The Clintons’ bedroom was spacious, but since the stillbirth Marjorie slept in it alone. Christopher had known it for years. “Off to visit holy ground I am,” Jeremy confided at the end of an evening’s drinking. Trinity Church owned the land between it and Hudson’s River, and on that land most of the city’s whores could be found; so everyone called the brothels holy ground. “Care to come and pray with me, Chris? For old times’ sake.”
“I won’t, thanks. But say hello to any as remember me.” He hadn’t been unfaithful to Jane since he married her. Unless you counted his unconsummated encounter with Amba. Which he didn’t. “I wouldn’t have thought you’d find the expense worthwhile, Jeremy. Marjorie’s still a fine-looking woman.”
That’s when he’d heard about the constant screaming, and the raving, and the fact that on one occasion, when Jeremy tried to climb into bed beside his wife, Marjorie had attacked him with a pair of scissors. Ever since, Christopher hadn’t been able to look at his old friend without pity. Probably that was why he was taking this risk today. That, and his fondness for the three living Clinton children, and the knowledge that not one of the Clintons, Jeremy included, had ever had the smallpox.
Marjorie was sitting in a chair beside the window, staring dreamily into space. Christopher went to her, but she looked straight through him. He’d stood witness at her wedding and he was godfather to two of her children, but he might have been a stranger. “I’m delighted to see you looking so well, my dear Marjorie. This heat doesn’t seem to trouble you.”
The slave who never left Marjorie’s side reached over to tuck a strand of light brown hair into her mistress’s cap. “Mistress Marjorie don’t mind hot or cold. Long as we give her what she wants, she be nice and peaceful like.”
“Well, then, let’s do what we’ve come to do quickly, and not disturb her.” Christopher took his lancet and a small pewter dish from one pocket, and the vial containing the smallpox pus he’d extracted from the dying boy from another.
“That’s it, then?” Jeremy stared at the little glass container and whispered as if the pox might jump out and attack him if it heard his voice.
“That’s it.”
There was a tall mahogany bureau against one wall. Exactly the right working height for Christopher. He took a step toward it, then stopped to wipe the sweat from his face. Damned heat was insufferable. “God, can’t you open a window? It’s stifling in here. The smoke would be better than this.”
“The pox,” Jeremy murmured. “I don’t …”
“Sweet Jesus, man. How many times do I have to tell you? The pox is not a bloody bird. It doesn’t fly through the air. A window, Jeremy. I cannot bear it.”
The window was opened. Christopher grunted his thanks and went on with his task. Jeremy continued to watch his every move. Sweat was pouring off him as well—not only from the heat. From fear. “Chris, listen.” He nodded toward the vial. “If the disease doesn’t fly through the air, how does it infect so many?”
“I’m not sure. I think it’s because we touch things that have touched … God help us, things that have touched that.”
Jeremy shook his head. “If it were only that, we in this house would be safe. We’ve nothing but our own things, and none of us have the pox.”
Christopher sighed. “I know. I can’t entirely explain it. I can tell you one novel idea, however. You’ve heard of Mather, up in Boston?”
“Cotton Mather? The minister? Isn’t he the one who started all this agitating for variolation?”
“The very same. Mather claims he’s looked at the variola through one of the latest microscopes. Says he saw tiny worms. Says they crawl among us without our ever seeing them, and that’s how the disease is spread.”
“Good God, what useless nonsense.”
Christopher shrugged. “Probably. But that”—he nodded toward the window and the smoke now wafting into the bedroom—“is worse than useless nonsense. It’s never been shown to do any good, and God knows we’ve seen the harm.”
“Perhaps. But what you’re doing is harmful as well.”
“A controlled harm. A small dose of the disease to make you immune to a larger one, and—” Christopher stopped in midsentence. “Listen, Jeremy, I told you there are no guarantees. And it was you who asked me, remember? I don’t want—”
“I know you don’t. I’m the one who wants. I want the same protection for my family and myself that you have arranged for yours. I trust you, Christopher. And I know you’re taking a risk in doing this for us in the face of the Council’s proclamation. I’m grateful. Now get on with it.”
Christopher picked up the dish and a lancet. It was not the same one he’d used to puncture the boy’s eruptions. Though the invisible worms probably existed only in the minister’s imagination, there was no harm in taking the extra precaution. He had no desire to infect Jeremy’s wife with twice the dose he intended.
A decade earlier, when the practice was first advocated by Mather and a few like-minded progressives, out of every hundred variolated some sixty or seventy died. Christopher was convinced the deaths occurred only because the victims had been given too much of the disease.
So far he’d been lucky: he’d never lost an inoculation patient. But how much of the noxious matter was enough rather than too much was guesswork. Christopher based his guesses on the variables of health and constitution and the potency of the diseased serum. It was a leap in the dark, an act of faith. And in the main, Christopher Turner was not a believing man.
His hand shook. He shot a quick glance at Jeremy, who was looking at Marjorie with something between pity and fury and … terror, Christopher decided. Like all mad people, Marjorie mirrored the secret demons inside others. That was why lunatics were feared, because they made others see the thin line between themselves and insanity.
The thought steadied him. Christopher carried his instruments to Marjorie’s chair and sat down beside her and took her hand. “Now, my dear, I’m only going to prick your finger.” It was done before he’d finished speaking. Christopher squeezed a few drops of her blood onto the pewter dish, then returned to the bureau, and, very carefully, working with the absolute concentration that had once marked his practice of surgery, he lifted a drop of the pus on the tip of his lancet and added it to the blood.
It took only a few seconds to thoroughly mix the two together. He went back to Marjorie. She still didn’t look at him. “Roll up her sleeve,” he told the slave. “Good. Now hold her arm steady.”
Christopher looked for a moment at Marjorie’s milk-white skin. Not a mark anywhere. Marjorie Clinton did not have smallpox. She might never get it. Many, after all, would not. But he was about to give it to her, and he damned well knew it was the right, the kind, the medically sound thing to do. Whatever bloody Zachary Craddock and his friends with their medical degrees said or did, and however much influence they had over those who ruled New York.
He swiped the scalpel quickly and repeatedly across a small patch of skin on the inside of Marjorie’s elbow, making shallow cuts. The blood oozed, a faint red haze on her thin, pale arm.
Jeremy took a step closer and bent his head to see. Christopher didn’t turn around. “You’re sure?” he asked. “There’s still time to stop.”
“I’m sure.”
Christopher dipped a fresh lancet into the mix of blood and pus in the pewter dish. He lifted a tiny quantity on the tip of the blade, then tapped off a portion. Only a pinhead of the mixture was left. Too little to do any good, perhaps. No, the correct amount. The boy had confluent pox. An absolutely lethal form of the disease.
Still he hesitated.
A second or two more passed. He felt Jeremy’s eyes boring into him. Even the slave was looking puzzled. Christopher smeared the tiny bit of infected matter on the cuts on Marjorie’s arm. “Done,” he said softly.
Jeremy let out his breath loudly. “Me next,” he said. “Then the children. After that the slaves. But let’s go across the hall to my room to do it.”
Christopher stood up, began gathering his things. “Your mistress may feel poorly for a few days,” he told the black woman. “She may raise a slight fever, perhaps even a few pox. Don’t be alarmed. It won’t be bad.”
“I know, master.”
“You know? How?”
She was an old Ibo who’d been brought to America in one of the Guinea ships when she was a girl of eighteen. For answer she lifted her skirts and showed him her leg. The smooth dark skin of her thigh was marred by one puckered scar, very like the scars that Christopher and Jane and their children all had on their upper arms. He knew instantly what it meant. “You were variolated?” he said in astonishment.
“When I was a little girl,” the woman said. “Soon as the pox came to a nearby village. Always, master. Long as anyone can remember, in my village they always be doing this.”
“In Africa. Among the black seed of Cain. Well, I’ll be damned. I only hope Craddock and his crowd don’t hear about it. It’ll be one more reason for them to reject the procedure as heathen wickedness.”
II
Shreds of September fog drifted in and out of the pall of smoke.
A young man walked alone through the bleak and deserted streets. He was tall and moved with the natural grace of a man who had been born knowing his elevated place in society. When he reached the corner where Dock Street joined Hall Place he stopped and hid himself in the shadows. A few minutes went by. A quarter-mile away, the clock at the City Hall on Wall Street tolled twice. The deep, resonant gong was muffled by the fog. A few seconds later the door to the house beside the barbering pole opened and Jennet Turner appeared.
He’d been watching for a week, and it was always the same. After she’d pulled the door shut behind her Jennet paused a moment on the stoop, long enough to pull the hood of the old gray duffel cloak well forward so her face was deeply shadowed. In one hand she carried a large wicker basket; the other held her cloak tightly closed and lifted her skirts above the powdered streets. The young man was quite sure she had no idea she was being followed.
The first time he’d stayed quite close, afraid he’d lose her in the fog of smoke. Now he knew where she was going, and he could hang back. His boots made a hollow echo on the cobbles. Once or twice he thought he heard the drumming of horses’ hooves.
Jennet headed up the Broad Way as far as Trinity Church, where she paused. The full length of the wide street was lined with trees. The man hid himself behind the thick trunk of an oak. Across the way Jennet unlatched the gate to the churchyard and made her way among the graves. In seconds she had disappeared into the gray mist.
He looked up and down the road—once, in a fog not as thick as this, he’d seen a man run down by a horse and carriage that seemed to appear from nowhere—then darted across the cobbles, which were slippery with red dust. The churchyard was surrounded by a wooden post-and-rail fence. He gripped the top bar and leaned forward, straining to see.
Jennet had met the other women. They were six altogether, all cloaked and hooded just as she was, and that day all clustered around what looked like a freshly dug grave. They put their baskets on the ground at their feet and joined hands. Their heads were bowed and they seemed to be praying, though they made no sound. Then, one by one, they threw back their hoods, gathered up their baskets, and left.
The man stepped back a few paces, disappearing again into the fog and the shadows of the trees, but he was close enough to see the women’s faces as they walked out the gate. One had no nose, another only one eye. Three had skin so pocked and pitted it no longer looked human. They wore their disfigurements like a badge of honor.
He had read of such sisterhoods, beginning back in the fourteenth century, the time of the Black Death in Europe. Alliances of women who had walked through the fire of the plague and lived. In Spain, for a time, they had been the only people permitted by law to bury the dead.
Jennet was the last to leave the graveyard. No sign of the pox on her. At first he’d thought that was what these afternoon journeys meant, that Jennet had contracted the pox while he was away and was ugly and maimed. Not so. Despite her association with the plague women, Jennet was still as beautiful as he remembered her. Christ, there was little he had remembered better in the three years he’d been away studying medicine in Edinburgh. Caleb Devrey, Will Devrey’s youngest son, had not stopped thinking about his cousin, though when he saw her last, he was a man of twenty and she was a child of thirteen.
Back then Caleb had found nothing about her mysterious. Now each day he followed her raised more questions. Jennet walked the streets with total confidence. Perhaps she knew she was naturally immune. Caleb was sure that was the case with him. He’d gone through two visitations of the pox while he was in Scotland and succumbed to neither. Which didn’t make him glad to have returned to New York in the midst of yet another epidemic. He’d come back to an empty house. His parents and his brother and his family had fled to the long island. His sister had married an Albany man and lived in the upper reaches of the province.
That was why he could spend his time following Jennet.
Who was, more was the pity, his second cousin—but only by adoption, he reminded himself. So he need feel no shame in the thoughts he had about her.
Caleb could no longer see the women who’d left the graveyard, but he knew they were bringing food and medicine and such comfort as they could offer to the sick and dying. He admired all of them for their charity, Jennet as well.
Obviously Jennet carried food in her basket, perhaps some salves for the afflicted, and quite probably some potpourri to relieve the pox stench. She spent some ten minutes in each house she visited. But then, when she was finished, his cousin did not return to the graveyard for a final rite with the other nursing women, and she did not go back to her father’s house on Hall Place. She walked north.
Each time he’d followed her, Jennet had finished her errands of mercy in the city, then pulled her hood back over her head and hurried past the cobbled streets to those made of hard-packed dirt. There the houses were sparse and built of wood, not brick, and almost the only tradesmen were the tanners who had been forced to take their evil-smelling occupation to the very edge of the town, to the new-made neighborhood surrounding the remains of Beekman’s Swamp.