What terrified both Lady Mary and Mr. Maitland—though he tried to maintain the appearance of sure calm—were the incisions. At first, they were barely perceptible—just a bit of red soreness. When the fever came out, though, they bloomed into foulness. Day by day they grew in size, the cuts a green-blue pallor of death, surrounded by pale dripping slime—and that, in turn, surrounded by clusters of tiny yellow pocks. Around the whole was a rosy ring of infection.
By the time the pocks crusted over, the sores encompassed the whole outer side of both Edward’s upper arms, and Lady Mary began to fear he might lose them.
On April 1, she wrote once more to Mr. W: Your son is as well as can be expected, and I hope past all manner of danger. She did not tell him that the manner of danger she feared was a double amputee for a son.
And then, quite suddenly, the incisions, too, began to scab over. On April 9, she still had received no word from her husband about their son. With relief pouring through her, she lost all patience. She had had a letter from her father, she harped, indicating that the duke was willing to be reconciled to them—if only Mr. Wortley would behave like a civilized man. Mr. W most certainly ought to write her father back: The birth of your Daughter is a proper occasion, and you may date your Letter as if writ during my lying-in. I know him perfectly well and am very sure such a trifling respect would make a great impression upon him.
She did not bother treating Mr. W to respect, trifling or otherwise; why should he expect from her what he refused to give?
You need not apprehend my expressing any great Joy for our return to England. I hope ’tis less shocking to you than to me, who have really suffered in my health by the uneasiness it has given me, though I take care to conceal it here as much as I can.
Your son is very well; I cannot forbear telling you so, though you do not so much as ask after him.
LM
The inoculation behind her, she returned her son to the keeping of his nurse, and set about doing everything else she could not replicate in London.
Unknown beneath her veils, she strolled like a native through the bazaars—noble stone buildings, she thought, full of neatly kept alleys and pillared galleries, with assigned quarters for different luxuries and mundane necessaries: meat, spices, and vegetables, slaves, silk, and leather. The jewelers’ quarter glittered so brightly with diamonds, emeralds, sapphires, and rubies that the dazzle made her squint. In their halls, the dervishes whirled. At the baths, the women lingered. Atop the minarets, turbaned muezzins appeared five times a day, as magically as if they had just alighted and folded up wings, and unfurled insistent prayer into the world: La ilaha illa Allah: There is no god but God.
In her own guise, Lady Mary rode her favorite white Arabian steed far and fast, admiring the fire with which he pranced beneath her and startling the Turks with her sidesaddle. From a balcony, she observed the sultan riding to worship flanked by a turbaned multitude that made her think of a garden of marching tulips; Achmet III—King of Kings, Emperor of Rome, Refuge of the World, and Shadow of God—was a handsome man, she judged, though his smile was cruel. She met one sultana wearing an emerald as big as a turkey’s egg. Another entertained in a chamber wainscoted with mother-of-pearl fastened with emerald studs; in all four corners, fountains poured water in gradual falls, ledge to ledge, from ceiling to floor.
Not everything was admirable. Near her house, the naked, bleeding body of a Turkish woman was found at daybreak one morning. Someone had knifed the lady twice, once in the side and once in the breast. She was not yet quite cold, and so surprisingly beautiful that Lady Mary surmised there were very few men in Pera who did not gather around to look at her. (And very few women, either, she scolded herself.) None of them recognized the body, however, as no Turkish lady’s face was known to men outside her own family. They supposed she had been brought there in the dead of night from the Constantinople side, but the government made no inquiries.
She begged official permission to see the Hagia Sophia—built so many years ago by the Christian Romans, kept up by the Byzantine Greeks, and then transformed into a mosque by the Turks. But leave was so long in coming that she schemed to sneak her way in, in the company of a Transylvanian princess almost as adventurous as herself. They dressed each other as Turkish men and walked straight in. The princess, unfortunately, proved a blubberer, and burst into tears at the sight of such a holy place desecrated by infidels. Lady Mary was reduced to hissing at her that they would soon join in the general desecration—probably by being burned at the stake—if Her Royal Highness did not get hold of her tears. The woman obligingly sniffled and stopped.
Lady Mary arrived home to find the official permission awaiting her, so she turned around and went back. This time, she came away with a handful of the mosaic work from the ceiling—it was falling out in a clinking, colored rain, the guides told her. In her hand it looked like small bits of glass, or the paste with which they made counterfeit jewels.
On the nineteenth of May, she seized one final afternoon to sit in her kiosk before the household should dissolve into the chaos of packing, and wrote a last letter—a long, tired sigh for the wonders of Turkey: I am almost of opinion they have a right notion of Life: they consume it in music, gardens, wine, and delicate eating, while we are tormenting our brains with some scheme of politics or studying some science to which we can never attain or, if we do, cannot persuade people to set that value upon it we do ourselves. I had rather be a rich Effendi with all his ignorance, than Sir Isaac Newton with all his knowledge.
On the fifth of July, the Wortley Montagus, no longer covered with the glory of ambassadorship, boarded HMS Preston along with their children, chaplain, surgeon, servants, and four horses Lady Mary refused to give up, and sailed for home.
6
ROSEBUDS IN LILY SKIN
Covent Garden, London
April 1721
LADY Mary shivered and drew closer to the fire glowering in the library grate.
She was reading John Dryden, as she often did when troubled, or tired, or sad. Since early childhood, his cadences had been as familiar and comforting to her as her own heartbeat. This afternoon, though, even Dryden betrayed her: his rhythms felt disappointingly brittle and his sensibility primly arch. How she longed, some days, for the perfumed sensuality of Turkish poetry, which she had breathed rather than read, it sometimes seemed, in her kiosk by the sea in Pera.
She rubbed her eyes—sore today—and glanced back down at her book, open to a rather bizarre elegy on Lord Hastings, dead many years ago now of smallpox—or the “filthiness of Pandora’s box,” as Mr. Dryden had put it. Which made the poem really rather relevant, come to think of it, though in fact it had been his first published work.
It was a marvel that it had also not been his last. What was one to make of such passages as this? She read the line again:
Blisters with pride swelled, which through’s flesh did sprout
Like rosebuds stuck i’ th’ lily skin about.
Really, she thought with a rueful laugh, it was all too romantically gruesome. Besides roses strewn upon lilies, Mr. Dryden had turned his patron’s pocks into tears, glowing gems, even a constellation of rebellious stars. How had he ever restrained himself from adding in a fiery fall of angels?
A few months ago, she would have clapped her hands in glee at such absurdity and concocted some witty remark to send winging through the more intellectual drawing rooms of Covent Garden, Piccadilly, and St. James’s. But then, a few months ago, violets and roses had blossomed in January, and she had thought it a fine omen of unlooked-for loveliness. Now, she deemed it more likely to have been a warning, the last valiant exhalation of beauty they might see for years to come. Perhaps the early bloom had even been a demonic joke: a gorgeous mask that Beelzebub himself had donned just long enough to slip unsuspected into the never-ending party of London’s western suburbs.
Since then, the demon had tossed off his disguise and pounced. Struggling in his talons, the world had lu
rched upside down.
But she was being dramatic, she told herself. Mr. Wortley would most certainly say that she was being dramatic.
Surely, though, it would be fair to say that after that early and all-too-brief warm spell, the weather had dipped into unseasonably cold weeping. Worse, the smallpox had begun slashing its way through her friends and family.
In point of fact, her husband had grunted just that morning, the distemper had been trampling through the city almost without pause since they had returned from Constantinople. She had merely ignored it, because it had lingered in the slums and tenements of the East End, St. Giles’s, Westminster, and Southwark. Dank and dangerous places, she retorted, where he would have chided her for going. As for smallpox in St. Giles’s, it might as well have been fever on the pockmarked moon.
St. Giles’s, Wortley had acidly observed, was no more than a few streets away. A few streets, and many worlds, she had said, sailing out of the room.
Soon after their return, Mr. Wortley had gratified her by purchasing a mansion in Covent Garden—Nos. 9-10, the Piazza—quite à la mode, for a woman of artistic bent and intellectual prowess, though the neighborhood was daringly racy by the standards of her more blue-blooded friends. Still, it was genteel, even if its notion of gentility admitted poets, painters, philosophers, and even a few politicians on the basis of merit and manners alone, waiving the need for much of a pedigree. Lady Mary had happily immersed herself in creating a home that was a work of art, and in rekindling old coteries and salons, as well as sparking some anew.
Then Princess Anne, the eldest of the king’s granddaughters, had gone down with smallpox last April—could it already be a year ago? Even at that point, Lady Mary had not managed to conjure up much real anxiety, though of course, she had, along with the rest of the kingdom, fretted over the little girl’s fate. Anne’s illness did not, however, seem a real and personal threat. After all, the palace was a veritable bedlam, people of all sorts endlessly creeping, pushing, battling their way in to see the king, or at any rate, to see whoever happened to be perched on the highest rung they could reach in the cascading hierarchy of royal lackeys.
These days, she had little to do with the palace, though she still often attended the regular weekly suppers put together for the king by the countess of Darlington—the exalted new rank of her fat, witty, half-royal, and wholly loyal friend, Madame de Kielmansegg.
By contrast to the young princess, Lady Mary told herself with satisfaction, her own little Mary was safely cocooned within private walls, surrounded by family and carefully screened servants.
Besides, at the time that the princess fell ill, there had been candidates that seemed much stronger than smallpox, if she really felt the need for a good worry: two and a half years before, the idiotic Prince of Wales, for instance, had turned both the court and the ministry upside down by openly challenging the power of his father in Parliament. In return, of course, the king had determined to crush his son, both politically and socially, once and for all. For starters, he had had him ejected from the palace, and the doors barred behind him.
Far from humbly returning to beg pardon, the prince had flounced off to Leicester Square to scheme against the king from an impertinently short distance. To the king’s further dismay, Caroline, Princess of Wales—one of the few persons on earth who could cajole his son into sense—had voluntarily joined her husband in exile. Reluctantly, the king had let her go. He did not, however, allow her to take her children: he kept the three little princesses and their infant brother with him, at St. James’s. Hostages for their parents’ good behavior, the world had muttered, and for the most part the world had been right. But in some part, Lady Mary surmised, the king’s decision had also been purely personal and selfish. Quite simply, he loved his grandchildren. He did not wish to give them up.
For courtiers and ministers alike, this familial war had been a two-year stomach-churning nightmare. In the end, everyone but a few of the prince’s most obsequious creatures had adhered to the king—How could the prince have failed to foresee that? she clucked to herself for about the millionth time. On the other hand, even the staunchest of the king’s men—Lady Mary’s own father among them—saw that since George I was not immortal, they could not afford to alienate the prince in any lasting way.
It had been in the midst of this rift, not long after a heart deformity had sent her new little brother, blue lipped, into death, that ten-year-old Anne had fallen ill. Even from this distance, Lady Mary shook her head. Were the doctors not always cautioning their patients to keep their minds and hearts full of good cheer? How could even the most obtuse of ten-year-olds maintains good cheer in such a storm of vicious anger as had ripped Anne’s family apart? That poor little princess had surely not been able to count good cheer among her allies as she fought off the smallpox.
She had very nearly lost that fight, rallying back even as the doctors had been preparing her squabbling royal elders for the worst. Remembering, Lady Mary shook her head. The princess had survived, but she was sadly scarred. At least Lady Mary had had a few years to revel in the delights of being young and beautiful in London, before her beauty had been scraped from her. Even so young, this princess was already famously accomplished; she would always be wealthy, always possess the power of her rank and her well-trained mind. Those, as Lady Mary well knew, were delights of their own, in many ways richer, deeper, more lasting. But they were not the same as the bright, fickle flame of beauty. Lady Mary allowed herself a rare sigh of regret. No, they were not at all the same.
As soon as the girl had fallen ill, the king had made quiet arrangements for the Princess of Wales to attend on her sick daughter as much as she liked. This proved to be most of the day and night, except for the hours when the king himself wished to sit and read to his little Annie. He had stood firm, though, on the point of his son’s exile from the palace.
Gradually, Caroline had whittled away at his obstinate anger; quite possibly, death’s obstinate hover over his grandchildren had also softened him. In any case, it had been in the sitting room just outside Anne’s sickroom that delicate negotiations toward a familial peace had been joined. The prince might be too jealous of rank and power to realize that what he really needed was patience, but the princess was a consummate politician. She was quite deft when it came to handling both her husband and her father-in-law, especially when she was allowed to handle them separately, in private.
So she had engineered a tête-à-tête, just the king and herself, in a small chamber next to Anne’s, ensuring that no voices would be raised and no tempers lost, if only for the sake of the child only one door away. A few days later, as Anne crept out of danger, the prince himself arrived to make formal submission to the king. All London—indeed, the entire nation—breathed a deep collective sigh of relief.
For courtiers, though, the respite had proved brief. While the king and the prince patched up their differences, the dreaded disease jumped the palace walls. For six months, it tiptoed furtively about the neighborhoods west of the City. Since the New Year, though, it had been cutting swathes of hot agony through the fashionable streets of St. James’s and Piccadilly, sending Lady Mary’s friends and family blistering and bubbling into heaven or hell.
Lady Mary had been able to ignore it until James Craggs died on the sixteenth of February. Four days later, her sixteen-year-old cousin Lady Hester Feilding succumbed, having shed her precocious beauty almost as fast as she acquired it. Up in Russell Square, the duke of Rutland and two of his daughters had all died within two weeks of each other, leaving Bloomsbury in mourning and mostly empty. All over London, but especially in the west, the whirl of parties and salons had ceased: not knowing who might be exhaling the infection, ladies had grown afraid to face each other across tea tables, and men shunned even old friends at cards. The crowds at the theater had thinned and drooped.
With all amusements off, there was little left to distract her from the smallpox but the crash of South Sea stock. With
the help of Mr. Craggs, she had invested heavily. Who could have guessed, she cried at her own walls that such a firm, one of the country’s largest trading companies—a financial behemoth big enough to treat with the government in the servicing of the nation’s debt—could be a fraud? A collectively dreamed glimmer of soap, bubbling on a breeze? Who was to know that when its fragile film of popularity burst, it would dissolve vast fortunes into thin air?
Her money—a sum sickeningly large, though not bankrupting—had shriveled in a matter of days, but it was not as if she was the only victim. Parliament was sniffing about for a scapegoat; everyone who had made money was suspect. The king himself was looked at askance. Really, it had been just as well that poor beautiful Mr. Craggs had died when he did, for he had been deeply implicated in the scandal. So deeply that his father, un-stricken by smallpox, had committed suicide a few days later. Everyone was dying.
A knock at the library door startled her. “What?” demanded Lady Mary, rising.
“It’s nurse,” stammered the maid.
Lady Mary crossed the room and flung open the door so quickly that she nearly tossed the maid against the wall.
The nurse’s room was off the night nursery, two stories up. Just inside, she lay shivering on her bed, flecks falling in an angry red snow down her body.
“Where is my daughter?” demanded Lady Mary, her mind spinning and her heart trying to pound its way out of her stiffly boned bodice.
“I’m sorry, my lady,” whispered Nurse. “I’ve tried to be so careful.”