The Speckled Monster (15 page)

“Mr. Wortley,” she murmured aloud to no one, “you have brought me at last to Paradise.”

Still, the ivory curves and twining limbs of Sofia glimmered in her mind. How was it that two hundred ladies could let their robes slide away without revealing the least sign of smallpox?

 

With the perfectly recovered second cook in tow, Mr. Maitland caught up with the ambassador's party in Adrianople late one night a week after his employers' arrival. Lady Mary was greeted with this joyous news when she awoke the next morning—and also with the information that the man's illness had not been a bad cold. He had gone down with the plague.

“If you ask me, Cook's illness was nothing more than a Turkish hoax—an excuse for a leisurely jaunt through the mountains,” grumbled Lady Mary to the surgeon when he came to pay his respects. “I thought the plague killed everyone by the village-load, but I glimpsed him flailing knives in the kitchen just an hour ago, fat and jolly as ever. Are you quite sure that plague was the problem?”

“Yes, my lady,” said Mr. Maitland.

“You are proving yourself an even more miraculous healer than Dr. Arbuthnot and Mr. Kennedy claimed. . . . But I tell you, in the matter of marvelous medicine, I am quite catching up with you, Mr. Hare, and if you are not careful, I shall speed by like the plodding but patient old Tortoise. In your absence, I have been investigating this inoculation business.”

He groaned.

“Don't be dismal. It sounds quite promising. Except that they do go on about ‘engrafting' and ‘transplantation' distressingly like the king talking up his orchards of pineapples and oranges—a sure way to ruin the taste of pineapple, if you think about it too long. I hope you have a strong stomach: I should like your help in delving into the matter farther. Locate this Dr. Timonius, for example, and sound him out.”

“Yes, my lady.”

5

MY DEAR LITTLE SON

 

Lady Mary ground out an entire wearisome paragraph of obsequiousness. It was worth it: she knew her father could not resist the bright lure of her kowtowing, and she very much wanted him to read on.

 

But the smallpox—that was a different matter. It was also the heart of her story. She had to think very carefully about how to entice her father onward—the smallpox had remained a forbidden topic ever since Will's death.

 

The French ambassador had supplied this strange story . . . would her father wish to know that? No. Might toss it down in disgust—French not high in his regard just now.

 

She went on describing the course of the treatment in detail. Waxing into her conclusion, she threw caution to the winds and stuck the French ambassador in after all:
Every year thousands undergo this operation, and the French Ambassador says pleasantly that they take the Small Pox here by way of diversion, as they take the waters in other countries. There is no example of anyone that has died in it
.

To other friends at court, she had written quite similar letters—anything to her father needed about ten drafts, and there was no point in wasting them. But for her intimates, she had added one more tidbit of information:
You may believe I am very well satisfied of the safety of the experiment since I intend to try it on my dear little son
.

For her father, however, she left that red flag out. Time enough for him to discover that another of his descendants would be battling the smallpox—on purpose. Let him mull this much information over for a while first.

She sanded the letter and sealed it, adding it to the tall stack to be dispatched on the next ship for London.

 

Lady Mary's maid arrived one morning at the head of a double-file troop of slaves invisible beneath armloads of silk, satin, and jewels; the sumptuous Turkish robes she had ordered had arrived. First, the maid sent a filmy smock of white gauze skimming over Lady Mary's head. Then she helped her step into drawers of thin rose damask embroidered with silver flowers, and slipped her arms into a waistcoat fitted to her shape from the same material and fastened with buttons of diamond and pearl. Then came the slender caftan of gold damask, clasped with a broad belt encrusted with cabochon jewels. Over it all—or draped in graceful folds over her arm—went the “curdee,” a loose cloak of blue brocade lined with ermine. Bending down, the maid set before her a pair of slippers in white kid leather embroidered in gold. At last, after brushing Lady Mary's hair into a high shine, the maid settled on her head a cap of a light, shimmering cloth-of-silver, fixing it with a plume of heron feathers and a nosegay of jewels carved to resemble flowers in every particular but scent: pearl buds, ruby roses, diamond jasmine, and topaz jonquils.

Except for the face, the figure Lady Mary saw in the looking glass was slender, elegant, and ravishing. Thereafter, she relished playing the Turk with as much ardor as she had disdained to look Viennese, abandoning European dress as much as possible. When Westerners visited her, she received them in the style and appearance of a Turkish princess. When she explored the streets on her own, she went incognito beneath the voluminous outer cloak and veils of a modest Turkish woman. Only when visiting real Turkish princesses did she grudgingly allow herself to be squeezed back into Viennese court dress.

There was a great deal of visiting to be done, and she made use of every minute. She studied Turkish poetry, cookery, music, and dancing—
so soft, and the motions so languishing,
she sighed to her journal,
that the coldest and most rigid prude upon earth could not have looked upon the dancers without thinking of something not to be spoke of
. She studied the language so assiduously that her new friends teased she was in danger of losing her English. She studied their manners and mores, and concluded that beneath their veils and behind their walls, Turkish ladies possessed more liberty than any others on earth. Most of all, she studied Turkish beauty. Men might swoon over it as a glory of nature, but Lady Mary recognized art when she saw it.

Turkish ladies, she observed, wore their hair in long tresses braided with pearl and ribbon—she counted 110 on one head alone, and heaven knew how long that took. They plucked their brows and lined their lustrous black eyes with kohl—
at a distance, or by candlelight this adds very much to their blackness,
she judged,
but 'tis too visible by day
. They dyed their nails a rosy pink, but here Lady Mary balked: try as she might, she could not accustom herself to tinted nails.

But their complexions, she sighed, needed no enhancement at all—and was surprised to learn that this, too, was art: one and all, they credited the marvelous powers of the Balm of Mecca. One lady presented her with the princely gift of a pot of it, swathed in thick pity. Lady Mary ignored the pity, and took the pot. That night, she opened the lid and sniffed at it, her eyes watering at its sudden pungent scent. To judge by the lovely bloom of Turkish faces, she told herself, she ought to think well of it. Surely, if they had contrived means to stop the smallpox, they might also be trusted to have found a way to repair its ravages.

She scooped some of the white cream on her finger and spread it onto her face; it burned with cold fire. Staring in the looking glass, she saw the Woman in the pockmarked Moon. The cream that could repair that would truly be a wonder.

The change the next morning was indeed wonderful: her face had gone from ghastly white to glowing crimson, and had swollen to such extraordinary size that she thought it might burst. At breakfast, Mr. Wortley laughed himself into a coughing fit and then dipped into anger. How could she embarrass him so? What if the sultan chose this afternoon to wish to present her to a daughter, or a wife? They would think he had married a giant strawberry. A prize hog's ham, he said the next day, as the red began to fade. Not for three days did Lady Mary's old face return, however. Her Turkish friends insisted that her beauty was much mended, but Lady Mary could see no improvement—and not for lack of looking.

I cannot in good conscience advise you to make use of it,
she wrote to the ladies anxiously awaiting news of the legendary stuff in London.
I know not how it comes to have such universal applause. For my part, I never intend to endure the pain of it again. Do as you please, only remember that before you use it that your face will not be such as you'll care to show in the drawing room for some days after
.

It was to be very much hoped, she remarked to Mr. Maitland, that the Turks' method of preventing smallpox worked markedly better than the folly of their favorite restorative.

 

At last, Mr. Wortley was presented to the sultan. Perhaps the sensuality of Turkey had pierced even Mr. W's armor, or perhaps this brush with power fired his cold, careful soul with a sudden need to exult. In any case, he came to visit Lady Mary among her carpets and cushions, her jasmine and honeysuckle, her songbirds and tinkling fountains. By the time they left Adrianople for Constantinople, Queen of Cities, late in May, Lady Mary was pregnant.

 

The largest, wealthiest, and most sophisticated metropolis in the world, Constantinople was certainly the most tolerant, and possibly the most ruthless as well. Not that Mr. Wortley could or would grant it such superlatives, of course. The French ambassador found himself freely able to admit that the sultan's capital was larger than Paris, but Mr. Wortley would not own that it was larger than London. It did not seem so crowded, thought Lady Mary; she could at least give him that.

She swept into the city sitting cross-legged on cushions on the shallow floor of a carriage lined with cedar and upholstered in silk, fitfully twitching aside the curtains that kept her decently veiled from the eyes of men. The best way to see the expanse of the Turkish capital, however, was by water. Being rowed hither and yon on the Bosphorus, she wrote home, was much nicer than going in a barge to Chelsea. It offered a beautiful variety of prospects: the Asian side was covered with fruit trees, villages, and delightful swooping landscapes. On the European side, stood the city on its seven hills, with gardens, pine and cypress trees, white stone palaces, mosques, gilded turrets, and spires all rising one above another with as much beauty and symmetry as the treasures in a cabinet, she thought, arranged by the most skillful hands: jars showing themselves above jars, mixed with canisters and candlesticks.
Very odd comparison,
she told herself—and everyone else who would listen,
but it gives me an exact image of the thing
.

Like all other Westerners, the British ambassador and his retinue lived in Pera—no more a suburb, Lady Mary insisted with horror at the very notion, than Westminster was a suburb of London. She was close to the city's teeming wonders, but she was also close to its teeming ills. “The smallpox, my lady, is even more malignant here than in London,” reported Mr. Maitland, shaking his head gravely. “As far as I can ascertain, when it flares into epidemics, between one third and one half of everyone who comes down with it dies.”

September,
she promised herself through clenched teeth, dread once again coiling tightly about her heart. But September and its smallpox inoculation parties seemed to dally in the distant future; they would never come. Her son, whispered her fears, would die before she could save him.