The Speckled Monster (55 page)

She bit her lip, swallowed hard, and blinked. “Come back to me.”

“I promise.” He kissed the top of her head and left.

Jack had saddled Prince. He had also saddled his mule. And he had muffled their hooves, in the Indian manner.

“Stay here,” said Zabdiel tersely. “Jerusha and the children need a man in this house.”

His prodigal son stepped out of the barn. “They have one,” said Zabdiel junior. “Though to tell you the truth, I think Mother is easily as good with this thing as I am,” he said, hefting the musket in his hand. Then he looked up and dropped his facetiousness. “God go with you, Father. And also with Jack.”

Their faces muffled in dark cloaks, they rode quickly up to the Nicholses'. No one stirred in the streets, though the moon hung huge and ominous in the sky. A rat or two scuttled at the edge of the sewer channel, and a stray dog slinked along behind for a while. Once a door banged open, and drunken singing spilled into the street, pressing them farther into the shadows on the opposite side. They rode on.

Mrs. Nichols was worse than Zabdiel had dared to imagine. She was clammy and cold. Blood coursed from between her legs while her mind wandered through the visions of Ezekiel and Isaiah.

“Behold waters issued,” she half sang, half sighed. “Waters to ankles, to knees . . . to the loins. A river I could not pass over, waters to swim in.” Her voice trailed off in high girlish giggles. “When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee.”

Seizing her husband's collar, and pulling him down to her with startling strength, she rasped, “Wilt thou be with me?”

“I am here, Beth,” he said, disentangling her fingers from his throat. “I am here.”

Pocks were scattered thickly over her body: small ones, but ominously close together and flat; they were ringed in livid red. Her eyes were swollen nearly shut, her face gray, and her breath rank. Her pulse was so faint that it was hard to tell by feel that her heart still beat.

Zabdiel had Jack mix up a cordial that would knock a horse back on its feet: laudanum sweetened with sugar and heated with a liberal sprinkling of oil of cinnamon.

Twenty minutes later, her heartbeat had sped up to a light flutter. “Come hither,” she murmured fretfully, “I will show unto thee the judgment of the Great Whore that sitteth upon many Waters.”

“No, Beth,” said her husband, “think of the Spirit of God moving on the waters.”

“God,”
she whimpered, curling into a ball as a cramp crossed her belly.

“What can we do?” stammered her terrified husband.

Zabdiel shook his head, and looked at him with pity. “Pray.” Though he had been awake the whole night before, Zabdiel remained at the Nicholses', nodding in a chair by the bed until Bethiah's bleeding slowed to a trickle, and then one hour more. Contractions were still rippling across her belly, but nothing other than thin blood had come forth. “There is no more I can do here tonight, Bill,” he said. “I will leave you with some cordial: give her one or two drops, if her pulse weakens. Otherwise, leave her alone to sleep: nature must take care of her now.”

For the nurse, he left other instructions: “Keep the sheets.”

Just before dawn, he returned to his own bed, where Jerusha wrapped herself around him so that he dropped into a leaden sleep in her arms.

Later that morning, he rode out to the Nicholses' again. Frayed lines of children and beggars whipped around him like tentacles of rage.
Raw Head and Bloody Bones! Murderer!

While Mr. Nichols had prayed through the cold hours of dawn, the nurse had dosed Mrs. Nichols with the cordial two more times; each time, they said, she had regained strength for a while, but then drifted farther into twisted dreams. At ten o'clock she was awake but groggy. At least her pulse was normal.

And the flooding had stopped. Zabdiel sent Bill out of the room for a brief rest, and asked the nurse for the sheets. She gave him only one; inside its folds he found the drying placenta and the tiny half-formed child, two inches long and most of it head and huge eyes, curled over itself in permanent sleep, one tiny thumb, as it seemed, in its mouth. It was covered in pocks.

He had seen women die in childbirth; he had cut still-living children out of just-dead mothers. He had amputated breasts and legs and arms; he had slit into abdomens to pluck out bladder stones. But none of that was as this.

For the first time in many years, he went outside and vomited.

 

Cotton Mather rose early, slipped away from the still-sleeping Lydia, and went to his study. Two days after losing his newest grandchild, aged one week—during the Sabbath meeting, no less, and only hours before she was to be baptized—the infant's mother, his dear Abigail, his Abby Nabby Nibby as he had babbled to her as a child, was dying too.
G.D.
he wrote.
To strengthen a dear Child in the Agonies of Death is a sad Work, which I am again called unto
.

He had spent so many hours consumed with terror for Sammy and Lizzy, who stood in the way of the smallpox, that he had almost forgotten that the Angel of Death had other weapons. A creeping, malignant fever was slowly fraying Nibby's life. Even in death, the Lord set the Mathers apart.

Dr. Mather spent the day on his knees before his daughter's bed, strengthening her grieving husband with prayer. Not until sometime between ten and eleven that evening did the dear child at last let go.

She was his twelfth child to die; around her, death was mowing down his neighbors, his friends, his family, and his flock by the hundred. Dr. Mather was far beyond tears. At home, he added one sentence to his diary:
A long and hard Death was the Thing appointed for her
.

 

Dr. Mather threw himself back into his work. His
Account of the Method and Success of Inoculating the Small-Pox, in Boston in New-England
had been finished and dated three weeks before, in gratitude for Sammy's recovery. Nibby's long, scraping death had pushed it aside. At last, he sent it winging away within the wooden walls of a ship named
Friendship,
with a request that the captain deliver Dr. Mather's papers personally to Jeremiah Dummer, Esq., agent in London for the province of Massachusetts.

The Fellows of the Royal Society had not shouldered the burden of testing inoculation: but they should know that one of their number in Boston had dared to roam where they had feared to tread. They should know that it worked.

But that knowledge could no longer remain confined to them. He meant to publish his treatise to the world.

 

As Dr. Mather's confidence rose, Zabdiel's sank. Across the next two weeks, the trees flamed through their autumn glory; at night, the stars burned ever brighter as the harvest moon waned. Somehow, the world's extravagant beauty only made Zabdiel feel worse. Bethiah Nichols had lost a child, and now she was losing her sight.

The rash oozed into her eyes, swelling them tightly shut. Not until too late did he realize that the swelling was not just around the eyes; pocks had grown up inside them. Then one of them burst, taking the eye with it. There was no telling whether the other might follow suit; there was nothing to do but wait.

Save for slinking to the Nicholses' at odd hours, Zabdiel stopped trying to go out. A few patients braved the screaming crowds to duck into his shop and beg advice or medicine; he gave it with a grave smile, but his heart held nothing but sawdust. Even Cheever could not rouse him to more than a flicker of a smile. For the most part, he let Jack run the shop, while he retreated to the parlor, where he read everything on the smallpox that Jack could scour up, and he reread everything he had already memorized, as if somewhere an answer, an explanation, an absolution, must be lurking.

He ate when Jerusha required it, but tasted nothing. He slept when she directed, but did not wake refreshed.

“You are fading to a ghost,” she said quietly one evening. “The very bogeyman the mobs threaten you with. Raw Head and Bloody Bones.”

“Raw hands and bloody bones,”
he said absently, holding his hands before him. “You don't know what I have done, Jerusha.”

“No, but I know what you are doing: you are giving up. You have a gift, Zabdiel, and you are giving up.”

He shook his head.
“Thou shalt not kill.”
He looked into her eyes. “I had a gift. It is gone.”

 

On October 2, Captain Paxton advertised a £5 reward for the return of Hector, alive.

“He is not coming back, Father,” said Captain Paxton's elder son, Roger, begging to join the ship's company in Hector's place.

Much against his will, Captain Paxton swallowed his pride and agreed.
His boy in the place of a slave
. But with trade stagnant, every halfpenny counted. Roger's enlistment meant one more set of wages trickling in to the office, and one less mouth to feed at home.

He tried to ignore the voice in his head that mocked,
two less
.

 

Tom Boylston began to cross Dock Square to join his brother's family for dinner every afternoon. “Zabdiel needs you,” said Jerusha quietly. “The children need you.” To herself, she clucked, “And you need the food.”
When was the last time a Boylston had not been able to afford enough to eat?
Tom's nieces and nephews did not seem to notice that he had grown gaunt. Whenever he appeared, they skidded across the room and threw themselves at their favorite uncle; Tommy climbed him like a tree. Top heavy with children and laden with laughter, he would lumber into the garden and wear them out until it was time to say grace. Which was just as well, sighed Jerusha to herself; for Zabdiel had forgotten how to play.

On the sixth of October, the selectmen again sent men scurrying from house to house, counting the sick and the dead. In two weeks, they reported, the death toll had nearly doubled, from 110 to 203. In all, 2,757—a quarter of the city—had fallen ill with the smallpox. At the Old North Church alone, prayers were requested for 202 people sick; in one day, Dr. Mather had prayed with 130 of them.
Surely,
he thought as he dragged himself home near midnight,
the epidemic has reached its height
.

The doctors were no better off, driving from one patient to the next with the horses at a gallop, when they were not inching door to door. And still, untreated multitudes cried out through windows, stretched thin grasping hands from foul doorways, and hobbled breathless and howling after them through the lanes. Other doctors were visiting eighty or a hundred patients each day, but Zabdiel sat in the parlor, reading.

That afternoon, Mrs. Eunice Willard skirted the shop and the house and knocked at the kitchen door. “Wait, Jack,” said Jerusha, as she heard him turning her away. “Let me talk to her.”

She heard young Mrs. Willard out in the kitchen and then ushered her upstairs to Zabdiel. “I cannot say what he will do,” she said quietly on the stairs, “but I wish you luck.”

Zabdiel looked up from his page and opened his mouth to refuse the caller, but Jerusha was already shutting the door behind her.

Reluctantly, he rose and bowed. “Mrs. Willard.”

She curtsied. “Dr. Boylston.”

“To what do I owe the pleasure of this visit?” Her brother Josiah Willard was the secretary of the province. The official mouthpiece, in other words, of the governor and Council. Surely, the government would not stoop to apprehending him through the offices of a woman.

She held both hands, still gloved, clasped in front of her; her dress was noticeably simple, though made well and worn neatly. “I would be inoculated, if you please.”

“I am no longer performing that operation,” he said.

“Then you must begin again.”

Had she said what he thought he heard?
He focused on her face. She was plain. Homely, to be honest. But her eyes gleamed with intelligence.

She drew herself as tall as she could. “I am a woman, sir, but I am not cut out for life as a wife and mother. I love my nieces and nephews, but that is enough. Thankfully, I have been well enough provided for by my father's will to make such a decision without fear of poverty. But I would like to do some good in this world, beyond needlework. I am told I have a reputation for learning, but the ministry and medicine are both closed to me. I have no aptitude for children not related to me, and sometimes, not even those: I would make a poor schoolmistress. However, I find I am quite patient with the sick.”

She said all this without rancor or bitterness: just a cool assessment of the way the world was, untainted by sorrow or anger over how it ought to be. “I would become a nurse, and there are no nurses in more dire need now, sir, than smallpox nurses. But you see, I have not had the smallpox.”

“For which you should be thankful.”

“There we disagree.”

“What does your brother say?”

“It is not his affair.”

“It will be, when you bring the smallpox into the family. In any case, I am no longer inoculating.” He turned his back on her abruptly and walked to a side window.

She sighed. “Then I must take matters into my own hands.”

He looked at her sharply. “You will do no such thing.”

“I am sorry, Dr. Boylston, but I must. You see, I assumed that you were not likely to have a supply of fresh matter.” She tugged on a chain around her neck, and pulled a vial out from her bosom. A small bit of dull yellow matter clung to the side of the glass.

He strode over and yanked the vial from the chain around her neck. She did not flinch, even as the chain flew off against the wall.

She held his gaze calmly. “Collected my own this morning. From a nephew just at the stage described in Timonius. A boy of clean living, now doing as well as can be expected under the distinct pox. Except that he could do with more nursing. As could all my family. My family, as you know, is rather large. So you see, my plan is not so altruistic as I have represented.”