The Speckled Monster (27 page)

The captain regretted, he said, the selectmen's concern that the Saltertudas fleet might have brought the smallpox into town.
Might?
Hutchinson's attention snapped back, one brow skimming up into the fringe of his wig.

Willing to do his part, of course, continued the captain: he had ordered the commanding officer on board to fall down with the ship to a mooring off Bird Island, so soon as these good gentlemen—small nod, just this side of perfunctory—could provide a suitable pilot.

In spite of himself, Hutchinson snorted.
Suitable, hell,
he thought.
Safely pock pitted is what you mean, and we all know it
. Then he identified the jolt that had bothered him in that sentence. “You mean Spectacle Island,” he said aloud.

“I am sure,” said Mr. Cooke just a little too smoothly, “that we can trust an officer in His Majesty's Service to keep our few small harbor islands straight in his head.”

Hutchinson glanced quickly from Mr. Cooke to Mr. Clark. Their faces should have betrayed surprise—same as his—but all he saw was a studied blandness.
So a deal has been struck,
he thought,
a bargain sealed
. He could smell it: something had been offered and accepted in return for escape from formal quarantine at Spectacle Island. But what? Not money: Mr. Cooke might be grasping, but he was also righteous. He would not sell the town into the smallpox.

Mr. Hutchinson knew as well as anyone that he had been elected so high so young for his staunch support of Mr. Cooke. But if Mr. Cooke's party assumed they had acquired a pliant yes-man, he thought, they might as well be disabused of their error at once. In this case, they would get his support, but for a price; for it galled him to the edge of fury to think of John dying alone in quarantine, while this smug, strutting captain draped in lace got off scot-free. “No doubt,” he said with a tight nod to Mr. Cooke, “His Majesty's ship
Seahorse
will be quite as isolated off Bird Island as she would be docked at Spectacle Island. Possibly more so.” He unfurled a smile of contempt for the captain. “So long as she flies the yellow jack, of course.”

Captain Durell glanced at Cooke, but he offered no help.

“Of course,” echoed the captain with a grimace. “We will show the yellow jack.”

Hutchinson transferred his smile back out the window, as the man departed.

Another tight-lipped discussion shot here and there between the six men, or between the five men and Mr. Hutchinson's back. There were one or two more decisions at hand.

The outcome went into their minutes, along with several other statements that were not as discreet as the captain might have wished. The selectmen had tacitly agreed, it was true, not to wag any more fingers of blame in public, but they had made no such promise about private conversations:

Whereas His Majesty's Ship
Seahorse,
Capt. Thomas Durell, Commander, now lyeth in the Harbor of Boston infected with the Small Pox, the greatest part of his company are now a cruise, sundry others sick on shore, so that there is not above ten or fifteen effective men on board, and the said Captain having given orders to the commanding officer on board to fall down to Bird Island with the ship, in order to prevent the infection spreading in the town, upon Captain Timothy Clark's repairing on board to take the charge of piloting her down:

Voted, that Captain Clark be desired forthwith to procure a sufficient number of men to effect that matter
.

 

“Vermin monger!”
thundered Dr. John Clark, flinging open the door to the best private room upstairs at the Bunch of Grapes, the plush tavern standing at the head of the Long Wharf and favored by the selectmen. Having worked through the dinner hour, they had at last left the Town House and sauntered the length of King Street to share a late supper of haddock in capers, beef, mutton, salad, and hasty pudding. By the time Dr. Clark found them, the last crumbs had been withdrawn; several half-f bottles of Madeira remained. The six men were gathered around the tavern's newest amusement, a large table covered in green cloth and edged with six holes, or pockets.
“Pox-ridden dog!”
cried Dr. Clark.

All but one of the men seemed to have found something fascinating in the close grouping of three ivory balls, red, white, and blue, in the center of the table. The sixth man, William Clark, turned and leaned on his long mace-ended stick. “Hello, brother,” he said. “Perhaps you would care to clarify that you do not intend to indicate any of us?”

“Captain Durell,”
roared the doctor.

Five backs straightened, and five pairs of eyes swiveled to face him.

“He's discharged them,” said Dr. Clark. “The three men sick with the smallpox. Gone. Cast out. Lord only knows where.”

William sighed. His brother was trustworthy as well as experienced in both medicine and politics, which was why they had chosen him as their inspector. But in medical matters he was also a perfectionist and a bit of an alarmist as well. Which would make him about as comfortable as a horsefly in the upcoming weeks.

“They're in the Province Hospital on Spectacle Island,” said Mr. Cooke, taking careful aim at the white ball with the mace end of his stick. The mace collided with the cue ball, and the cue ball collided with the red ball, which spun silently down the table, banked off the end, and veered back through a hoop called the port. This was followed by a short, sharp silence, like a pop, not entirely due to the marvel of the man's skill at billiards.

Mr. Cooke straightened, though he kept his eyes on the table, assessing the new layout of the balls. “As you say, the captain discharged the three men you told us of. James Mansell of Boston, and the two strangers, John Wilkinson and Gilbert Anthony. Unfortunately, he also offered—as is his right—to go on discharging men, as fast as they should fall ill.” He cornered the table and confronted Dr. Clark directly. “What would you have done?”

Most of the time, he and the doctor were wary allies against their mutual foe, the despised governor; occasionally, though, they could be determined, if respectful, opponents.

“That whole damned ship belongs at Spectacle Island,” growled the doctor.

“The whole damned ship was not going to go there.”

“It's where she belongs,” Dr. Clark insisted.
You're a physician by training if not by practice,
he thought.
You know that much
.

Cooke shrugged. “I don't give a ship rat's fart where she is,” he said, “so long as she is not here, and Durell is not discharging his sick at will into my streets.” With a firm shove of the mace, he sent the white ball spinning toward Mr. Clark's blue ball, which flew into the pocket in the far corner. The point of this delicious new game of billiards was, like its forerunner croquet, as much to wreak havoc on one's opponent as to work one's own ball through the port at one end of the table and back to hit the skittle called the king on the other side. Cooke turned to Dr. Clark and spread a wolfish smile. “I owe you thanks, though, for the tip that he would do anything to remain free to chase pirates. Quite useful information, that. Deal clincher, in fact.”

“What deal?” asked the doctor.

“I suggested it might be best if we joined forces to round up all the ramblers and stragglers from the
Seahorse,
sent the sick to the Province Hospital, the healthy back aboard ship, and the ship away from the docks. After short consideration, and the promise of some likely timber for the repairing of his crosstrees, Durell agreed.” Cooke laughed. “Though Mr. Hutchinson quite brilliantly wangled a further promise that they will fly the yellow jack.”

“And in return?”

“A promise that the
Seahorse
will not be forced into formal quarantine. And none of her officers or crew threatened with either the fifty-pound fine or the six months' jail time specified by the law. . . . I think it was the threat of time, in jail or in legal haggling, that won him over.”

Dr. Clark stalked back to the door. “You have made a deal, sir, with the devil,” he said, laying his hand upon the latch.

“No, Doctor,” said Cooke with smooth disagreement. “I've made a compromise with reality. Furthermore, the other selectmen have agreed.”

“I see that,” said Dr. Clark, gazing around the room, his stare coming to rest upon his brother. “Thankfully, this year I am not one of your number.” He departed, banging the door behind him.

 

From dawn till dusk on Saturday the thirteenth there were discreet searches along the docks, the taverns, and brothels frequented by sailors: the Dog and Pot, the Turkey-Cock, three different Castles, Noah's Ark, the Sun, the Swan, the Three (soused) Mariners. Every Seahorse who could be found was whisked away, inspected for fever and spots, and sent one of two directions: the healthy back aboard ship, the sick out to Spectacle Island. A distressing number had melted into the still cold and damp air of spring. One man—Joseph May, the gunner's mate—was discovered dead, curled up in the deserted corner of a warehouse, whispered some, or, muttered others, rolled gently this way and that by the swell beneath a dock. At least, observed one of the gravediggers given the task of consigning him to a pauper's grave, he would not rest in the earth as he had died: alone.

At five in the morning on the fourteenth, forty mariners with pitted faces strode through pearly light down the Long Wharf, grimly ignoring the fourth commandment to do no work on the Sabbath. At seven o'clock, the ship slipped from her moorings, weighed anchor, and glided away with misleading grace. She did not go far: not anywhere near as far as the quarantine dock on Spectacle Island. Her borrowed sailors moored her in five fathoms in the shelter of the tiniest, closest island, named for the birds that incessantly wheeled and called overhead. Castle Island and its fort lay a mere two miles to the southeast, noted the master. He did not bother to note that Boston herself lay at just about the same distance to the west: where the sailors on board could gaze contemptuously at the town, while the landsmen returned their stares with murderous interest. It was just as well for the Seahorses' safety that they were away from the docks.

As soon as the ship was secure in her new anchorage, the town's mariners shipped back to shore, where they were met with fresh clothing; the old was removed, washed, and fumigated. Dr. Clark would have had it burned, but that was rejected as a needless expense.

In the days that followed, most of the town's elders, those who could remember the epidemic of 1702, hunched down, tense and trembling as a deer that has scented panther. Some of more impressionable among the young thrashed through nightmares, having been haunted since infancy by the ugly face of the speckled demon. Others frolicked in their best scarlet brocade and yellow fringe, fiddling, dancing, and debauching ever harder and faster. Why slow up now, when tomorrow you may be dead?

One day, then two, three, four, crept by. Another and still another. The selectmen waited a week before organizing another search: this time, not to find lagging Seahorses, but anyone whom they might have infected. There were plenty who were anxious to look earlier, but Dr. John Clark held them back. It would do no good to look too soon; might well give false security: this was a disease that bided its time in the dark.

At last, on Saturday the twentieth, the justices of the peace, the selectmen, the overseers of the poor, the constables, even the hogreeves, whose job it was to chase down nuisance pigs and remove them from their happy wallowing in the streets, joined to scour every house, every warehouse, shop, and shed in Boston. They made a strict and thorough inquiry of each and every inhabitant of the town. At the end of the day, a long, hushed roll call turned up nothing.

On the twenty-second, the newspapers blazoned their findings with relief:
They found none sick of that distemper but a Negro man at the House of Capt. Paxton near the South Battery, being the House that was first visited therewith: the Negro is almost recovered, and will be in a day or two removed unto the Province Hospital at Spectacle Island
.

No one mentioned Captain Paxton's son.

On the twenty-fourth, still holding their collective breath, the selectmen authorized Mr. Aeneas Salter to conscript twenty-four of the town's “free male Negroes, mulattoes, etc.,” to work six days cleaning the streets and the sewers that ran down their centers: these men might be free—might have worked mightily, for years, to earn the price of their freedom—but the town still considered itself as possessing a right to their time in the matter of doling out the nastiest jobs, namely, the shoveling of shit.

Perhaps by now the sickness had fallen out of the air, out of the infected bodies, had run into the sewers where it belonged. Perhaps now it could be swept away like so much dirt. So twenty-four men of African, Indian, and mixed-race descent—et cetera—fanned out in small groups, plodding through the streets, shoveling the sewers clean, carting the contagion away.

That same day, the sloop hired by Captain Durell returned, along with the pirate ship now manned by Seahorses. They had found her, as promised, at anchor in Tarpaulin Bay. Disappointingly, the pirates had long since fled with most of the slaves and much of the cocoa and sugar to boot. Worse, the ship—a Dutch-built tub, it was true, but one that might be made to blaze with as many as twenty-four guns—was already in the possession of customs officials: there would be a fight in court over the prize money. Nonetheless, Lieutenant Hamilton and his men had, as ordered, assumed control of her and sailed back to Boston to join the
Seahorse
.

The sloop succeeded. The pirate ship, still manned by Seahorses, was sent directly to Spectacle Island, with smallpox aboard.