In 1675, the massacres that set off King Philip’s War had induced him, briefly, to think otherwise. Heavy of heart, he had ridden to join Captain Thomas Prentice’s mounted troopers. A few months later, however, Dr. Boylston had ridden home again from the blood and fire of the Mt. Hope campaign, and had never offered either himself or his horses again; had never suffered his sons to join the fighting. I can see—just—city fools from Boston mistaking one tribe for another, attacking a peaceful tribe for a warring one, he would say grimly into a tankard of beer. But even a fool from Boston should be able to distinguish between battling warriors and barbecuing women and children alive in their homes.
At the end of the war, there had been a free-for-all, as the settlers rounded up what Indians were left and sold them off to slavery in the West Indies, keeping a few of the likeliest for heavy work at home. To his neighbors’ chagrin, Dr. Boylston let a few families live as they chose on his land in return for intermittent tutorials on the medical secrets of the wild plants in the woods and swamp marshes, and a few weeks’ heavy work each year during planting and harvest. So, trailing after his father, Zabdiel had learned the secrets of the green life always curling and uncurling in the woods, learned the Indian names and uses for plants that the English blasted as weeds, if they saw them at all.
That knowledge, though uncommonly useful in practice, had proved little or no help in winning him paying patients in Boston. Zabdiel’s apprenticeship with Dr. Cutler, on the other hand, gave him cachet. He was just on the verge of setting up a separate practice, when the smallpox had returned, as it did every twelve years, like some vicious clockwork made of hot knives and oiled with pus and with blood.
Dr. Cutler had summoned Zabdiel into his presence. Upon discovering that his assistant had never had the disease, Dr. Cutler had twisted his lips in dismay and looked off into the distance, as if gazing right through the walls and clear across the world to Holland. “You can leave, and hope to outrun it,” he said. “Or you can stay, and almost surely contract it.”
“What good will I be if I leave?”
“None, to your patients, or to me. But you will be alive, which may be of use to you.”
“I want to be of use as a doctor,” Zabdiel had said quietly.
So he had trailed Dr. Cutler through his rounds as the epidemic thickened, his stomach rising, his skin prickling, as he bent to cross into every sickroom. It had taken only two weeks until he had shifted places, from assistant to patient.
At first, he had taken notes, right through the first fever and the up-welling of the pocks, comparing what was happening to what various authorities said would happen. It looked, he thought with curious detachment while staring at his forearm, to be confluent. Dr. Cutler, with less equanimity, had agreed.
Within a week, the agony of the still-swelling sores splitting his skin had made further note-taking impossible. The pocks swelled his eyes shut and rattled the air in his throat. He remembered, he thought, chasing his breath, lumbering after it, trying to find it by listening for it. After that, he could remember nothing but agony, all thought compressed into a thin, dark line as he set himself, from minute to minute, to the grim task of surviving. Until now.
“Three days ago, I would not have given you one chance in ten,” said Dr. Cutler’s voice somewhere above him, the clipped Dutch accent spiking out, as it did whenever the doctor was in the grip of exhaustion or euphoria. “But now I think you will live to be a fine physician. Not a pretty one, maybe. But a fine one.”
“Why?” He had not known a word could hurt so badly, cracking the inside of his mouth, scraping it raw. Almost, in the gasp of pain, he missed the answer. Would have, he realized later, had Dr. Cutler not taken time searching about for the right words.
“There is nothing, my boy, to spark compassion like a sojourn in hell.”
In autumn 1705, in the heart of Boston, Jerusha Minot ducks inside a shop, and the din and rough smells of Dock Square—the shout and laughter of men, the harsh screams of seagulls, creak of leather and wood, all laced with the rough smells of tar, salt, fish, rum, and tobacco—disappear. The shop, though small, is thankfully open; the last two she tried were shut up. In place of the noise and the smells outside, a thick, twining scent, more luxurious than any silk, envelops her.
Chinese pagodas and island jungles bloom in her mind; she senses red-feathered birds flashing in the sun and tigers stalking through the shadows. It is a green-and-gold vision, hot and insistent with life, woven from bright threads that do not grow in the chill of New England: boxes of lemons and oranges, neatly stacked pyramids of sugar loaves, white and brown, suitable for the finest confectionary or the roughest rum. She senses chocolate, coffee, and green and black Bohea tea. A tease of snuff prickles the air—to suit any fancy, a placard proclaims, whether for Brazil, Barcelona, or Spanish, perfumed or plain. She catches tangled whiffs of salty anchovies, bitter capers, and sweet oils; plain walnuts and sugared almonds. Pungent jars of pepper, ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, and aniseed. Musk, bergamot, and vanilla.
Her uncle and guardian, Stephen Minot, is a prosperous merchant with a large warehouse and his own wharf, so it is not as if she has never sensed such fragrances before. But she has never sensed them with such tactile immediacy, like satins draped over the counter for her own perusal and purchase.
Life does not hold much prospect of luxury for a spinster of twenty-six, a woman of billowing imagination but scarred beauty—and no money to speak of. Especially, she tells herself, one living on the charity of her uncle—as she has been since the age of eleven, when he found her and her last living brother behind the house, knee deep in earth, trying to scrape out a grave. No one else had dared come near that farm out in Dorchester, on the edge of the wilderness, in the smallpox winter of 1689-90. Why would they? When, two days before her eleventh birthday, her beloved father had died, and then the speckled monster had gnashed its teeth and leapt at her and her four brothers in turn. First Israel, then little George, then her favorite, Josiah, had died. And then, last and most terrible, her mother.
The neighbors were either too afraid, or too busy dying themselves, to offer any help. John, just eighteen, had enough to do to struggle suddenly into manhood and look after the farm; he had no patience or skill to look after a young sister as well. Nor was it suitable, in any case. So Uncle Stephen had galloped grimly out of the arch of trees lining the road, had helped to bury the dead, and fetched Jerusha to his home and his overwhelmed wife, the heavily pregnant mother of a two-year-old boy. Jerusha had submerged herself in the squeal and tumble of Uncle Stephen and Aunt Mary’s ever-growing brood of children, in their fierce greed for love and their casual generosity in giving it.
For twelve years, she had made herself indispensable, a bulwark against the many woes of childhood—until the next smallpox epidemic. In 1702, she found herself once again helpless against her old foe. First little Peter, not quite eight months old, had died; two weeks later, two-and-a-half-year-old George had followed.
After that, she decided that no one else in her family would die ever again. Standing in this shop she clings to that decision with ferocity, however ridiculous it sounds, however much the Reverend Mr. Colman would chide her for trespassing on the prerogative of Providence. Which is why she is here, she reminds herself. Not that anyone at home is in danger at the moment. But it is never too early to battle headache, stomachache, fever.
She wanders along the shelves. There are the packaged medicines—the latest rage from England: Lockyers Pills, Dr. Salmon’s Pills, the Royal Honey Water, Daffy’s Elixir. She fingers them idly, curious yet aloof. She would like to know what is in them, though she has no notion of trying them. As for the basics, she herself can do better than that, and if anyone were to fall really ill, beyond her skill, Uncle Stephen would demand the proper services of an apothecary to match the medicine to the particular patient and trouble. He would never allow them to dose themselves with some potion mixed up in an anonymous vat, to be s
quirted at random at every ill under the sun.
Laid on a shelf she sees a winking of metal: a display of surgical instruments such as those who live out of town might need, or new doctors might care to buy: cupping glasses, urinals, lancets, plaster boxes.
But what catches her attention most is the wall whose shelves are neatly lined with white earthenware jars labeled in blue, full of powders, cordials, spirits, medicinal herbs, and metallic compounds of alum, copper, antimony, mercury, and arsenic; the heavy guns of spirit of vitriol, or sulphuric acid, and laudanum, or opium-infused alcohol. Here she finds rosemary, rue, roses, and lavender. Waters infused with black cherry, peony, or sheep’s dung; syrups of violets and marsh mallows. Most intriguing of all are the many jars with no names.
These she picks up, one by one, lifting the lids and scenting the contents. Mostly they are dried herbs, and suddenly her nose fills with the scent of home. Not Uncle Stephen’s home. Her home, the farm out in Dorchester: with the sunlit woods, the brown scent of working horses, of turned earth. She closes her eyes, breathes in deeply—and realizes that the scent is coming from behind her, not from the jar under her nose.
“The scent is free,” says a man’s voice. “I hope you will not be needing the substance.”
She turns to see a man behind the counter now: tall, with laughing eyes. She knows Zabdiel Boylston, of course, by sight: they both attend the Brattle Street Church, which her uncle helped to found. But she knows nothing about Dr. Boylston, other than the fact that he is a young doctor with his own new apothecary shop, and that he is proud—justifiably, so far as she can tell—about his horses. Many girls, her young cousin Mehitabel for instance, would call him handsome, if his face weren’t so pock pitted. But then Mehitabel yearns for a dashing young sea captain. Jerusha cannot think why the sound of the blood rushing in her ears suddenly makes it difficult to think.
“What is it?” she asks, holding out the jar in her hand. Brilliant, she says to herself.
The name that rumbles out of him is an Indian word.
“In English,” she says, a little impatiently.
“It doesn’t have one.”
“Then you should give it one.”
“What matters is what it does. What it’s for. Not what it’s called. Besides, it has a perfectly good name.”
“What is it for, then?”
“Rattlesnake bite.”
Unaccountably, the lid leaps from her hands, and shatters on the floor.
“I don’t keep a snake in there with the antidote,” he says dryly.
She blushes and sinks to the floor, sweeping up the shards with her hands, as if she might fix it.
Then she notices there are other hands on the floor as well: fine ones, long fingered and precise. They seize hers.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “My fault. I startled you. Close your eyes, and I’ll make it up to you.”
She frowns, but he says, “I won’t bite. And if I do, you still have the antidote.”
She grimaces at him, but closes her eyes, just as he pulls something out of his pocket.
A sweet, earthy scent suffuses through her body. She opens her eyes in surprise. He is holding a small grayish lump of what looks to be wax.
“What is it for?” she asks, giving that last word the faintest flicker of wickedness.
He shrugs. “To smell good. Some say there are medicinal properties, but I don’t know what they are.”
“What is it, then?”
“Ambergris,” he says, a smile hovering at the corners of his mouth.
“You look like a thirteen-year-old boy,” she says.
“No one knows where it comes from, but some say it is whale vomit.”
Proper ladies, no doubt, would be properly offended, but she is an old aunt loved by many boys who have passed through the age of thirteen. “You are a thirteen-year-old boy,” she says with a faint tease of amusement.
She tells him what she needs, and he measures it out, wraps it up, and she heads to the door. On the threshold, she turns. “Snakeroot,” she says as firmly as any aunt, even as her whole face flashes into a young girl’s smile. “That’s your Indian herb’s English name. It needs one, you know. Not for its sake: for ours. How will we know it exists, know we need it, without a name?”
Then she disappears, and he watches the place where she was for a long time.
He begins courting her, soon after, with the scents of autumn: apples, pumpkins, running horses, burning leaves, saddle leather.
When scents finally evaporate in the cold, around Christmas, they publish the banns signifying their intention to marry.
That is what makes the official records: Married, Zabdiel Boylston and Jerusha Minot, by Mr. Benjamin Colman, January 18, 1706.
2
CURIOSITIES OF THE SMALLPOX
The North End of Boston
December 16, 1706
IN a garret at the top of a tall gabled house, a young man shivers alone on a pallet. Around him, the room rocks gently, as if during his months at sea, dry land had taken up rippling in waves, while the water had stilled. Clenching his teeth to stop the chattering, he stares at the shards of light that splinter a small square of night framed in the window. He has not seen the stars since he was forced into the dark belly of that first ship; now he sees that the constellations he once knew as well as the patterns on his own hands have stretched and scattered into chaos.
Everything else is different here, he thinks, why not the stars too?
During the day, there is no sky overhead, only a low gray gloom. When this grayness grows thick enough to rain, it does not spit water, but cold, silent salt—enough to blanket the earth in white, but when it touches his tongue, it disappears without a taste, leaving only a cold burning behind. There are no leaves on the gray, jagged trees, and no birds to roost in them: the only birds are the wheeling gray-and-white gulls who cry with the voices of lost souls. This land where he must learn to be a slave is a place of nothingness and absence: no heat, no scent, no taste, no color. Some angry god has devoured them.
Even the people are grayish white, paler than the leathery demon-men who skim the shores of his home, stealing people. Paler than the scalded pink people on the Sugar Islands. Glow-in-the-dark pale, like the nameless things that squirm beneath rotten logs. Some even have eyes drained of color.
He shudders. The stars, the land, the people—everything is different, except one: his determination to find his way home.
In the reek and clank of the ship’s bowels, while men stacked around him broke into babble or sank into blank silence, that determination was the rock on which he anchored his sanity. At first, like most of the others chained belly to back, he had dreamed hot red dreams of killing his captors. Then he saw what happened to those who tried. The pale demon-men quickly overpowered the rebels, killing them and hanging their dripping remains on hooks overhead, as a warning.
He heeded that warning by changing his plans, the very drift of his dreams. Not out of fear: out of cold calculation. You cannot take revenge if you’re dead, he reasoned. Nor can you go home. First and foremost, he wants to go home. After that, there will be time enough to plan revenge.
To get home, he needs to learn two things. First, where he is now. And second, where, in relation to the first, his home stands. Once he knows both these things, he can draw a line between the two places. Then he will step onto that line and never stop moving until he rounds the last bend and sees home.
His thoughts circle back to the stars. Maybe the whispers he has heard are true: that after swallowing two hundred men, women, and children, the ship—so misleadingly beautiful, even fragile, from a distance—had spread its wings, risen from the sea, and flown through the spaces between the stars to land on the ocean of some other world.
He shifts fitfully on the thin mattress. It does not matter. Such a flight would make his quest harder, but not impossible: as his father, a trader far and wide along the routes that crisscross through their village, lik
es to say, All roads except time can be traveled in both directions.
He is well on his way. Has he not already wriggled into their language? In the auction pens on the bright steaming islands where the ship disgorged them, the others tried desperately to cling to anyone and everyone who shared their words. He, too, had felt that urge. But he squelched it, sidling at every opportunity to the edge of the huddle to grasp at the phrases tossed about by the pale men always watching them.
By the time they were sold, he had deciphered a great many. The two he prizes most are names: “the Gold Coast”—the demon-people’s name for his land—and “Coromantee”—their name for his people. He likes the latter word especially: not for its sound, or its nonsense—so far as he can tell, it is confused, lumping together many obviously different groups of the Akan people, some of them long-standing enemies, and naming them all after Cormantine, one of the fearsome island-forts where captives are held until the ships come. No: he likes the word Coromantee for the tangled tones with which the pale men say it: a thin layer of contempt failing to mask deep admiration twined with fear. For his people are strong, he thinks proudly. They are warriors. Untamable, he heard one of the pink men say. Bloody trouble, spat another.
Most of the others from his ship were marched off to the cane fields under the cracking of whips; he was the only man, whole and healthy, to be shunted off into a smaller huddle of women, children, and trembling elders. His curiosity flattened to thin despair as they were herded back to the harbor, pushed aboard another ship.
For nearly the length of a complete cycle of the moon, they sailed ever northward, keeping the rising sun on their right and the setting sun on their left. Day by day, both sky and sea had drained of heat and color, and still they sailed north. He knows this because on this second ship they were not chained below. True, they spent nights locked in a small rolling room, but during the day, they were caged in a pen on deck.