The Speckled Monster (6 page)

In 1708, when Lady Mary was nineteen, he bought Berrymead Priory, a big old house set in fragrant gardens in Acton, three miles west of London. Conveniently close to town, the place was still far enough away to serve as sweet escape whenever clouds of sickness and stench thickened the city air. Smallpox had shaken off its long fitful sleep, and was once again scattering its blisters across London with ominous if not quite epidemic thickness. Having worked his way up in the peerage, however, Dorchester did not intend to allow smallpox or any of London's other pestilential fevers—typhus, typhoid, influenza—to muck through his family. The house in Acton was part of his plan to secure the new title for future generations. It was also useful, he discovered, whenever he wished respite from his offspring's inquisitive eyes.

To Lady Mary, Acton had seemed more a place of exile than safety. Then she found that she, too, could make use of a shield from inquisitive eyes: in February 1710, Anne Wortley died, glassy eyed and shivering with fever. Wortley lost his favorite sister and Lady Mary her best friend; they had both lost safe cover for their flirtation. Just shy of twenty-one, Lady Mary was not to be deterred. Within a month, she dared what tight-lipped and tighter corseted conventions of virtue decreed unthinkable, and her father would never forgive: she took up the pen to write Wortley directly. Soon, their correspondence bloomed into the deliciously forbidden drama of a secret courtship.

 

From the beginning, she was clear about what she wanted and what she could offer:
I can esteem, I can be a friend,
she wrote,
but I don't know whether I can love
. She proposed a tranquil meeting of minds, a rational relationship based on shared interests, calmed by country life and enlivened with travel.

That was not nearly enough for Wortley.
I love you,
runs the subtext of most of his letters,
and I despise myself for it
.

They wrote often and at length, hurling hidden pages of sniping argument at each other. They met furtively and infrequently at luxury shops in the New Exchange on the Strand, walking in and out of church, and driving in stately circles around the ring in Hyde Park. There, the women who hawked oranges and sweets to famished young lords and ladies also ferried pretty messages between coaches, tying love letters around their oranges with bright ribbon, for a price.

In April, Wortley looked for Lady Mary several days on end in the park, but did not find her. One of the orange women he had employed earlier as go-between found him though. “Fair lemons and oranges!” she shrilled as she approached. “Cherries just ripe,” she added in a lower register, though he saw none among her offerings. Brushing by him with skirts pinned up in a bustle as bright—if not quite as clean—as the fruit in the wide flat basket she balanced on her head, she whispered in his ear: “The young lady sends to say that Betty can see as she gets a message.” By the time he processed this offer, she was swinging her mocking hips away down the lane.

He caught up with her and dashed off a querulous note.

Three days later, his friend Richard Steele forwarded him a reply.
This is left tonight with me to send to you. I send you no news because I believe this will employ you better. Your most obedient servant,
he scrawled on the outside, his smirk nearly visible in the ink.

Wortley tore open the letter. It was not from Lady Mary; it was from the orange woman, Betty Laskey:

 

Wortley's skin prickled with apprehension. The red-spotted rash, high fever, and swollen eyes of the measles were dangerous. Even if Lady Mary survived, she might well emerge from the sickroom blind. Another, far worse fear, though, sputtered at him from the dark corners of the room: In the early stages, measles was easily confusable with the worst kinds of smallpox. Some doctors held that the purples—hemorrhagic smallpox—was a foul double brew of disease, “smallpox and measles mingled.” Others used the measles as a safe haven, a diagnosis to cling to until all hope was past, as if they might ward off the smallpox by refusing to name it.

Measles was rife that spring, but the smallpox was worse. By May, the city was spiraling into the worst smallpox epidemic England had ever seen, its spotted tracks visible at every turn. Laborers who could not afford to be ill trudged about with pocks still ripening, and newly recovered urchins roughhoused in the streets, sowing the last late scabs—or “seeds”—from the soles of their feet and the palms of their hands into the dust and the puddles. Everywhere were the coffins: new made and stacked high on carts, in single-file quick procession to the churchyards. One morning, Wortley had nearly collided with a woman hurrying by with a tiny coffin not two feet long tucked under her arm; he could still smell the raw scent of new-cut wood. She had glanced up at him, but her face was empty: no sorrow, no rage, just emptiness.

However proudly the doctors, apothecaries, and quacks might point to their successes, the only real safety lay in already having survived the scourge, as Wortley had. But Lady Mary, as he well knew, had not.

He was being womanish, he told himself. Excitable. His father and grandfathers had reserved such reeling fears for the worst visitations of the plague. But the plague, taunted a voice in his head, had not been seen in epidemic strength in London in forty-five years—since 1665. Smallpox, some warned, was taking its place as the scythe of an angry God.

Outside the window, a deep bell tolled another victim to the grave; beyond that he heard a rumbling of heavy wheels. For a moment he wondered whether the dead-carts of the plague had returned to trundle through the night, stacking corpses like kindling and dumping them in open pits ringed with bonfires. He shook himself; surely the smallpox could never sow its dead as thick as the plague once had. He flicked the curtain aside and saw a cart carrying the living: a woman and two wailing children. He breathed a sigh of relief.

Then she turned her eyes up to his and he stepped back and froze. Her face was thick with yellow pocks; so were the children's. The despair in the woman's eyes sent a cold wind knifing through his belly. In a moment, the cart was gone, trundling west, no doubt, toward the pest house of Westminster. But in his mind, the images of the pocks lingered, glowering like embers in the dusk.

Shuddering, he let the curtain fall closed and returned to the letter:

 

Wortley spent a bad night, tossing and pacing. He had lost his favorite sister—his poor Anne—only two months before; he could not bear to lose Lady Mary too. At dawn, he sat down to draft her a letter.

Though last night I was perfectly well till I saw the letter signed by you,
he wrote,
I am this morning downright sick. The loss of you would be irretrievable; there has not been—there never will be—another Lady Mary
.

He took a breath and reined himself in.

You see how far a man's passion carries his reflections. It makes him uneasy because the worst may possibly happen from the least dangerous distempers
.

He meant, no doubt, to be comforting, but his own fears kept creeping through. It was a thousand to one, he wrote, that he would next hear of her recovery. He could not keep from wondering, though, what might happen if the news were not so fine. She might lose her complexion or her sight, he mused. With this, the demon whispers in the dark slid sideways into his letter: Both the measles and smallpox could cause blindness, but only smallpox was notorious for ruining faces with permanent, stomach-twisting scarring.

Assuring Lady Mary that his love would weather all possible ravages of disease, Wortley's love twisted back into jealousy:
I should be overjoyed to hear your beauty was very much impaired, could I be pleased with anything that would give you displeasure, for it would lessen the number of your admirers, but even the loss of a feature, nay of your eyes themselves, would not make you seem less beautiful to
—

He never finished the draft. Overcome, he dashed off a clean copy of his letter, and Betty headed back to Acton.

 

Two days later, Wortley still had received no answer; in the city, the carefully counted and reported death-count for smallpox soared up toward one hundred per week. He could not step out to head for a coffeehouse or the theater without passing two or three funeral corteges—strangely tense and more hurried than stately, the mourners' ranks thinned by fear to ragtag, blank-faced huddles. Once, crowds had parted in the midst of the Strand to reveal a man covered with pocks stumbling down the street, crying with hunger, but every time he veered toward a shop, its door banged shut. At one, a pail of scraps was shoved through a doorway, along with a harsh cry,
Take it and be gone
. But before he could fetch it, some boys snatched it up and began pelting him. Howling, the man had limped away down the street, with the boys circling at a distance.

I entreat you not to let another day pass,
he begged Lady Mary.
Send one line to let me know you do not grow worse
.

Her reply, when it finally came, arrived through a different channel than the one he had used. About the smallpox she remained obstinately silent. She confirmed, however, what the London gossip mill had been whispering to him but he had refused to believe except from her pen: Her fever and her spots sprang from the measles. She would live, and keep both her color and her sight. In the matter of Betty Laskey, however, she could not keep her temper; the rest of the letter was blistering.
Your indiscretion has given me so much trouble, I would willingly get rid of it at the price of my fever's returning,
she snapped.
You employed the foolishest and most improper messenger upon earth
. Betty was certainly attentive, but she was also as rapacious as a raven and about as discreet as one croaking in a field full of canaries. Lady Mary denied that she had ever had anything to do with the woman, much less given her a commission to carry messages, and told Wortley that he had been a fool to let himself fall for such an obvious con game.

Wortley refused to see anything amiss with his means of approach; in his eyes, Lady Mary owed him great thanks for taking such pains to get through to her. He hired Betty again to tell her so.

How could you think of employing that creature?
Lady Mary shot back.
She has made everything public to every servant in this house. Imagine the pretty pickle I am in
.

She yearned to return to London to sort things out in person, but smallpox dashed her hopes. Margaret Brownlow, one of the girls next door with whom Lady Mary had once giggled over the garden wall, was sitting amid clouds of white satin, sewing her trousseau, when she was seized with shivering and sweats. By evening, red flecks were drifting thickly across her, marking the spots where the pocks would rise. Up and down Arlington Street, windows shuttered and doors slammed as if by themselves. Those who could crammed into coaches and sped west to clean air. The less fortunate passed by the Brownlow house with faces averted and feet skimming at a quick patter, pressing themselves against the opposite side of the lane.

While Arlington Street panicked, Lady Mary fretted out in Acton.
I have just now received a letter,
she wrote Wortley in morose irritation,
that tells me a Lady is fallen dangerously ill of the small pox over against our house
. It was the first time she had deigned to name the disease.
I am to stay here till all danger of infection is over
.

The danger did not appear likely to pass anytime soon. Dr. Garth and his fellow physicians were stretched skin thin across shivering nights and stench-filled days, tending to ten and then twenty thousand ill. Londoners trembled in church, weeping through sermons proclaiming God's just punishment on a wicked world. They repented their manifold sins and then fled out to buy amulets and astrological signs against the scourge. Quacks and mountebanks swarmed out to feed on the panic, plastering their bills for marvelous cures on every street corner and house post. INFALLIBLE PRESERVATIVE FROM THE INFECTION! SOVEREIGN CORDIALS AGAINST THE CORRUPTION. THE ONLY TRUE ROYAL ANTIDOTE AGAINST THE SMALLPOX AND ALL OTHER INFECTIONS! At their best, they did no more good than a glass of water—but no more harm, either, grumbled Dr. Garth. At their worst, they preserved patients from the smallpox by dispatching them with poison first.

Lady Mary had other worries. Her father at last noticed the bright flutter of Betty, and the correspondence with Wortley that the orange woman's presence marked like a flag. For the sake of his own honor, Wortley was forced to propose marriage; for the sake of his daughter's honor, Dorchester was forced to entertain the notion. Far from apologizing for his indiscretion, Wortley insinuated that Lady Mary had leaked news of the correspondence on purpose. On the brink of being forced into the alliance she had so longed for, she was no longer sure she wanted him.