The Speckled Monster Read online

  Out in the wider world, smallpox subsided to a small threat, sputtering fitfully in corners. With the invincible arrogance of youth, Lady Mary ignored it. There were myriad other more interesting dangers: the king, for instance, was killed by a fall from his horse. The king is dead, cried his adopted people in 1702. Long live Queen Anne.

  For the most part, Lady Mary’s girlhood rolled gently on, the days—as she put it in one of her tales—threaded with silver and gold. She never forgot her dream of brilliance, though. In its pursuit, she made herself a rebel three times over, punctuating the tranquility of her young life with the burst and spatter of fireworks.

  Her first rebellion was to write. Her second was to learn. And her third was to love.

  She never found out who betrayed her.

  At fourteen, she had meant the tale of her father as a kind of homage, carving and polishing it with more care than she had lavished on any other piece of writing; nevertheless, she would never have so much as hinted its existence to him. Her enemy did more than hint. What the earl of Kingston heard filled him with such fury that he did not wait to send for his daughter; he raged through the gilded magnificence of Thoresby himself, ignoring the painted company of laughing cherubs and Caesars in triumph slipping past him on the walls.

  The earl was fast, but the servants’ hissing current of gossip was faster. By the time he threw open the door to his daughters’ rooms with a crash and sent Lady Frances, their French governess Madame Dupont, and several maids scuttling into the hall, Lady Mary had obliterated two of her poems beneath blots of ink.

  Tamping his fury down to an icy hauteur, he stepped inside. He had not yet dressed; his purple velvet morning gown and sable-trimmed cap heightened the strangely delicate pink of his wide cheeks, full jowls, and long, faintly hooked nose. There was nothing delicate, however, about his wrath. Lady Mary sank to her knees and kissed his hand in the ritual court greeting he always demanded from his children.

  “I have heard that you are a meddling minx,” he said, letting his diamond ring needle her cheek.

  She caught her breath. Her favorite reading had long been the fiction and poetry à clef, “with a key,” that filled her father’s library shelves: tales that masked real-life adventures of love under false, florid names, all nestled in fantastic settings like jewels set in spun sugar. Half the fun of reading them was working out the puzzle of who was who. Recently, she had discovered they were even more fun to write.

  She had first tried writing about herself, intensifying her girlish infatuation with Jane Smith into a full-blown romance. Transforming herself into the male shepherd-poet Strephon, Lady Mary dedicated the whole volume to “the beauteous Hermensilda.” But Jane, daughter of the speaker of the House of Commons, had shed her part as Hermensilda and abandoned Lady Mary to become a maid of honor to Queen Anne. In any case, most of their adventures had to be heavily embroidered or invented altogether, although they had made the part about carving their names in the ancient oaks of Sherwood Forest satisfyingly real. So Lady Mary cast a connoisseur’s eye upon the amorous adventures of her father: full of everything a romance reader could want, except possibly pirates or a bandit king.

  “Where is this book?” he demanded, his black eyes hooded with menace.

  Slowly, she held it up to him.

  He took it between finger and thumb, pursing his full lips. “What have you put in it?”

  Her chin went up. “Love and wit.” Only a week ago, carving the roast as hostess at her father’s table, she had heard Mr. Congreve proclaim these the only fit subjects for the drama.

  Contempt cascaded over her. “What can an ignorant slip of a girl like you possibly have to do with love and wit?”

  A flush crept up her neck to her cheeks and faded away again.

  He opened his fingers, dropping the book to the floor in front of her like some dead, broken-winged thing. She heard another clatter and glanced down. A knife lay atop the book.

  “In a few moments I intend to read it cover to cover,” said her father. “If I find so much as the shadow of a trespass into disrespect, the whole book will burn. So I suggest you remove any trace of folly.”

  Hot tears spilled down her cheeks, but her father said nothing more. Under his pitiless gaze, she picked up the knife and slit out twenty pages.

  “Burn them,” he said as she finished.

  She gasped, but the look on his face made her gather up the scattered leaves and cross to the fire. One by one, the pages slipped into the flames, bursting into brief crackling glory before curling away into black nothingness.

  “Bring me what is left,” he said behind her.

  Sitting cross-legged in Madame Dupont’s armchair, he read for what seemed like hours, whipping the pages as he turned them, while Lady Mary stood in the center of the room, trying not to wring her hands or suffocate on fear and her own fury. Outside on the terrace, a peacock wailed like a lost soul.

  “There are one or two pretty rhymes here,” said Kingston at last, standing up. “In a womanish way.” Stashing the book under his arm, he stalked to the door.

  At the threshold, he paused. “You do not dream of seeing your follies in print, I hope?”

  Polite tradition held that aristocrats published only by circulating their work anonymously in manuscript; ladies did not publish at all. “No, my lord,” she said, glaring at the floor.

  There was a short silence, broken by the book itself as Kingston sent it whizzing across the room toward the fire. Lady Mary stumbled forward just in time, thrusting her hand into the burning heat to scoop up the book before it could land atop the coals.

  “I have made you a lady, mistress Mary,” said her father with distaste. “See that you deserve the courtesy of that title.” He whirled about and strode from the room.

  She fled across the floor to her writing desk, smoothing a hand across the book’s thick vellum cover. She knew a better use for her father’s odious knife. She picked it up and sharpened a quill. Opening her book, she riffled through the pages until she found one of the last remaining blank spaces. Then she dipped her pen into ink and squeezed a new poem into the emptiness:

  ’Twas folly made me fondly write:

  For what have I to do with love and wit?

  I own I trespass’d wickedly in rhyme,

  But, oh, my punishment exceeds my crime.

  My follies though on parchment writ

  I soon might burn and then forget,

  But if I now both burn and blot,

  By me they cannot be forgot.

  Still seething, Lady Mary turned to the reverse of the title page and wrote, I question not but here is very many faults, but if any reasonable person considers three things, they would forgive them: 1. I am a woman, 2. without any advantage of education, 3. all these was writ at the age of 14.

  As soon as possible, she acquired another book, gripping it like a weapon bound in fine-grained leather. Knowing the irritation it would cause her father, she dropped her mask of male authorship and titled her new book as if for print, carefully inscribing the first page:

  The Entire Works of

  Clarinda

  London

  She couldn’t alter her age or her sex, but her education she could do something about. For two years in her midteens, Lady Mary spent six hours each day burrowing into the black leather chairs that lurked in the stately hush of her father’s library at Thoresby. Whenever Madame Dupont looked in, she saw the girl lost in romances and travel tales: giddy things, no doubt, but at least they kept the little hoyden quiet.

  As soon as Madame went away again, Lady Mary turned back to the contraband books that she kept hidden in a cubbyhole in a little-used corner: a Latin grammar and dictionary.

  Under Madame Dupont’s strict care, Lady Mary’s education focused on French, riding, dancing, and carving with precision and delicacy the immense roasts proper to a lord’s table. These were the skills that would please a man in a wife, thought Dupont; conversing in Latin on the f
iner points of philosophy and poetry was what a man’s friends were for.

  But Lady Mary did not care to please a man, she meant to please herself. Boys like her brother were carefully escorted across the sacred ground of the classics; breaking into the ivory tower by herself, Lady Mary ranged freely through its treasures. Later, she would come to appreciate Virgil and Horace. Those much-worshiped monuments, though, were not what lured her in.

  Whatever her father might say, her will to learn had everything to do with both love and wit. She tunneled her way into Latin in search of the unbridled, violent loves of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, unadulterated by translation: Jove consuming Semele in bright, burning fire; Daphne scraping Apollo’s fingers as her smooth skin scurfed into tree bark and she took root as a laurel rather than yield to his lust; Acis’ crushed body flowing into a bloody river for the sake of Galatea’s love; mutilated and trembling Philomel escaping her brother-in-law’s repeated rapes, flying free at last in the shape of a nightingale.

  Despite Dupont’s dim view of educated women, Lady Mary’s scholarly accomplishments soon attracted her most tenacious lover.

  She met Edward Wortley between tea and cards in the apartments of his sister Anne. He was enchanted by the rarity of a lady with a taste for classical poetry; Lady Mary was enchanted by the rarity of a man who appreciated that hard-won taste. He offered to help her in her studies; she pretended to need it.

  A few days later, a parcel arrived for her. The scents of brown earth and new ink slid in magic-carpet curls from the paper as she unwrapped it; within gleamed the leather and gilt of a superb edition of Quintus Curtius’ Latin history of Alexander the Great. It was the perfect gift: quietly admiring her command of Latin, appreciating her love of books, and beckoning her into long, exotic hours of armchair travel. Nor had Mr. Wortley neglected gallantry. Facing the title page, a poem unfurled compliments in a neat, spidery hand: Alexander would have “laid his empire down” and made “polished Greece obey a barbarous throne,” it declared, had Persia only managed to show the conqueror beauty like Lady Mary’s.

  Eleven years older than Lady Mary, Edward Wortley Montagu—or Wortley, as he preferred to be known—was heir to the lion’s share of Newcastle’s coal mines. In business, he was as pitiless and gritty as his coal; in politics, he had already won grudging respect for prickly integrity. A Whig member of Parliament, he spent his happiest hours in debate with men of searing wit. His closest friend was the satiric journalist Joseph Addison, just then making waves as one of the main writers of a new paper, The Tatler; he also counted Addison’s paunchy, black-wigged Irish-born associate Richard Steele—the paper’s editor and chief writer—and William Congreve among his close acquaintance. Through Wortley, Lady Mary glimpsed reentry into the world of brilliant men, this time welcomed as an adult rather than a petted child.

  Her visits to Anne grew more frequent, and more stilted. Soon, the unfettered girlish laughter in Anne’s letters evaporated as well, replaced by a stiff courtliness: she and Lady Mary still wrote, but the correspondence, like the friendship, became a charade. Anne was still writing out and signing the letters, but her brother was composing them, and Lady Mary knew it; her replies, though addressed to Anne, were meant for Mr. Wortley.

  Her father had no inkling of their dalliance.

  A few years earlier, as Lady Mary had neared seventeen in the spring of 1706, her thirteen-year-old brother Will left for Cambridge, taking a great part of her day-to-day laughter with him. That December, Queen Anne elevated Lady Mary’s father in the peerage, moving him up a rank as the marquess of Dorchester; the title of earl of Kingston instantly descended to his son. Meanwhile, Lady Mary and her friends underwent transformations of a different sort, blooming into eminently marriageable ripeness. She had been in no hurry to marry, however, and on that subject, father and daughter agreed. Far from being willing to squire his daughter through the company of eligible wits that he graced with his presence, Dorchester wanted her out of the way, while he cast lascivious eyes on her acquaintance, for himself.

  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:

  Dear Sir,

  I ask pardon for my presumption, but the occation that happened makes me take this liberty. My Lady Mary gave orders to write to let you know she received your two letters this day. The very time you went away she went to Acton and is very ill of the measles, and is very sory she could not write sooner.

  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 th
at 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.