The Speckled Monster (71 page)

The men's verses are drawn from a list of Kit-Cat toasts given in 1703. Garth made the verse quoted; I have given Lord Halifax—famous as an extempore versifier—an unattributed toast. Lady Mary must have said something pretty as well, for her father's friends praised her brilliance as well as her beauty. Within a year or two, she wrote a poem to Lord Halifax, praising him for his praise, in turn, of the countess of Sunderland. (One of the four famously beautiful daughters of the duke of Marlborough, Lady Sunderland was the elder sister of Lady Mary's friend, Lady Mary Churchill.) I have drawn Lady Mary's verse exchange with him from this slightly later poem. The first couplet adapts lines from the later poem to the Kit-Cat situation; the second I quote verbatim. Halifax's verse within hers is adapted from another of the 1703 toasts.

Jesting stories as to the origin of the Kit-Cat Club's name became legion soon after its rise to fame. I have accepted the three most common theories. That 1. a tavern owner-cum-pastry chef named Christopher Cat 2. served the mutton pies called Kit-Cats 3. at an establishment under the sign of the Cat and Fiddle makes as much—or more—sense as one combined story than as three separate stories. Sheer—or Shear or Shire—Lane, where the first meeting place stood, has since disappeared beneath the white fairy-tale castle of the Royal Courts of Justice. Soon after Lady Mary's visit, the club moved to larger digs at another tavern under the sign of the Fountain, in the Strand.

Lady Mary recorded her girlhood escapades, her clashes with her father, and her courtship with Wortley in detail in letters and in her diary. Her letters often report whole conversations; her diary was lively enough that her granddaughter remembered what she read of it for decades. I have also adapted some dialogue from Lady Mary's more autobiographical romances and poems.

Lady Mary later recalled that her brother had always been her best friend; every scrap of evidence suggests that she regarded her father with awe and fear. From the beginning, Wortley both intrigued and irritated her.

The garden-wall episode with the Brownlows is true, as was her practice of giving her girlhood friends names out of romances—and listing them in her notebook. Lady Mary did indeed slit twenty pages from her earliest album of poems and stories (dating from 1702-04, when she was twelve to fourteen), and then burn them. She squeezed the poem quoted into a blank space on an earlier page; its content strongly suggests that while it was she who carried out this “burning and blotting,” she did not do so voluntarily. The poem's phrasing sounds as if it answers direct accusations: I have reconstructed the book-burning episode from these clues.

The critic who made her mutilate her work remains unknown, however, as does the exact nature of the offense. Very young, she developed a dangerous taste for both reading and writing tales that lightly masked real people's adventures as fiction. Later, this temptation would get her into much worse trouble; I have surmised that her mistake at fourteen may have been an early foray into this habit. Whatever the problem was, it was particular to the excised pages, or the whole book would have burned.

Her tormentor may have been her French governess, Madame Dupont, or her brother's tutor (who possibly also tutored Lady Mary), but the anger-prone authority in her life whose biography was hands down most tale worthy was her father. I have drawn his character from sketches to be found in her diary and romances. He did, in fact, always require from his children the ritual court greeting of bended knee and kissed hand. In 1709 Kneller painted Kingston in a suit of purple velvet; I have drawn his physical description from this painting, and put him in morning dress of the same material.

Lady Mary gave out many different stories about teaching herself Latin in secret. At times she credited Wortley with sparking her desire to learn. She also credited both Wortley and Congreve for help along the way.

As an old woman, Lady Mary saw her father in a rakish character from Samuel Richardson's novel
Sir Charles Grandison;
had she survived to read Jane Austen's
Pride and Prejudice,
she would surely have seen Edward Wortley Montagu in Elizabeth Bennett's first disagreeable impressions of Mr. Darcy: but Wortley never transformed into Prince Charming. Lady Mary described him in arch detail in her letters and romances—especially the tale of Princess Docile (herself) and Prince Sombre, clearly a fictionalized alter ego of Wortley. “He had all the qualities of an upright man, and no single quality of an amiable one,” she wrote: a line I've adapted as an exchange between Lady Mary and her sister. Wortley's letters to Lady Mary uphold her romance characterizations of him, good, bad, and irritating.

It is not clear when or where they met, though they certainly continued to meet through the convenience of seeing Anne. Why Anne died in February 1710 is uncertain, but at the time typhus—London's other great eighteenth-century scourge—was rampant.

Wortley carefully preserved the squabbling letters that passed back and forth between him and Lady Mary, including the mischief-making note of Betty Laskey, endorsed by Richard Steele. Nothing is known of Laskey beyond this note and Lady Mary's lamentations about her. In one autobiographical romance, however, Lady Mary made her hero Sebastian (Wortley) incur wrath of the heroine Laetitia (Lady Mary) by falling for just such a trumped-up offer on the part of an orange-woman who had played go-between for the lovers in Hyde Park. I have sketched Betty Laskey from that hint, drawing on contemporary engravings of street hawkers using the cries “Fair Lemons & Oranges” and “Six pence a pound fair Cherryes.”

Wortley's anxiety about Lady Mary's possible loss of “colour” or complexion betrays his apprehension about her diagnosis. Given the timing of her illness within the worst smallpox epidemic London had yet known, his fears suggest that he was all too aware of the long-standing confusion between measles and smallpox.

The epidemic of 1710 was at its height from May through July. Using James Jurin's slightly later statistic that one of every five or six Londoners who came down with small-pox died, I have extrapolated the number of people ill in 1710 from the official figure of 3,138 dead of smallpox that year. The quack bills are adapted from Daniel Defoe's
Journal of the Plague-Year
. Defoe's fictionalized history covers London's last great epidemic of the bubonic plague in 1665, but within a year of writing it in 1722, he had been eyewitness to the devastations of another disease: the smallpox epidemic of 1721. Though that more recent epidemic was not near so fearsome as the 1665 outbreak of the plague, it also seems to have progressed through the city from west to east. Other details, too, are general enough to fit London's panic in the face of any epidemic disease.

I have given Wortley encounters with various epidemic scenes, as well as thoughts comparing smallpox to the plague: Creighton documents the general awareness of small-pox as a threat of growing intensity and frequency, such that it began to replace the plague as Britain's most feared disease in the early eighteenth century. (The plague could and did kill far more people than smallpox within the span of a single epidemic. In London, however, its “visitations” were far fewer, and it was virtually absent between epidemics; after 1665, it also belonged to the past. Smallpox remained a steady killer in that city even in “healthy” years right into the twentieth century; at the beginning of the eighteenth century, fearsome smallpox epidemics began appearing with markedly increasing frequency.)

Margaret Brownlow's death is the first known instance of smallpox interfering in Lady Mary's life. Beyond the two facts that Margaret fell ill and died of smallpox while Lady Mary was convalescing from the measles, and that her sister Jane did indeed marry Margaret's intended husband in June 1711, however, I do not know the details. I have given her the nickname of “Meg” and a standard set of smallpox symptoms. Cream applied with a feather was a traditional regimen for preventing smallpox scarring.

Emperor Joseph and the grand dauphin Louis both died of smallpox as stated. The emperor certainly was given the ancient “hot” treatment; given descriptions of the dauphin's rooms just after his death, he may well have endured the “cold” treatment (an innovation of the famous seventeenth-century English doctor Thomas Sydenham). I have made Dorchester and his cronies discuss these regimens; they surely discussed the political consequences.

Lady Mary detailed her longing for her unidentified Paradise and her loathing of Skeffington in her many letters to “Dear Phil.” I have condensed and combined a few of them and pulled her dramatic sentence “Limbo is better than Hell” into the place of a conclusion because it crystallizes her tortured choice of Wortley over Skeffington; otherwise, the letters stand as she wrote them, save for modernizing spelling and punctuation.

Lady Mary reported her various interviews with her father, family, and brother on the subject of the match to Skeffington—complete with most of the dialogue presented here—in several detailed letters to Wortley just before the elopement, as she tried to make him see that her father would not easily forgive them and was certainly not going to pony up money. I have added her brother's unhappiness with his own marriage, on the strength of Lady Mary's extreme reactions against it, and his own willingness to help her escape a similar fate. I have divided between Lady Frances and Lady Kingston the reactions Lady Mary reported as generally being those of the family. When she gave her father her “final” answer, she first chose the single life, but relented in a letter following her father's threat to pack her into the country immediately. The threat is Kingston's as Lady Mary later reported it to Wortley; its presentation in a valise is my way of literalizing the cramped life he was offering her. She gave no indication as to the dates or settings of any of these familial encounters; those are my surmise.

The particulars of her aversion to Skeffington are lost, but surviving letters suggest that it was both primarily physical and inexplicable to others (especially her father). Skeffington's family were the proud lords of Castle Antrim and other vast estates in Northern Ireland.

Her long bickering courtship with Wortley was Byzantine in its plotting and spying, and their elopement was worse: a two-months' tangle of aborted attempts, near break-offs, procrastinations, and terrors. I have streamlined both courtship and elopement, but the general arc of events—including the two major breaks—remains accurate. Whether the lovers actually met in the inn on the way to West Dean is unclear, but they certainly passed a flurry of notes that attest Lady Mary's laughter at Wortley's “highwayman” getup, her indignation at his inability to provide the “decent conveyance” of a coach, Wortley's suggestion that they borrow her family's, and her absolute refusal to implicate her brother—though he was undoubtedly an accomplice.

How Lady Mary received word of her brother's illness is unclear, though the timing is accurate. I have let her learn from Lady Frances, though a face-to-face meeting would have dared their father's wrath. It seems to have been Lady Frances who later took it upon herself to keep Lady Mary informed of Will's progress.

Lady Mary poured her anguish over her brother's death into her diary and letters; her sorrow and rage made a lasting impression on her granddaughter, reading them many years later.

Wortley's vengeance in coyly threatening to consign his wife and child to an infected house is taken directly from their letters, though I have reconstructed his first (
I have taken a house in Duke Street
. . . ) from her reply to it.

Pope's readings of his
Iliad
translation before Halifax took place somewhere between October 1714 and May 1715, when Halifax died. I've taken the liberty of including Lady Mary at the second gathering, as she was in town and fast becoming a fixture in the literary crowd that Halifax—an old acquaintance and good friend of her father's—liked to entertain. She was certainly on jesting terms with Pope by the summer of 1715. Pope's illness and reflections on his own appearance are amply documented.

The “ridiculous adventure” with Craggs is one of the few that Lady Mary's granddaughter reported in detail from her reading of Lady Mary's diary. I have supplied Craggs's rebuke to Lady Mary, reported only as “a bitter reproach with a round oath to enforce it.” In a polite age that enveloped passion in delicate nettings of euphemism, such frank anger carried the force of a slap across the face.

The real distress evident in Craggs's reaction, as well as the extravagant emphasis that Lady Mary's granddaughter lavished upon the awfulness of her indiscretion, suggest that Craggs was worried about far more than just being revealed as an impetuous young man—which in any case he was already known to be: such pranks were common among the nobility, even if not often run directly under the king's nose. I have opted for rivalry as the most likely undercurrent of danger, given the king's known interest in the lady.

The appearance and habits of King George I, Schulenberg, and Kielmansegg (including their nicknames and La Schulenberg's pastime of snipping caricatures out of scraps of paper), are all attested by their contemporaries.

Details of Lady Mary's bout with smallpox are few but richly suggestive. Gossip revealed that Lady Mary was “very full”—i.e., that she had a case of confluent smallpox—and that she was thought to be fighting for her life for two days around Christmas. From these details, I have given her a classic case of confluent smallpox, following Ricketts's description of “confluent smallpox with severe suppurative fever.” The notion that victims looked weirdly old or young is Ricketts's, as is the image of the gray caul. Richard Mead, one of Lady Mary's physicians, wrote a treatise on smallpox published in 1747, though written much closer to the time of Lady Mary's illness. His words, as well as the details of her treatment, come from this book. The statistics are from the World Health Organization.