“I should like to read you something.”
Zabdiel steeled himself to hear a Biblical passage, a prayer: relatives of the dying, especially parents, often had a desperate need to share some faint shadow of their grief.
Mr. Loring cleared his throat. “It is from this morning’s Gazette.”
London, July 29
On Monday, several physicians and surgeons belonging to the Prince and Princess, attended by Mr. Lilly, their Royal Highnesses’ Apothecary, came to Newgate to treat with the felons about undergoing the operation of inoculating into them the smallpox, for an experiment, and agreed with three of them, viz. two men and one woman, who are to be removed into the most airy part of the prison in order to have their bodies prepared for the said operation . . .
Mr. Loring looked up. “Did you know of these experiments?”
Zabdiel was startled speechless; all he could do was shake his head. Mr. Loring set the paper in his hand, and he read it twice through, his mouth moving as he read.
“I would say you—perhaps I might be permitted to say we—are running in very high company,” said Mr. Loring with a wan smile. “The very highest.”
It was true—if the article could be trusted. Zabdiel was not alone: the practice whose merit seemed so clear upstairs, but so muddied out in the streets, had drawn royal attention—not yet approval, perhaps, but enough attention to merit experiment. At Newgate, said an arch little voice in his head. Among felons.
“And the lowest,” said Zabdiel.
He hurried to the post office, to purchase his own copy. At the door, Mr. Musgrave, postmaster and proprietor of the Boston Gazette, hailed him with the heartiness he reserved for people from whom he wished to wheedle something.
It was as Zabdiel expected; the postmaster had a whole pile of Mercurys, and knew perfectly well what came next. He winked at Zabdiel. “Sometimes, you have to dole out excitement in mere drams, like opium, eh? Keep ’em coming back for more.”
It was all Zabdiel could do to keep from leaping over the counter and seizing him by the collar. “What came of the experiment?”
“Not so hasty, not so hasty,” said Mr. Musgrave, pulling out a bottle of Madeira and two glasses. “I must ask a favor in return. Fair’s fair, you know, and I owe both Mr. Campbell and especially Mr. Franklin a drubbing in the matter of sales.”
Forty-five minutes later, Zabdiel departed only a little unsteadily, leaving behind a promise and carrying with him a copy of the day’s paper and, even better, knowledge that made him so giddy he thought he might float.
“Look,” said Zabdiel, setting the paper down on the parlor table as the family gathered for prayers just before dinner.
Tommy scanned through the ship notices and the advertisements, and looked up with shining eyes. “Papa! A camel!” He ran his finger along the page word by word, reading carefully, “Just arrived from Africa, being above seven foot in height and twelve foot long.”
“I am not talking about the camel, child,” said Zabdiel.
Young Jerusha and John snatched the paper to their end of the table. Tommy shrugged and ducked under the table, which made a good treasure cave.
“Operation of inoculating,” read John carefully, and then his eyebrows rose. “Newgate!” he blurted. A sharp rap came from under the table; Tommy reappeared, rubbing his head. “Felons . . . experiment . . .” continued John.
“The Prince and Princess of Wales,” breathed his sister, looking up at her father in awe.
Peering over their shoulders, Zabdiel junior read the article aloud from beginning to end.
There was such a commotion of shouting and laughter that no one heard Tom ride up; his face just suddenly appeared, floating pale and staring in the doorway. Jerusha took one look at him and sent the children downstairs to Moll. They obeyed in stricken silence.
“Sarah?” asked Zabdiel, steering Tom to a chair.
“She has given birth to a boy. Both healthy.”
“But what?” asked Zabdiel.
Tom rubbed his eyes. “But one of the maids went visiting a beau on the sly, and came back with the smallpox. . . . It was several days before anyone knew it, though. She helped at the birth.” He sat forward, his hands on his knees. “Sarah’s near hysterical to be inoculated, Zabdiel. I don’t know what to tell her. Will you come?”
He left at dawn on October 26, Governor Shute’s Day of Thanksgiving, glad for the excuse to be absent.
The consultation was brief. Zabdiel explained the procedure and the risks to them both, and then he laid down his sole condition: that the infant should be sent elsewhere with a nurse while Sarah recovered. Perhaps to their brother Peter’s out on the family farm in Brookline, he suggested. Sarah nodded, but tears poured silently down her face.
Zabdiel withdrew from the bedchamber to let the two speak in private, only to find himself besieged by his sisters. The house was full of Boylston women, some having taken refuge there with Sarah from the first, some having arrived lately to help with her labor and lying-in. Now, though, with the disease lurking in the house, they were preparing to scatter.
It was no more than a minute before Tom emerged and begged his brother, for both of them, to inoculate Sarah.
It took no time at all. After it was done, as Tom arranged for the nursing of his newborn son, Zabdiel inoculated the daughters of two of his sisters: eleven-year-old Rebecca Abbot and twenty-year-old Mary Lane.
Just as he was finishing, Mrs. Blague, Dr. Mather’s younger sister, came to call. “The dowager duchess of Matherdom,” groaned Mary, glancing out the window. “She will expect tea just so, and tipsy cake. And us in the middle of packing, with cabbage plastered over our arms.”
But Mrs. Blague surprised them all.
“Poor thing,” she clucked from the doorway of Sarah’s chamber, watching the tearful farewell between mother and newborn. “She belongs in her own bed, cared for by her husband, she does.”
“She must have a coach for that,” said Zabdiel.
“And how do you think I arrived here, Doctor?” snapped the lady. “On a broomstick? She shall have mine, of course.”
Mrs. Blague’s coach returned not two hours later, fitted with a bed for Sarah’s comfort. In thanks, and more than a little shamefaced, Zabdiel rode over to the widow’s place on his way home, and inoculated her new little black girl, just five years old.
In town, Dr. Mather dared to hope the epidemic might be receding: The Sick of the Small-Pox in the Notes to be prayed for sunk to 180. But not even he had the heart for a full day of Thanksgiving. All across town, the usual services were scaled back from two sermons to one.
In the Brattle Square Church, Jerusha tried not to think dark thoughts while the prayers rumbled on: Amidst the various awful rebukes of Heaven with which we are righteously afflicted in the contagious and mortal sickness among us, still, Lord, we owe gratitude for Your Divine Goodness vouchsafed to us in the course of the year.
“What goodness?” she wondered. For the king, proclaimed the prayers, and she sighed. For the Prince and Princess of Wales, they continued, and suddenly Jerusha found herself absorbed in fervent supplication to heaven, for the Prince and Princess, for their experiment of inoculation, and for the lives of six felons in Newgate.
In the small hours of the morning, young Daniel Loring died, even as Nathaniel and Hannah shed the last of their scabs in their sleep. Zabdiel attended the funeral, but regretted it. All his grief had been drained from him; he could only mask his face with solemnity, behind which washed regret and an unseemly relief. But for the grace of a howling mob, he thought, I would have notched another death on my soul tonight.
On October 30, the Boston Gazette reported the story Zabdiel had been hugging close to his heart for a week, waiting for the rest of the town to learn:
The smallpox have plainly appeared upon some of the persons in Newgate who underwent the experiment of inoculation on Tuesday last Sev’night; and ’tis concluded from appearing symptoms that the rest will ha
ve them, except one man who was known to have had them before, on whom the engraftment of them hath made no alteration.
The royal experiment with inoculation had been a success. Or just as good as a success, he told himself.
Below that came the piece Mr. Musgrave had coaxed from him, in exchange for an early peek at the news. It did not have his name on it; Mr. Musgrave wanted to maintain decorum and the semblance of neutrality. But it was filled with Zabdiel’s knowledge, his arguments, and his conclusions:
A Faithful Account of what has occurred under the late Experiments of the Small Pox managed and governed in the way of Inoculation. Published, partly to put a stop unto that unaccountable way of Lying which fills the Town and Country on this occasion, and partly for the Information and Satisfaction of our Friends in other places.
I. The Operation within these four months past has been undergone by more than threescore persons. Among which there have been Old & Young, Strong and Weak; Male and Female; White and Black; Many serious and virtuous people, some the children of excellent persons among us.
II. Concerning five or six of these, we had all possible demonstration that they first received the infection of the Small Pox in the Common way; and these (as none would imagine otherwise) underwent the distemper in the Common way: However, there is cause to think that the discharge at their Incisions was of use unto them. Only one gentlewoman so circumstanced died, but her nearest friends and all that knew her case do firmly believe the transplantation was not the least occasion of it.
III. Of all the rest that have passed under the operation, there has Not so much as One miscarried. It has done well in all, and even beyond expectation in the most of them.
It went on, detailing their symptoms and answering the objections of the doubters, point by careful point. With particular satisfaction, Zabdiel read through his conclusion once again:
But for a further confutation of all the opposition, and that all the Raw Head and Bloody Bones with which our good people have been practiced upon may vanish, let this One Passage be considered. We are not only credibly informed that this New Practice is now begun in England with success and that persons of quality are coming into it, but also that a person of too much honor to have his veracity questioned asserts that the English Ambassador at Constantinople brought his two sons under the Inoculation of the Small Pox. And that same gentleman also adds that if God Almighty had not mercifully taught the poor people there this way of encountering the Small Pox the mortality was thought so great as to have threatened an extreme dissolution to those countries.
It was too late for Boston, he thought, but God willing, other towns might take warning in time to preserve themselves.
But let us beseech those that have called this method the Working of the devil, or a going to the devil, no more to allow the cursed thought or utter the horrid word, lest they be found Blasphemers of a most merciful and wonderful work of GOD.
It was better, he thought, than his earlier efforts. He was learning. But then, he ought to be, seeing as he had had Dr. Mather’s help in going over it. If only Zabby would apply himself at college, as he was doing under Dr. Mather’s tutoring. The boy might make something of himself yet.
Zabdiel turned the page and found yet another snippet from Newgate. A second experiment had been tried: the doctors had dipped a bit of cotton in smallpox matter and thrust it up some poor woman’s nose. The opposition screamed that it was done nefariously, while she was asleep, and that she was deathly ill—as good as murdered, they implied: but the latest news denounced these shouts as lies intended to discredit—and he read this part twice—the safe and universally useful experiment of inoculating the smallpox.
The papers flew out of the post office; people could be seen huddling at corners under gray skies, stepping in puddles or bumping into posts, reading while they walked. They read it over tea tables, and spread the sheets across shop counters. They gathered around tables and heard it told aloud in the taverns.
That afternoon, Judge Addington Davenport’s carriage swept through the gabbling crowd to Zabdiel’s door. The judge and his son descended, and right there in the street, for all to hear, he said, “I beg of you, sir, the favor of inoculating my son John.” Captain John Osborne and his wife Sarah rolled up next. Elder Caleb Lyman, founder of the New North Church, and his adopted daughter Susannah, were not far behind. “Elder Dixwell,” he said, “has recommended me to your service.”
The following day, Dr. Mather’s nephew the Reverend Thomas Walter and two friends arrived from Roxbury to be inoculated. Mr. Loring’s brother Nathaniel, who had lost all his children but one to the epidemic, brought his last son and namesake, Nathaniel, to submit to the operation. The next day Councilor Edward Bromfield brought his young daughters to be inoculated. “It was my Fanny’s last request,” he said. “I should have done it before now.”
Day by day, the number of his patients swelled: not to a flood tide, to be sure, but to a steady stream. More remarkable was the rise in their stature and power, and the coincident rise in stature and power they granted to him. They did not come in the dark; they did not ask for discretion or secrecy. They did not send for him to attend them at home, as any of them could have demanded. They drove up in broad daylight and requested the operation in full view of the street.
Even as the crowds grew more stately and decorous during the day, they grew more vicious at night.
“But the distemper is diminishing, Jer,” said Zabdiel. “I don’t understand it.”
“They need someone to blame,” she answered. “In the last month alone nearly twenty-five hundred people have fallen ill, Zabdiel. Over four hundred are dead. Still more are staring starvation in the face. As for your considered opponents, they are more dangerous now than ever: before, they were fueled with the hope of victory; now they are burning with the hatred of the vanquished.”
“They are not vanquished yet, you just said so.”
“They will be,” she said.
On the fourth there was a contentious town meeting, in which the anti-inoculators drove through a vote making it illegal to enter Boston with the intention of being inoculated. As if that weren’t a direct enough attack on Dr. Boylston and Dr. Mather, they picked up the plague bludgeon again. Anyone caught disobeying, the law announced, would be dispatched immediately to Spectacle Island, lest the Town be made a Hospital for that which may prove worse than the Small Pox, which has already put so many into mourning.
Never mind, Cheever observed angrily to Zabdiel afterward, that the multitudes fleeing Boston had driven up the price of food and housing in all towns round about. Never mind that Bostonians had trailed the disease into Roxbury, Cambridge, and Charlestown. No stranger was to find either prevention or cure in the suspicious bosom of Boston.
Zabdiel, as usual, ignored the huffing and puffing as much as he could. He focused on Sarah Boylston, who erupted that morning, and looked to do well. All his new inoculees looked to do well.
On the seventh, the General Court crowded into the pews of the First Church of Cambridge, just across the street from Harvard, to hear the governor open the session, displaced and late as it was, with the shortest speech anyone could recall falling out of his mouth, formally or informally.
Gentlemen,
Since it hath pleased God in His wise Providence to suffer the smallpox to spread very much in this province; and being also informed that many members of the Council and the House of Representatives have never had the distemper; I shall therefore only recommend to you at this sessions, the quick dispatch of those affairs which will be absolutely necessary for the present welfare of the government.
Hear, hear! called the House, stamping the floor in agreement—especially the men who had not had the smallpox. It was quickly resolved that all minor affairs should be postponed to the next session.
But Mr. Cooke, Dr. Clark, and the governor nonetheless found plenty to bicker about, including how much to pay the governor and where to stow the Indian h
ostages from the war up in Maine, since the smallpox was rampant at the Castle, but the jail in Cambridge was not judged to be secure against the wiles of the Abenaki.
A week later, they were still squabbling, when the smallpox broke out in the heart of Cambridge. On the thirteenth of November, fear dissolved even House solidarity against the governor. A delegation was sent up to beg the governor to call an end to the session.
The governor refused.
That same day, Daniel Loring’s second wife Susanna and her twelve-year-old daughter Mary Breck returned to Boston from the no-longer-safe country, and Zabdiel inoculated them.
That afternoon, James Franklin made a face as Dr. Mather passed him on the other side of King Street; the knot of young men he was walking with sputtered into laughter. The sound of it chipped and hammered at the minister’s self-control; suddenly, the wrath that he had caged for so long leapt free and roared through him like a whirlwind. “You there!” he cried, striding across the street. “Young Man! Mr. Franklin!”
Mr. Franklin turned, startled at the outburst. His companions disappeared, while all along the street, heads craned from windows and doors.
Dr. Mather pitched his voice at the crowd. “You claim to edify the public with your Courant, but it is plain to all that your chief design is to abuse the ministers of God. You would do well, sir, to remember that God’s blessing on the priestly tribe of Levi contains these words: Smite through the Loins of them that rise against him, and of them that hate him.”