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

England had ever seen, its spotted tracks visible at every turn. Laborers who could not afford to be ill trudged about with pocks still ripening, and newly recovered urchins roughhoused in the streets, sowing the last late scabs—or “seeds”—from the soles of their feet and the palms of their hands into the dust and the puddles. Everywhere were the coffins: new made and stacked high on carts, in single-file quick procession to the churchyards. One morning, Wortley had nearly collided with a woman hurrying by with a tiny coffin not two feet long tucked under her arm; he could still smell the raw scent of new-cut wood. She had glanced up at him, but her face was empty: no sorrow, no rage, just emptiness.
    However proudly the doctors, apothecaries, and quacks might point to their successes, the only real safety lay in already having survived the scourge, as Wortley had. But Lady Mary, as he well knew, had not.
    He was being womanish, he told himself. Excitable. His father and grandfathers had reserved such reeling fears for the worst visitations of the plague. But the plague, taunted a voice in his head, had not been seen in epidemic strength in London in forty-five years—since 1665. Smallpox, some warned, was taking its place as the scythe of an angry God.
    Outside the window, a deep bell tolled another victim to the grave; beyond that he heard a rumbling of heavy wheels. For a moment he wondered whether the dead-carts of the plague had returned to trundle through the night, stacking corpses like kindling and dumping them in open pits ringed with bonfires. He shook himself; surely the smallpox could never sow its dead as thick as the plague once had. He flicked the curtain aside and saw a cart carrying the living: a woman and two wailing children. He breathed a sigh of relief.
    Then she turned her eyes up to his and he stepped back and froze. Her face was thick with yellow pocks; so were the children’s. The despair in the woman’s eyes sent a cold wind knifing through his belly. In a moment, the cart was gone, trundling west, no doubt, toward the pest house of Westminster. But in his mind, the images of the pocks lingered, glowering like embers in the dusk.
    Shuddering, he let the curtain fall closed and returned to the letter:
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    Betty tooke a great deal of troble goeing often to Acton to see for a letter, but Lady Mary could gett no conveniency to write. She gives her love and respects to you, but if it is not expressed as is proper you’l excuse it as from whence it comes insteed of my Lady.
    Lady Mary desires you to direct your letter for Betty Laskey at the Bunch of Grapes and Queen’s Head in Knightsbridge. She had not time when Betty gave her the letters to read them. She signs her name to this for I shewed it her.
    April 17th 1710
    M.P.
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    Wortley spent a bad night, tossing and pacing. He had lost his favorite sister—his poor Anne—only two months before; he could not bear to lose Lady Mary too. At dawn, he sat down to draft her a letter.
    Though last night I was perfectly well till I saw the letter signed by you, he wrote, I am this morning downright sick. The loss of you would be irretrievable; there has not been—there never will be—another Lady Mary .
    He took a breath and reined himself in.
    You see how far a man’s passion carries his reflections. It makes him uneasy because the worst may possibly happen from the least dangerous distempers .
    He meant, no doubt, to be comforting, but his own fears kept creeping through. It was a thousand to one, he wrote, that he would next hear of her recovery. He could not keep from wondering, though, what might happen if the news were not so fine. She might lose her complexion or her sight, he mused. With this, the demon whispers in the dark slid sideways into his letter: Both the measles and smallpox could cause blindness, but only smallpox was notorious for ruining faces with permanent, stomach-twisting