenty-odd men too light.

Captain Durell sighed as she tacked clumsily out of the harbor. If it weren't for the matter of his wife, whom he was leaving behind eight months pregnant, he'd have been relieved to be free, for a while, of blasted Boston: her intrigue, her finger pointing, her groveling weakness in the face of the smallpox. He had no respect for weakness.

 

In the Boylston household, the dreaded fever played coy. The boys' incisions, however, were another story. They grew, even as the pocks shriveled into hard little brown discs imbedded in the skin.

“Good thing I took it in the neck,” said Jack, looking at the green-and-yellow dripping sore, clustered with small pocks, that now covered his son's upper leg. Not that it would have mattered, on himself. His own incisions had dried up and healed over a week ago, leaving nothing but guilt behind. “That'd make for one sore seat in the saddle, Jackey boy.” He whistled, squelching the question he really wanted to ask—
They going to spread till the whole arm and leg rot off?

“It must be where the body is venting the poison,” reasoned Zabdiel. “At least, I hope that's the case.”

That was good enough for Jack. It had to be.