The Speckled Monster (13 page)

“Because it is an old wives' tale, my lady.”

“Begging your pardon, Doctor,” chimed in Lord Townshend's brother, a merchant who had spent three years in Constantinople a few years before. “But Lady Mary's question has merit. With my own eyes, I have seen two hundred people undergo the operation. Only two died.”

Dr. Arbuthnot's voice sliced through the rising babble. “A new book by Peter Kennedy—a Scottish surgeon who has himself visited Constantinople—considers the reasons judiciously: in his estimation, it is fear of death on a grand scale that makes the British so timorous to try it. No one, says Mr. Kennedy, knows whether inoculation will in fact deliver the protection bestowed by a natural bout with smallpox, but we can be pretty certain that the operation will pass on the disease. It might well trigger an epidemic.”

“I have read that book,” said Mr. Townshend. “You have left out Mr. Kennedy's uncertainty: ‘If this method is so innocent as those who practice it assert or maintain it to be,' he writes, ‘it need be no more minded than giving or taking the itch.' ”

“Fear!”
scoffed Lady Mary. “I should rather claim greed as an excuse.”

“You have put the question the wrong way round,” said Dr. Garth. “It is not why haven't we tried it, but why
should
we? Only two died, Mr. Townshend says: but as I would put it, only two were killed. Why should we take such a risk?”

In answer, Lady Mary reached up and slipped off her mask; around her every other face blanched.

Slowly, her face had recovered most of its old shape. She was not, as she had feared, entirely disfigured: but her great beauty had been scraped away. Despite all the ointments and jellies and washes, her skin remained stained and pitted, as roughly scored as a nutmeg grater. Her eyelashes had never come back, changing her once merry gaze into a fierce, falconlike glare.

“To prevent this,” she said.

 

Timonius's and Pylarinus's descriptions were duly published in the
Transactions of the Royal Society
—along with various reports about giants' bones, rattlesnakes, comets, fortune-telling dreams, and weird weather—but after an initial sensation, interest proved short-lived. As Dr. Garth predicted, inoculation was dismissed as an old wives' tale, a bit of mystical Oriental nonsense, good for a pleasant little shiver of curiosity at the bizarre and backward practices of the East, but no more.

Meanwhile, Lady Mary left her mask off and quietly laid her final plans for her family's departure. They included hiring one of Mr. Kennedy's colleagues, another Scottish surgeon named Charles Maitland, to attend the Wortleys throughout their stay in Turkey.

 

On the first of August, 1716, Lady Mary and Wortley, their three-year-old son and his nurse, their new Scottish surgeon, a chaplain, secretaries, lady's maid, valet, steward, two cooks, footmen, grooms, and other assorted servants in silver livery stepped up into coaches and wagons. The crowd cheered, sniffled, and waved farewell, and the adventurers waved back. Then the drivers shouted, horses leaned into their harness, wheels grudgingly poured into their work, and the new British ambassador extraordinary to the Ottoman Porte and his entourage were off.

Holding heavily scented handkerchiefs to their noses, the cavalcade ducked beneath the ornamental arches at Temple Bar, now decorated with the heads of Jacobite traitors, and crossed the bridge over the open sewer of the Fleet Ditch. Clattering through Lud Gate—the westernmost gate in the old city walls—they strained uphill into the summer-ripe throng of London. Everyone, it seemed, was trying to sell something with a song: cherries, chair mending, or chickens (alive and squawking), socks and songbirds (alive and singing), asparagus and almanacs, eels and oysters, books and brooms, milk, matches, and mops. On either side, shops like little gilded theaters wafted perfume and compliments into the street.

The ambassador's party churned past the new expanse of St. Paul's Cathedral and turned sharply south, skidding down the steep hill and across shop-lined London Bridge. Long lines of laborers and wagons piled high with produce streamed against them, pushing to get into the city. On a rise beyond the bridge, they halted to gaze back one last time. St. Paul's sleek new dome rose from the city's gables like an immense pillared egg. On every side, sun glinted off an urban forest of spires and dodged among fraying threads of smoke to spill like a shower of gold coins across the Thames, still dotted with barges and oared boats and striped with long wharves.

They did not expect to see home again for many years, but Wortley was not the sort to moon with sentiment. His business lay far to the east, in another city at the opposite edge of Europe. By far the fastest and easiest route to Constantinople lay by sea, south around Spain and then east across the Mediterranean. Determined to find some way to coax the emperor and the sultan into an unlikely peace, however, Wortley had opted for the difficulty and dangers of an overland journey in order to stop first in the emperor's favorite city of Vienna.

From the Rhine to the Main to the Danube, from the Morava to the Iskar to the Maritza, to the Golden Horn itself with the ethereal brilliant blue of the sea floating beyond, they followed the paths that water had carved across the European continent. Whenever they could, they floated smoothly and silently down the rivers. When they could not, they stepped into coaches and trundled along the banks, raced across wide plains, or toiled through mountain passes at preposterously steep angles, inching between fanged peaks draped in glaciers and snowfields like diamond necklaces laid across ermine.

On September 3, they arrived in Vienna, a pleasure hive of balls and operas, concerts and theater, as well as a den of intrigue. Its citizens had long since run out of room on the ground and had begun piling their way into the sky. All the houses reached the dizzying height of five or six stories—as if the builders, Lady Mary exclaimed, had “clapped one town on top of another.” Shoemakers and tailors lived next door to great ladies and ministers of state, with no more than a thin partition dividing them. The interior furnishings of even the minor nobility's apartments, though, were as magnificent as those of sovereign princes elsewhere: moderation was no virtue in Vienna.

Before Lady Mary could be presented at court, she had to acquire a properly monumental court gown: “more monstrous and contrary to all common sense and reason,” she wrote to Frances, “than 'tis possible for you to imagine.” Its hooped skirt and train covered acres of ground; while the whalebone cage of the bodice and high-backed collar squeezed Lady Mary's torso into a tinier space than she had thought possible. Inconvenient, not to mention uncomfortable, she remarked, but it certainly showed the figure to great advantage.

She also had to have her hair done. Viennese ladies engaged architecturally minded hairdressers and lady's maids to build their hair into three-story towers a yard high, reinforced with gauze and ribbon and bristling with jeweled bodkins—“it being a particular beauty,” scoffed Lady Mary, “to have their heads too large to go into a moderate tub.” As she watched in horrified fascination, her hair was combed over a pad the same shape—but four times as big—as the rolls that London milkmaids used in balancing their wide wooden pails on their head. To Lady Mary's natural hair, the headdress architects added a great deal of false hair, plastering the mixture together with prodigious amounts of powder.

Dipping and swaying like a ship under top-heavy sail, she tottered off to be formally presented to the three empresses. Fair haired and twenty-five, the reigning empress Elisabeth Christine played cards, waited upon by two dwarfs. The black-veiled empress mother Eleanore Magdalene proved tiresome, “perpetually performing extraordinary acts of penance,” sniffed Lady Mary, “without having ever done anything to deserve them.” The dowager empress Amalia, however, commandeered her interest. Presiding over a shooting contest, Amalia sat enthroned in her garden, surrounded by archduchesses and maids of honor in full court dress, their Tower-of-Babel hair sparkling with jewels. All the noblemen of Vienna pressed round as spectators, but only the ladies were allowed to shoot. They took turns aiming light guns down a long alley at three targets: Cupid holding a goblet of wine, Fortune holding a garland, and a sword circled with a poet's laurels. Bestowed by the dowager empress herself, first prize was a fine ruby ring set round with diamonds, in a gold snuffbox. It went, as a matter of course, to an archduchess who happened to be not only her daughter but her namesake.

In Vienna, even adultery was both excessive and ritualized; every great lady was expected to display a husband on one arm and a gallant lover on the other. Lady Mary had many offers from young men eager fill the lover's place, but she refused them all. “She sticks to her English modes and manners,” one English courtier reported to another, “which exposes her not a little to the railleries of the Vienna ladies. She replies with a good deal of spirit, and is engaged in a sort of petty war, but they all own she is a witty woman, if not a well-dressed one.” Pope wrote to tease that she had “out-traveled the sin of fornication” to arrive “at the free region of adultery.” He could not fathom why she should persist in wishing to “pass from that charitable court” and head for “the land of jealousy, where the unhappy women converse with none but eunuchs, and where the very cucumbers are brought to them cut.”

 

Though diplomats on all sides wanted the British ambassador to press onward to Constantinople, King George had other ideas. He summoned Wortley to attend him in his beloved Hanover, which he was visiting for the first time since taking the British throne. So in the middle of November, the Wortley Montagus veered north.

Lady Mary despised Bohemia (now the western part of the Czech Republic), complaining that the villages were so poor that clean straw and water were “blessings not always to be found.” Sometimes they traveled all night rather than stop at one of the miserable inns whose hot, crowded rooms were itchy with vermin and thick with foul scents. In Prague, she proclaimed the fashions even more absurdly excessive than in Vienna: between hoopskirts and headdresses, the women virtually disappeared. On the other hand, the city's cooks dished up the best wildfowl that she had ever tasted.

Crossing the mountains dividing Bohemia from Saxony at night, she peered out the frost-etched window and saw barely an inch of grace between the wheels and a precipice that sheered hundreds of feet into the foaming anger of the River Elbe. Silhouetted up ahead in the moonlight, she glimpsed the postilions—the men who supposedly controlled the coach by riding its horses rather than driving them—nodding off while the horses thundered into a wild gallop. Forcing the window open, she leaned out and shouted,
“Look where you are going!”
Next morning, Mr. Wortley grudgingly commended her for saving all their lives.

Stopping in Leipzig only long enough to buy material to make liveries for still more pages, as well as some “gold stuffs” for Lady Mary—all for half what it cost in Vienna, she exulted—they raced ever northward, arriving in Hanover on the night of November 23. King George loved its neat comforts, but his cramped court had long since grown peevish, despising the place as an overstuffed snippet of a city. The Portuguese ambassador counted himself quite lucky to have two wretched parlors in an inn, but the Wortley Montagus found themselves installed in the spacious luxury of the palace.

“Ah! La revoilà!”
teased the king, indulging in their old private jest as Lady Mary was presented, but though he took little notice of any other lady thereafter, irritating the Hanoverians no end and delighting the English, she soon discerned that his affection was of a different nature than it had been. She amused him, and he wished to impress her, poor lady; that was all. “Both pitted
and
pitied,” thought Lady Mary ruefully as she followed him about, professing rapture with the German ingenuity that invented superb heaters and then disguised them as China jars, statues, or inlaid cabinets. At least she did not have to feign fascination with the results, as baskets piled high with oranges, lemons, and other exotic fruit appeared upon the king's dinner table in the middle of winter. “A fruit perfectly delicious,” she rhapsodized upon her first taste of pineapple.

Lady Mary's friends had all expected she would greet Hanover as an opportunity to pull out of the arduous journey; perhaps the king, too, indulged in that hope. She surprised them all. “While Mr. W is determined to proceed in his design, I am determined to follow him,” she announced, stepping back in the coach.
Forsake mankind, and bid the world adieu,
she told herself.

As the Wortleys reentered Vienna, Lady Mary's friends both new and old grew seriously alarmed. Prince Eugene of Savoy, general-in-chief of the emperor's armies, warned her of killing cold on the snow-covered Hungarian plain. Others hinted at deaths far worse than freezing; Pope's letters twitched that curtain of discretion aside, dwelling openly on rape.

Hungary, Serbia, Bulgaria, and Macedonia had been killing fields for several centuries, yanked this way and that between the Holy Roman Emperor and the Ottoman sultan. Only six months earlier, Prince Eugene's army had annihilated an entire Turkish army at Peterwaradin (modern Petrovaradin, now in Yugoslavia), which lay along their route. Still celebrating that victory, the Viennese were looking forward to more. It was vengeance that inspired them, as well as policy: thirty-three years before that, in 1683, a Turkish army had thrust its way clear to the walls of Vienna, very nearly bursting through them before they were forced to retreat. Whenever the Austrians and Turks took a break from fighting, the Tatars descended to raid anything left worth stealing, while the emperor's Catholic armies turned their swords on Protestants. Thus a territorial contest between superpowers had been razored by religious and cultural differences into endemic savagery of a kind that Western Europe had rarely experienced.