Curiosity by Joan Thomas Read Free Book Online Page A

scars (for the pox is not a respecter of persons). She had never asked where the marks had come from; it was not in the way of the highborn to ask. Or perhaps she had heard in the town. At chapel, the pastor had delivered a thundering sermon especially for the Annings, on the practice of mingling animal humours into human blood. A
devilish
cure, he called it. Why the Devil would choose to cure people was something no one explained.
    Miss Philpot listened to the story of Mr. Buckland with amusement. “A professor!” she said. “If he has survived, you must ask him what he thinks of the pig-faced lady.” And then, with great relish, she told Mary a story about the Philpot brother Charles, riding down a wide highway in the great city of London and seeing, in a carriage beside, a lady famously known in London as the pig-faced lady. There were many who had seen her, but no one knew her name or where she lived. She was thought to possess a fortune, but this was scant comfort to her. The day Charles saw her, she wore a veil, but it had got caught up on her snout. Charles Philpot saw her lift a graceful hand to fix it. A lady’s hand in a fine glove, not a pig’s trotter.
    “Gentlemen have been posting notices in the
Times
,” Miss Philpot said, her mouth turned down in the wry twist that passed for a smile, “offering themselves to the lady with the heavy facial affliction, as they delicately put it. For five thousand pounds per annum, they reckon they can stomach a bit of squealing at supper.”
    If the pig-faced lady did find a husband, Mary wondered, how would he bear to kiss her? If she’d had any thought of saying this aloud, Miss Philpot’s poor pox-fretted face stopped her before the words came out.
    “Oh, Catherine, Saint Catherine, please come to my aid, and grant that I niver may be a wold maid,” Mary said secretly to herself as she went out through the back garden, feeling a bit ashamed as she said it, because of the liking she had for Miss Philpot.
    The Philpot sisters had paid Richard a deposit for the cabinet and now, for the moment, there was money to spare and her mother knew it, but Richard took Joseph to the Three Cups for his supper that night and left her no chance to importune him about the seventh son. Long after Mary and Lizzie and their mother had retired, Richard and Joseph came clattering up to the bedchamber and laid themselves down in the dark, Joseph on a pallet on the far side of the bed. Murmuring voices started up from the bed.
    Lizzie, who was on a floor pallet beside Mary, was wakened by all the noise. “Mary,” she said, putting a hot hand on Mary’s cheek, “where did they cut you to put the pox in?” It was the question she asked almost every night.
    Mary wanted to hear her parents’ conversation. She pulled the cover over both her head and Lizzie’s. “Not in one place but in five,” she said fiercely. “Like our Lord Jesus Christ. Here –”She scratched at Lizzie’s palm, then she poked at Lizzie’s side and grabbed for Lizzie’s feet. “– and here, and here.” Lizzie began to cry and Mary clamped her hand over her mouth, but pips of sob escaped into the room.
    “Hush,” their father said, rising up in the bed. “You two hush yer moaning.”
    Finally it was quiet again, and then Molly asked Richard about taking Percival to Exeter.
    “It’s a big town, Exeter,” Richard said. “Where the devil does the lad dwell? Do ye have any notion?”
    Molly was silent.
    “Does Mrs. Stock have the name?”
    “I hate to ask her.” Mary could hear her mother turn over in bed. “She has a gloating way about her, does Mrs. Stock.”
    “A pullet with its legs tied together could gloat, if it cast for cause as wide as the Widow Stock does,” Richard said, turning over also.
    They would be lying close, with their legs bent to fit together. Mary heard them both sigh. There was a comfort in their sighs and their silence, and she wished she was small enough to climb into