The Speckled Monster Read Free Page B

it was the virus now known as variola major. Its identification would take another two and a half centuries, but in 1694 the disease it triggered was already notorious. “The small pox,” the English called it, to distinguish it from “the great pox,” syphilis, whose strange rashes it sometimes mimicked.
    Silently, without so much as a lone tickle or twinge of warning, the infection burrowed deep into the queen’s body. For almost two weeks, it stayed out of sight, as the virus multiplied in the dark. Meanwhile, Mary seemed to be wrapped safe within the gilt pavilions and cupolas of her favorite pleasure house, its rooms festooned with laughter and music, swept with the rustling of silk, and gleaming with forests of the blue-and-white Chinese porcelain she loved to collect.
    Then, five days before Christmas, fever exploded through her body, chased by intense flashes of pain in her head and back. Without telling anyone she was ill, she dosed herself with her old-faithful cold remedies, but by evening nothing had helped. With a smallpox epidemic raging in London, Queen Mary assumed the worst. She sent everyone who had not already had the disease away from the palace and shut herself in her innermost room. Veering between shivers and sweats, she wrote a last long letter of love and advice to the sometimes wayward king. After locking it in a little drawer in the desk by her bed, she spent the rest of the night burning her diaries and long-treasured letters, preparing to die.
    Three days later, a deep reddish-purple flush crept in uneven patches across her face. Confronted with this rosy fire, the nine physicians who gathered at her bedside looked grim. They knew of two maladies that commonly produced it, and neither was good news.
    â€œIf the queen is lucky,” they intoned among themselves, “it might be measles.” If she were not, they knew but could not yet bear to say, it would turn out to be smallpox.
    The only way to find out was to wait.
    The next day, a cold and blustery Sunday, the ominous blush faded, and blisters began to rise on the queen’s face, arms, hands, and feet. Despite the now inescapable diagnosis of smallpox, the physicians’ hopes rose along with her bubbling rash.
    â€œAt least she does not have the purples,” they told each other with relief. The mere appearance of the blisters canceled out the possibility of that horror: the rare but invariably fatal form of early hemorrhagic smallpox, which made its victims leak blood from every orifice while their bodies swelled beneath skin turned to dark purple velvet, until they died of heart failure—all before a rash of telltale pocks could ever break out.
    â€œThen she is out of danger?” asked King William.
    But the doctors shook their heads. “That we cannot yet say.”
    The king, who had suffered the disease in childhood and lost both parents to it, broke down and wept. He was a soldier at heart, a daring and some said brilliant commander who relished any threat that action and strategy might answer. He thrilled to direct men through the danger and chance of the battlefield, but as his wife headed into her own private war with smallpox, there was nothing he could do but watch from the far shore of immunity. He set up a camp bed inside Mary’s room and refused to leave her side.
    You can believe what a condition I am in, loving her as I do, he scribbled to a cousin. If I should lose her, I shall have done with the world .
    He was not alone in his fear; nor was the queen. All that day and the next, which was Christmas Eve, courtiers and bishops pressed into the stifling sickroom. Still more milled just outside the door, while less exalted crowds gathered in hushed throngs amid the snow flurries down in Kensington High Street.
    Up in the palace, the doctors held their breath and kept their voices low. Perhaps, after all, the queen would suffer only what they called “kind and distinct”