The Speckled Monster (45 page)

After giving his son just enough time to withdraw to his own chamber, Dr. Mather clapped his wig on his head, tugged it straight, and departed.

Perhaps Sammy is mistaken,
he thought as he strode toward the Charnocks'.
Perhaps Will's malady is no more than a headache and a stomachache. A short, sharp joust with bad oysters or spoiled meat
.

It was not. Sammy had been right.

Dr. Mather left the Charnocks' in a daze, hardly knowing what he was doing or where he was going, aware only of Sammy's cry spiraling through his mind:
Please, Father, let me be inoculated.

If he should die by receiving it in the common way,
thought Dr. Mather,
how can I answer it?
He resolved to allow it. Two strides later, a curse hurled from a high window across the street cut through his resolve:
On the other side, if I suffer this Operation upon the Child, our people—who have Satan remarkably filling their Hearts and their Tongues—will go on with infinite Prejudices against me and my Ministry. If he should happen to miscarry under it, my Condition would be insupportable
. Round and round these threats chased each other, until his feet took him, almost of their own accord, to the house of his father, Increase Mather.

The encounter was not one of their best. He went for advice; he was showered with icy disappointment instead.

Back at home Dr. Mather shut himself in his library as the light waned and rain spattered the windows.
Full of distress about Sammy,
he scrawled into his diary. The whole argument seesawed once more through his mind. On the verge of hunching beneath a load of despair, he straightened his back and stabbed at the paper.
His Grandfather advises that I bring the Lad into the new Method of Safety, and that I keep the whole Proceeding private
. He sighed and rubbed his temples. How did his father expect him to arrange this? Getting Dr. Boylston to operate in private was the least of his problems. First, he would have to get him to resume inoculating at all.

 

His eyes were also upon Dr. Boylston: for nearly three weeks now, Dr. Mather had kept a close watch on the doctor and his inoculated patients. It had not been hard; John Helyer was one of his parishioners. It was no more than Dr. Mather's duty to visit him every day. If he chose to head north each morning the very moment that he saw Dr. Boylston ride by the house on his own way to Salutation Alley, his man Jack in tow, who was to know or care?

Dr. Boylston was a man of habit; he usually stopped first at Mr. Cheevers's house. By dawdling either at the Helyers', or on his way there, Dr. Mather now and again met the doctor, coming or going. Always, the minister asked about the progress of the experiment. No one need search any farther than his transcriptions of Timonius and Pylarinus to explain his eager interest. Furthermore, every last one of the inoculees was either currently his parishioner, or had once been, until swarming off to form the upstart New North: of course he would ask about them. Nothing could be more natural.

Mr. Cheever sped through the distemper with startling speed; his inoculation had been an unequivocal success. Most of his sparse scabs had already crumbled away. Under his unceasing care, Sarah Cheever had clung to life; against all expectation, she had turned a corner, and her distemper was subsiding. Quietly, Dr. Boylston said that he thought her chances of surviving were strengthening.

John Helyer's main problem was nerves; he had had palpitations as the eruption broke out, but the spread had slowed and stopped at no more than half a hundred pocks. Since then, he had subsided into calm, if not downright smug, cheer. One street over, old Mr. John Webb had rebounded from an early bout of faintness, probably also attributable to nerves. Mrs. Deborah Webb remained fretful and fragile, to be sure, but even the family rolled their eyes at this, at least when she wasn't looking: that was Mrs. Webb's normal state of being. Except for Mrs. Esther, her daughter; much against Dr. Boylston's advice, she had tended her mother and father with stubborn gentleness from beginning to end.

At home in Dock Square, reported the doctor, his son John's light sprinkling of pocks was scabbing over. Having been forbidden milk after it gave him nosebleeds, the boy was grimacing his way through teas of all kinds that his father and Moll could dream up, while concocting more and more outlandish schemes to steal slices of ham and chicken from the kitchen. The decree of meatlessness rankled even more than the ban on milk. Unfortunately, after the first two nosebleeds, nothing escaped the kitchen without Moll's notice.

Moll, of course, was perfectly well and had been for some time. Her incisions, like Jack's, had quickly dried up, leaving only the smallest of scars.

 

Dr. Mather was by no means Dr. Boylston's only observer. Ambush over, Dr. Douglass had hurled his accusations of poison and plague into the press, writing a letter to the
Boston News-Letter
and signing it W. Philanthropos—William, lover of mankind. Dr. Mather winced just thinking about it; there had not been a single line in the whole missive that had the least pretension toward love or charity. It was not even useful as a mask of anonymity: everyone in town recognized the rant as Dr. Douglass's.

It was not so much an argument against the operation as one long snarling mockery of Dr. Boylston.
A mere operator,
Dr. Douglass had called him,
an undertaker, a cutter for the stone
. As if there were something shameful in that!
Illiterate,
he'd sneered,
ignorant, confused, rash, mischievous, negligent, inconsiderate
. Why Mr. John Campbell had agreed to print such unmannerliness Dr. Mather couldn't fathom.

Kind Reverend Colman, usually tolerant to a fault, had crackled with righteous indignation. He composed a dignified reply to Mr. Misanthropos—he did not deserve the name Philanthropos, said Mr. Colman—and canvassed Boston's other ministers. If they agreed with his defense of Dr. Boylston—a man whom heaven had adorned with remarkable gifts of tenderness, courage, and skill, as well as a gentle and dexterous hand—they could join him in signing it.

Not surprisingly, the pastors of the First Church and King's Chapel—Mr. Cook's and Dr. Douglass's parishes, respectively—declined. But the pastors of three other churches—the Old North, the New North, and the Old South—consented. Dr. Mather's father graced it with his signature,
Increase Mather,
right at the top, passing the pen to his son and pointing right where to sign. Then came Mr. Colman, followed by Thomas Prince, pastor of the Old South Church, and John Webb, pastor of the upstart New North. Mr. Webb's father, uncle, and aunt had trusted in Dr. Boylston; his nieces and nephews had been barred from the operation by the selectmen's ban. He looked as if he would prefer to sign in fire and blood, but had settled for a great flourish. Right at the bottom, William Cooper, Mr. Colman's assistant pastor at the Brattle Square Church, squeezed in his name.

Mr. Musgrave published Mr. Colman's letter in his
Boston Gazette
—rival of Mr. Campbell's
Boston News-Letter
and the closest thing there was to an official newspaper. Just above it appeared Dr. Boylston's open invitation to the justices, selectmen, and other gentlemen of the town to visit his inoculated patients at their convenience.

In answer, Mr. Campbell's paper went silent. Dr. Mather smiled to himself. A discreet delegation had gone to the governor, intimating just how dangerous it was to allow this sort of defamation in print: if it could be directed at Dr. Boylston, who might be next? The governor had taken the point. It had hardly been necessary to hint that Dr. Clark, Mr. Cook, and the other selectmen were behind this attack—or at least in tacit support.

To make his point, in turn, the governor had not had to do anything other than shut his mouth: official news in the form of unofficial gossip was the lifeblood of papers like Mr. Campbell's. The next time the publisher had stopped by the governor's office for his weekly exchange of gossip, the governor treated him to polite silence. A few days later, when Dr. Douglass had slapped another Philanthropos letter into Mr. Campbell's hands at a meeting of the Scots Charitable Society, Mr. Campbell wordlessly handed it back.

He could not, however, call back the fear his paper had already sparked: having devoured Dr. Douglass's lies, the whole town was muttering about the plague.

 

On August 4, Dr. Mather ran into Dr. Boylston at the house of Samuel and Mary Hunt at the foot of Salutation Alley, next door to the inn owned by Mary's father, John Langdon. The Hunt children had fallen ill in the night, and Mrs. Hunt was distraught; she did not want to leave her babies in anyone else's care, but she had never had the distemper herself. Dr. Mather owed the Hunts a debt of loyalty; Mary and her husband Samuel had both refused the familial pressures to shift their worship to the New North Church when it had splintered off from his congregation. He spent a great long time with her that morning, instilling a proper sense of resignation to Providence.

Dr. Boylston instilled some drops of laudanum in a small glass of wine and had her drink it down, which no doubt also helped restore calm.

“How does the experiment with inoculation proceed?” asked Dr. Mather, as they were leaving.

“I am all but certain that all ten of my inoculated patients will survive,” said Dr. Boylston with obvious relief and a little whiff of pride. “Unscathed, no less. I am not ready to shout it from the rooftops, but I can tell you, I am in great hopes that inoculation will prove a success.”

“It p-proves a success, you say?”
Slow down,
he barked to himself.

“Almost,”
specified Dr. Boylston, but Dr. Mather dismissed the qualification.

“M-might it be arguable, then, that it is not only lawful, but your bounden duty to make use of such a God-granted weapon?”

Dr. Boylston threw the minister a sharp look. “I will not inoculate again until I am sure that everyone I have already operated on has passed safely through the distemper.”

“When will that be?”

“A few days yet, I expect. Speaking of weapons, I should like to discuss with you the possibility of publishing your transcriptions of Timonius and Pylarinus. I believe we must counter some of these spreading lies. I have seen no trace of plague, but the natural smallpox settles in more thickly every day.” He looked out to sea for a moment and then turned back to Dr. Mather. “Salutation Alley has become a pit of Lamentation.”

“A voice was heard in Ramah,”
said Dr. Mather with a grim smile,
“lamentation, and bitter weeping: Rachel, weeping for her children, refused to be comforted, because they were not
. . . I will consider it. How is Mrs. Esther Webb?” he asked as a parting shot. “Is she still well?”

 

G.D., Dr. Mather wrote later that day, quite satisfied with the foundation he had laid.
I will allow the persecuted Physician to publish my Communications from the Levant about the Small-Pox and supply him with some further Armour to conquer the Dragon
.

He would help the man. If he happened to instill in him the sense of a favor owed, well, so much the better. He had not thought this scheme up. He had not sought it out. The situation had come to him. It was the will of the Lord.

 

Cotton Mather rose early the next day.
G.D.
he informed his diary.
The Condition of my pious Barber and his Family calls for my particular consideration
. Edward Langdon, barber and periwigmaker, was a gallant young pillar of the Old North Church. He was also Mary Hunt's brother. That poor family, centered on their father's inn, was at the eye of a foul, spitting storm.

Dr. Mather's consideration took the form of a question that he scattered here and there through the neighborhood:
Why should Dr. Boylston hold off any longer?
That very day, the families of Salutation Alley came together to discuss the issue. Edward and his brother Josiah, and Mary and Samuel Hunt were there. The other Langdon sisters, Joanna and Elizabeth, along with their husbands, Grafton Feveryear and William Pitman. Their neighbor, Bill Larrabee. The publican, Joseph Dodge, and another neighbor, Ebenezer Thornton. Bill Merchant came, but dissented; Benjamin Bronsdon declined the invitation. But that was not a surprise; he was Mr. Cooke's brother-in-law.

The Webbs did not come, but they agreed to let the delegation know when Dr. Boylston arrived at their house.

By the time he left, a small knot of men was waiting for him at the Webbs' gate.

“We would like you to begin inoculating again,” they said.

He gave a short laugh. “I already have.”

 

Zabdiel had wrestled with himself all night long. He had not known what he would do even as he turned up the lane. But at his first stop, he had given in to Sarah's wan behest, and inoculated the Cheevers' servant lad. And then he had inoculated Esther Webb. He had put them both in the way of smallpox; he owed them some chance at deliverance. Now that he was certain it was deliverance, and not a dream.

He had not meant to reenter the fray with quite such a crowd, but he agreed to ride a few doors up the street and inoculate Mrs. Hunt, whose three children were ill, and Mr. Larrabee, whose wife and twins were sick.

It mattered a great deal to them, he told himself. But he had no more to lose: they could only hang him once.

 

The very next day, a Sunday, Esther Webb flushed with the first fever of smallpox. It was patent to everyone, the Webbs included, that she had taken the disease in the natural way.
While nursing her inoculated parents and grandfather,
screamed the naysayers.
He's killed her. Or just as good as
.