The Speckled Monster Read Online Free

smallpox—the most common and least debilitating form of the disease, in which the pocks remained relatively small and self-contained, resembling a savage case of the chicken pox. Overheard in snatches, the physicians sounded as if they were arguing over a malodorous orchard they both loathed and longed for, producing foully abundant “crops” of “limpid” blisters.
    â€œYou talk like the horned gardeners of hell,” snapped the king. “Are you sure you are doctors?”
    The queen’s blisters, the physicians continued in soothing tones, appeared to be ripening into plump and mellow pustules. Such putrid fruit might smell like death, but it heralded a far better chance for survival than any other form of the disease.
    On Christmas morning, the blisters on the queen’s face began to change, flattening and spreading into rosy spots. “Measles, after all,” said someone in quiet triumph. But not quiet enough: before the others could protest, the words were snatched up, stretched out, and tossed through the streets as news that the queen was clear of smallpox and out of danger. Cheers and hat tossings erupted through the city and the nearby countryside.
    The doctors, however, had not been quite so optimistic, nor had they been unanimous in this opinion of measles. Just as some predicted, the red spots proved not to be a new rash. By evening, it was clear that they were the old blisters in the process of sinking until they were once again level with the surface of the queen’s skin, buried but visible like vials of poison beneath glass. Watching helplessly, the doctors felt their hearts sink as well. The sores darkened to purple and black; they were outlined with rings of red like burning coals.
    That night, it seemed as if the queen’s invisible foe were clamping her chest in a vise; her breathing grew labored, and she began spitting up blood. The next morning, a gentle probe with a lancet revealed what the pessimists had feared most: her sunken sores had filled with blood. She was also bleeding into her urine and from her vagina.
    â€œWhy are you crying?” she asked the crowd hovering around her bed. “I am not very bad.” They were brave words, but no one believed her. It was no longer possible to deny that she had come down with possibly the most monstrous of the several forms of this terrible disease that doctors then regularly distinguished: flat or crystalline or bloody pox, they called it. Late hemorrhagic smallpox.
    In the hours that followed, the queen’s face swelled as her mouth, nose, and throat filled with so many blisters that they ran together into one raw sore, making it agony to eat, drink, or speak. Blood seeped from around her eyes and through her gums. Her nose bled uncontrollably, and she began to vomit and shit blood. From her breath and body oozed a sickly-sweet stench of decay so thick that at times even her most devoted nurses fled the room, retching. The slightest brush against her peeled skin away in strips, leaving her shivering like a creature flayed alive.
    With a torturer’s cruel cunning, the disease did not touch the queen’s mind even as it ravaged her body. She was conscious until very near the end, inescapably aware of her transformation from beauty to beast. Late on the evening of the eighth day, she drifted into oblivion; she died at just past midnight on the twenty-eighth of December, only thirty-two years old. To most of those watching, it seemed a blessed release.
    They feared, however, that the king would go mad with grief.
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    The queen missed deliverance by the slim margin of a single generation.
    As she lay dying in Kensington Palace, a rebellious five-year-old—also named Mary—was already kicking against the stiff skirts and even stiffer proprieties in which her family sought to encase her. Most of her days were spent miles away from the dangers and diseases of London, under the wide sky of the