The Speckled Monster (48 page)

This roused gruff laughter: it was hard to imagine circumstances less encouraging than awaiting the gallows in Newgate. But the point was taken.
Applebee's
—London's gadfly of a Tory paper—had been shouting that the prisoners were being prepared for a dubious smallpox experiment by means of purges.
As if purges might somehow corrupt the outcome,
snorted Mr. Maitland to himself.

Sir Hans gave the nod for Mr. Maitland to proceed.

He opened the little gate in the barrier and crossed into the prisoners' side of the room. As Sir Hans put to rest the theory that a needle must be used—much less Dr. Pylarinus's golden needle—and extolled the praises of a modern lancet, Mr. Maitland drew out his own and stepped into a long, slanting stream of light from a high window. He wanted the clearest view possible of what he was about to do.

 

With pardons dangled before their noses, the prisoners had all agreed to participate, but now, with that blade flashing in the sun and so many gentlemen peering over the rail like fiends, all six shuddered and recoiled. Mary North gasped aloud and gripped Lizzy's hand.

Was there not a basin on the table? It was just as their tormenters had foreboded: the glittering gentlemen with their wolfish faces would fill it with blood and pass it around like a communion cup.

“Who's to be first?” asked Mr. Maitland.

A short, sharp wail rose over the table, though none of the six could have said who voiced it. Lizzy took a deep breath and tried to recall the vision of Mr. Maitland's kind eyes. However, if it was to be bad, best get it over with. She untangled her hand from Mrs. North's grasp, patted her arm once, and pushed back her chair. “I'll do it, sir,” she said.

Every eye in the room swiveled to watch as she stood.

“Oh, Lizzy,” whispered Mrs. North,
“no.”

Lizzy tottered and gripped the edge of the table as a hot black wave rolled through her. Somehow, she forced her feet forward to Mr. Maitland.

Necks before and behind her craned to see as she rolled up both sleeves at Mr. Maitland's request. The hands plucking at her looked like her own, but she could not feel them. Surely they were someone else's.

“The operation,” said Sir Hans, “is performed by making a very slight shallow incision in the skin, about an inch long.”

Lizzy shut her eyes. If the cut was to come at her throat, she didn't want to see it. For a long hot moment, she felt nothing. Then she heard a gasp from her fellows, and a cold line drew down her right arm—and stopped. Two footsteps, and another stroke down her left arm.

“Now your leg, please,” said Mr. Maitland's voice, and she hitched up her skirts.

Another couple of footsteps, and the same cold line drew down her right thigh.

“Good girl, Lizzy,” Mr. Maitland said quietly in her ear. “You can open your eyes now.”

The room was filled with eyes. She glanced down at both arms. A few droplets of blood had beaded on the surface of each cut. That was all. Her throat was untouched.

“Great care should be had in making the incision,” said Sir Hans, “to go just deep enough to draw blood, but not all the way through the skin, for in that instance it may be attended with very troublesome consequences.”

Fear flooded down and away, and for a moment, Lizzy thought she might have peed where she stood. She had not, but her cheeks flushed crimson, shamed by the thought.

“After the incisions are made,” Sir Hans continued, “a cotton is dipped in the ripe matter of a favorable kind of the small-pox.”

Mr. Maitland wrapped a bit of cotton around the end of a toothpick, dipped the stick into a vial, and stepped back toward Lizzy.

She shut her eyes again. Perhaps it was poison; perhaps it would set her blood afire, shooting flames through her veins. In the end, all she felt was a gentle touch as Mr. Maitland smeared each cut once.

“The matter is put into the wound,” said Sir Hans, “and covered by a plaster for twenty-four hours, after which it is removed.”

Applause scattered like dry leaves between the stone walls, punctuated by the thumping of walking sticks on the floor and a few calls of “Bravo!” and “Well done!”

“Preposterous,” announced Dr. Wagstaffe. “You cannot pass on the smallpox through the skin; it must be taken into the lungs or the gut.”

“That is all, Mrs. Harrison,” said Mr. Maitland with a smile, as he finished fixing the third bandage in place. “You may sit down now, and send up someone else.”

She turned and saw her fellows as intent upon her as the gentlemen were. “It don't hurt a mite,” she murmured as she resumed her place at the table. Cawthery and Alcock jumped up: now that it was safe, they wanted it over with. Mrs. Tompion took her turn, and then Lizzy pulled Mrs. North up by the hand and propelled her forward.

After Lizzy's return, Evans had lounged back in his chair, sneering. When it came time for him, he swaggered up and stood feet apart, hands folded in front him, as if to say,
Do yer best, you bloodsucking butchers. You can't touch me, an' we all know it
.

But he had been just as afraid as the rest of them, when it began. It was the first emotion Lizzy had seen in his chilly eyes.

 

For the next two days, little happened. All six prisoners slept well and woke refreshed: for a few blinking moments Lizzy had trouble remembering whether the operation had already been done, or whether she had dreamed it.

They dressed, walked about, and ate hungrily—at the king's expense, who wouldn't? The only unpleasantness was being on display all day, visitors coming and going, sitting on the benches and gawping at them, as they whiled away the hours. Sometimes Mrs. Tompion read from the newspapers that the gentlemen left behind, which Lizzy liked; she had not known the world had so many doings in it. Sometimes they gambled. But mostly they just talked and drank.

Mr. Maitland was the only gentleman who crossed the boundary. Their pulses were fast, he noted, scratching his chin, but he could not detect any sensible cause.

“You mean like fear of catching the smallpox?” sneered Evans.

 

Mr. Maitland's worries were twofold: He had to steer this experiment between the two dangers of death and nothingness: between serious smallpox and a distemper so light that it might not be smallpox at all—or not small-pox enough to produce a survivor's protection.

On the morning of Saturday, August 12, the fourth day of the experiment, the incisions were still not inflamed. Dr. Wagstaffe smugly noted in his diary that all six prisoners were “very well.” The prisoners and even the supporting physicians, on the other hand, began to get restless.

Mr. Maitland knew it was early, he knew he should have patience, but he felt a growing dread all the same. Perhaps the matter he used had been defective; he had been obliged to collect it the day before the operation and let it sit in its cold little vial in his surgical kit for at least fifteen or sixteen hours—for the very good reason that they had chosen a donor far from the prisons and stews of London, a boy who lived an otherwise healthy life in the country. But perhaps they had let their concern for a clean subject outweigh the need for fresh matter.

At Sir Hans's urging, he went in quest of likely matter to be had closer by, and found it at last in Christ's Hospital, just down the street. At about six o'clock that night, he cut new incisions in his patients' arms. This time, he swabbed them with the new matter in grim abundance, swirling the cotton deep in the cuts.

Unfortunately, he used his new supply with such abandon that he ran out by the time he got through John Alcock's right arm; Alcock's left arm had to go without. Evans got no new matter at all: but that was little matter, Mr. Maitland remarked jovially, as Evans had already had enough to last him a lifetime.

Mr. Evans scowled and spat.

Really,
thought Mr. Maitland,
he's a right nippit blackguard
.

Watching the disapproval in Mr. Maitland's eyes, Lizzy agreed: Evans followed her, as many men did, with his eyes. But where other men undressed her, she had the feeling that Evans was peeling her, slitting her to bits, and laughing. She did her best to keep Cawthery between her and him. Given time, Evans might think Cawthery into a corner; on the other hand, Cawthery could knock Evans's brains out in one smack. When Cawthery was around, he kept his eyes down.

“Listen to this,” said Mrs. Tompion. In a surprisingly good imitation of Dr. Wagstaffe, she read a snippet from
Applebee's
. Felons in fear of death, no doubt, were duping the doctors “by pretending that they have never had the smallpox, when perhaps they have had them.” She looked sharply at Evans. “I think they mean you, ducky.” He shrugged and tossed down a card, winning the hand he was playing.

Mr. Maitland sighed. No doubt Evans was capable of cruel falsehoods, but in this instance, he had not lied: he had had the smallpox in jail last September. They had included him precisely because they
knew
he'd had it. But the story was easily twistable, and
Applebee's
seemed to relish the twisting. But then,
Applebee's
was firmly committed to ravaging any project the king and his Whiggery-jiggery might endorse. Not that the Tories could quite say that, of course, at least not in print. They contented themselves with taking potshots at the prisoners, the procedure, and the foreigners, Jews, and women who had dreamed up such quackery to begin with.

“Do you think Dr. Droop-staff and his Friend leave this place and run straight to the paper to wag tongues over everything they'd like to think they've seen here?” asked Mrs. Tompion, to no one in particular. It did not bother her in the least that Dr. Wagstaffe was in the room, right up next to the railing. She gave him a slow, wicked smile, and he stalked from the room, to the sound of her laughter.

 

The following morning, the five who had been reinoculated all woke to the throb of their arms. Unwrapping their dressings, Mr. Maitland was pleased to find all the incisions inflamed and festering. His patients' pulses were noticeably quicker, and their urine cloudy. Except for their sore arms, though, none of them felt sick.

Lizzy went for a walk with Mrs. North in “the garden,” though it was little more than a stone passage between the prison and its high outer wall. Still, thought Lizzy, you could see a long wide ribbon of sky. Once, she saw a bird flying high overhead.

 

Though the Princess of Wales stood by her unquailing, Lady Mary grew weary of the curiosity and thinly veiled disgust of the crowd that went on swelling at her door, as the news of her experiment rumbled through town. She retired to her country house in Twickenham. The soprano Mrs. Anastasia Robinson, the composer Giovanni Buononcini, and the castrato Senesino had retreated there as well; Lady Mary wrote to her sister in Paris that she was melting her time away in perpetual concerts.

She did not bother to mention that she was running from the inoculation controversy; she did not bother to mention the word
smallpox
at all. Her poor sister, after all, was fighting off madness in exile and alone. So Lady Mary chattered instead about Molly Skerrett, a little thread-satin beauty who deserved better connections than she'd been born with. She'd welcomed Molly into her house as her companion, wrote Lady Mary; their long talks made her think of those she had enjoyed long ago with Frances, walking arm in arm through the grounds of Thoresby. And would Frances please not forget the fine silk she had promised for young mistress Mary? She was growing quite the little woman, and was almost as much fun to decorate as a new house; Lady Mary and Molly played with her every day.

When the music stopped and the child was whisked off to eat or sleep or be coaxed out of tiresomeness by her nurse—now quite well, and what a relief—Lady Mary peppered Mr. Maitland with notes of advice, in an entirely different tone.

 

With Mr. Maitland's experiment well under way, Dr. Richard Mead began his own, on a seventh prisoner, a young girl of eighteen. Sir Hans had somehow managed to take charge of the Turkish inoculation—though really, thought Dr. Mead, it was by rights his; he had known Lady Mary since girlhood, and that ought to have counted for something. Instead, he had had to settle for a slightly different experiment. Nonetheless, Dr. Mead had high hopes for this other method, from China. It did not require cutting.

Which wasn't to say that it did not have its unpleasant moments, he thought.
If only the girl would lie still!
He picked up a small bit of cotton and dipped it in matter he taken from ripe pocks that morning. Laying one hand firmly on her head, lest she wriggle, he proceeded to pack her nostrils with the pocky cotton.

The papers, quite shamefully, claimed it had been done while the girl was asleep.

 

Right on cue, the eagerly awaited rashes bloomed across Mr. Maitland's patients on Monday morning, the sixth day after their inoculation. Red spots and flushings had appeared on all the five, but the marks were clearest on Mary North, especially about her face, neck, and breast. “The engrafting has taken root,” he observed with satisfaction.

“Mary, Mary, quite contrary, how does your garden grow?” quipped Mrs. Tompion, though her symptoms were quite similar.

They were still all without any nausea, headache, or thirst, though when pressed, they agreed that they might have been a little hot in the night. All of them, that is, except Evans. He had suffered no twinge whatsoever, and made no effort to satisfy the doctor on that point. By evening, his incisions had dried up entirely.

The next day, Mr. Maitland found them all much the same, though by nightfall, the spots were darkening and then paling in the center as they swelled into blisters.