The Speckled Monster (9 page)

She saw him no more that night. The next day, her father's coach delivered her to West Dean. A week after that, on the twenty-seventh of August, she went for a walk in the garden with Will; he came back to the house alone, saying that she had wished to walk on.

She never returned. Instead, she slipped through a gate and stepped into a coach manned by no fewer than six footmen. As Wortley wished, they drove to Salisbury in silence, lest they bicker on the way to the altar. He stared straight ahead with a grim look on his face; Lady Mary watched her former life recede out the window and wept.

 

The moment Lady Frances heard that Mary was missing, she stoked the fire and began piling it with her sister's journals and bundles of carefully kept letters. Lady Mary was beyond help, but Lady Frances meant to protect herself, Will, and everyone who had ever been an accomplice in the affair. As Lady Mary had predicted, Dorchester's fury was boundless. He cut her off entirely, refusing so much as to hear her name spoken in his presence.

Lady Mary took pains to display unconcern. As soon as possible, she sent Frances a chatty letter from Wortley's home outside York.
I thought to find Limbo,
she gushed,
but I have entered Paradise
.

That position, however, was a front almost from the start. For several years, Wortley had been outraged by his failure to possess her; in possession, he could not bear to be near her. It did not help that he had discovered, after the wedding, that Paradise had been his rival right up until that last flight. In disgust, he turned about-face and ran the other direction, keeping as much distance as possible between them by moving between his London bachelor's quarters over a shop off the Strand, his father's house outside York, and his family's coal-mining business near Newcastle. Lady Mary would not admit she had made a mistake, but by January 1713, she was strongly advising Philippa to choose family over romance.

For all Wortley's jealous fears, she had not cuckolded him. With impeccable timing, she produced a son and heir nine months after the elopement, on May 16. He was christened Edward Wortley Montagu, Jr. Wortley stayed in town for the whole length of her lying-in, the six-weeks court that new mothers presided over from their beds, from which they were not allowed to rise. It was the longest period they had yet spent together. The very morning she was free, she found him in his study, packing.

“So much for conjugal bliss,” she said icily from the door.

“You would do well to control your sentiments,” he said tersely. “They are nothing but affectation.”

“Affectation!” she cried. “A pious prude in love with her stableman, Mr. Wortley, could not be more outraged by her own passion than you are.”

They quarreled, and Wortley departed abruptly, leaving Lady Mary to wander about London all afternoon like a soul adrift.
You have not been gone three hours,
she wrote that evening,
and I have called at two people's doors. Without knowing it myself, I find I am come home only to write to you. The late rain has drawn everybody to the Park. I shall pass the whole evening in my
chamber, alone, without any business but thinking of you, in a manner you would call affectation, if I should repeat it to you
.

Her eyes sore from hay fever, dim light, and crying, she left off at dusk and went early to bed. The next morning, she awoke early to find Frances pushing hollow-eyed into her bedchamber.

“What is it?” gasped Mary, her stomach dissolving into cold fear for Mr. Wortley.

“It is Will,” said Frances. “He has been taken with the smallpox.”

3

A DESTROYING ANGEL

M
Y brother has the small pox,
Lady Mary scrawled numbly at the bottom of the letter she had written to Wortley the night before.
I hope he will do well
.

She would never have been allowed near the sickroom, since she had not had the disease herself. Still in her father's disgrace, however, she was barred even the comfort of holding vigil with the family. Pacing through her tiny rooms alone with dread coiling tightly about her heart, she had to await the few terse messages Lady Frances could smuggle out and finagle whatever else she could from Dr. Garth.

When word came at last, she sifted between the lines for hope:
My brother,
she wrote Wortley,
is as well as can be expected. But Dr. Garth says 'tis the worst sort, and he fears he will be too full, which I should think very foreboding if I did not know all doctors (and particularly Garth) love to have their patients thought in danger
. She refused to admit that her brother, not yet twenty-one, had already been pronounced beyond remedy. Six days later, on July 1, he died.

The howl that rose through her mounted in waves until she thought she must burst. Fists to mouth, she strangled her grief into a silent scream that she poured into her journal: Will had been her best and only natural friend, standing by her even as she found herself banished from the rest of her family for the sake of a man whose desire had frozen to disdain. His death left her worse than alone.

She had never seen the smallpox at work, but she had heard plenty about it and saw its scarring tracks everywhere. Spotted and blown like a carcass left in the sun, Will began to haunt her dreams. In her waking hours, her fears veered in the direction of Wortley:
Your absence increases my melancholy so much I fright myself with imaginary terrors, and shall always be
fancying dangers for you while you are out of my sight. . . . I am afraid of everything. There wants but little of my being afraid of the smallpox for you, so unreasonable are my fears, which, however, proceed from an unlimited love. If I lose you
—she broke off and fought for control—
I cannot bear that
If,
which I bless God is without probability, but since the loss of my poor unhappy brother, I dread every evil
.

Never again would she dismiss smallpox as a mere irritation. From then on, it surged dark and terrible in her imagination as her own private demon.

 

A week after her brother's death, her husband had still finalized no plans to come south. Terrified for her new son and herself, Lady Mary fled north. While she stayed near York, searching for a suitable house, Wortley kept his distance, residing in bachelor's quarters in the tiny borough where he was campaigning for a seat in Parliament. He insisted that she make all decisions about where and how they would live and grew irritated when she consulted him, even by letter. Then he questioned all her choices: of house, of coach and horses, of servants.

Wortley would have preferred the Sheffield area, but she chose the Italianate elegance of Middlethorpe Hall, just south of York. Shifting between Middlethorpe and London, Lady Mary whiled away a lonely year playing with her son and bickering long-distance with Wortley, who continued to flee every scene as soon as possible after her entrance.

The following summer, this dull run of affairs was punctured by two deaths and a wedding. At the end of May 1714, the dowager electress Sophia died in Hanover at the age of eighty-four, leaving her son George as Queen Anne's heir. Two months later, on July 20, Lady Mary's sister Lady Frances married John Erskine, earl of Mar, an unprincipled Scottish spendthrift fifteen years her senior. It was an inexplicable match—except as political insurance for Dorchester: Mar was a power among the Tory ministers of state. Lady Mary caught no whiff of the proceedings until too late to urge rebellion on her sister; she was not even in town when the ceremony took place. A week later, the queen fell ill. She had a rosy red rash, said the whispers; perhaps the scourge of smallpox had struck her family yet again. It had not, but that reprieve failed to improve her health. On August 1, 1714, Queen Anne died.

Up in York, Lady Mary saw George I proclaimed king amid fireworks, pealing bells, and rumbling fears of rebellion in favor of James Francis Edward Stuart, once the Whigs' nemesis as the exiled Prince of Wales and now the chief challenger to George's claim for the throne. The Pretender, the Whigs branded him. His followers they called Jacobites—after Jacobus, the Latin form of James.

With the kingdom on the edge of riots and his wife and child in direct path of Jacobite armies rumored to be massing in Scotland, Wortley remained in London, awaiting the new king. In the middle of September George arrived from Hanover to claim his new crown, and Wortley saw his star rise, along with the Whigs generally. He even began to gain ground in reconciling himself to Lady Mary's father; by October 1, she could finish a letter to him saying, “My duty to Papa.” The Jacobite rebellion failed to materialize, but consumed by London politics, Wortley ignored his wife.

I cannot forbear any longer telling you I think you use me very unkindly
, complained Lady Mary, still alone up in York in November.
I parted with you in July, and 'tis now the middle of November. As if this was not hardship enough you do not tell me you are sorry for it. You write seldom and with so much indifference as shows you hardly think of me at all. You never enquire after your child
.

At last, Wortley stirred himself to make arrangements for Lady Mary and their child to join him in London.
I have taken a house in Duke Street,
he wrote,
near both the park and your father's house
.

She wrote back in a dither. The houses in that street were damp and falling down, she said. In particular, she hoped he had not taken the house of his cousin, Mr. George Montagu, nephew and heir to Lord Halifax, her long-ago partner in rhyme.

Wortley retreated once again to silence. Lady Mary grew frantic, as he knew she would: There was a particular terror about the house in question.

 

Before she could finish this letter, another arrived from her suddenly gregarious husband. Montagu had had two houses in Duke Street, Wortley suggested. He did not bother to say which one he had let.

I have received your second letter,
Lady Mary added to the bottom of the one she had already begun,
and hope by your mentioning another house of Mr. G. Montagu's that you have not taken that which Mrs. Montagu died in. I know of but one he lived in, in that street
.

 

This time, her fears about smallpox were neither random nor irrational. It had come to seem a time-honored tradition for pestilence to shadow the start of each new reign; previously, the epidemics of starkest memory had been the plague. With cruel irony, King George came accompanied by the scourge that had set him on the throne: the smallpox. The disease never entirely departed from London, but before the last epidemic in 1710, there had been a lull for a dozen years, long enough for Londoners to grow complacent, dismissing it as the mere inconvenience of a childhood disease. Now, only four years later, it was back at full putrid strength, sending Londoners young and old scattering before it. Perhaps, rumor muttered, the spans between epidemics would go on dwindling until London bubbled with infection year in and year out.

Once, Lady Mary had tormented Wortley by withholding information in a time of smallpox; now he took revenge in selective silence.
As to the child,
he replied,
if you do wrong about him, you will have no reason to blame me, for I desire it may be as you like best. You shall know by next post which of Mr. Montagu's two houses we have taken,
he promised.
It is certainly not that which was thought in danger of falling
.

The next post came and went, however, with no enlightenment, and Lady Mary began to despair.
I hope you'll take care to have the house all over very well aired, which I am sure is particularly damp in that situation. There should be fires made in all the rooms, and if it be the house Mrs. Montagu died in (which I hope it is not) that all the bedding (at least) be changed. Lady Mary Montagu got the smallpox last year by lying in blankets taken from a bed that had been laid in by one ill of that distemper some months before
.

Finally, just before Christmas, Wortley told her what she wanted to hear: he was not, after all, consigning her to a stew of infection.
I am very well satisfied about the house,
she replied. Even so, she decided to leave their precious son behind in York, rather than expose him to the hazards of a cold journey or cankered city air. At the beginning of the new year, she set out alone for the brave new Hanoverian metropolis of London.

 

At twenty-five, Lady Mary was beautiful, witty, highborn, and wealthy. She had shackled herself to a husband so cold and remote that she nicknamed him Prince Sombre, but however stingy Wortley could be emotionally, he spared nothing where his reputation was concerned. They had a fine (if possibly infected) house in a fashionable part of town, and he supplied all the gowns and jewels proper to her station. So long as she did not disgrace him, he left her at liberty to do as she pleased. Even the smallpox seemed to bow in her presence and withdraw, waning to a faint glimmer of its former terror. In January 1715, the city spread itself invitingly before her, and she determined to enjoy it.