The Speckled Monster by Jennifer Lee Carrell Read Free Book Online

accomplishments soon attracted her most tenacious lover.
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    She met Edward Wortley between tea and cards in the apartments of his sister Anne. He was enchanted by the rarity of a lady with a taste for classical poetry; Lady Mary was enchanted by the rarity of a man who appreciated that hard-won taste. He offered to help her in her studies; she pretended to need it.
    A few days later, a parcel arrived for her. The scents of brown earth and new ink slid in magic-carpet curls from the paper as she unwrapped it; within gleamed the leather and gilt of a superb edition of Quintus Curtius’ Latin history of Alexander the Great. It was the perfect gift: quietly admiring her command of Latin, appreciating her love of books, and beckoning her into long, exotic hours of armchair travel. Nor had Mr. Wortley neglected gallantry. Facing the title page, a poem unfurled compliments in a neat, spidery hand: Alexander would have “laid his empire down” and made “polished Greece obey a barbarous throne,” it declared, had Persia only managed to show the conqueror beauty like Lady Mary’s.
    Eleven years older than Lady Mary, Edward Wortley Montagu—or Wortley, as he preferred to be known—was heir to the lion’s share of Newcastle’s coal mines. In business, he was as pitiless and gritty as his coal; in politics, he had already won grudging respect for prickly integrity. A Whig member of Parliament, he spent his happiest hours in debate with men of searing wit. His closest friend was the satiric journalist Joseph Addison, just then making waves as one of the main writers of a new paper, The Tatler; he also counted Addison’s paunchy, black-wigged Irish-born associate Richard Steele—the paper’s editor and chief writer—and William Congreve among his close acquaintance. Through Wortley, Lady Mary glimpsed reentry into the world of brilliant men, this time welcomed as an adult rather than a petted child.
    Her visits to Anne grew more frequent, and more stilted. Soon, the unfettered girlish laughter in Anne’s letters evaporated as well, replaced by a stiff courtliness: she and Lady Mary still wrote, but the correspondence, like the friendship, became a charade. Anne was still writing out and signing the letters, but her brother was composing them, and Lady Mary knew it; her replies, though addressed to Anne, were meant for Mr. Wortley.
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    Her father had no inkling of their dalliance.
    A few years earlier, as Lady Mary had neared seventeen in the spring of 1706, her thirteen-year-old brother Will left for Cambridge, taking a great part of her day-to-day laughter with him. That December, Queen Anne elevated Lady Mary’s father in the peerage, moving him up a rank as the marquess of Dorchester; the title of earl of Kingston instantly descended to his son. Meanwhile, Lady Mary and her friends underwent transformations of a different sort, blooming into eminently marriageable ripeness. She had been in no hurry to marry, however, and on that subject, father and daughter agreed. Far from being willing to squire his daughter through the company of eligible wits that he graced with his presence, Dorchester wanted her out of the way, while he cast lascivious eyes on her acquaintance, for himself.
    In 1708, when Lady Mary was nineteen, he bought Berrymead Priory, a big old house set in fragrant gardens in Acton, three miles west of London. Conveniently close to town, the place was still far enough away to serve as sweet escape whenever clouds of sickness and stench thickened the city air. Smallpox had shaken off its long fitful sleep, and was once again scattering its blisters across London with ominous if not quite epidemic thickness. Having worked his way up in the peerage, however, Dorchester did not intend to allow smallpox or any of London’s other pestilential fevers—typhus, typhoid, influenza—to muck through his family. The house in Acton was part of his plan to