The Speckled Monster (51 page)

His own son Zabby had erupted, and looked to do well. All his other patients were doing well too. They were growing in numbers, at any rate. And in desperation: Take the twenty-year-old daughter of Joe Dodge, the Salutation Inn's publican. She had been determined to be as brave as her friend Esther Webb at first; she had undertaken to nurse her own sister, though she herself had never had the disease. By the seventh day, though, she was terrified by the bubbling and bloated monster that lay in the bed where her sister had been; she and her mother fled to him in tears, begging for his help.

Best of all, since the inoculation of Samuel Valentine, the cloud of a murder charge had lifted.

He rode through the gate and out onto the Neck, forcing himself to veer close by the gallows once again. But Joseph Hanno was gone and so was his scent, both in reality and in Zabdiel's head. All that was left was clean: the sky and the sea and, far out in the marshes, a million birds wheeling and dancing through a rain-washed dawn.

Back at home, he wrote to Jerusha. Just two words, but they gleamed beckoning and beautiful on the paper:
Come home
.

At the bottom of the page, he had added one more:
Please
.

When he visited young Samuel Valentine on September 5, the boy's uncle, Judge Benjamin Lynde, was there. “Miraculous,” he said, rising from a chair next to the boy's as Zabdiel entered. “I would bare my own arm this instant in support, sir, would it do you any good.”

He did the next best thing. He had Zabdiel inoculate his seventeen-year-old black slave. “Fine fellow,” said the judge. “Spent the last two years training him as footman, you know. Don't wish to lose him now.”

Things were definitely looking up, thought Zabdiel.

 

On Wednesday, September 6, there was a break in the clouds, one brief shiny day streaming with the slanted light of autumn. That afternoon, a carriage rolled up and deposited Jerusha and the girls on the front step. She went straight into Zabdiel's arms and stayed there. The girls ran through the hall, fluttered through the kitchen, and burst into the garden to show Tommy and John and Jackey their treasures from Roxbury.

Presently, Zabdiel led Jerusha up the stairs to the parlor and opened the door, as if ushering her into a king's treasure house. Zabdiel junior was lying in state on the sofa with a book—a sight that made her fairly gasp. She inspected his thirty or so pocks, which were already scabbing nicely, and felt his cool forehead. And then she smothered him with mother's kisses that made them both laugh, and made Jerusha cry too.

Not half an hour later, the three girls in turn sat bravely on Zabby's lap while they had the operation. He had promised them each a ginger candy if they could watch the whole thing and yet not squeal, and all three of them worked hard to earn their prizes. Jerusha said they must not actually eat the amber sweets until after dinner, though, so they made a centerpiece of them. For the girls' sake and Zabby's the meal had to be meatless, but Moll had made it festive as possible: fried eels with parsley and lemon—
eel season, already!
—a salad of purslane, spinach, capers, and raisins in an oil-and-vinegar dressing, and apple pie.

If there was any jolt of unhappiness in the day, it had been Tommy's that morning as he dismantled the pirate ship. Tomorrow, it would be back to the Indian game.

“Those girls won't be playing Indians in this rain, with them pocks raised on 'em, I can tell you that,” said Moll, one eye on the sky, the other on Tommy's moping face. “I bet those girls'd love to play pirates. You ever asked 'em?”

“It won't be the same,” grumped Tommy.

“No, but it won't be the same old Indian game either. You just sail that ol' ship right on upstairs, and see what happens.” She demanded the sacrifice of his mother's best sheets, though, as the price for Captain Roberts's liberty. “That's a pirates' world,” she said, handing him an old gray blanket instead. “Win some, lose some. 'Sides, you need a set of dark sails.”

 

On Friday, Moses Pierce stepped up from his glass workshop next door to Tom Boylston's shop and warehouse on the Town Dock and begged Zabdiel's attendance on his little family; all three children were ill. His wife, Elizabeth, would not leave them, though, so they had decided that she should undergo inoculation. “I can't try it myself,” he said anxiously, twisting big hands scarred with fire and glass, as if he were confessing a crime. “I had it back in '02.”

“Me too,” said Zabdiel, and the man broke into a relieved smile.

That evening, Zabdiel rode home with Mr. Pierce to North Square, into the very shadow of Selectman William Clark's grand mansion, with its three brick stories and twenty-six rooms—and a king's ransom in windows, said Mr. Pierce. “Not as what I'll be called upon to replace them in the future, when he finds what I've inoculated Elizabeth right under his nose.”

Across the street, the Clark house brooded silently, but Zabdiel felt the prickle of watching eyes.

On the way home, he stopped in to see Mrs. Dixwell in Union Street. She was a little jittery, but he showed her her own forearm, peppered with a light scattering of red flecks, and coaxed her back into calm. On the uppermost floor, three of her children were doing well, but ten-month-old Mary, her newest darling and her namesake, was in grave danger. In low, urgent tones in the stairwell, Zabdiel urged Mr. Dixwell to keep the news from her.

“
Thou shalt not lie,
I am commanded,” said Mr. Dixwell gruffly, his face gaunt with sleeplessness, “and I shall not. Nor will I tolerate lying in the servants.”

“Do not lie, then,” said Zabdiel, very close to exasperation, “but try to keep the truth from her. It is paramount that she remain calm and cheerful. We do not want her blood or her spirits troubled any more than they are.”

 

On Saturday, he inoculated his brother. Jerusha shamed Tom into it, telling him that out in Roxbury, Sarah was fretting over his safety, to the point of harming the unborn child. “A boy,” she added, “by the way she's carrying him. And a feisty one too. He kicks from noon to night.”

Later that day, yet another Webb—Bethiah Nichols, old John's thirty-year-old daughter—rushed in and begged to go under his poisoned knife. Her youngest sister, Abigail, had died the week before; her sister-in-law Fanny Webb, the reverend's wife, lay so sick that she was swollen beyond recognition. What with her father and her aunt and uncle inoculated, with Esther, Abigail, and Fanny so ill, and now with her own children sick, Mrs. Nichols wept that she had lived in the way of infection for over a month, haunted by inoculation day by day. Time and again, she had dithered and drawn back just as she told herself she was ready. Now, in hope and fear, she had made herself stay with Esther until he came. Even then, she had come close to fleeing the back way out the house as he entered at the front.

With his soothing encouragement, she undertook the operation. He left her sitting by Esther's side with a teary smile on her face.

 

On Monday, things began to slip and crack. In Union Street, Mary Dixwell's rash went on thickening; if it did not stop soon, he would have to concede that the inoculation had failed.
No,
he told himself.
Not failed:
she had caught smallpox in the natural way, before the operation.

Worse was the news that Bethiah Nichols was already feverish. His heart sank. It was only the third day of her inoculation. In her case, there could be little doubt: the operation had come too late.
Why the Webbs again, Lord? Why the Webbs?

It wasn't, of course, only the Webbs. Funerals had become so frequent that the bells filled the air from morning to night with deep, booming carillons of death. Following a recent resolve passed by the General Court, the selectmen (who had pushed that resolve through the court in the first place) met to regulate funerals. No funeral should toll more than one bell—no more of the full pealing tangles of sound, they decided. And no person should have the chosen bell toll more than twice—or, in the case of Indians, Negroes, and mulattoes, more than once. Furthermore, funerals were to be kept to one hour of mourning, between five and six in the afternoon. It sounded draconian, they told the dubious ministers, but really, how could the doctors urge their patients into cheer when death was sounding incessantly around them?

On Tuesday, the Reverend Mr. Colman had Zabdiel inoculate his daughter Jane. Mr. Melville, keeper of the prison, and his wife, Mary, scion of the vast Willard clan of the Old South Church, put their son and daughter under the operation. As if the Salutation crowd did not want either the world or Zabdiel himself to doubt their faith in the face of tribulation, still another put himself under the operation: this time it was the baker Grafton Feveryear, another of Edward Langdon's brothers-in-law.

That evening the Boylston girls sparked into their fevers. For a few hours Zabdiel and Jerusha held their breath, but unlike Tommy's, the girls' fevers were mild.

On Wednesday morning, September 13, a black servant in silver-lace livery strutted up to the door with a message he stressed was urgent: Would Dr. Boylston be so kind as to attend Mrs. Margaret Salter?

He very nearly was not. At thirty, she was a weakly hysterical woman who was ill every other day—a perfect physician's nightmare. Though, to be honest, she was also a physician's gold mine. Her real attraction at the moment, though, was that she was the niece of Selectman John Marion. By marriage, admittedly—but still, she was family. It might—just might—be a way to force one of the selectmen to witness inoculation, willy-nilly. Unless Mr. Marion planned never again to lay eyes on his niece.

Stilling a tiny voice of warning, Zabdiel agreed.

That evening, he somehow found the time to slide into the Salutation to meet Cheever over a pint.

“Mrs. Dixwell's pocks fluxed in her face this morning, and Mrs. Nichols's pocks sprouted in hordes this afternoon,” said Zabdiel. “On only the fifth day. None of her cohort of inoculees have yet felt so much as a feverish twinge.”

“What do the Webbs say? What does Bill Nichols say?”

“Good men,” said Zabdiel. “Sat there patiently while I explained the different numbering of days between inoculated and natural smallpox. On top of that, they grasped the point before I explained.”

“There's no doubt Bethiah's is natural?”

Zabdiel shook his head. “None. Not with her.” He sighed. “Though there are plenty out there who'll be more than happy to doubt it.”

“In French and Scottish?” asked Cheever, but got no reply. Behind the house, a horse screamed in terror, the high twisting sound nipped by the deeper shouts of men and the clash of shod hooves kicking against walls. With everyone else, they rushed into the stable yard.

Someone had tossed hot tar on the horse's saddle, followed by a scattering of feathers. Some of the tar had dripped down on the horse's back and belly and no doubt burned it; it was wild with panic that was shaking hot drops of the stuff all over the yard.

The poor man who owned the horse was nearly as frantic as the animal was, running about, yelling and clutching his hair. After watching him for two minutes, Zabdiel told Cheever to haul the man inside for a drink and had the Langdons clear everyone else out of the yard. Then he and Jack went to work.

Fifteen minutes later, they had the horse calmed down to a shivering stand, long enough to get the saddle off. After another fifteen minutes of jittery walking, the gelding allowed himself to be led into a stall, trusting them enough to let them put some ointment on its burns. They weren't bad; thankfully, the poor beast had been more frightened than hurt. Zabdiel left Jack working the rest of the tar out, and keeping an eye on the other horses too.

When he reentered the pub, Cheever was alone by the big fire.

Zabdiel looked about for the horse's owner.

“Lightweight,” said Cheever, blowing a large ring of smoke. “Two glasses of rum punch and his forehead did a double bounce on the table. Langdon's treated him to a bed upstairs.” He still had a small row of full glasses lined up in front of him. He slid one across the table at Zabdiel. “He's a visitor. Says he knows no one in town; he's just stopped here on his way up to see cousins in Cambridge. So, he asks, why would someone tar and feather his horse?”

“Why would a man like a mouse have a horse like that?” snorted Zabdiel, tossing the rum down his throat. “That's a better question. Or at least one with a less obvious answer.” He fixed Cheever's eye. “Did you get a good look at him?”

“Two rums' worth.”

“No, the horse.”

“In the dark? With him thrashed about like hurricane?” He slid another rum toward Zabdiel.

Zabdiel sipped at it. “He looks just like Prince. I might have mistaken him myself. Except, of course, that his pockets have been picked.” He threw back the rest of the rum, and then started to chuckle. “Meant for me, of course. Only, my foe in the dark can't tell the difference between a horse who's been castrated and one who has not.” His snickering broke into laughter, and soon he and Cheever were roaring till they cried.

Eventually, the laughter petered out. “You watch your back,” said Cheever. “Bastard who did that'll try anything.”

“I'll be fine,” said Zabdiel.

Nonetheless, the Salutation Alley men tightened their knot around him. They gave up all pretense of happening to be riding the same direction; two of them began accompanying him wherever he went.

“I am not a virgin in distress,” he once said testily to Cheever. “I do not need to have my hand held.”

“Glad to hear it,” said Cheever. “I don't think we could manage an escort of eight, plus a chaperone for hand holding.”