The Speckled Monster (44 page)

“Who is it wants to know?”

“I'm doin' you a favor, silly bitch. Or tryin' to. But it all rides on you bein' unbit as yet by the smallpox,” he said, reaching toward her cheek. She snapped at him again, and he snatched his hand back. He stood over her, wrestling with his temper, his fists clenching and unclenching. After a moment he spat. “You can follow me to it”—he shrugged—“or you can stay 'ere and wait for one o' the boys to fetch you to the Stone Hold.” He bent and unlocked her shackles. “Your choice,” he said, and turned to leave.

She frowned, searching about in her mind for the trick she was sure was there somewhere.
What could the king possibly want with a ravaged soul like her?
Whatever it was, it could not possibly be as bad as this castle of misery. She pushed herself up to a stand, and stumbled after him.

The warden himself looked on as the head jailer lined a dozen women up against one wall of a large sunny room; the sudden burst of sweet air made her a little dizzy. She squinted against the glare, and became aware of dark figures huddled in the far doorway.

“Her,” said a peremptory Scottish voice, pointing at poor Mary North with a long, stiff demon claw that she only later realized was a walking stick. Mary was hustled off wailing through another door in the side wall.

“And her,” said the voice. The second woman, whom Lizzy didn't know, fainted and had to be carried away.

“That's it, then,” said another voice, sounding of velvet and sweet English plums. Lizzy managed to gasp in a small bit of air.

“No,” said the Scottish voice. “One more,” and then slowly, ever so slowly, as if it might take as long as the entire previous eighteen years of her life, she watched that claw rise to point straight at her. She went cold with fear, and lost all power to move. It did not matter; she was shoved through that door in the wake of the other two women.

It opened onto a stone corridor; holding her up between them, two guards half dragged, half carried her down the passage and into another room, empty save for a washtub, five steaming basins of water, and a short, squat bundle of disapproval that turned out to be a woman jailer. Lizzy's clothes—no more than rags, really—were removed and burned. Under the jailer's watchful eye, Lizzy scrubbed herself with harsh lye soap until her skin burned. She rinsed every hair on her body with tobacco juice—twice—and then topped it with the strange luxury of lavender oil. She was handed a lice comb, and most degradingly made to use it, naked, while the warden watched in disgusted silence.

Finally, she was bundled into a clean set of clothes, almost new, and hustled back down the passage, this time to a smaller room. This time, the watchers entered the room with her, though she was still made to stand in the far corner.

She had not known the prison contained any room of such luxury: the walls were several feet thick as they were everywhere else, but here they were pierced by tall windows streaming with golden light. Carpets softened and warmed the walls, fragrant rushes strewed the floor, and two plush armchairs huddled in the far corner near a fireplace crackling merrily with a fire that drove away the damp.

“Now, madam, here is your choice,” said the Scot from one of the armchairs. “You are a convicted felon, condemned to the gallows at Tyburn. You may choose to go that direct way to your maker, or you may avail yourself of the king's mercy.”

“Wot's the catch?”

The warden cuffed her from behind. “Mind your manners for the gentlemen,” she growled.

“Well, 'e ain't goin' to pardon the likes o' me for no catch,” she said.

Across the room, the gentleman laughed and held up a hand, staving off the warden's next blow. “The catch,” he said, “is that you must allow yourself to be inoculated.”

Lizzy's face furled into thought. “Wot'zat?”

“A remedy for the smallpox.”

Her eyes narrowed.

“Give the gentleman your answer,” said the warden impatiently.

She looked at the Scottish man. “Not meaning to be ungrateful, sir, but I wants to know wot it is you want to do to me,” she said, dodging the next blow. “ 'Aven't I got a right to ask such a question?”

 

Across the room in the stiff, shabby armchair that he fervently hoped was not crawling with lice, Charles Maitland considered Mrs. Elizabeth Harrison. She was not, like so many of the others, out to trick him just for a brief crow of victory, he thought. Or perhaps she was, and just hid it better behind a pretty face—for her face was surprisingly pretty, minus the grime. At least he had been right about the light of intelligence in her eyes—which was what had drawn him to point her out of that dismal crowd, in the first place.

“I will scratch you on each arm, and insert a tiny bit of smallpox matter,” he said.

Most ladies he knew, unprepared, would have shrilled in horror, and many would have fainted dead away. True, she was no lady. But she was nonetheless a young—touchingly young—woman, and her reaction surprised him. She just cocked her head and considered.

“If it works,” he continued, “you'll come down with a light case of that distemper, rendering you secure from catching it in the natural way for the rest of your days. Which, if you accept the bargain, stand to stretch to a considerably greater number than if you don't.”

“Wot makes you think it'll work?”

He sighed. It was a good question, to which he had no good answer. “I have seen it work on two children of the quality.”

Her eyebrows shot up. “Then why should the king in 'is castle want to know about 'ow it works on the nonquality?”

“The king in his castle”—
how had she known that?
—“wishes to know whether it works steadily.” He watched her register the implications—yes, she was a smart one. Much braver in the face of knowledge, he suspected, than drowning in the miasma of ignorance. She had looked skittish as a deer when first shoved in the room, but none of his revelations, stark as they were, had made her flinch. Far from it; she was growing more sure of herself with every tidbit of fact he gave her. “The king, you see, cannot in good conscience ask free men and women to risk death to satisfy his curiosity. You, though, have already been consigned to death. In his mercy, he offers you a gamble at life.”

She smiled; she still had most of her teeth. “I like you, guv'nor,” she said. “I thinks yer honester than most. I'll try yer med'cine.”

 

“Straight from the fryin' pan into the fire,” she growled to Cawthery later, as the six chosen felons had gathered in the Press Yard hall—as grand a place, really, as she had ever dwelt in. Clean, at least in comparison to the tenements she had grown up in. As for the wards on the common side of the prison, there was no comparison.

There were six of them in all: three women, and three men. All convicted felons, facing the gallows. Cawthery was one, she was glad enough for that, though she had little doubt that he'd trot his pardon straight back to the excitement of robbing the king's highways. Twenty-five was too old to learn new tricks, he said, and too young not to need the easy money of the old ones.

He was by no means the oldest of their little company, though. At thirty-six, Mary North granted herself the position as matriarch of their new little clan. She was to be hanged for returning to London after being transported overseas for robbing a linen draper near Cripplegate; Maryland had not agreed with her, she sniffed. She was not born to be in service, especially in such wilting heat, so she had slipped away to the docks and worked her way back home as a sailor's dolly. Unfortunately, her husband had found the bounty on her head more to his liking than sharing her widely shared bed. So here she was.

Ann Tompion was twenty-five, same as Cawthery; like Lizzy, she had been convicted of theft. Of all of them, she had taken the steepest tumble down the long stair of Fortune: her husband had once been watchmaker to old King William himself. But Mr. Tompion had died nigh on ten years ago, and his widow, who was no good with watches, had found it hard to make ends meet. So she had met her end, as the gibe went, by stealing it. John Alcock, at twenty, was in for horse theft. Richard Evans, just Lizzy's age, did not deign to give them his story.

He did not fit in with the others in any case. They had all heard that not having had smallpox was a condition of the bargain: but Evans's face had clearly been cratered and gnarled by its claws. He sat alone in a corner, sneering at the rest of them.

“As if it took talent to put pocks on your own face,” needled Mrs. Tompion.

Evans responded by drinking himself into a solitary stupor.

 

The Royals, as they soon came to be called, were not the only prisoners in that exalted part of the prison, of course; they mingled with the lucky few who could afford to remain in the Press Yard. As space had got tighter, what with the beds reserved for the Royal Experiment, the price of the other Press-Yard beds had risen considerably. It did not endear the Royals to their fellows. Nor did the specter of pardons.

That night in the Press Yard taproom, one of the women from the women's ward taunted “Their Highnesses” mercilessly. “I'll tell you the meaning of nockle-ate, you knuckleheaded fools,” she said, staring hard at Lizzy. “Them gentlemen'll drain yer blood and then drink it.” She took a long, gurgling suck on her gin, for illustration. “The rest of us ain't such want-wits as to believe blabber about remedies for the smallpox. If there was such a thing—an' I an't sayin' there is, mind you—but if there was, would they be trying it on the likes of us?”

She put both palms on the table and leaned forward. “It's virgin's blood they'll be needing—an' 'tis their own great pox they'll be curing. On'y, ain't a maid among the lot o' you, is there? So it'll all be useless.” She cackled with delight and drained her gin.

“Have you seen what they done to the common room?” said someone else. “Set a rail acrosst it, like an altar rail, and lined up benches on the far side.”

“Just like I tole you,” said the woman, slamming her empty cup down on the table. “Them gentlemen'll hold a black mass and drain yer blood.”

Lizzy ushered a pale and shaking Mary North back to bed; Ann Tompion followed, her face hard and blank. Their chamber was a plain stone room with three beds, tables, and chairs; the walls were bare but for biblical passages and scraps of verse written in charcoal. She couldn't decipher them, but Mrs. Tompion could.

“See that one?” said the watchmaker's widow, pointing. “It says,
Abandon all hope, ye who enter here
.” Then she closed her eyes and went to sleep, still tense and unmoving.

Clinging stubbornly to hope and the memory of the doctor's kind eyes, Lizzy lay awake until dawn.

5

SIGNs AND WONDERS

 

AT the top of his house on Ship Street, Dr. Cotton Mather stood at his library window, glaring at the people scuttling by below and the masts bristling along the wharves across the street. Beyond that brooded the ocean, from whence had come so many of Boston's fortunes and misfortunes. The contagion that was its most recent curse was spreading with gathering speed, and so was the fear of it, like a rolling black fog that made old friends stumble blindly past one another in the street.

Already, the town lay under dreadful judgments, but it was ripening for more, with its monstrous and crying wickedness, the vile abuse that it hurled at him. And for what? He had done nothing but instruct the physicians how to save many precious lives. He smiled in vengeful triumph: they meant to frighten him, no doubt. But all they did was to give him the glory of being crucified with Christ.

A knock jarred him from his reverie. “Come,” he rasped.

The door cracked opened slightly, but no one entered. He strode over and swept it back against the wall. Sammy stood ghostlike in the doorway, his face pale. Tears coursed silently down his cheeks.

He pulled the boy inside and made him sit down.

“It's Will,” his son stammered at last.

Cold prickled over Dr. Mather's neck, followed by waves of heat. Will Charnock was Sammy's seventeen-year-old best friend, his chamber mate at Harvard. John Charnock's second son, just as Sammy was his second son. Even after returning home from Cambridge, the two boys had spent almost every waking moment together.

“He broke out in a fever last night,” Sammy said miserably. “Dr. Clark says it is the smallpox.” Something fell through the pit of Dr. Mather's belly, and the world went dark for a moment. When his eyes cleared, he found his son on his knees before him. “I want to try your new operation, Father,” he begged.

Dr. Mather recoiled.
“Not mine.”

“Please, Father,” wailed Sammy, his voice breaking with terror. “Let me be inoculated.”

How could he refuse? How, on the other hand, could he agree?
Searching desperately for some way between yes and no, he dropped one hand on his son's head. “Let us pray,” he said. As he once had with Lizzy, he now spent hours on his knees with Sammy, supplicating the Lord. When the trembling and weeping had finally subsided, he stood.

Sammy, still on his knees, awaited his father's blessing. “May I send Obadiah for Dr. Boylston?”

“No.”
Dr. Mather drew in a sharp breath and said with more calm, “Not yet.”

Sammy opened his mouth to protest, but Dr. Mather raised a warning hand. “I will take it into consideration,” he said.

Sammy bowed his head, and rose to go. At the door, he paused. “Please hurry,” he whispered, without looking back. Then he was gone.