The Speckled Monster (47 page)

And it may be hoped with the more Efficacy because his dearest Companion (and his Chamber-fellow at the College) dies this Day of the Small-Pox taken in the common Way
.

If only Dr. Clark would allow him to bring Lizzy into this fellowship of safety, he would rest easy. But Dr. Clark had made it clear that she would suffer no such operation while living under his roof. And with Lydia's glittering eyes following his every move, Dr. Mather knew he could not have his daughter back in the house. Lydia would not dare to touch Sammy, but the girls she would torment night and day.

 

Dr. Douglass conferred with Dr. Clark, and Dr. Clark conferred with his brother and the rest of the selectmen. After being threatened with a felony indictment, Dr. Boylston had now tested them not once but twice. They would be a laughingstock if he walked away from such threats unscathed.

“We will get an indictment,” said Mr. Cooke. “And then we will get a conviction.”

 

For the first few days, as the disease burrowed into Sammy, Dr. Mather hovered at his door, full of generosity and nervous energy. He would press his many terrified kinsmen to undertake the wonderful operation, he thought. For the sake of the world at large, he would write a treatise for the London press—especially apropos, now that he could lay claim to notable experience. For the sake of his own humble corner of the world, he would recommend the insertion of some edifying passages into Mr. Campbell's
News-Letter
.

The twentieth—the sixth day, the usual time for the first fever to bloom in inoculated smallpox—came and went, leaving Sammy cool. The next day, the tiresome
Courant
struck again: and again, the lead column was anonymous but obviously by Dr. Douglass. At the Mather house, the day crawled by, and both father and son began to fret. Dr. Boylston promised a blooding on the eighth day, if no fever appeared.

The morning of August 22 hunched into the afternoon. Minutes before the doctor arrived, headache hammered through Sammy's skull; his skin was soon clammy with sweat. Obadiah must have given Dr. Boylston the news out in the yard, thought Dr. Mather; the doctor was humming as he stomped up the stairs.

“You are cheerful today,” he said acidly, as the doctor was shown into Sammy's chamber.

“You will never guess who I inoculated this morning,” answered Dr. Boylston.

Dr. Mather gave up with a quick frown. He did not care; he cared only about Sammy.

“Samuel Valentine,” crowed Dr. Boylston.

Dr. Mather's heart rose in his throat, spilling over with sweet relief and not a little sour-green envy. For he knew as well as anyone what that meant.

 

“Bloody hell!”
swore Elisha Cooke when Dr. Clark delivered that same news to the select men in their customary room upstairs at the Bunch of Grapes Tavern. “Bloody hell,” he said again, as it sunk in. The news was surely worth two such epithets, possibly more: for young Valentine's father was John Valentine—no inconsequential ally of the governor's, but His Majesty's advocate general for the provinces of the Massachusetts Bay and New Hampshire, and the colony of Rhode Island. He was, in short, the crown's chief lawyer in New England. To make matters worse—as if they needed to be made worse—the boy's mother was Mary Lynde, daughter of old Judge Samuel Lynde, and niece of the present judge and councilor Benjamin Lynde.

With Mr. Valentine party to the operation, there would be no indictment on a charge of felony murder, or felony anything else for that matter. The governor, Council, and all the highest legal apparatus of the province might as well have sent trumpeters on white horses clanging through the streets, proclaiming inoculation to be right, good, and necessary.

“Dr. Boylston must be stopped,” insisted Dr. Clark.

“Oh, he will be stopped,” said Mr. Cooke. “They will all be stopped.”

 

The next day, Dr. Boylston inoculated his own eldest son and namesake, Zabdiel junior, who rushed home after finding that he had lain in an infected chamber two nights running. One of the college friends he had been bunking with for the summer break had broken into the dread fever just that morning. That same day, Dr. Boylston inoculated three more Langdons: Edward's much younger brother and sister, Nathaniel and Margaret, and his niece Joanna Syms along with Ebenezer Thornton's new bride, Elizabeth, just nineteen. A neighbor of the Langdons, Mr. Thornton was one of the wealthiest men in the North End.

 

At the opposite end of Boston's world, out on the Neck at the Roxbury line, the General Court descended upon the George Inn. The country men had absolutely refused to set foot in the cloud of contagion that enveloped the city. Even the governor had recognized that to demand a meeting in the Town House was futile.

Owned by Jerusha Boylston's uncle, Stephen Minot, the rambling old inn was known far and wide as a jolly place to break the long ride—and even longer walk—between Boston and Roxbury. With the entire General Court squeezed inside, not to mention regular wanderers and a small army of serving girls handing out beer, strong Madeira wine, rum punch, and gin, though, the huge open common room that took up almost the entire ground floor no longer seemed so spacious. In fact, it seemed hair-raisingly cramped and fetid. It was impossible not to draw breath that reeked of having already been breathed by someone else in the midst of drinking and smoking. Hoping to bake, sting, or drown the invisible contagion and render it harmless, most of the men smoked and drank all the harder. Now and again, they looked at each other askance, and went silent or stepped outside for a breath of the hot, humid air of late summer. In such a crowd, thought Dr. Clark as he gazed around the room, the angel of death had only to hover over one man and breathe through his breath to spew death over a multitude.

Mr. Cooke began agitating for a move to Cambridge. The urgency of that move, however, was soon lost as the House began squabbling with the governor and council upstairs over who had the right to send what kind of messages to whom and when. The minutes ticked away.

 

In town, word of Sammy Mather's inoculation leaked out; crowds now followed Dr. Mather everywhere. He had forgotten his promise to help Dr. Boylston. The following day, however, the twenty-fifth of August, the doctor gently recalled it for him as they stood together, watching the rash that had at last begun to flow across his son.

G.D.,
Dr. Mather wrote after the doctor had departed.
I will assist my Physician in giving to the Public some Accounts about relieving the Small-Pox in the way of Transplantation, which may be of great Consequence!
Odd, he thought, how quickly Dr. Boylston has become “my” physician. He skimmed a few pages back: yes, only a few weeks ago, he was a stranger: “the” physician. Dr. Mather bit the inside of his lip and hoped tightly that the shift would turn out to have been a good one. Sammy's fever had not gone off as he thought it should. Dr. Boylston, however, was not at all properly distressed. Indeed, the doctor went so far as to look pleased.
Pleased!
No matter how hard Dr. Mather suggested that his son's case surely ought to be declared hazardous, Dr. Boylston remained implacably and most irritatingly sanguine.

Dr. Mather turned with renewed zeal to supplying his son with instructions for suitable prayers, cries, and offerings to heaven. The boy would have to make quite a noise, he grumbled to himself, to counteract the clamor in the street.

 

Out on the Neck, the House posted guards at the doors to the inn to keep strangers out of their chambers. Inside, they went on bickering with the governor.

Up in Salutation Alley, Esther Webb was recovering from a fearsome bout with confluent smallpox; her cousin Abigail, John's daughter—also uninoculated—was dying. On the twenty-eighth, the
Courant
appeared yet again, though notably mutilated. A delegation from the governor had represented to Mr. Franklin exactly how much trouble he might get into if such libel continued; his own father had been less polite.

He had at last canceled Dr. Douglass's column, though he left a whole page blank, in expensive if quietly eloquent protest. A waste of spirit in an expense of paper, someone had quipped.

Still, what was left was bad enough. The lead column written by a minister, no less. Even if it was that Anglican prig Henry Harris of King's, and it was in tone quite different—being at least rational and void of personal insult—still, such public mixing of journalism and divinity was shameful.

 

Again and again, he warned his flock to repent, lest they provoke the Lord to terrible vengeance, even in His holy places.

On August 29, as Sammy's pocks were maturing into full pustules, the fever veered around and came roaring back. Dr. Mather spent hours in solitary prayer, summoning the strength to offer up his son as a sacrifice to the Lord. Dr. Boylston, however, still refused to take proper alarm, scribbling in his case notes only that the boy had a “brisk” fever. His own son, he said, had suffered much worse. It outraged Dr. Mather: no matter how high Tommy Boylston's fever had spiked, it had all been within the bounds of the first fever. His son's warmth, surely, was a harbinger of the dreaded secondary fever. He stomped angrily up to his study.

 

If only Providence would reveal some sign that he was Doing Good.

Sometimes, Providence required to be provided with a slate. Reaching across the clutter of his desk, Dr. Mather slid his Bible toward him. Holding the book gently in one hand, resting its spine against the desk, he shut his eyes, said a quick prayer, and released his hand. With a small thud, the book fell open.

He opened his eyes, letting the black and white resolve into a single verse:

Go thy Way, thy Son liveth
.

Tears sprang to his eyes. It was the very passage he had been hoping beyond hope to read: Jesus healing the son of a nobleman at Capernaum. Even as this thought slid through his mind, though, suspicion slithered in its wake. It was too perfect; he had somehow caused the book to open just at this point.

He had
not
influenced the outcome, he told himself; he had not. Look: hadn't a paper lodged just behind the page in question put the book at some disadvantage for opening at this longed-for place? That the Bible had fallen open here anyway was surely the very sign and wonder for which he had pleaded. Providence had not merely spoken, but shouted the righteousness of his ways.

Dr. Mather's heart lifted, and he sped downstairs to see his son.

6

NEWGATE

 

 

THE following morning at nine sharp Mr. Maitland, the king's physicians, Sir Hans Sloane and Dr. Steigerthal, and the Prince and Princess of Wales's apothecary, Mr. Lilly, entered the hall where the prisoners had first been chosen, and where they had been gathered again. Twenty-five more physicians, surgeons, and apothecaries jostled through the door behind them, including Dr. Harris and Dr. Keith. Many were members of the Royal College of Physicians and the Royal Society; a few were ambitious young doctors from the Continent. To their noses, they held clove-studded oranges or handkerchiefs drenched in perfume.

A barrier like a knee-high fence had been run across the middle of the room, parting the prisoners from the spectators. On the prisoners' side, there were six high-backed chairs and a table. On the spectators side, the armchairs had been pushed to the back and a row of benches installed. The men shoved the benches aside and crowded forward in a huddle.

On the other side, the prisoners sat pale and staring, as Sir Hans Sloane stood to the fore, welcomed the company, and launched into a brief lecture describing the operation as performed by Drs. Timonius and Pylarinus in the Levant, and now, in their own city of London, by Mr. Maitland. Here he stopped to bow gracefully to the surgeon; the surgeon bowed in turn, first to Sir Hans, and then to the gathered assembly. In a ripple of heads, all the men bowed back, save Dr. Wagstaffe and Dr. Freind, who stood with defiantly straight backs, their faces pinched with contempt.

Sir Hans ignored them. “In order to demonstrate the operation's power in itself, it has been determined that no art or medicine shall be used to promote the eruptions—not even so much as obliging the patients to keep to their beds. The whole process is to be left to nature—”

“Nothing about it is natural,” came a call from the back.

Sir Hans rolled smoothly on: “—assisted only by a strict and regular diet. Furthermore, there has not been the least encouraging or favorable circumstance attending any of the prisoners before the operation.”