The Speckled Monster (67 page)

 

As word of royal interest in Zabdiel buzzed through London's drawing rooms, requests for him to attend inoculations kept Jack and Jackey busy traipsing from the front door to his study and back with notes piled on a silver tray. He would be happy to attend, he always replied, though he refused all suggestions that he perform the operation. In the ensuing weeks, Zabdiel's path began to cross Lady Mary's at these inoculations. Frequenting the Grecian with Mr. Cheselden and Dr. Arbuthnot, he also met the celebrated portraitist and art theorist Jonathan Richardson, sixty-ish and fond of moralizing, and once or twice their even more celebrated friend, Mr. Alexander Pope. Gradually, Zabdiel found himself invited to convivial gatherings at private homes as well.

Somehow, the prince's interest in Zabdiel's horses trickled out. Offers to buy them, sight unseen, began to arrive—with such outlandish prices attached that Zabdiel assumed they were sent in mockery.

I fear he overvalues his horses,
Mr. Hollis wrote home to Boston,
and will never again get the prices offered that he is said to have refused
.

 

Meanwhile, the small princess fared superbly: growing only about forty pustules, though her incisions ran a great deal and were not healed till the twenty-eighth. Two days later, Leicester House went into pandemonium when a tussle between Prince William and Princess Mary burst open the incision on her left arm. Fanned by much hand-wringing, it healed again by the third of May. On May 8, however, a small boil began swelling in her left armpit. This necessitated another medical council of war. After a great deal of discussion, it was decided to allow nature to proceed without any more help than watching.

“Ah, my American doctor,” said the prince as the meeting broke up. “I should like to see these horses of yours. I hunt at Richmond this summer. Perhaps that would serve?”

“I should be honored, Your Highness,” said Zabdiel.

“Capital,” said the prince, striding off.

“You should indeed be a great deal more honored than you look,” said Lady Mary, appearing at Zabdiel's elbow. “Many men would kill for an invitation to hunt with the prince.”

“His invitation, I fear, will kill my horses,” replied Zabdiel. “Horses must eat, my lady, and sleep warm and dry, if they are to run well. How I am to house them in that neighborhood, I cannot conceive. My connections do not reach to such grandeur.”

“I have a summer house in Twickenham,” she said, “with room to spare in the stables.”

 

After a little oozing, the swelling under Princess Mary's arm subsided on its own. On the eighth of June, the Prince and Princess of Wales gathered their younger children and trundled westward to the clean air of Richmond.

In Twickenham, four tall bay horses and two black grooms moved into the Wortleys' stable. On the first day the prince was to hunt, three horses were led back out, groomed to a high gloss, their tails and manes intricately braided.

“Where is Prince?” asked Lady Mary.

“In his stall,” replied Zabdiel. “Where he belongs.”

“Surely you will not leave him behind,” she chided. “He is peerless.”

“He is also yours, my lady. I am not in the habit of giving the possessions of others away, my lady. Even to princes.”

 

I ride a good deal,
she wrote to Frances,
and have got a new horse superior to any two-legged animal, he being without fault
.

At the royal stables, the prince inspected Dr. Boylston's American horses, grudgingly pronouncing them capital, until he was presented with all three of them, when his interest transformed to evangelistic pride.

Trotting behind his father, trying to appear distinct from his gaggle of sisters, Prince William thought them tall. “In America,” said Zabdiel, “we make a special saddle for mounting small people atop tall horses. If it would please you, I shall send you one, when I return.”

The young prince crowed with delight; then he collected his dignity. “It is the duty of a field marshal, after all—”

“If you are finished,” Prince George cut in, “we might ride.”

“May I ask a favor of my own first, Your Highness?” asked Zabdiel.

“What?” barked the prince.

“The use of a horse.”

The prince snorted in amusement; around him, the roiling pack of courtiers tittered and broke into laughter.

 

“You are not dressed for riding,” said Zabdiel one morning.

“The quarry has shifted from foxes to deer,” sighed Lady Mary. “The riding has gone beyond my ladylike skill.”

“Then your skill must improve, my lady,” said Zabdiel. “I might be of some help, if you would allow it.”

All that summer, they chased deer through the green-gold glimmer of sunlight dancing through trees, pausing to let their horses drink at laughing streams while whip-thin dogs flowed on through the grass like white-and-dun water determined to roll to the sea. Sometimes, the princess called Zabdiel to take refreshment with her in some open glade, to tell his tale until her eyes glittered with tears, and her ladies wept openly. At other times the horns and the baying of hounds pulled the company into an ecstasy of flight, skimming together and apart like swallows whittering low over the earth.

When they were not hunting, Twickenham offered them other delights. Not far from the Wortley Montagu's house stood Mr. Pope's palladian villa, where the laughter of Lord Bathurst, Dr. Arbuthnot, Mr. Richardson, and Mr. Cheselden was joined at times that summer by that of Dr. Boylston and Lady Mary.

 

“We have had riding enough,” said the Princess of Wales as the weather snapped cold, and the beau monde trooped back toward London. “I should like to see some writing, if you please.”

“Writing, Your Highness?” replied Zabdiel.

“Your experiment with inoculation, Doctor, is not just a tale to make ladies weep happily in the sun. Dr. Jurin, I am sure, will want the numbers. The details, sir, are what matter. They must find their way into print.”

“She wants a book,” he groaned later to a small gathering in Mr. Pope's grotto, artfully arranged on a bank sloping down to the Thames. “What am I to do?”

“Write,” said Dr. Mead.

“Writing is a skill I have never pretended to.”

“Then your skill, Doctor, must improve,” said Lady Mary with a small smile. “I might be of some help, if you would allow it.”

“By all means, the conquest of smallpox must be immortalized,” pronounced Mr. Richardson, as Mr. Pope caught his eye.

“It is not a conquest,” Zabdiel protested. “Not yet.”

“False modesty, Doctor, will get you nowhere,” teased Lady Mary.

Zabdiel turned on her. “If I must tell my story, my lady, then surely you must tell yours.”

In this, the whole party warmly agreed.

 

Lady Mary had long been at work arranging and editing her
Embassy Letters
with their salacious gossip and their sublime descriptions of distant towns, lands, and people. That fall, as Zabdiel labored to transform his notes into a book, she turned her hand to polishing the deeply embedded jewel of her smallpox letter.

Back in London that winter, Zabdiel sloshed through heavy wet snow up to Lincoln's Inn's Fields, to the house Mr. Cheselden had specified; at his nod, Jackey rapped on the door, which was answered by an Irish girl, her green eyes widening to see a small black boy on the step.

They were ushered upstairs into a room filled with the scents of new-sawn wood and paint. Its edges were a dark riot of color and shadow, strewn with bare canvas and frames and unfinished paintings of figures stepping from gray nothingness. But the center of the room was clear, lit by a single slanted shaft of light dancing with bright motes.

In its midst stood Lady Mary, glowing as if from within, in a golden robe with a cloak of blue brocade and ermine draped like a soft stretch of sky around her shoulders.

“Ah, Dr. Boylston,” said Mr. Richardson, stepping from the shadows palette, in hand. “May I present my son-in-law and principal assistant, Mr. Thomas Hudson? You know Cheselden and Arbuthnot.”

Zabdiel bowed to them all in turn.

“Richardson,” explained Mr. Cheselden, “has been charged with a commission to commemorate the battle against smallpox. We could not proceed, of course, without you.”

“I am honoured,” said Zabdiel with a nod to Lady Mary, “to watch such splendor transferred to canvas.”

Mr. Cheselden glanced to the other men and back. “Your
double
battle, sir.”

Zabdiel felt heat flush his face. “You surely cannot be suggesting that you wish to put me in your picture,” he said, turning to the painter.

Mr. Richardson bowed. “Posterity will wish to look on the faces of its saviors. I only hope I may do you some justice.”

“Justice!”
exclaimed Zabdiel, shaking his head. “I must disappoint you, sir. I will not disgrace any canvas with this face. Especially not one that is to hold Lady Mary.”

“False modesty, Doctor,” she chided from the middle of the room.

“No, my lady,” he said firmly.

For a moment, no one moved, and the afternoon hovered on the edge of disappointment.

Mr. Richardson stepped forward, addressing everyone in turn. “Might I suggest, gentlemen, a symbolic alternative? The origin of your discovery, my lady, is to be represented by your Turkish costume. I understand that the doctor learned from Africans. Perhaps, sir, we could borrow the boy.”

“Borrow the boy?”

“Paint him, sir, in your place,” said Mr. Richardson, pointing to Jackey, who was peering at the canvases as if they were doors to other worlds.

Zabdiel began to laugh. “You have no idea, sir, how fitting your suggestion is. He is the first fruit of the operation, being one of the first three people I inoculated, along with his father and my youngest son. I would be happy to agree, if it would please Lady Mary.”

“The lady will make the best of it,” she said, shifting the gleaming blue fall of her cloak.

So Jackey was pulled to a costume rack and put into a fur-lined red coat—far too large, but Mr. Richardson thought it looked properly exotic—and red boots, ditto, and given a parasol to hold. As a final touch, Mr. Hudson clattered through a chest and came up with a silver collar.

“No,” said Zabdiel. “That is preposterous.”

“It is preposterous that you claim to own him,” shot Lady Mary.

Zabdiel opened his mouth to protest, and closed it again. Jackey stood stone-faced as Mr. Hudson snapped on the collar.

All that morning and into the afternoon, Zabdiel stood with his friends and watched the image of Lady Mary bloom upon Mr. Richardson's canvas, as the painter captured the uptilt of her shoes, the light that skated like gold wine from the falls of her caftan, the jewels winking at her waist and cascading over one ear. Most amazingly, Mr. Richardson caught the glitter of her eyes fixed on them all with challenge and with pride. Behind her, in the shadow of his parasol, Jackey peered up at her with much the same intensity, his almond eyes fusing awe and fury.

 

Lady Mary saw little of Dr. Boylston that spring. He had other projects as well as the book to keep him busy. With Mr. Cheselden, he studied the new method of cutting for the stone. He spent long, happy hours with Doctors Jurin and Arbuthnot, discussing the implications of applying the mathematics to the analysis of disease and its treatment. He visited every relative he could find in the vicinity of the capital, and then traveled north to see more in Birmingham. And still, he inched his way through his book.

Of Mr. Pope, on the other hand, Lady Mary saw more than she wished, for on the afternoon that Mr. Richardson's painting was delivered, he went down on one knee—he was already only knee-high—and declared his grand passion for her. It was so gloriously absurd that Lady Mary laughed aloud, and saw, too late, that he had not spoken in jest.

Having finished her
Embassy Letters,
she began writing a long, winding tale of hopeless love. If her friends noticed her quarrelsome and sad, they said nothing. She had many reasons for low spirits, after all. Her son was already proving himself a young rake; he ran away from school again. Her sister was slipping into madness, and in March, the duke of Kingston quite suddenly died. That, her family could neither have predicted nor stopped—though the ensuing squabble over the young heirs and their money was predictable enough. But Lady Mary railed against the unnecessary deaths of Lady Townshend and her old Sister in Affliction, Philippa Mundy, from smallpox. Lady Townshend—Dolly—had inoculated most of her family, but had ignored herself; poor dear timid Phil had never summoned the courage to put herself through the operation.

Early in April, just after Easter, Jack laid a letter from home on Zabdiel's breakfast table. The paper was marked with the wind, weather, and rough handling of an Atlantic crossing, but for all that, it was nearly blank. Only four words crossed the page:
Come home to me
.