The Speckled Monster by Jennifer Lee Carrell

bedclothes off. Directly, she shivered and pulled them back up. At last, her head pounding and her skin burning, she rose to drink in cold air at the window, but when she stood up, the room spun. She could barely stagger to the washbasin before she began vomiting.
    Still reeling, she called her maid and had young Edward and his nurse packed out of the house without waiting for daylight. By morning, her fever had dipped a little, but her back throbbed dully and her headache intensified until she thought the front of her skull must be clapping open and closed like a loose shutter in a storm. As the sun climbed in the sky, her fever turned around and soared ever higher.
    Richard Mead and Samuel Garth, both royal physicians and members of the Royal Society—and Dr. Garth a longtime friend in the bargain—were sent for. But Lady Mary guessed what was wrong long before she heard their coaches halt at her door. After all her running, the demon smallpox had finally caught up with her—as it happened, very close to the same day that it had caught Queen Mary, twenty-one years before.
    The two doctors tended toward agreement, though they would confirm no diagnosis before the telltale rash. They ordered her bled, to which she submitted though she detested it, and prescribed both a “gentle” vomit to empty her stomach, and a purge, or laxative, to empty her bowels. Four times a day, they poured down her throat a medicine only a half-step away from magic: two parts powdered bezoar—or ground-up “stones” of calcified hair and fiber found in animal stomachs and valued since ancient times as an antidote to poison—and one part niter, or saltpeter—one of the chief ingredients of black gunpowder. This mixture, Dr. Mead intoned, leaning on his golden-headed cane, was “to keep the inflammation of the blood within due bounds, and at the same time to assist the expulsion of the morbific matter through the skin.”
    Snow already blanketed the cobblestones of Duke Street below her window, but grooms padded them further with straw. Smallpox, Dr. Mead announced outside her door, was a dangerous effervescence of the blood. Lady Mary, advised Dr. Garth, his eyes fixed upon Wortley, was therefore to be kept from any commotion, confabulation, and passion—whether grief, love, or fear—that might further stir up the poison boiling inside her.
    â€œHow is my little boy?” she begged everyone who drew near. “He is well,” came the unvaried reply.
    Despite the hushed tiptoeing around her bed, her mind grew restless with a strange, brilliant clarity, as if she had previously been imprisoned in a cloudy crystal ball that some unseen hand had suddenly wiped clean. She could not sleep, but the doctors refused her any opiates, so she chattered through the night, the nurses nodding off as the candles guttered in the darkness.
    The next morning, the fever began to fall, though her skin was still hot to the touch. Soon, tiny red flecks no bigger than pinheads and smooth with the surface of her skin sprinkled across her forehead. Hour by hour, they flowed down her body from the top of her head to the tips of her toes, as if some fiery-eyed destroying angel stood caught out of time behind her bed, the hot wind from his wings blowing a slow-motion storm of red sand across her. Even as the flecks drifted downward, those that had appeared first began to rise into hard little bumps. They neither itched nor hurt, but when she rubbed them, they rolled like shot scattered beneath her skin. This time, no diagnosis of measles would rescue her. She most certainly had the smallpox; the only question was what kind.
    The next day, the spots went on growing in size and deepening in color, gathering most densely on her face, forearms, and hands. All the while, her fever went on falling, until she felt almost well. Perversely, Dr. Mead and Dr. Garth grew graver with every visit. What they knew but did not tell