The Speckled Monster (72 page)

In eighteenth-century England, surgeons (who learned from apprenticeship and often did not hold any university degree whatever) were properly titled “Mr.” rather than “Dr.”—the latter being an honorific reserved for physicians (who held medical doctorates). With what is now a bit of reverse snobbery, modern British surgeons retain this ancient distinction of title, going by Mr.—or Miss, Ms., or Mrs.—though they hold medical degrees. In colonial America, where trained doctors were in perennially short supply, strict divisions between physicians, surgeons, and apothecaries collapsed; the title “Dr.” was given to those with proven talent and experience, whether their training came from the university or from apprenticeship.

I have dramatized the scene of Lady Mary's first look at her ruined face from her eclogue titled:

 

According to her granddaughter, “she always said she meant the Flavia of her sixth Town-Eclogue for herself, having expressed in that poem what her own sensations were while slowly recovering under the apprehension of being totally disfigured.” From this poem come the details of her reclining on a couch, holding a mirror reversed in her right hand, the identities of her doctors (Mead as Mirmillo with the golden-headed cane, Garth as Machaon wearing a red cloak), Garth's reassurance about her beauty, and her order to have the Kneller removed from her sight. Her granddaughter attested the loss of Lady Mary's “very fine eyelashes.” I have supplied the detail of the veiled mirrors; it fits with the general desire to keep her calm, and with her lack of any knowledge about what she looked like well into convalescence.

At the end of this chapter and elsewhere through the book, I have made Lady Townshend stand in for Lady Mary's wide circle of aristocratic friends. Her comment on Lady Mary's loss of beauty is adapted from one recorded by Lady Hertford. Lady Mary's reply comes from her own assessment of her loss of face in “Carabosse”—a personalized version of “Sleeping Beauty,” in which the cursed princess is clearly herself. She probably wrote this French fairy tale years later, but the feelings it records about smallpox echo those of Flavia, and were probably of long standing.

From her fascination with “Frost Fairs” to her travels to Turkey, Lady Mary's life at times bears an uncanny resemblance to Virginia Woolf's
Orlando
. Whether Lady Mary attended the frost fair of 1716 is uncertain; given her regret for missing the previous one (when she had been trapped up at Thoresby by impassable roads) and Mead's prescription for taking fresh air, it seems likely that she would have done her best to see it, even if only from the window of a coach.

Asses' milk was a standard drink while convalescing from many illnesses; Mead specifically recommended it for smallpox. The scene of Lady Mary and Lady Townshend examining other remedies is my invention; the remedies, however, are drawn from contemporary recipes.

The story of Pope's revenge on Edmund Curll is unfortunately accurate.

Direct evidence that Lady Mary heard about inoculation before leaving London is lacking; circumstantial evidence, however, is very strong: those who were buzzing about the story abroad were among her closest friends and their families. Given Lady Mary's imminent journey to Constantinople, her vested interest in smallpox, and her wide-ranging intellectual curiosity, it beggars imagination to think that none of them should have mentioned the story to her. I have therefore created scenes in which Garth and her other friends who knew the rumors gather to tell her. The timing of these rumors' appearance, however, is accurate.

At some point that spring, Lady Mary satisfied public curiosity and discarded her mask; the particulars are my surmise. Photographs in Ricketts suggest that Lady Mary's face would have recovered significantly during convalescence: the swelling would eventually have disappeared, and the scars faded a great deal. The “nutmeg grater” image comes from the same source. The total disfigurement that Lady Mary feared did not come to pass, said her granddaughter. Lady Mary's famed beauty, however, was gone for good. (Pepys reported a similar outcome for the duchess of Richmond.)

While Maitland cannot be specifically linked to Kennedy, London's learned surgeons were then a tight-knit group; it is far more likely than not that two of their number who were Scottish knew each other at least well enough to discuss such a hot topic, especially when Maitland was soon headed to the source, and Kennedy had been there previously.

Lady Mary wrote an unending stream of letters home about her adventures en route. Wherever possible, I have kept close to her language (or to that of the snippets of gossip about her). Though almost all the originals as well as her own copies have been lost, she later edited these letters into literary gems that run together as an epistolary travel book. As she intended, this was printed after her death. Wortley also kept several pages of her notes recording dates, addressees, and general content lists of her actual letters: these often, but not always, correspond to their edited counterparts.

In Hanover, the king was widely seen to be still fascinated with her, but I have surmised that his interests might have been altered—as hers seem to have been toward him. She had no intention of remaining behind, no matter who might delight in her presence.

Lady Mary's description of her visit to the Baths of Sofia is one of the gems of her
Embassy Letters
. I have dramatized the scene from that description; the dialogue, both direct and indirect, is hers. I have assumed that she used, as she did later, a Greek interpretress.

Lady Mary carefully shaped most of her embassy letters to focus on one Turkish custom at a time: dress, poetry, the baths, inoculation. I have made explicit connections she implies by logic and timing. At the baths, she is quite clear that the ladies' smooth, shining skin is what amazed and delighted her most. Though she does not specifically say that smallpox (or the lack of it) was on her mind, it seems likely that her fascination with their unmarked skin prompted her immediate efforts to figure out how the Ottomans protected themselves from smallpox. Within two weeks, she had ferreted out stories of inoculation and interviewed everyone she could find on the subject. Maitland, it is important to note, was not with her at this point. Whatever she had learned before she left London or along the way, what she discovered at this juncture, she discovered on her own. According to her granddaughter, Lady Mary acknowledged that “former sufferings and mortifications . . . led her to observe the Turkish invention with particular interest.”

Lady Mary wrote at length about her sojourn in Turkey; Maitland wrote somewhat more tersely about his inquiries and experiment with smallpox inoculation. Though neither makes much mention of cooperation, much less debate and discussion, with the other, events suggest that all of that was going on. I have woven their accounts together, and given them life as scenes.

Lady Mary wrote about inoculation to many people; her record of letters sent home includes one to her father concerning the smallpox. Sir Hans Sloane later said she also wrote the court and various friends on the subject. The only such letter that survives is the one she included in her
Embassy Letters
—polished and edited for circulation, and addressed to her girlhood friend Sarah Chiswell (who had, by the time of editing, died uninoculated from smallpox). I quote from it, in the place of the lost letter sent to her father, adding a suitable opening; I have also added the word
rendered
where some such word seems to be missing.

She described her Turkish dress in detail to her sister while it was still being made. If her later portraits in it (or a modified version of it) are to be trusted, however, she mixed up a few things. I have followed Lady Mary's written account, “corrected” by what Jean Baptiste Vanmour and Jonathan Richardson seem actually to have seen. (Commissioned by Alexander Pope, Kneller painted another portrait of her in her Turkish robes, but her dress is so shadowed in the reproductions I have seen that it is hard to make out details.)

The disastrous Balm of Mecca experiment comes from a self-mocking letter to the king's half-sister. Lady Mary pointedly lamented her “mortification” at Wortley's reproaches, though the specific reproaches are my inventions.

Wortley engaged Dr. Timonius as the family physician in August, and though Lady Mary seems to have decided earlier to have her son inoculated, she missed the first opportunity to join the regular smallpox parties. I have surmised that the expert Dr. Timonius had a hand in preventing her; though she never gives a reason for missing this opportunity, pregnancy was a very good reason to stay as far away from the smallpox as possible.

I have drawn the conversations between Lady Mary and Maitland from his account of his inquiries into inoculation while in Constantinople, staying as close as possible to his language. That Lady Mary might have had some part in his discoveries or discussions is my supposition; she was certainly investigating the topic for herself during her stay in Constantinople.

The inoculation of young Edward closely follows Maitland's account, save that I have elaborated on the boy's struggles. Mr. Maitland merely remarked that “the good woman went to work; but so awkwardly by the shaking of her hand, and put the child to so much torture with her blunt and rusty needle, that I pitied his cries, who had ever been of such spirit and courage, that hardly any thing of pain could make him cry before; and therefore inoculated the other arm with my own instrument, and with so little pain to him, that he did not in the least complain of it.” I find Mr. Maitland's terse explanation suspicious—if understandable, given the need to be complimentary to the Wortley Montagus in print. The Greek woman was far more experienced and almost certainly more capable than he makes out. Given Maitland's extreme reluctance to inoculate later—when he already had firsthand experience of success—his sudden willingness to operate at this point is odd, to the say the least. And while Edward Wortley Montagu, Jr., certainly had spirit and a wayward courage, he also regularly caused more than his share of mischief and mayhem—even for a scion of the Pierreponts. I have given the boy a minor episode of well-provoked mischief, which goes some way toward
requiring
Maitland to participate.

The boy's course through inoculated smallpox adheres almost word for word with Maitland's account, with some details filled in from modern descriptions of standard symptoms, in particular, Ricketts's descriptions of “modified smallpox”—by which he meant cases seen in people whose protection due to long previous vaccinations had in large part worn out. In many details, these cases resemble those described by inoculators. Neither Lady Mary nor Maitland had much to say about the incisions. Medical paintings of variolation, however, suggest that their development would have been startling.

From the Wortleys' return to London in 1719 through the spring of 1721 (including the location of their house, the illness of Princess Anne, the rift in the royal family, and the bursting of the South Sea stock bubble), the events Lady Mary recalls are well documented. Her reverie, however, is my invention. While she certainly knew Dryden through and through, I am responsible for having her ponder this particularly weird poem at this apropos moment.

Some of the tiniest details in this chapter are true: roses and violets did indeed bloom in January 1721, after which the early warmth dissolved into a cold, wet spring. The small-pox house in Swallow Street did exist, serving as both refuge and quarantine, primarily for servants from the great houses of St. James's and Piccadilly.

Lady Mary began to lose friends and family to smallpox in frighteningly large numbers in February 1721. She does not appear to have considered inoculating her daughter until the beginning of April, however, at which point she was suddenly insistent. This abrupt switch suggests a known exposure; unfortunately, the loss of Lady Mary's diaries has obscured the details. As no particular close friend or family member seems to have succumbed to smallpox right around this time, I have located such an exposure in the nurse. It is at least plausible, in explaining Lady Mary's suddenly sharp fear for her daughter. Furthermore, if she was the same nurse that Mary had had in Constantinople, she was vulnerable: according to Lady Mary, the reason little Mary was not inoculated in Turkey along with her brother was that “her Nurse has not had the smallpox.” Presumably, she refused to be inoculated as well.

More generally, servants were always a concern as agents of infection. No doubt there was a great deal of class prejudice involved in this fear, but it was not without foundation. Servants worked long and exhausting hours for mere pittances, and even in great houses their rooms could be crowded, cold, damp, and unsanitary. Furthermore, the work of supplying their masters with food, drink, fuel, and other necessaries took many into the crowded streets and marketplaces even during epidemics. The living and work conditions of servants, in short, not infrequently made them more vulnerable to disease than their more comfortable masters.

Charles Maitland is the chief source for young Mary's inoculation. He sketches out the bargaining that went on before he would agree to perform the operation, though he does not give details as to the situations in which the negotiations occurred. (I am responsible for making Lady Mary conjure up Constantinople for him.) But he did request witnesses, and Lady Mary at first refused. According to family tradition and her own later writings, she feared that professional jealousy and greed would induce physicians to try and make the inoculation fail. For his part, Maitland appears to have been reluctant to inoculate in London at all. No doubt his stated reason of wanting to increase the operation's credit and reputation in part explains his insistence on witnesses. Self-protection, however, seems also to have been an issue.