The Speckled Monster (23 page)

As they glided into the outer harbor, Captain Gore made it clear to his passengers and crew that no one would go ashore anywhere but into quarantine on Spectacle Island until they knew the fate of the eighth man, and beyond that, until the last scab had dropped from the last survivor. He had sailed in so close only to deliver this news and to catch one glimpse of home—not just the town, but the tall brick house high on the slopes of Beacon Hill, where Rebecca awaited him. That Rebecca herself sailed out as near as possible to him had been at once a surprise and a relief: it was just like her.

Soon after, the ship drew away eastward, mooring off the quarantine island named for its resemblance to a pair of spectacles through which the ocean could peer up at the skies. The sick were taken ashore to the Province Hospital, clean and new built for the purpose just three years before, and John Gore settled down in his cabin to wait out the fate of the eighth man: himself.

He did not have to wait long. The following day his temperature soared. Three days later, on All Hallow's Eve, the telltale rash sputtered across his skin, growing thicker by the hour. For a week, he clung to life, to the cool, smooth-skinned dream of his wife, but his luck had run out. On November 7, he died. The following evening he was consigned to a grave scooped from the windswept sand of the quarantine island.

Officially, this was not news. It was a secret, kept out of the papers, whirring in hushed whispers. It spread through town, of course, like fire in a dry midwinter wind. The memorial service, a week later, filled the Brattle Street Church to overflowing—not for the man, though he was widely liked, but for the martyr: the captain with the courage to die in sight of home, yet in exile, for the sake of a city.

“Captain Gore was truly an ornament to his country, to the college, to the town, and to our church,” Mr. William Cooper preached at the funeral, his voice ringing out over hushed weeping, his eyes held with kindness on Rebecca. “Very much the honor of his order among us, a glory to his profession,
the beauty of the sea
.”

 

“Ships!”
shouted six-year-old Tommy Boylston, dashing into his father's apothecary shop, as Saturday afternoon dipped toward sundown and the Sabbath on the twenty-second of April 1721.

He was Zabdiel Boylston's favorite among his six surviving children, in spite of his effort not to have favorites. At fourteen, Zabby—his namesake—had reached an age when even the best of sons would clash all too easily with his father, and Zabby was wild, though Dr. Boylston hoped not irretrievably spoiled. John, thirteen, was on the other hand alarmingly earnest and good. As for the girls, nine-year-old Jerusha and eight-year-old Mary already twittered like little ladies. Lizzy, the baby at four, was thankfully as fat, firm, and jolly as her elder sister of the same name, lost to death before this Lizzy's birth, had once been frail. But Tommy—he was all imp. Just like his uncle, Zabdiel's brother Tom, after whom young Tommy took his name (or half of it, as Tom said; the boy's grandfather had to be allowed his fair share). Tommy—little thief—had also taken Tom's walk, Tom's talk, and Tom's laugh, as well as the same rock-solid certainty in Zabdiel's invincibility that Tom had possessed as a child. Like his uncle before him, he yearned to grow up to be just like Zabdiel. How could such antics and adoration not fill one with delight?

“Ships!”
Tommy repeated breathlessly, all other words having evaporated.

There were always ships in Boston Harbor, of course. It would surely take more than a ship or two, thought Dr. Boylston, to produce quite the thrum of excitement streaming through the town's streets. He dropped pestle into mortar and let his son tug him out the door of the shop. The lilacs in his spacious garden would burst any day now, filling the whole street with their sweet lavender foam, but as yet the damp prickle of salt from the harbor still reigned supreme. A few yards down, father and son rounded a corner into the open space of Dock Square at the working heart of the city: and stopped short, eyes and mouths round with awe.

From end to end, the outer harbor was scattered with the plume and puff of sails—twenty, thirty, forty ships—all bearing down on the town like a flock of gigantic white-winged swans chasing day out of the thickening east.

It was the Saltertudas fleet in from the West Indies, ushered home by the sleek power of His Majesty's Ship
Seahorse
. She was a warship, though not one of the behemoth ships-of-the-line meant to spout half a ton of fiery death at France with each thundering breath. In the eternal shifting dance between strength and speed, her makers had turned into the wind, letting it streamline their very dreams, not to mention their plans and their planing tools. She was no lightweight—she carried twenty six-pound guns and so could throw sixty pounds of fire and steel with one roar—but she was built for speed, and speed she had. Zabdiel was no seaman, not by a long shot, but to his eye she was lithe, lissome, and lovely.

The beauty of the sea
. How that phrase from John Gore's funeral sermon hung on the mind.

Boston, it had to be said, was overdue for some beauty. Between the ravages of pirates and a scarcity of currency, trade had very nearly ground to a halt. At least the navy was attempting to fix the part of the problem it could reach: assigning ships like
Seahorse
to escort merchant fleets in convoys, sending others in heavily armed squadrons to scour pirate-infested waters from Surinam to Nova Scotia. The provincial government, by contrast, had proved worse than useless in solving the currency crisis.

Within days of arriving, the new governor, Samuel Shute—a bit of a pompous ass, admittedly—had tripped into a petty personal feud with Elisha Cooke, Esq. That gentleman was known as a hard-drinking boor: once, while too drunk to stand, he had been heard to call the governor a blockhead. But he was also the wealthiest and most powerful man in New England, the boss who ran Boston's political machine—and through it, the province's elected house of representatives. These two men, both crucial to the smooth running of any government, had mishandled each other colossally; their mutual contempt had quickly seeped through their circles of friends, which had hardened into factions. By now, the parties were far more interested in thwarting each other than in governing.

Still, Zabdiel reflected, these irritations seemed easy enough to sort into some kind of order—enough to comprehend them, at any rate, if not to fix them. The private troubles that had haunted his family through the autumn and winter were more amorphous, as hard to grasp as sea fog at midnight, impossible to control.

In July, Jerusha—at forty-one, old enough to make pregnancy frighteningly dangerous—had borne their eighth child, a son she named for her brother Josiah. Jerusha, thank the Lord, had survived, but little Jo had not. His first pink bloom gradually, inexorably, faded to blue-gray. All too soon, they had laid him to rest in the churchyard next to their first Elizabeth.

Helpless to cure his wife's hollow-eyed grief, Zabdiel awoke one morning in October to find a professional squabble forced upon him. Not in the open, but in a sly campaign waged in whispers over tea tables and punch bowls, screamed silently in advertisements in the newspapers:

 

This proclamation was not, for all its air of proud innocence, a lone voice of salvation crying in the wilderness: it was a salvo of heavy artillery. There were upwards of fifteen doctors practicing in Boston—but this boast was aimed with precision at Dr. Boylston's fame throughout the province as a high-risk surgeon skilled in cutting away cancers as well as excising bladder stones. Almost, it had the flavor of the conniving malice of that young Scottish snake, Dr. William Douglass—except that Douglass would not admit the merits of Dr. Sharp any more than he would admit those of Dr. Boylston.

The part that really grated was the postscript:
N.B. he gives his advice to the poor gratis
. Boylston did not give advice to anyone gratis: which is not to say that he was heartless in the matter of caring for the poor. Jerusha teased that they had traded places: he had become as sentimental as the maiden aunt she used to be. Time and again, he took hopeless cases into their home, nursing them around the clock for months, doing his best to alleviate advanced syphilis, or patch together whatever ribbons and shards were left after knife fights or savage wife-beatings.

He just demanded, as was proper, that someone pay for his services: if not the patients, then the township responsible for their welfare. Some thought his charges high at first glance, but they were scrupulously just. In tricky cases, they included the unusual luxury of room and board in his house, with skilled nursing day and night. Furthermore, his drugs were never substandard, never siphoned off, but delivered at the full dose, in the highest quality he could cull from his garden and orchard, from the woods, from fields and mines as far away as Spain, Turkey, the Spice Islands, China.

He didn't mind if patients who were neither destitute nor flush with cash eked out their payments across years, so long as they made an honest effort meet their debt. He had been poor once himself, on his own in the world after his father died: but had paid off every debt, every bit of charity, to the last penny. It was a matter of respect.

In private, he was hurt by this sly challenge to both his competence and his compassion. In public, he responded with dignified silence.

His admirers had not been so reticent. Eventually, at Jerusha's urging, he had allowed their indignation to bubble over into print. Even so, it had been odd to read this description in the same newspaper:

 

Dr. Boylston had not previously advertised this spectacular case. Partly because he was not sure Sarah Winslow would live: cancers as far gone as hers often came back. Partly because no one in New England had ever dreamed of such an operation, much less performed one. He knew what would happen. Through most people's minds, over and over, would slice the vision of a circle of men holding a woman down on her own kitchen table, while he, Dr. Boylston, stood in the middle, one hand forking the diseased breast, the other scything through it with a ruthless blade. The flesh would fall to floor as he reached for the red-hot cauterizing iron, sealing the wound by searing it, the sizzle and steam pierced by screaming of a kind rarely heard outside childbirth or war.

That was the swift horror of surgery. What the doctor could not make most people understand was that it was also the most compact, condensed part of an operation, lasting mere minutes. The vast bulk of his time was spent cleaning, not cutting. At the Winslows, he had spent hours supervising the scrubbing of that already clean kitchen: the table, the floor, the hearth. He had cleaned his instruments himself, trusting no one else to do it. And he had instructed the maid how to help Mrs. Winslow clean herself just as thoroughly.

Because he arrived with a cask of strong rum, people thought he soused his patients with it, but that was not true. Alcohol only made people bleed faster; he strictly forbade it, at least on the inside. He doused them rather liberally, however, on the outside, all around the area where he was to cut. He allowed opium for the pain, but only after the operation was over.

A smaller but significant bit of time was taken up with study: he had examined Sarah minutely, determining exactly where and how he meant to cut.

Only then had he motioned to the ministers to add physical force to the heavenly might of their praying, and hold the woman down. (That was what they were there for, as far as Dr. Boylston was concerned: there was no way his man Jack, though as fine an assistant as you could wish, could hold her still all by himself.)

The fee of £35, though steep, had been as scrupulously fair as all his others. Mrs. Winslow had been far too ill to come to Boston, so he and Jack, the black slave he had trained as his assistant, had ridden all the way down to her home on Cape Cod. After the operation, they had lingered in Rochester a few more days, until Boylston was sure she was out of danger. He had been anxious about the cautery. Ligatures were much cleaner, and healed prettier: but that wound had been too wide and too bloody for stitching. He had risked an infection-prone burn in exchange for the speed of fire.