The Speckled Monster (26 page)

Dr. Clark stared at the man in disbelief. “Surely you are not suggesting, sir, that you have been aware for some time that your ship carries this contagion and have disregarded it?”

Captain Durell's eyes flared with anger; the man insisted upon pressing the far edges of gentlemanly behavior. “The health of the men is my surgeon's concern,” he snapped. “Mine is to sail this ship.”

“And mine is to safeguard the health of this town,” growled the doctor. He had not budged an inch since entering: just stood there, his ample girth occupying what seemed like most of the room for air and light that the cabin possessed. “Perhaps,” he went on, forcing his voice back to the cadences of pleasantry, as if they were speaking of gardening or husbandry, “you do not realize the gravity of the situation. This town has not seen a case of smallpox in nineteen years, in which time the population has doubled. In regard to that disease, we are a keg of powder. The smallest spark will not sputter, will not smolder: it will ignite a conflagration whose destructive force you cannot begin to imagine. That, sir, is why we have laws governing quarantine.”

Laws,
hung an unspoken sentence between them,
which you have violated quite flagrantly
. “So perhaps you would be so good as to allow me to examine your logs and paybook, so that I may—in the absence of Mr. Gibson—attempt to piece together the recent history of your crew's health for myself.”

It was an irregular, even audacious invasion of the captain's privacy, but Dr. Clark intended to obtain what he wanted. “Meanwhile,” he added, “no one will leave this ship without my leave.”
Including her captain,
said the ice in his eyes.

The logs were duly produced.

He had, of course, all the evidence he needed to quarantine the ship: sick men in the hold. But Dr. Clark was nothing if not thorough. It was one of the reasons he had become the most prestigious doctor in town. He thought of everything. He explained everything.

For all their neat, spidery writing, their massive officiousness, the logs and books were not easy to decipher. As usual the men were listed by the dates they had volunteered, or been pressed into service. Dr. Clark obtained paper and pen, and in the rock and creak of the ship, he sat at the captain's table, rearranging the information into a list of his own devising, ordering men by their date of death, dismissal, or disappearance, scratching his way through to an understanding of what the captain apparently took pains not to know. Or at least, not to say.

The
Seahorse
had arrived in Boston on October 11, from London via New York, where she had delivered that province's new governor. At the end of November, as she sat in Boston Harbor, three men had died in the space of five days: no reason given.

“What, may I ask,” said Dr. Clark, his voice rasping in the silence, “was the trouble in November?”

“You will have to ask Mr. Gibson,” Durell answered tightly. “As I said, it is his job to keep the crew healthy. Mine to sail the ship.”

It was debatable, thought Dr. Clark, whether his men entirely agreed: certainly they seemed to have concluded that
Seahorse
was not a desirable place to be. By the time she sailed for Barbados with her brood of merchantmen on January 6, 23 men—a fifth of her allowed complement of 115—had jumped ship, though the captain did not mark them down as having run, or deserted, until she sailed out of the harbor without them. Presumably, he had known of this hemorrhage before leaving, even if he refused to know the cause: because he had already replaced quite a few of them.

The problem could have been smallpox, mused the doctor. London—including nearby Deptford, home of the naval dockyards and
Seahorse
's port of origin—had been in the throes of an epidemic for over a year. If the ship had been carrying smallpox, though, surely men would have begun to die during the voyage across the Atlantic. And many more would have jumped ship at first opportunity, in New York: but
Seahorse
had lost only seven men to desertion in that city, plus one more at Staten Island. Furthermore, the disease would not have waited until May to appear in Boston.

More disturbingly,
Seahorse
had been in and around Barbados at the height of the smallpox epidemic there in February and March. Durell had listed eight desertions in Barbados and Tortuga: eight runs, or eight deaths ashore? It was useless to ask. If he could cocoon himself so successfully within the claustrophobic wooden world of his ship, refusing to know what was forcibly held under his nose—well, remaining blissfully ignorant of what happened to his men on shore must be easy.

It was after the first call at Barbados that death began flitting about the ship with the determined abandon of a sailor's whore. One at sea on February 4, just eight days after arriving in Barbados on January 27. Surely, thought Dr. Clark, that could not be smallpox, not yet. No—the logs showed a ship newly burdened with 86 extra armed soldiers, heaving hard on a chase after pirates, until terrible storms had snapped so much of her rigging that they had been in serious danger of the masts tumbling overboard and the ship swamping. Surely that man had died in the mayhem of splintering wood and wet whipping canvas, of waves leaping across the deck: the wild, roaring danger of the sea.

The doctor's finger stopped at a second death, duly noted as drowning, on February 20.

Thereafter, the explanations evaporated. One death, unexplained, on March 30. A second—a Boston man, Samuel Gregory—on April 20, just two days before reaching home. A third on May 4, while the ship lay in the harbor: which made steam rise from the back of the doctor's plump neck.

Again, he asked the captain what had been killing his men. Again, the captain claimed ignorance. Momentarily, the doctor lost his grip on calm. “Damn it all, Durell,” he exclaimed, slamming both hands down on the table. “I am not asking for the precision of a medical report. I am asking, did they have pocks, sir? Did you see wens, boils, blisters, so much as a pimple or two?”

But the man clung steadfastly to his ignorance.

Dr. Clark did a few quick calculations. If just the last three deaths had indeed been smallpox, that indicated anywhere from 9 to 18 men ill. Maybe more. Not enough to cripple the ship: as the captain had implied, most of the men had volunteered or been pressed into service in the home ports of London, Deptford, and Portsmouth. Were likely scraped from the floors of jails, from the sewers of the streets: had imbibed that contagion with their gin-soaked mother's milk, and having survived, could now laugh in the face of smallpox and pass the rum.

A fair number of his crew, though, were mariners recruited in Boston since last October: and many more of these would—or should—be quaking in their boots. No matter what kind of strict quarantine Mr. Gibson might have been able to impose when he was present, the doctor thought grimly.

“I should like to see the entire crew, for medical inspection,” he said aloud.

Reluctantly, Durell gave the order to muster all hands on deck.

There were 111 men currently on the books. The turnout was just what Clark had feared: pathetic. No more than 15, and a handful of those, by the look of them, too scurvy-weakened to be of any use setting sail. According to the master's log, fifty of the missing were accounted for in the sloop Durell had hired and sent chasing the pirate sheltering in Tarpaulin Cove. That should have left 61 men. Three lay below, ill. Which left the hair-raising number of 43 loose ashore, the devil only knew where, or how many were ill.

Dr. Clark stayed only long enough to demand that the yellow jack be run aloft and to inform Captain Durell that he would have to withdraw to Spectacle Island as soon as a pilot who knew his way through the harbor's shifting confusion of sandbars, currents, and deep sea lanes could be secured.

Fifteen men, Clark reflected, would not be near enough to move her even so far on a fine day. He would have to inform his brother and the rest of the selectmen they needed not only a pilot, but mariners. All pockmarked.

The doctor accompanied the captain all the way back up the Long Wharf in silence: his freedom being the unspoken price of a look at the logs. At the bottom of King Street, where Dr. Clark's carriage stood waiting, they bowed one last time.

“I have every confidence,” said the captain, “that it is I who shall prove correct in our differing assessments of the danger at hand.” If the doctor had been a sporting man, he would have tossed out a bet; but the Bostonian elders were a singularly unsporting lot, suffering from extravagant overdoses of a noxious, pinched brand of piety.

“You have a taste for trumpets, sir,” said Dr. Clark. “Do you recall what will happen after the sounding of the first trumpet?”

“What?”
Captain Durell was a Church of England man; it took him a moment to realize that he was being steered, in fine Puritan style, toward the Bible.

The doctor's voice rang out clear and deep.
“There followed hail and fire, mixed with blood, which fell on the earth; and a third of the earth was burnt up.”
Around them, men stopped their work, drew in a step closer. “Apocalypse, sir,” said the doctor. “Hell on earth. And that is just the beginning.” He rapped the driver's box with his stick, and his carriage drove on.

4

CAGING THE MONSTER

ON the twelfth of May, a Friday, the freeholders of the town of Boston—the propertied men sworn in to the company of voters—filed upstairs into the great domed representatives' chamber that occupied most of the upper story of the Town House. Slanting through long narrow windows, the morning light skated over polished wooden floors and splashed the yellow walls with sunny foam. Almost, so warm and relentless was its cheer, they might be in Barbados, rather than the center of Boston, convening a town meeting.

As a first order of business, the men elected Elisha Cooke, Esq., as moderator; then they went noisily to work. There were many contentious items on the agenda, from choosing representatives to the General Court to levying the town for the next year's expenses. Just before two o'clock, the men burrowed out from under piles of unfinished business and adjourned for dinner. At three, they reconvened and began tidying up loose ends. Tucked in at the end of the meeting, as if that might somehow make it negligible, Mr. Cooke mentioned the word
smallpox
.

Stillness fell across the room as Dr. Clark rose to detail his inspection of the
Seahorse
. Sitting amid a tight knot of selectmen, Mr. William Hutchinson, the youngest of the town's chief office-holders—and as of that morning, newly elected representative to the General Court as well—watched his fellows listen with quiet gravity to the doctor's formal report, as if they had not already heard it informally. As if, hearing it, they had not already rejected it outright, mulled it over, cursed it, silently shouted it down, leaned their shoulders hard into its obstinacy, striving to shove it aside with strength accustomed to move mountains. The selectmen were, after all, men of a certain stature, men used to command and obedience. They were not used to standing aside helpless or, worse yet, turning their backs to run. Or, worst of all, he thought, scuttling to the governor to ask for help like scared schoolboys.

As Dr. Clark finished, a deep murmur swept through the room and died away like a dark squall scudding across the open sea. A short, sharp debate ensued, presided over by Elisha Cooke's very sour face. And then, respectfully, the men of the town took a vote.

 

“If anyone can persuade Captain Durell to just action, it will be his good friend the governor,” grumbled Dr. Clark as the company filed out.

If anyone can persuade the governor to any action whatsoever,
thought Hutchinson with uncharacteristic gloom,
it'll be the six selectmen arguing the opposite case. And if there is anyone whose advice he will contradict more happily than ours, it's Dr. John Clark
.

 

In the end, Mr. Cooke and Dr. Clark's younger brother, Selectman William Clark, called on the governor alone, while the rest of the selectmen watched shadows lengthen in the Council chamber. Striding to the central window, his back to the room, hands clasped behind, William Hutchinson looked more ship's captain than fine shore-bound gentleman. Staring eastward down King Street and the Long Wharf, he could see the three masts of the
Seahorse
—the tallest in the harbor—swaying slightly, just beyond the town's grip. They were still brazenly barren, free of the least flutter of a quarantine flag. It put his mind on the ghost of another ship, with a different captain at her helm: John Gore, who had died last year among strangers rather than risk infecting the town with smallpox. Captain Gore had been Mr. Hutchinson's classmate at Harvard. Had been his friend.

Presently, Mr. Cook and Mr. Clark returned with grim faces. The governor had agreed to call the Council, reported Mr. Cook. Meanwhile, he had sent for the insolent puppy of a captain himself. With that, Captain Durell was announced. The blast of air that sprang up as the man strode into the room, thought Hutchinson with a shiver, had been born, surely, in the farthest southern seas, fanged with ice.

Puppy,
scoffed Hutchinson to himself.
Here is a puppy who fancies himself a lion
. A vision of the lion—
the King of the Beasts, and the only one of his kind
in America!
—on display at Mrs. Martha Adams's place in the South End flitted through his head. That creature lazed all day in the sun, not unlike the captain standing at such arrogant ease before them. Not at all the same sharp attention that Durell granted the governor. Hutchinson shifted his gaze back out the window, lest the captain's report snag on his smile.