The Speckled Monster (39 page)

 

By the time Lady Mary retired, this time to her own bed, the six speckles on the child's face had doubled to twelve. An equally small number had sowed themselves across her body. Most wonderfully, they appeared to have stopped spreading in numbers, and were now growing in size instead.

The next morning, Lady Mary ran to her daughter's bed directly upon waking. The rash had not increased by so much as a single speck in the night; the two dozen or so she had were already blistering.

 

“Looks to be a right light case,” confirmed Mr. Maitland a few hours later. Privately, he worried that it might prove too light: however much of a relief it might be at present, surely a mere two dozen pocks could not possibly weave a very strong web of future protection? And what was this dare for, if not that? For the time being, though, he kept his doubts to himself.

By midmorning, the parade of handpicked witnesses began to drift, one at a time, through the nursery. At the far end of the room, Miss Mary Wortley sat on the floor in a patch of hyacinth-scented sunlight and played with her dolls.

“Ignoring the prying multitudes,” said Lady Mary.

The girl certainly did not revel in the attention, as her mother surely would have, Mr. Maitland supposed, at her age. At any age, for that matter. On the other hand, the girl did not hide in her new nurse's skirts either. “You invited half the multitude yourself,” he countered comfortably.

“I do not count Dr. Mead and Dr. Arbuthnot,” sniffed Lady Mary. Her own personal physicians had already arrived and departed. She missed Dr. Garth, she said, now more than ever since he had died two years earlier.
He
would be down on the floor teasing Mary into peals of laughter, not looking her over like a vulture.

The first of the vultures to be admitted was Dr. James Keith, Mr. Maitland's mentor and fellow Aberdonian. He was, however, as different from Mr. Maitland as it was possible to be (and also from vultures, for that matter, as she had to admit): ebullient, cheerful, given to mysticism and seeing the glories of the Lord everywhere.

He made the child smile, at least. Conferring with Maitland, however, his face was grave enough to give Lady Mary alarm.

But Mr. Maitland had only pity for the doctor. “He has lost several of his own children to the worst sort of smallpox,” he said.

Dr. Keith was followed by Dr. Walter Harris. On the subject of acute diseases of childhood, among which smallpox was such an eminent foe, he was London's most venerated authority, explained Mr. Maitland.

“You mean he's ancient,” whispered Lady Mary behind her fan, as he was announced.

“Antediluvian,” agreed Mr. Maitland with irritating calm. Dr. Harris had been one of the nine physicians who had stood helplessly about that bed in Kensington Palace so many years ago, watching Queen Mary die. Since then, he had watched the same disease kill hordes of children. If he seemed reticent, perhaps even reluctant to believe that in inoculation they had discovered a workable shield, it was for no more complicated reason than protection against severe disappointment. Against smallpox, Dr. Harris was accustomed to conceding defeat. “He will not rejoice until he is sure,” Mr. Maitland observed to Lady Mary as Dr. Harris departed, “but then he will rejoice indeed. If we can convince him, we will prove the best of allies.”

Finally, Sir Hans Sloane, M.D. twice over (once from the dubious Dutch University of Orange, and again from Oxford), Fellow of the Royal Society, Member of the College of Physicians of Edinburgh, President of the Royal College of Physicians in London, and personal physician to King George, was announced. Voracious for knowledge but a stickler for evidence, he had been ferreting out reports of inoculation from all over the Levant for years now. He could not quite decide whether he was miffed or relieved to find a bona fide experiment proceeding right under his nose— though nearly without him—in the heart of London. It would have been more convenient, certainly, if the persons involved had been slightly less august, and so more subject to his control.

Lady Mary might have enjoyed the curiosity and caution chasing each other across his face, had he not, at his elbow, been towing a second, uninvited guest. Sir Hans bowed deeply, and presented the Hanoverian Dr. Johann Georg Steigerthal.

As it was, she went white with rage, but there was nothing she could do about it. She could not very well send the king's two favorite physicians packing from her house. As Mr. Maitland meekly put it to her in a pill both sweet and sour, this visit amounted, more or less, to a sickroom visit by the king himself.

Sir Hans proved quite interested in the incisions, and wished for a closer view. With a curt little nod, Lady Mary marched across the room before him. During the whole inspection, she stood over her child like a lioness.

The two men were gentle, but they spoke of Mary as if she were as inanimate as one of her dolls. The blisters, noted Dr. Steigerthal somewhat dubiously, looked more like chicken pox than anything else. The matter within them, agreed Dr. Sloane, looked to be too light and thin to be the true smallpox.

Never mind that Dr. Harris had made the same observations. Lady Mary regarded their doubt as a personal affront. After no more than ten minutes, Mr. Maitland hurried the two men out.

“They might at least
pretend,
” she shrilled as he returned, “not to expect that they're practicing for her funeral procession.”

 

Across the next two days, Mary's pocks filled as much as they ever would, which was not much. Truthfully, they gave Mr. Maitland pangs of concern to the point that he found himself in the strange position of rooting for a case of the smallpox to get worse.
Slightly,
he emphasized to himself.

Had he done something wrong? he wondered. Countless times, he reviewed the inoculation in his head, as if he could have forgotten a step, though he knew this was impossible. In the end, he accounted for the lightness of her case by regarding the difference between the climates of London and Constantinople. Perhaps the pocks would not ripen so fully in the chillier air of England, especially during a spring that had been more than usually dank. This explanation had the added bonus of easing his mind about the operation's effectiveness too. The Circassians of the Caucasus practiced inoculation to astonishingly beautiful effect, as did other peoples along the banks of the Caspian Sea, in climates much colder than that of Constantinople. Much colder than that of England and Scotland, too, for that matter. Manifestly, they made it work: did their daughters not stock the finest harems in all Turkey?

 

Lady Mary did not share Mr. Maitland's caution or the physicians' doubts. As soon as Mary's blisters thickened into pustules, and it was clear that no more new pocks would appear, she gathered her daughter in her arms, and wept.
It is over,
she thought.

It was not over.

No sooner had she dried her eyes, and let her daughter wriggle free, than a line of curious friends and powerful connections appeared at the nursery door. At least, that is what it soon began to seem like.

Lord and Lady Townshend came several times: Dolly because she was a child at heart and loved little Mary almost as much as she loved her mother, and Lord T because he loved to see Dolly happily at play with babies. Also, he quite liked Lady Mary in her own right.
Damned fine woman,
he rumbled to himself.
Startlingly intelligent. Can actually talk political sense
. Besides, he owed her an infinite debt for bringing a once-reluctant Dolly around to the point of marrying him. As a result, he was permanently on the lookout for indirect means by which to repay her.

In any case, even without Dolly, he would in all likelihood have made a visit, though doubtless one of a stiffer nature, in his capacity as secretary of state. For he and his formidable ally in Commons, Sir Robert Walpole (Dolly's brother)—not to mention the entire Whig ministry—had staked everything on the ascendancy of the German family now occupying the palace of St. James. Smallpox, you might say, had set the House of Hanover on the British throne; it was unthinkable that the foul disease should swat them off again. Unthinkable, but not impossible, apparently, Lord Townshend sighed to himself. The ministry had thought the family strong against this particular distemper until Princess Anne—then just three lives away from the throne—had had such a terrible time battling it last spring; she had been quite touch-and-go for a week. And really, she had been sadly marred by its grinding tracks, he clucked. There was now one new prince, to be sure, but two princes and three princesses still seemed a paltry force with which to face a speckled demon that could dispense with thousands with a mere breath.

A viable shield against this ravager was potentially a defensive weapon of power that no one at the highest levels of realpolitik could afford to ignore.

He was not the only person to draw such a conclusion. Another day, the duchess of Dorset arrived with Charlotte Tichborne. Both ladies officially belonged to the Princess of Wales's household, but they were also genuinely her friends; not coincidentally, the pair had been childhood friends of Lady Mary as well. “The princess,” said the duchess, trying to find the right tone between grandeur and familiarity as she swept up the stairs, “is quite keen to know how your Mary does, my dear.”

At the door, she raised a perfumed scarf to her nose and peered in. Her hand dropped, and then her jaw followed. This was no malodorous room holding a wailing, shivering child covered in sores. The girl was hopping about, trying to coax a canary into singing. On her face were a few small pimples. No more than the chicken pox.

The duchess left at something very close to an undignified run: not out of terror, but out of excitement.

Charlotte Tichborne was both more relaxed and more relaxing. As a woman of the bedchamber, Charlotte had the ear of the princess as often—possibly more often—than the duchess did, but as a commoner and a widow, she was not such a fierce guardian of either the princess's dignity or her own. The duchess could claim that as her duty; Charlotte thought hers was to fill any room she was in with cheerful chatter.

In Lady Mary's nursery, she stayed long enough to teach little Mary a new game. But not much longer. She, too, wanted the pleasure of reporting this sight to her royal mistress.

The parade of visitors would have stretched on to the crack of doom, thought Lady Mary, if the disease had not been so mercifully quick. Within no more than three days after ripening—if it could even be called that—Mary's small dusting of pocks had already scabbed over. Only a week after the first fleck had appeared, she was shedding her few small scabs.

A week after that, there was nothing more to see.

 

Having lost his two elder sons to the flat pox and the purples, Dr. Keith came to his conclusion about inoculation more quickly than the others. On May 1, he had Mr. Maitland drain five ounces of blood from his last surviving son, Peter, who was not quite six. Ten days later, Mr. Maitland returned to inoculate the boy. Peter's fever and rash appeared earlier and a little thicker than little Mary's had, but his bout with the smallpox, too, was marvelously light. By the end of the month, he had dropped all his scabs.

At the same time, a month shy of her eighth birthday, the Princess of Wales's youngest daughter and namesake, Princess Caroline, flushed with an illness that Sir Hans Sloane feared might be the purples. For several days, the beating of drums and the piping of music was forbidden throughout the grounds of St. James's. Even Mr. Handel prayed for the little princess in silence.

After four terrible days and many close consultations, Sir Hans shifted his diagnosis to scarlet fever. The little girl was still gravely ill, but even so, both the Prince and Princess of Wales wept with relief. Their plump, dark-haired little Caro had been spared.

With this second success of inoculation and this second close call within the royal family, the physicians, the Princess of Wales, and the Whig ministry began to scheme among themselves to bring the operation into still greater repute. They never all sat down at once; their maneuverings followed more devious and meandering indirections—a scribbled note here, a book borrowed there, a stolen and hurried conversation or two elsewhere. From time to time, they skimmed through Covent Garden to include Lady Mary.

She had, after all, taken the first and therefore the greatest risk. It had been wonderful to watch her daughter sail through the smallpox so easily, the others all agreed. But that was not evidence enough: not, in any case, for what they now wished to do. It was one thing for a private lady to submit her children to such a hazardous operation. It was quite another for a new dynasty to risk its heirs. More proof was paramount.

But where to find it, and in abundance?

 

Lady Mary never discovered who first realized that there was in London an almost infinite source of already lost lives, chained in darkness within the prisons that had been built in and around the ancient gateways through the city's medieval walls. Perhaps someone in the ministry had a thought jogged by a conversation, of an evening, with the Tory scribbler turned Whig propagandist, Daniel Defoe—hard at work, as he put it, on a grand new tale about the fortunes and misfortunes of a jailbird. A woman, no less! Moll or Doll or Poll, the minister thought. With a country for a surname. Not France. Flanders. That was it:
Moll Flanders
.

Perhaps Dr. Keith dreamed it up, in concert with his friend, the pastor of St. Sepulchre's, the church that tolled its funeral bell as the condemned prisoners of Newgate clattered past on their last ride from the dungeons to the hangman's noose at Tyburn. Perhaps it was Dr. Sloane, who knew that the French king had used prisoners from the Bastille to test the effectiveness of quinine in fighting malaria and a certain delicate surgery in closing anal fistulae. Or perhaps it was the princess, who knew of the same French experiments.