Read Online The Speckled Monster by Jennifer Lee Carrell - Free Book Online

the marriage she wished for, Mary’s father now set about condemning poor Will to Hell, marrying him to a fatuous fifteen-year-old heiress whose lone asset was to arrive in the family towing one of the largest fortunes in England.
    One evening in April, Lady Mary was serenaded in Acton by a group of young rakes, Wortley’s prime suspect among them. After singing under her bedroom window, her suitors had all been invited into the drawing room for punch. The party then moved on to the house of a duchess, where they danced till dawn.
    The next morning, a footman brought her a single letter sitting on a silver tray.
    At last I am ready to confess my errors, wrote Wortley. I retract all I have said of you and ask your forgiveness . His fair words cloaked a foul message: He declared he had at last discovered who her other lover was. Worse still, in a pretense of willingness to assist in furthering her new affair, he offered to take this information to her father.
    I wish you all possible happiness, she replied acidly, and myself the quiet of never hearing from you more .
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    Carving at her father’s table up at Thoresby that summer, Lady Mary heard the news that had set all of Europe to trembling. On April 17, the very day she had received that infernal letter from Wortley, Emperor Joseph I, the great hope of the Hapsburgs in both the Holy Roman Empire and Spain, had expired of the smallpox in Vienna, swathed in twenty yards of sweat-drenched scarlet cloth. Three days earlier, Louis, eldest son of King Louis XIV and therefore the grand dauphin of France, had died of the same disease, shivering in a drafty room outside Paris.
    Their doctors belonged to the opposing camps of the hot treatment and the cold, Dorchester and his cronies surmised. Fearing above all else that the emperor’s pocks might fail to ripen, his conservative doctors had no doubt turned the sickroom into a dark crimson hothouse, draping not only His Imperial Majesty but the bed, windows, and walls in the warm color of red, which ancient tradition held would open pores and lure the pus out into pocks. If that weren’t enough hocus-pocus, the windows were probably shut, the fire stoked up, and the patient buried beneath quilts and blankets. None of it to any effect, grumbled Lady Mary’s father, but to increase the imperial misery. The dauphin’s doctors, on the other hand, appeared to have worried far more about the poison ripening in too much abundance than failing to ripen. Rumor had it they’d done their best to chill the effervescence they feared was boiling in Louis’s blood by allowing no bedclothes beyond a light coverlet drawn up to the prince’s waist. They had thrown the windows open wide and quenched the fire in the grate too.
    Neither treatment, griped Dorchester, was worth the paper a single quack bill could be printed on—much less the mountains of gold that royal physicians extorted for such tortures. Moderation, observed Dr. Garth, is what is called for, neither roasting patients nor freezing them. “A miracle,” retorted her father, “is what is called for. None of you has the least notion of what to do in the face of smallpox, save to scrape to yourselves tidy fortunes in fees for your ignorance.” His rant over, Dorchester spun the conversation toward the politics of the French, Imperial, and Spanish successions, all three now redirected by the smallpox just as the British succession once had been.
    Lady Mary listened with only half an ear. Smallpox might rearrange the chessboard of Europe as many times as it pleased; at twenty-two, she was still far more entranced by the subjects of love and wit. Wortley had been unforgivably rude, but he had also been right: there was someone else. In imagination and intellect, in his love of music and words, Lady Mary’s Paradise was her match. Unfortunately, he was also far beneath her in rank and fortune. He was not—and never could