The Speckled Monster Read online

  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:

  Betty tooke a great deal of troble goeing often to Acton to see for a letter, but Lady Mary could gett no conveniency to write. She gives her love and respects to you, but if it is not expressed as is proper you’l excuse it as from whence it comes insteed of my Lady.

  Lady Mary desires you to direct your letter for Betty Laskey at the Bunch of Grapes and Queen’s Head in Knightsbridge. She had not time when Betty gave her the letters to read them. She signs her name to this for I shewed it her.

  April 17th 1710

  M.P.

  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.

  One door down from her father’s town house, smallpox silenced another set of longed-for wedding chimes, even as shrieks of mourning slipped through shuttered windows and rose from the chimneys. For days, Mrs. Brownlow had been anointing Meg’s face every hour with thick layers of cream, painting it on with a feather to soften the scabbing pocks and save her daughter’s complexion, but nothing helped. Meg’s
skin stretched taut over pools and geysers of pus; she died smelling of sour milk and sweet rottenness, swollen beyond all recognition. Deep into negotiations to marry her to the marquess of Lindsey’s heir, Meg’s family rocked briefly in grief. Then they dried their eyes, hunched their backs against disaster, and went on with their plans very nearly as before, smoothly substituting the name of Meg’s sister Jane where the contracts had once read “Margaret.”

  Still out in Acton, the news made Lady Mary shiver. In the making of a great match, fathers spent months and years negotiating the exchange of children for cash, titles, lands, and political support or protection. The future of whole families was what mattered: particular children were expendable. Death, her father observed tartly, was an acceptable reason for failing to marry as one’s family directed. Wayward desire was not.

  Lady Mary still yearned to return to London, but as soon as she was movable, Dorchester banished her still farther west—“over the hills and far away,” as she put it—to West Dean, the half-forgotten home of her early childhood. I know not whether you can make me happy, she concluded to Wortley; you have convinced me you can make me miserable.

  That summer, as smallpox deaths mounted into the thousands, she wandered alone through the Wiltshire woods, staring glumly at the fish in the streams and wishing for more interesting company. She tried to content herself with translating the stoic philosophy of Epictetus and asking the bishop of Salisbury to critique it. In letters to friends, though, she dropped all pretense of stoicism. Men are vile inconstant toads, she scrawled.

  Early in August, Wortley wrote to tell her that the marriage negotiations had broken off. Her father, he complained, was insisting that he entail the lion’s share of his property upon a hypothetical eldest son: the accepted practice for keeping an inheritance intact, preventing future generations from splintering it to nothingness. Wortley had no problem with the notion of keeping an inheritance whole, but argued that it was irrational to settle everything on an unborn heir who might or might not turn out to deserve it. He preferred to keep the power to bestow his wealth as he saw fit, according to the proven merits of his offspring. It was not a question of valuing her, he told Lady Mary: I know too high a rate can’t be set upon you. But her father had done just that—and having found a price that Wortley was unwilling to pay, Dorchester was gleefully exploiting it.

  To revitalize his spirits and mend his fragile pride, Wortley stalked off to Belgium, to the original Spa. He had not given up all hope of a resolution, however. He begged Lady Mary to write often, care of Richard Steele. For I know that when you write, he scribbled, you shine out in all your beauty.

  As August spilled into September, which stretched into October, her letters fluttered through Steele’s door and stacked up on his desk. Arriving on the continent, Wortley had called a sudden truce with business, politics, and especially love, and asked Steele to hold all his mail—but neither Wortley nor Steele deigned to tell Lady Mary so. So she waited. Near the end of October, as the smallpox epidemic loosened its grip of terror on London, Lady Mary received the letter she had been longing for since summer. Tangled with anger and eagerness, she withdrew to her chamber to read it, but instead of tenderness, she found a mean-spirited rant, disagreeing in nitpicking detail with everything she had written.

  Mockingly, she translated his letter back to him: Madam, you are the greatest coquette I ever knew; the only happiness you propose to yourself with a husband is in jilting him most abundantly. Filling with indignation, she resumed her own voice. You are unjust and I am unhappy, she wrote. ’Tis past—I will never think of you more, never.

  Wortley could not so blithely dismiss Lady Mary from his mind. After Christmas, he wrote to present his grievances once again. She wrote back in self defense, and soon they were once again sparring via smuggled correspondence. What other man, she exclaimed to Frances, would attempt not to flatter but argue her into love, backing his points with quotations from the classical poet he graciously ceded to her as “your admired Virgil”?

  “What other woman,” retorted Frances, “would find such churlishness charming?”

  “He has all the qualities of an upright man,” protested Mary.

  “And no single quality of an amiable one,” sniffed Frances.

  Their father judged Wortley neither upright nor amiable, and saw to it that Lady Mary was carefully watched. Private meetings became next to impossible; in public Wortley disdained melting into her throng of suitors. From a dignified distance, he watched her dancing at Dr. Garth’s ball, flushing with pleasure at Mr. Handel’s newfangled Italian operas, and relishing the scandal of a bigamy trial in the House of Lords. Little by little, he convinced himself she was in love with someone else. But he could not discern with whom.

  Lady Mary had irritations other than Wortley’s jealousy to think about.

  With her sister Lady Frances and some girlfriends, she formed a clandestine club called the Sisters in Affliction. In defiance of the marriage-market haggling of their fathers, they declared themselves predestined for Paradise, code for husbands who would also make handsome and passionate lovers. They dedicated themselves to rejecting Hell—threatened husbands who filled them with revulsion or fear—and they urged each other to believe that some gray neither-here-nor-there state of Limbo—marriage to men of convenient wealth and emotional neutrality—was possible. It was not only girls who faced such trials, however, as Lady Mary discovered all too well that spring.

  Having thwarted the marriage she wished for, Mary’s father now set about condemning poor Will to Hell, marrying him to a fatuous fifteen-year-old heiress whose lone asset was to arrive in the family towing one of the largest fortunes in England.

  One evening in April, Lady Mary was serenaded in Acton by a group of young rakes, Wortley’s prime suspect among them. After singing under her bedroom window, her suitors had all been invited into the drawing room for punch. The party then moved on to the house of a duchess, where they danced till dawn.

  The next morning, a footman brought her a single letter sitting on a silver tray.

  At last I am ready to confess my errors, wrote Wortley. I retract all I have said of you and ask your forgiveness. His fair words cloaked a foul message: He declared he had at last discovered who her other lover was. Worse still, in a pretense of willingness to assist in furthering her new affair, he offered to take this information to her father.

  I wish you all possible happiness, she replied acidly, and myself the quiet of never hearing from you more.

  Carving at her father’s table up at Thoresby that summer, Lady Mary heard the news that had set all of Europe to trembling. On April 17, the very day she had received that infernal letter from Wortley, Emperor Joseph I, the great hope of the Hapsburgs in both the Holy Roman Empire and Spain, had expired of the smallpox in Vienna, swathed in twenty yards of sweat-drenched scarlet cloth. Three days earlier, Louis, eldest son of King Louis XIV and therefore the grand dauphin of France, had died of the same disease, shivering in a drafty room outside Paris.

  Their doctors belonged to the opposing camps of the hot treatment and the cold, Dorchester and his cronies surmised. Fearing above all else that the emperor’s pocks might fail to ripen, his conservative doctors had no doubt turned the sickroom into a dark crimson hothouse, draping not only His Imperial Majesty but the bed, windows, and walls in the warm color of red, which ancient tradition held would open pores and lure the pus out into pocks. If that weren’t enough hocus-pocus, the windows were probably shut, the fire stoked up, and the patient buried beneath quilts and blankets. None of it to any effect, grumbled Lady Mary’s father, but to increase the imperial misery. The dauphin’s doctors, on the other hand, appeared to have worried far more about the poison ripening in too much abundance than failing to ripen. Rumor had it they’d done their best to chill the effervescence they feared was boiling in Louis’s blood by allowing no bedclothes beyond a light coverlet drawn up to the prince’s waist. They had thrown the windows open
wide and quenched the fire in the grate too.

  Neither treatment, griped Dorchester, was worth the paper a single quack bill could be printed on—much less the mountains of gold that royal physicians extorted for such tortures. Moderation, observed Dr. Garth, is what is called for, neither roasting patients nor freezing them. “A miracle,” retorted her father, “is what is called for. None of you has the least notion of what to do in the face of smallpox, save to scrape to yourselves tidy fortunes in fees for your ignorance.” His rant over, Dorchester spun the conversation toward the politics of the French, Imperial, and Spanish successions, all three now redirected by the smallpox just as the British succession once had been.

  Lady Mary listened with only half an ear. Smallpox might rearrange the chessboard of Europe as many times as it pleased; at twenty-two, she was still far more entranced by the subjects of love and wit. Wortley had been unforgivably rude, but he had also been right: there was someone else. In imagination and intellect, in his love of music and words, Lady Mary’s Paradise was her match. Unfortunately, he was also far beneath her in rank and fortune. He was not—and never could be—for her, and she knew it. In the summer of 1711, though, love was still a delicious game. Full to brimming, she painted her glory and agony in long letters to her fellow Sister in Affliction, Philippa Mundy. The world glowed with an inner fire when her beloved was present; it lost all savor and color when he was not. Hunts, balls, and races crowded her days, but how dull they all were, she sighed, unless Paradise was by.

  The discovery that her father was negotiating a marriage for her dissolved this flippant ennui. There was nothing particularly wrong with the Honorable Clotworthy Skeffington, son and heir to Viscount Massereene. On the other hand, there was nothing particularly right with Clodworthy Clotworthy either: he cared nothing for poetry or theater, music or dancing. He would rather listen to his dog snore than to a Latin oration, she exclaimed, and he would have a much better chance of deciphering the dog. The heart of the matter was not his middling looks, his middling character, or even his widely different notion of the finer things in life. It was simply that with the sweet touch of Paradise floating in her mind, the thought of Skeffington so much as brushing her sleeve gave off a faint but unmistakable fire-and-brimstone whiff of Hell.