The Speckled Monster by Jennifer Lee Carrell Read Free Book Online Page A

secure the new title for future generations. It was also useful, he discovered, whenever he wished respite from his offspring’s inquisitive eyes.
    To Lady Mary, Acton had seemed more a place of exile than safety. Then she found that she, too, could make use of a shield from inquisitive eyes: in February 1710, Anne Wortley died, glassy eyed and shivering with fever. Wortley lost his favorite sister and Lady Mary her best friend; they had both lost safe cover for their flirtation. Just shy of twenty-one, Lady Mary was not to be deterred. Within a month, she dared what tight-lipped and tighter corseted conventions of virtue decreed unthinkable, and her father would never forgive: she took up the pen to write Wortley directly. Soon, their correspondence bloomed into the deliciously forbidden drama of a secret courtship.
    Â 
    From the beginning, she was clear about what she wanted and what she could offer: I can esteem, I can be a friend, she wrote, but I don’t know whether I can love . She proposed a tranquil meeting of minds, a rational relationship based on shared interests, calmed by country life and enlivened with travel.
    That was not nearly enough for Wortley. I love you, runs the subtext of most of his letters, and I despise myself for it .
    They wrote often and at length, hurling hidden pages of sniping argument at each other. They met furtively and infrequently at luxury shops in the New Exchange on the Strand, walking in and out of church, and driving in stately circles around the ring in Hyde Park. There, the women who hawked oranges and sweets to famished young lords and ladies also ferried pretty messages between coaches, tying love letters around their oranges with bright ribbon, for a price.
    In April, Wortley looked for Lady Mary several days on end in the park, but did not find her. One of the orange women he had employed earlier as go-between found him though. “Fair lemons and oranges!” she shrilled as she approached. “Cherries just ripe,” she added in a lower register, though he saw none among her offerings. Brushing by him with skirts pinned up in a bustle as bright—if not quite as clean—as the fruit in the wide flat basket she balanced on her head, she whispered in his ear: “The young lady sends to say that Betty can see as she gets a message.” By the time he processed this offer, she was swinging her mocking hips away down the lane.
    He caught up with her and dashed off a querulous note.
    Three days later, his friend Richard Steele forwarded him a reply. This is left tonight with me to send to you. I send you no news because I believe this will employ you better. Your most obedient servant, he scrawled on the outside, his smirk nearly visible in the ink.
    Wortley tore open the letter. It was not from Lady Mary; it was from the orange woman, Betty Laskey:
    Â 
    Dear Sir,
    I ask pardon for my presumption, but the occation that happened makes me take this liberty. My Lady Mary gave orders to write to let you know she received your two letters this day. The very time you went away she went to Acton and is very ill of the measles, and is very sory she could not write sooner.
    Â 
    Wortley’s skin prickled with apprehension. The red-spotted rash, high fever, and swollen eyes of the measles were dangerous. Even if Lady Mary survived, she might well emerge from the sickroom blind. Another, far worse fear, though, sputtered at him from the dark corners of the room: In the early stages, measles was easily confusable with the worst kinds of smallpox. Some doctors held that the purples—hemorrhagic smallpox—was a foul double brew of disease, “smallpox and measles mingled.” Others used the measles as a safe haven, a diagnosis to cling to until all hope was past, as if they might ward off the smallpox by refusing to name it.
    Measles was rife that spring, but the smallpox was worse. By May, the city was spiraling into the worst smallpox epidemic