The Speckled Monster (43 page)

“Are you suggesting, sir” croaked Boylston, “that the operation of inoculation
causes
the plague?”

“You have made the leap yourself,” said Dr. Douglass.

“Ridiculous!” exclaimed Boylston. “Excessively ridiculous!”

“Not according to Timonius and Pylarinus, in whom you have otherwise put such trust. Both say that inoculation can produce the very abscesses, swellings, and tumors that Dr. Dalhonde has witnessed.”

“And they both insist they are rare,” Boylston retorted. “And neither makes any mention of the plague whatsoever.”

“Perhaps,” said Dr. Douglass, “they did not need to in Constantinople, where the plague can kill as many as a hundred thousand people in a year.”

The intake of breath was audible. Of all the world's queenly cities, Constantinople was the one most haunted by the plague. It was also the city where inoculation had originated. Was this not further evidence that the two were linked?

“One disease does not transform into another,” said Boylston, his anger at last making him reckless. “You might as well say that inoculation turns men into women.”

This time, Dr. Douglass noted with satisfaction, his flippancy was greeted with silence.

“Indeed, sir?” Dr. Douglass smoothed his voice to glassy calm. “On what grounds do you say so?”

“Lots of diseases cause glandular swellings,” said Boylston. “If you begin shouting
plague
at every glandular swelling in the country, you'll be chasing a thousand people a week.”

“Have you ever seen a case of the plague?”

Boylston caught his breath. “No, I have not.”

“Not one? Not one and twenty?” sneered Dr. Douglass.

“None,” said Boylston.

“Then you have no grounds for making such a statement,” said Dr. Douglass briskly. “A spark in one of your inoculated patients might escape your attention until our whole town was burning with a fire that would make this plague of smallpox look like a child's bonfire on the beach.”

He turned from Boylston to the men. He began his final assault quite gently, as if he regretted what he must say. “Unfortunately, as you have seen, Mr. Boylston's experiment proves to be quite flawed. He has based it, as he admits, on articles that appeared in the Royal Society's
Philosophical Transactions
. Unfortunately, he failed to recognize that they were meant as no more than virtuoso amusements.

“I do not blame Dr. Mather in this,” he added. “No doubt the reverend has operated all along under a pious and charitable design of Doing Good.” He inflected his voice in the merest shadow of a Mather imitation.
Yes—a smile or two lifted at the mockery, and not just among the Scots
. “Even the best of men have some foible, and that of Dr. Mather is credulity in his amateur zeal for medicine.” He hardened his voice.

“But what should we say of Mr. Boylston, who professes to practice the medical arts?” He shook his head. “Mr. Boylston has displayed not only credulity but criminal rashness. This sort of quackery is only fit for a stage in a country market town; he defends it with nothing more than the hearsay of old Greek women and African slaves.

“In short, he is mischievously propagating infection, not just anywhere, but in the market square at the very heart of town. Already he has convinced seven hapless souls to risk their lives and health on the basis of a few scanty experiments. How many more can we let him infect?
And with what?
”

Boylston opened his mouth to speak, but Mr. Cooke brought his gavel down. “Gentlemen,” he said, “I think we have heard enough. The time has come when I must beg you to consult among yourselves, weighing carefully all the evidence you have heard here today. The selectmen would like to have your recommendation in deciding a proper course of action.”

Politely but firmly, Boylston was requested to withdraw to the anteroom. Barely a quarter of an hour passed before he was recalled.

Dr. Douglass could not look at him, for fear of trumpeting his triumph aloud. Instead, he watched Mr. Cooke smooth the sheet he had written out with such care and forethought the day before. It had passed, with no emendations.

Fixing Boylston with a baleful stare, Mr. Cooke announced, “On the subject of inoculation, sir, the doctors of this town have made the following recommendation to the selectmen.” He looked back down and read:

Mr. Cooke looked up at Boylston. “Your fellow physicians, in other words, have deemed the operation so wicked as to be criminal. In consideration of which, the selectmen have unanimously agreed that should you persist in this practice, we will have no choice but to charge you with felony poisoning and deliberate spreading of infection.” Boylston's face could have been carved from stone. “Furthermore, should any of your patients come to grief, we will be forced to pursue a charge of murder.”

The last word rang through the silent room.

In the speaker's chair, Dr. Clark stirred and stood. “You have, sir, put this town at the gravest risk. Some might say you have betrayed the noblest goals of our profession, to heal and not to harm. It is fervently to be hoped that you will abide by these resolutions.”

At last Boylston stirred. With stiff courtesy, he bowed to Mr. Cooke and again to the gathered company. “Thank you, gentlemen,” he said stonily, “for your consideration. Should any of you wish to gather further information at first hand, my offer of visitation still stands.” The recoil was visible. “Good day.” With that, he turned on his heel and strode out.

 

Zabdiel drove himself down the stairs the way he had once, as a boy, driven himself up from deep water toward air and glittering light just as his lungs were on the point of explosion. Down, down, down, he went, through a gauntlet of waiting men whose silence turned to the hissing of serpents as he passed; the news was spreading fast. Down through the doors and into the street.

The late afternoon light was fading under the burden of ever longer, thicker shadows. Thankfully, there was no mob lying in wait outside. A side effect, he thought wryly, of the selectmen's need to keep this meeting secret, so as to heighten the ambush. At this point, he would take whatever accidental good he could find in the world.

Across the street, though, one woman did turn and step toward him. Esther Webb, whose parents and uncle he had inoculated three days before. Her face lit with hope as she hurried across to him.

He thought of Cheever's early flecks, and Sarah's grotesque agony.

“Esther,” he said, seizing by her shoulders, “listen to me. I cannot inoculate you as we planned.” He saw her hopes fall again, as she read disaster on his face. “They will try me for murder,” he rasped. “You must take your brother and sister and leave now. Anywhere. Tonight. It may not yet be too late.” She felt limp in his hands. He shook her.
“Do you understand?”

How could she? The full weight of understanding was only now beginning to settle on him. The selectmen had threatened him with a death sentence if he were to continue inoculating. But others faced a death sentence if he were not to inoculate.
Others
. Not just a faceless ten or twenty, or even a hundred, who might have been saved: The young woman who stood there in front of him. The young woman whom he had refused to inoculate earlier, who had undertaken to nurse her parents through the inoculated pox with the full understanding that she, too, was to be inoculated in turn, tomorrow.

Terror winged across her face. Pulling away from him, she spun on her heel and melted into the shadows.

He stood there for a moment, empty and shaking, and then he turned for home.

Up in his bedroom, he stared dully out the bedroom window, watching the boys at play in the garden. An hour later, he was still there, though the boys were not.

Jack knocked and rescued the untouched supper tray. On his way out, he paused at the door. “I heard what they said in the Town House,” he offered.

Oh, yes, he'd heard it: “The greatest race of liars on the earth.” That had whirled through the entire black community about five minutes after the steward—a man who had worked fifteen scrupulous years to buy his freedom, and another ten to rise into the stewardship—had managed to snort it out over his own dinner
.

“I heard they don't like your evidence,” Jack continued. “I hope you remember, you got plenty of more evidence coming. It just ain't all the way cooked yet. So I hope you consider your own advice.”

“What advice?”

“Now we wait,”
said Jack.

“Now we wait,” repeated Zabdiel, as if they were words he'd never heard before. At the dim end of a long summer dusk, the garden was mysteriously pale, a world of gray and silver, of columbine and gillyflowers and tall foxglove, all glowing like will-o'-the-wisps caught out of time. It would do Esther no good to wait, unless she could be pressed upon to do it elsewhere. Or unless he went ahead and inoculated her anyway.

Traces of citrus and anise from his patches of lemon balm and sweet cicely drifted through the casement. He smelled, too, the rich brown fragrance of his horses. And there—fainter but still pungent, a too-sweet scent of nausea that took him a moment to place. He had been riding, when he smelled it. Thinking of little but wind and the sound of thundering hooves. And smallpox.
That was it:
the night ride, when he had decided to inoculate Tommy.

Just beyond the gate that led out onto the Neck, he had passed by the creak and clank of the gallows. And he had smelled Joseph Hanno, rotting in the gibbet after being hanged for murder.

4

THE CASTLE OF MISERY

 

SHE had been dreaming of a green place, filled with the sound of sweet running water. She did not want to wake up. Refused to wake up, until someone kicked her in the ribs for the third time, seized the irons shackling her legs, and began dragging her toward the door, scraping her skin raw against the lice layered like thick crawling seashells between her body and the floor.

She fought like a wildcat in the first few minutes of wakefulness, blinking in the glare of the stinking torch. This place was hell, but the place they were taking her to was worse. Pawnbroker's daughter, pickpocket, whore—native of London's infamously fetid and windowless tenements—nineteen-year-old Elizabeth Harrison was no green girl. She was not queasy about turning tricks, especially when it would buy her a hot meal, a few hours' sleep in some clean, safe place, or at the very least, the oblivion of gin.

Her father, her mother, and one, possibly two, brothers—she wasn't really sure—had preceded her in this evil place, ending their days with a drunken ride out to the gallows at Tyburn. By the time she had followed in their footsteps, she knew a thing or two about making the best of this fearsome place. She'd been happy to attend to the needs of John Cawthery, the blustery highwayman turned jailer's toady. Wardsmen, they called the felons who were part guard, part prisoner. He, too, was a felon, eventually bound for Tyburn, but meanwhile he had been given relatively clean, airy cell, all to himself, on the top floor, and a tab at the bar, in exchange for duty as a turnkey.

But the night before, he had played cards too hard and too long in the cellar taproom, and had lost her to a mean-eyed lout who was playing for his entire ward, Stone Hold, the deepest, meanest dungeon in the prison. As Cawthery steadily lost, she steadily drank enough raw gin to cast her so deep in the tapsters' debt that she'd never climb out. At the time, she hadn't cared for anything but some way to forget that that she was being bet—being sold—by a jailer to a roomful of murderers to do with as they pleased in a crowd. It did not help to know that the man who had won her had won his spot on the floor of the Stone Hold by slitting the throat of a whore in the very midst of country matters.

So she fought.

In the scrabble, a thumb came her way; she bit down hard. “Lizzy!” roared Cawthery, walloping her across the cheek. The blow momentarily blinded her and dissolved every bone in her body to jelly. “I ain't taking you to the boys, you damned 'ellcat,” he whispered in her ear. “I found us another way out. Maybe all the way out, if you get my drift. Any more of my blood spills, though, an' I waltz out o' this room without sayin' another word.”

She shook the floating sparks from her eyes and tried to glare at him.

He went on. “There's a doctor wot wants to see some likely-looking prisoners—for some scheme that may earn them as partakes a pardon.”

She shook her head again, this time to jostle his words into sense.

“A pardon, Lizzy!” he snarled. “Rumor has it, there's royal highnesses involved.”

“Royal highness of what?” she said thickly. “Rotgut?”

“Aw, Lizzy, shut up. The king 'isself want you at Kensington, for all's I know. Just tell me: 'ave you 'ad the smallpox?”