The Speckled Monster
“They owe loyalty to nothing and no one but the sultan,” said Achmet Bey, “and sometimes, they force that formula in the other direction.” Seized as young boys from among the empire’s non-Muslim population—mostly Balkan Christians, he said—they were marched to Constantinople, where they were circumcised, converted, and mercilessly trained. Lady Mary tried to pity them, but whenever she glimpsed them through the door, their scorn dried her pity to dust.
Their host spent much of the day in his library, but he supped with the ambassador and his lady every evening. Unaccustomed to the free ways of Western women, he delighted to spend hours sitting cross-legged on cushions with Lady Mary, discussing poetry, religion, and philosophy. She began by telling him—in Italian, the language they shared—a Persian tale she had read in French; he paid her the compliment of assuming she was cultured enough to have learned it directly from the source, and went on to stir her with the bright delicacy and searing sensuality of Arabic and Ottoman love poetry. At her request, he taught her the rudiments of Arabic grammar and scansion; at his, one of the ambassador’s secretaries taught him the Roman alphabet. Lady Mary sparred with him in lively debates about their differences in religion and day-today life, especially the confinement of women in harems and veils. “There is but one advantage in it,” he teased her. “When our wives cheat us, nobody knows it.”
He both entertained and educated her with inexhaustible grace, but still, she yearned to be back on the road and moving. To Pope, she chalked it up to the weather: colder than it had ever been anywhere but Greenland, she groused. Despite the hardworking stove, the windows kept freezing up on the inside. Faintly audible between the lines of her letter was a hum of nerves pulled taut, and a stubborn refusal to acknowledge the whisperings of inadmissible fear.
At last, three weeks later, official summons to Adrianople arrived. Assured that the route was plague free, they headed for the town of Nissa (modern Nis, in Yugoslavia). Their guard of Janissaries swelled to five hundred: against the thieving Serbs, they were told. For seven days, they traveled at breakneck speed through narrow mountain valleys, with dark fir forests pressing down on all sides. The horses foundered and died in their traces, or stumbled lame; in compensation, their peasant owners were beaten for slowing the company down. Lady Mary wanted to empty her pockets in payment, but Wortley stopped her: the aga, or general, of their Janissaries would only take the money as soon as it left her hands. When they came to villages, the Janissaries seized whatever they fancied, no matter how ill the peasants could spare it or how little sense it made in terms of husbandry. “Lambs just fallen, geese and turkeys big with egg: all massacred without distinction,” she mourned. Watching this grinning cruelty, but helpless to stop it, Lady Mary wept tears of rage every day.
At one village, their second cook fell ill; the Janissaries would have left him to freeze alone on the road, but their surgeon, Mr. Maitland, insisted upon staying behind with him. They would catch up, he assured Lady Mary in his Scottish burr, as soon as the man recovered. As long as the ambassador did not threaten to slip from their grasp, the Janissaries were indifferent. Lady Mary pressed the surgeon’s hand in gratitude, and the Wortleys sped on. After a brief stop in Nis, they pushed up and over yet another range of peaks and rumbled down to the city of Sofia (now the capital of Bulgaria) on the banks of the River Iskar, in the midst of another large and beautiful plain. There, she had the luxury of one free day.
As if she might wash all the anger, horror, and fear away, at ten o’clock in the morning she summoned a Turkish-style coach and headed, informally and incognito, for the hot baths for which Sofia was famous.
The hamam or bathhouse was a pale cluster of domes like opaque bubbles that had settled into the ground. In the outer dome, Lady Mary slipped off her shoes and tipped the portress a crown. An interpretress and two maids in tow, she ducked inside.
Small round skylights pierced the high marble curve of the ceiling, so that the air itself, moist and faintly redolent of sulfur, gleamed faintly with the sheen of pearl. A sinuous Turkish melody wound languidly through the vault overhead. In the center of the tiled room, four scented fountains of cool water plashed and sang, arcing into basins that spilled smoothly into streams running into inner rooms. Around the edges of the room ran two sofas: not Western couches, but built-in ledges of marble, one set above the other like a wide stair, the lower spread with crimson carpets and cushions. Reclining on these, braiding each other’s ebony and honey-gold hair with pearl and ribbon, drinking the bittersweet earth of thick Turkish coffee and the sweetened fruit juice called sherbet, lounged two hundred women.
For a moment, all movement ceased. Long before, Lady Mary had startled the Kit-Cat Club into silence for being dressed up like a lady. Now, it was simply for being dressed: save Lady Mary and the servants stepping in behind her, every woman in the room was naked.
The Turkish ladies recovered first. Unfolding themselves from the attentions of their slaves, they approached her cooing with delight: Uzelle, pek uzelle, they murmured over and over: “Charming, very charming.”
They drew her farther into the room and tried to help her out of her clothes, but thankfully, they had a little trouble with the flaring jacket and fitted waistcoat of her riding habit. At last, though, she let a black-haired young beauty who was also the highest-ranking lady among them slide the jacket from her shoulders and reach in with slender fingers to unbutton her waistcoat.
At the sight of her tightly laced stays beneath, all the Turkish ladies blanched and stepped back aghast, but curiosity and civility soon drew the black-haired lady back again. “Englishmen,” she informed her companions after inspecting the boned corset, “lock up their wives in little boxes shaped like their bodies.” Inch by inch, the others crept near. European women, they all assured Lady Mary through her interpretress, were to be pitied for being such slaves as to be kept prisoner in their own clothing; no man of the East would dream of such barbarity.
Lady Mary shed no more than her jacket and waistcoat; unwilling to endure the sight of more savagery, her hostesses pressed her no further. All around her, though, women sat, knelt, and walked with a majestic grace that made her think of Milton’s Eve, clad in nothing but proud honor. They were beautiful in face and slender of body, and their long, lustrous falls of hair were unlike anything she had seen among the rarely washed, oft powdered and pomaded heads of Europe. But what entranced her more than anything else was the shining expanse of smooth skin, all of it un-marred, as she was all too aware that hers was, by the red pits and twists of smallpox scars.
She left earlier than she would have liked: she had only one day to play tourist and thought a visit to the ruins of Justinian’s church should not be passed up. The ruins were a disappointment; she longed to return to the baths, but Mr. Wortley and the Janissaries were relentless. Their cavalcade left the next morning, toiling up and over the last mountain range that blocked their way to Constantinople.
Every step toward Turkey swathed her more luxuriously in a warm Mediterranean world scented with lemon, wild thyme, and cedar. Vines grew wild over the hillsides, and the very air was spiked with paprika and mint, softened with olive oil, and sweetened with honey. Cypress speared the sky and music twined like serpents swimming through the trees. Lithe, long-haired boys danced, sunlight rained gold upon an infinite carpet of flowers, and everywhere shone the color blue. From the dome of the sky, to smooth jewel-stones set in gold, to the tiles poured across walls, the Ottomans washed their world in the intense brilliant blue still known simply as “Turkish,” in its old French form: turquoise.
On March 24, they at last reached Adrianople (modern Edirne), the jewel of western Turkey and Sultan Achmet III’s favorite home away from the splendors of Topkapi Palace in Constantinople, as well as the staging ground for invasions of Austria. As the sultan found it pleasing to be in Adrianople that spring, so did all his ambassadors. The Wortleys were housed in one of the grand signior’s palaces on the banks of the Maritza R
iver. As Wortley impatiently awaited his audience with the sultan, Lady Mary sat day after day in a marble kiosk in the garden, listening to the dance of the river and sipping sherbet or coffee as nightingales sang in the cedars. Poetry was everywhere: fine ladies at their looms made her think of the Iliad; Greek children playing upon Pan pipes and adorning lambs with flower garlands brought to mind the pastoral worlds of romance.
“Mr. Wortley,” she murmured aloud to no one, “you have brought me at last to Paradise.”
Still, the ivory curves and twining limbs of Sofia glimmered in her mind. How was it that two hundred ladies could let their robes slide away without revealing the least sign of smallpox?
With the perfectly recovered second cook in tow, Mr. Maitland caught up with the ambassador’s party in Adrianople late one night a week after his employers’ arrival. Lady Mary was greeted with this joyous news when she awoke the next morning—and also with the information that the man’s illness had not been a bad cold. He had gone down with the plague.
“If you ask me, Cook’s illness was nothing more than a Turkish hoax—an excuse for a leisurely jaunt through the mountains,” grumbled Lady Mary to the surgeon when he came to pay his respects. “I thought the plague killed everyone by the village-load, but I glimpsed him flailing knives in the kitchen just an hour ago, fat and jolly as ever. Are you quite sure that plague was the problem?”
“Yes, my lady,” said Mr. Maitland.
“You are proving yourself an even more miraculous healer than Dr. Arbuthnot and Mr. Kennedy claimed. . . . But I tell you, in the matter of marvelous medicine, I am quite catching up with you, Mr. Hare, and if you are not careful, I shall speed by like the plodding but patient old Tortoise. In your absence, I have been investigating this inoculation business.”
He groaned.
“Don’t be dismal. It sounds quite promising. Except that they do go on about ‘engrafting’ and ‘transplantation’ distressingly like the king talking up his orchards of pineapples and oranges—a sure way to ruin the taste of pineapple, if you think about it too long. I hope you have a strong stomach: I should like your help in delving into the matter farther. Locate this Dr. Timonius, for example, and sound him out.”
“Yes, my lady.”
5
MY DEAR LITTLE SON
Adrianople
April 1, 1717
Dear Papa,
My deepest duty to Your Grace and the Duchess.
Lady Mary ground out an entire wearisome paragraph of obsequiousness. It was worth it: she knew her father could not resist the bright lure of her kowtowing, and she very much wanted him to read on.
Those dreadful stories you have heard of the plague have very little foundation in truth. I own I have much ado to reconcile myself to the sound of a word which has always given me such terrible ideas, though I am convinced there is little more in it than a fever, as a proof of which we passed through two or three towns most violently infected. In the very next house where we lay, in one of ’em, two persons died of it. Luckily for me I was so well deceived that I knew nothing of the matter, and I was made to believe that our second cook who fell ill there had only a great cold. However, I left our doctor to take care of him, and yesterday they both arrived here in good health and I am now let into the secret that he has had the plague.
There are many that ’scape of it, neither is the air ever infected. I am persuaded it would be as easy to root it out here as out of Italy and France, but it does so little mischief, they are not very solicitous about it and are content to suffer this distemper instead of our variety, which they are utterly unacquainted with.
But the smallpox—that was a different matter. It was also the heart of her story. She had to think very carefully about how to entice her father onward—the smallpox had remained a forbidden topic ever since Will’s death.
Apropos of distempers, I am going to tell you a thing that I am sure will make you wish yourself here. The Small Pox—so fatal and so general amongst us—is here rendered entirely harmless, by the invention of engrafting (which is the term they give it). There is a set of old women who make it their business to perform the operation. Every autumn in the month of September, when the great heat is abated, people send to one another to know if any of their family has a mind to have the smallpox.
The French ambassador had supplied this strange story . . . would her father wish to know that? No. Might toss it down in disgust—French not high in his regard just now.
They make parties for this purpose, and when they are met (commonly fifteen or sixteen together), the old woman comes with a nutshell full of the matter of the best sort of smallpox and asks what veins you please to have opened. She immediately rips open the one that you offer to her with a large needle (which gives you no more pain than a common scratch) and puts into the vein as much venom as can lie upon the head of her needle, and after binds up the little wound with a hollow bit of shell, and in this manner opens four or five veins.
The Grecians have commonly the superstition of opening one in the middle of the forehead, in each arm, and on the breast to mark the sign of the cross, but this has a very ill effect, all those wounds leaving little scars, and is not done by those that are not superstitious—who choose to have them in the legs or that part of the arm that is concealed.
She went on describing the course of the treatment in detail. Waxing into her conclusion, she threw caution to the winds and stuck the French ambassador in after all: Every year thousands undergo this operation, and the French Ambassador says pleasantly that they take the Small Pox here by way of diversion, as they take the waters in other countries. There is no example of anyone that has died in it.
To other friends at court, she had written quite similar letters—anything to her father needed about ten drafts, and there was no point in wasting them. But for her intimates, she had added one more tidbit of information: You may believe I am very well satisfied of the safety of the experiment since I intend to try it on my dear little son.
For her father, however, she left that red flag out. Time enough for him to discover that another of his descendants would be battling the smallpox—on purpose. Let him mull this much information over for a while first.
She sanded the letter and sealed it, adding it to the tall stack to be dispatched on the next ship for London.
Lady Mary’s maid arrived one morning at the head of a double-file troop of slaves invisible beneath armloads of silk, satin, and jewels; the sumptuous Turkish robes she had ordered had arrived. First, the maid sent a filmy smock of white gauze skimming over Lady Mary’s head. Then she helped her step into drawers of thin rose damask embroidered with silver flowers, and slipped her arms into a waistcoat fitted to her shape from the same material and fastened with buttons of diamond and pearl. Then came the slender caftan of gold damask, clasped with a broad belt encrusted with cabochon jewels. Over it all—or draped in graceful folds over her arm—went the “curdee,” a loose cloak of blue brocade lined with ermine. Bending down, the maid set before her a pair of slippers in white kid leather embroidered in gold. At last, after brushing Lady Mary’s hair into a high shine, the maid settled on her head a cap of a light, shimmering cloth-of-silver, fixing it with a plume of heron feathers and a nosegay of jewels carved to resemble flowers in every particular but scent: pearl buds, ruby roses, diamond jasmine, and topaz jonquils.
Except for the face, the figure Lady Mary saw in the looking glass was slender, elegant, and ravishing. Thereafter, she relished playing the Turk with as much ardor as she had disdained to look Viennese, abandoning European dress as much as possible. When Westerners visited her, she received them in the style and appearance of a Turkish princess. When she explored the streets on her own, she went incognito beneath the voluminous outer cloak and veils of a modest Turkish woman. Only when visiting real Turkish princesses did she grudgingly allow herself to be squeezed back into Viennese court dress.
There was a great deal of visiting to be done, and she m
ade use of every minute. She studied Turkish poetry, cookery, music, and dancing—so soft, and the motions so languishing, she sighed to her journal, that the coldest and most rigid prude upon earth could not have looked upon the dancers without thinking of something not to be spoke of. She studied the language so assiduously that her new friends teased she was in danger of losing her English. She studied their manners and mores, and concluded that beneath their veils and behind their walls, Turkish ladies possessed more liberty than any others on earth. Most of all, she studied Turkish beauty. Men might swoon over it as a glory of nature, but Lady Mary recognized art when she saw it.
Turkish ladies, she observed, wore their hair in long tresses braided with pearl and ribbon—she counted 110 on one head alone, and heaven knew how long that took. They plucked their brows and lined their lustrous black eyes with kohl—at a distance, or by candlelight this adds very much to their blackness, she judged, but ’tis too visible by day. They dyed their nails a rosy pink, but here Lady Mary balked: try as she might, she could not accustom herself to tinted nails.
But their complexions, she sighed, needed no enhancement at all—and was surprised to learn that this, too, was art: one and all, they credited the marvelous powers of the Balm of Mecca. One lady presented her with the princely gift of a pot of it, swathed in thick pity. Lady Mary ignored the pity, and took the pot. That night, she opened the lid and sniffed at it, her eyes watering at its sudden pungent scent. To judge by the lovely bloom of Turkish faces, she told herself, she ought to think well of it. Surely, if they had contrived means to stop the smallpox, they might also be trusted to have found a way to repair its ravages.