The Speckled Monster

“THERE is no species of fever,” announced Dr. Mead, “which requires the body to be thoroughly cleared of the remains of the disease more than the smallpox.” So Lady Mary’s blood was let yet again, and she was purged several more times. After that, recovery called for drinking deep drafts of both asses’ milk and fresh air.

It was a bitterly cold winter: the Thames froze solid enough to hold a frost fair on its strangely solid, opaque surface. Wrapped in furs, with hot stones tucked beneath her feet on the coach floor and her face protected from snow glare and curious stares alike by the silken mask she never shed, Lady Mary ventured out to share in the carnival games, puppet shows, roast apples, and fortune telling. She also began once more to entertain a chosen few of her old admirers in the safe warmth of her home: Mr. Jervas, Mr. Pope, and Johnny Gay were not allowed to see the ruin of her face, but she welcomed their undiminished adoration of her mind.

Early in February, the Pretender scuttled back to France; the earl of Mar went with him. As the fever of rebellion fizzled out, the nation, too, began to recover. In London, a few Jacobite prisoners were executed, but the king exhibited remarkable leniency for the period. Even as Parliament attainted Mar, the crown granted his wife not only safety but an income. The loyalty and goodwill of Frances’s family were not to be trifled with.

Even now, Lady Mary managed to get herself into more trouble than her sister—and to do so in rhyme. The Princess of Wales had digested her acidic poem in silence, but the rest of the world could not let it go. Late in March, the disreputable pirate-publisher Edmund Curll printed it along with a few others, hinting that they were by Pope, Gay, or “a lady of quality,” by which everyone understood Lady Mary. Deeming this attribution to be more scandal-mongering advertisement than discreet disguise, Pope determined to take revenge. Two days later, he arranged to meet Mr. Curll at the shop of his own publisher, Bernard Lintot. After first scolding Curll as a knave, Pope reluctantly made a peace offering of a glass of wine. It was a ruse: Pope doctored Curll’s drink, and the printer spent the rest of the day and night vomiting.

Lady Mary snickered until Pope published his schoolboy prank in grotesque detail in a pamphlet titled Full and True Account of a Horrid and Barbarous Revenge by Poison, on the Body of Mr. Edm. Curll. Abruptly, Lady Mary stopped laughing. Though her name never actually showed up in print in connection with this fiasco, it might as well have proclaimed it with a flourish of trumpets. She did not find the cost to her reputation pleasing; Wortley was even less amused.

They did not have to face this absurd disgrace for long. On the seventh of April, the newspapers named Edward Wortley Montagu as the next British ambassador extraordinary to the Ottoman Empire—or Porte, as the empire’s government, perched at the other end of Europe in Constantinople, was then called. He had accepted the next-to-impossible job of brokering peace between the Holy Roman and the Ottoman empires, just when the emperor and the sultan were glaring daggers at each other, preparing once more to unleash their dogs of war.

“Never,” said Lady Mary. Friends, admirers—even acquaintances who had glimpsed her once across the theater, she sighed in exasperation—sent remedies to erase the smallpox scars. “All marked infallible,” she said, rifling through the jars, bottles, and powder papers piled higgledy-piggledy on a table in her sitting room, “which is true, so long as you are discussing failure.” She picked up a few and read their labels. Lemon juice and salt to bleach the brown stains. A syrup of white wine steeped with sheep’s dung.

“Prevents good taste,” said Lady Mary. “Before, during, and after.” She dropped the bottle back on the table and moved on. Ointment of almond oil, chicken grease, goat tallow, and gold. Alternating face-washes of vinegar and bran-water. A jelly of camphor and calves’ feet. Snatching up a scrap of paper, she stared at it in silence for a moment, and then sank into a chair in helpless wonder. “From Mrs. Brownlow,” she said, tossing it to Dolly. “Her recipe for boiling cream to an oil, with directions to anoint it with a feather. She would have sent the feather, too, but after Meg died the servants burned it.”

“Excrement,” said Lady Mary. “No—it is said to be made from tears wept by a tree more aromatic than frankincense. Unfortunately, it is also as rare as the phoenix, and as dear. Half an ounce is said to be worth a whole kingdom. Mr. W will never pay.”

The strangest story of all, though, came from Dr. Garth, his coach hurtling up to Lady Mary’s door after a meeting of the Royal Society. Presided over by Sir Isaac Newton, the Royal Society was one of Europe’s most elite gatherings of scientifically interested men, so voracious for information about the natural world that they had begun soliciting news from every nook and cranny across the globe. Two and a half years earlier, in October of 1713, reported Dr. Garth, a preposterous tale had trickled west. The Turks, it was said, protected themselves from smallpox by inserting the scab of someone else’s pock into a small incision in their own skin.

“Precisely,” said Dr. Garth with a nod. But several months later, the Fellows had heard the absurd story again, this time in more detail from one of their own members, Dr. Emanuel Timonius, then practicing medicine in Constantinople. “Foreign, you know,” shrugged Dr. Garth. “Italian. But is a Fellow, with a degree from Oxford as well, so was deemed to merit at least passing attention.” Dr. Timonius not only repeated the tale, but claimed miraculous success for “engrafting,” as he called this practice of transferring the disease from one person to another. Still dubious, Sir Hans Sloane began canvassing other sources, particularly Dr. William Sherard, British consul in Smyrna. They had just heard back from Dr. Sherard, said Dr. Garth. Engrafting, or inoculation, was not practiced in Smyrna, but Sherard had heard of it.

At the end of May, at a glittering farewell party given in Lady Mary’s honor by Lord and Lady Townshend, Dr. Garth made a beeline through the poets and the painters toward the guest of honor, still masked. Tossing aside some superfluous conversation on drama, or verse form, or possibly architecture, like so much kindling, he announced that the Royal Society had at last received Dr. Sherard’s final report on engrafting.

Lady Mary cocked her head, and Dr. Garth bowed and proceeded. Both Timonius and Pylarinus, he said, claimed that an old hag would prick a patient’s arm with a needle; into the blood that appeared, she would mix a tiny bit of “matter” or pus from the pock of some unfortunate sufferer of full-blown smallpox. The recipient soon contracted a mild form of the disease, suffering no more than a brief, low fever and a few shallow pocks that quickly dried up and fell off, leaving no scars. The operation was said to have originated among the Circassians, he said with a mischievous glance at the mooning young poet, whose daughters were the most exquisite of the hothouse flowers to be found in Turkish harems.

“Begging your pardon, Doctor,” chimed in Lord Townshend’s brother, a merchant who had spent three years in Constantinople a few years before. “But Lady Mary’s question has merit. With my own eyes, I have seen two hundred people undergo the operation. Only two died.”

Dr. Arbuthnot’s voice sliced through the rising babble. “A new book by Peter Kennedy—a Scottish surgeon who has himself visited Constantinople—considers the reasons judiciously: in his estimation, it is fear of death on a grand scale that makes the British so timorous to try it. No one, says Mr. Kennedy, knows whether inoculation will in fact deliver the protection bestowed by a natural bout with smallpox, but we can be pretty certain that the operation will pass on the disease. It might well trigger an epidemic.”

“I have read that book,” said Mr. Townshend. “You have left out Mr. Kennedy’s uncertainty: ‘If this method is so innocent as those who practice it assert or maintain it to be,’ he writes, ‘it need be no more minded than giving or taking the itch.’ ”

“You have put the question the wrong way round,” said Dr. Garth. “It is not why haven’t we tried it, but why should we? Only two died, Mr. Townshend says: but as I would put it, only two were killed. Why should we take such a risk?”

Slowly, her face had recovered most of its old shape. She was not, as she had feared, entirely disfigured: but her great beauty had been scraped away. Despite all the ointments and jellies and washes, her skin remained stained and pitted, as roughly scored as a nutmeg grater. Her eyelashes had never come back, changing her once merry gaze into a fierce, falconlike glare.

Timonius’s and Pylarinus’s descriptions were duly published in the Transactions of the Royal Society—along with various reports about giants’ bones, rattlesnakes, comets, fortune-telling dreams, and weird weather—but after an initial sensation, interest proved short-lived. As Dr. Garth predicted, inoculation was dismissed as an old wives’ tale, a bit of mystical Oriental nonsense, good for a pleasant little shiver of curiosity at the bizarre and backward practices of the East, but no more.

Meanwhile, Lady Mary left her mask off and quietly laid her final plans for her family’s departure. They included hiring one of Mr. Kennedy’s colleagues, another Scottish surgeon named Charles Maitland, to attend the Wortleys throughout their stay in Turkey.

On the first of August, 1716, Lady Mary and Wortley, their three-year-old son and his nurse, their new Scottish surgeon, a chaplain, secretaries, lady’s maid, valet, steward, two cooks, footmen, grooms, and other assorted servants in silver livery stepped up into coaches and wagons. The crowd cheered, sniffled, and waved farewell, and the adventurers waved back. Then the drivers shouted, horses leaned into their harness, wheels grudgingly poured into their work, and the new British ambassador extraordinary to the Ottoman Porte and his entourage were off.

Holding heavily scented handkerchiefs to their noses, the cavalcade ducked beneath the ornamental arches at Temple Bar, now decorated with the heads of Jacobite traitors, and crossed the bridge over the open sewer of the Fleet Ditch. Clattering through Lud Gate—the westernmost gate in the old city walls—they strained uphill into the summer-ripe throng of London. Everyone, it seemed, was trying to sell something with a song: cherries, chair mending, or chickens (alive and squawking), socks and songbirds (alive and singing), asparagus and almanacs, eels and oysters, books and brooms, milk, matches, and mops. On either side, shops like little gilded theaters wafted perfume and compliments into the street.

The ambassador’s party churned past the new expanse of St. Paul’s Cathedral and turned sharply south, skidding down the steep hill and across shop-lined London Bridge. Long lines of laborers and wagons piled high with produce streamed against them, pushing to get into the city. On a rise beyond the bridge, they halted to gaze back one last time. St. Paul’s sleek new dome rose from the city’s gables like an immense pillared egg. On every side, sun glinted off an urban forest of spires and dodged among fraying threads of smoke to spill like a shower of gold coins across the Thames, still dotted with barges and oared boats and striped with long wharves.

They did not expect to see home again for many years, but Wortley was not the sort to moon with sentiment. His business lay far to the east, in another city at the opposite edge of Europe. By far the fastest and easiest route to Constantinople lay by sea, south around Spain and then east across the Mediterranean. Determined to find some way to coax the emperor and the sultan into an unlikely peace, however, Wortley had opted for the difficulty and dangers of an overland journey in order to stop first in the emperor’s favorite city of Vienna.

From the Rhine to the Main to the Danube, from the Morava to the Iskar to the Maritza, to the Golden Horn itself with the ethereal brilliant blue of the sea floating beyond, they followed the paths that water had carved across the European continent. Whenever they could, they floated smoothly and silently down the rivers. When they could not, they stepped into coaches and trundled along the banks, raced across wide plains, or toiled through mountain passes at preposterously steep angles, inching between fanged peaks draped in glaciers and snowfields like diamond necklaces laid across ermine.

On September 3, they arrived in Vienna, a pleasure hive of balls and operas, concerts and theater, as well as a den of intrigue. Its citizens had long since run out of room on the ground and had begun piling their way into the sky. All the houses reached the dizzying height of five or six stories—as if the builders, Lady Mary exclaimed, had “clapped one town on top of another.” Shoemakers and tailors lived next door to great ladies and ministers of state, with no more than a thin partition dividing them. The interior furnishings of even the minor nobility’s apartments, though, were as magnificent as those of sovereign princes elsewhere: moderation was no virtue in Vienna.

Before Lady Mary could be presented at court, she had to acquire a properly monumental court gown: “more monstrous and contrary to all common sense and reason,” she wrote to Frances, “than ’tis possible for you to imagine.” Its hooped skirt and train covered acres of ground; while the whalebone cage of the bodice and high-backed collar squeezed Lady Mary’s torso into a tinier space than she had thought possible. Inconvenient, not to mention uncomfortable, she remarked, but it certainly showed the figure to great advantage.

She also had to have her hair done. Viennese ladies engaged architecturally minded hairdressers and lady’s maids to build their hair into three-story towers a yard high, reinforced with gauze and ribbon and bristling with jeweled bodkins—“it being a particular beauty,” scoffed Lady Mary, “to have their heads too large to go into a moderate tub.” As she watched in horrified fascination, her hair was combed over a pad the same shape—but four times as big—as the rolls that London milkmaids used in balancing their wide wooden pails on their head. To Lady Mary’s natural hair, the headdress architects added a great deal of false hair, plastering the mixture together with prodigious amounts of powder.

Dipping and swaying like a ship under top-heavy sail, she tottered off to be formally presented to the three empresses. Fair haired and twenty-five, the reigning empress Elisabeth Christine played cards, waited upon by two dwarfs. The black-veiled empress mother Eleanore Magdalene proved tiresome, “perpetually performing extraordinary acts of penance,” sniffed Lady Mary, “without having ever done anything to deserve them.” The dowager empress Amalia, however, commandeered her interest. Presiding over a shooting contest, Amalia sat enthroned in her garden, surrounded by archduchesses and maids of honor in full court dress, their Tower-of-Babel hair sparkling with jewels. All the noblemen of Vienna pressed round as spectators, but only the ladies were allowed to shoot. They took turns aiming light guns down a long alley at three targets: Cupid holding a goblet of wine, Fortune holding a garland, and a sword circled with a poet’s laurels. Bestowed by the dowager empress herself, first prize was a fine ruby ring set round with diamonds, in a gold snuffbox. It went, as a matter of course, to an archduchess who happened to be not only her daughter but her namesake.

In Vienna, even adultery was both excessive and ritualized; every great lady was expected to display a husband on one arm and a gallant lover on the other. Lady Mary had many offers from young men eager fill the lover’s place, but she refused them all. “She sticks to her English modes and manners,” one English courtier reported to another, “which exposes her not a little to the railleries of the Vienna ladies. She replies with a good deal of spirit, and is engaged in a sort of petty war, but they all own she is a witty woman, if not a well-dressed one.” Pope wrote to tease that she had “out-traveled the sin of fornication” to arrive “at the free region of adultery.” He could not fathom why she should persist in wishing to “pass from that charitable court” and head for “the land of jealousy, where the unhappy women converse with none but eunuchs, and where the very cucumbers are brought to them cut.”

Though diplomats on all sides wanted the British ambassador to press onward to Constantinople, King George had other ideas. He summoned Wortley to attend him in his beloved Hanover, which he was visiting for the first time since taking the British throne. So in the middle of November, the Wortley Montagus veered north.

Lady Mary despised Bohemia (now the western part of the Czech Republic), complaining that the villages were so poor that clean straw and water were “blessings not always to be found.” Sometimes they traveled all night rather than stop at one of the miserable inns whose hot, crowded rooms were itchy with vermin and thick with foul scents. In Prague, she proclaimed the fashions even more absurdly excessive than in Vienna: between hoopskirts and headdresses, the women virtually disappeared. On the other hand, the city’s cooks dished up the best wildfowl that she had ever tasted.

Crossing the mountains dividing Bohemia from Saxony at night, she peered out the frost-etched window and saw barely an inch of grace between the wheels and a precipice that sheered hundreds of feet into the foaming anger of the River Elbe. Silhouetted up ahead in the moonlight, she glimpsed the postilions—the men who supposedly controlled the coach by riding its horses rather than driving them—nodding off while the horses thundered into a wild gallop. Forcing the window open, she leaned out and shouted, “Look where you are going!” Next morning, Mr. Wortley grudgingly commended her for saving all their lives.

Stopping in Leipzig only long enough to buy material to make liveries for still more pages, as well as some “gold stuffs” for Lady Mary—all for half what it cost in Vienna, she exulted—they raced ever northward, arriving in Hanover on the night of November 23. King George loved its neat comforts, but his cramped court had long since grown peevish, despising the place as an overstuffed snippet of a city. The Portuguese ambassador counted himself quite lucky to have two wretched parlors in an inn, but the Wortley Montagus found themselves installed in the spacious luxury of the palace.

“Ah! La revoilà!” teased the king, indulging in their old private jest as Lady Mary was presented, but though he took little notice of any other lady thereafter, irritating the Hanoverians no end and delighting the English, she soon discerned that his affection was of a different nature than it had been. She amused him, and he wished to impress her, poor lady; that was all. “Both pitted and pitied,” thought Lady Mary ruefully as she followed him about, professing rapture with the German ingenuity that invented superb heaters and then disguised them as China jars, statues, or inlaid cabinets. At least she did not have to feign fascination with the results, as baskets piled high with oranges, lemons, and other exotic fruit appeared upon the king’s dinner table in the middle of winter. “A fruit perfectly delicious,” she rhapsodized upon her first taste of pineapple.

Lady Mary’s friends had all expected she would greet Hanover as an opportunity to pull out of the arduous journey; perhaps the king, too, indulged in that hope. She surprised them all. “While Mr. W is determined to proceed in his design, I am determined to follow him,” she announced, stepping back in the coach. Forsake mankind, and bid the world adieu, she told herself.

As the Wortleys reentered Vienna, Lady Mary’s friends both new and old grew seriously alarmed. Prince Eugene of Savoy, general-in-chief of the emperor’s armies, warned her of killing cold on the snow-covered Hungarian plain. Others hinted at deaths far worse than freezing; Pope’s letters twitched that curtain of discretion aside, dwelling openly on rape.

Hungary, Serbia, Bulgaria, and Macedonia had been killing fields for several centuries, yanked this way and that between the Holy Roman Emperor and the Ottoman sultan. Only six months earlier, Prince Eugene’s army had annihilated an entire Turkish army at Peterwaradin (modern Petrovaradin, now in Yugoslavia), which lay along their route. Still celebrating that victory, the Viennese were looking forward to more. It was vengeance that inspired them, as well as policy: thirty-three years before that, in 1683, a Turkish army had thrust its way clear to the walls of Vienna, very nearly bursting through them before they were forced to retreat. Whenever the Austrians and Turks took a break from fighting, the Tatars descended to raid anything left worth stealing, while the emperor’s Catholic armies turned their swords on Protestants. Thus a territorial contest between superpowers had been razored by religious and cultural differences into endemic savagery of a kind that Western Europe had rarely experienced.

As her departure neared, Lady Mary’s women friends broke into tears whenever they saw her, but she made light of both their nerves and her own. To Pope, she wrote, I think I ought to bid Adieu to my friends with the same solemnity as if I was going to mount a breach, at least if I am to believe the information of the people here, who denounce all sort of terrors to me. I am threatened at the same time with being frozen to death, buried in the snow, and taken by the Tatars. How my adventures will conclude I leave entirely to Providence; if comically, you shall hear of them.

To Frances, she claimed that her only fears were for her son. They were not, however, dire enough to make her alter her course. Also, she was having trouble taking Prince Eugene’s warnings seriously. She saw the great man often, she said, but it was as if she had met Hercules serving as a slave in women’s clothing at the court of Queen Omphale. She refused, however, to elaborate on this tantalizing bit of innuendo.

On January 16, 1717, they slid out of Vienna. Snow lay thick over the land, but the ambassadorial party wrapped themselves in furs and set their coaches on runners to become sleighs, racing southeast across “the finest plains in the world, as even as if they were paved.” Far from being terrified or even tremulous, Lady Mary was exhilarated.

At night, they lodged with governors and army officers. They were given honor guards, and bishops and nobles feasted them with wine, winter fruit, and venison. Five days later, they reached Buda, the old royal Hungarian city that has since combined with the mercantile town of Pest on the opposite bank of the Danube to form Budapest. The city and its castle lay in ruins; outside the walls a Serbian shantytown huddled in narrow rows, the odd, half-dug-out houses looking like thatched tents. With no reason to linger, they departed that same day.

Heading almost due south, they skirted the western edge of the Hungarian Plain, keeping close to the Danube. The hiss and slice of the runners, the jingle of harness and crack of whip, the snort and heave of the horses, sounded thin and brittle in a world otherwise wrapped in white silence. During the day, they glimpsed the ruins of Turkish towns in the distance, marked only by falling minarets. Nearer their path, farms and fields lay destroyed and deserted. Immense flocks of birds rose up around them, and wolves howled in the shadows of the forests that pressed down the mountains toward the river. In the few villages they passed, the sheepskin-clad villagers always gave the travelers space to warm up by their stoves and dished up abundant food, garnered mostly by hunting: wild boar, venison, and pheasant. They had been ordered to provide the ambassador’s party with whatever they needed gratis, but Wortley paid them full worth—which made their hosts press ever more food on the travelers, as parting gifts. At night, the winter stars glittered overhead like shards of ice.

On January 26, they crossed the frozen river. At the hilltop fortress of Peterwaradin, they waited two days to finalize the details of their transfer from the Austrian to the Ottoman Empire and then set off with an escort of two hundred heavily armed Imperial troops. The Turks were to meet them with exactly equal numbers, exactly halfway through the no-man’s-land between Austrian Peterwaradin and Turkish Belgrade.

A little ways outside town, they came upon the site of the Austrian victory that had been celebrated with such relentless joy in Vienna. Thirty thousand Turks had died in a matter of hours, and had been left to the wolves and the crows. In deep winter, the cold thinned the odor into nothingness, but the diamond shimmer of the ice only heightened the horror that enveloped the ambassador’s party. For what seemed like hours, they drove in silence across a field strewn with skulls and the mangled and shredded bodies of men, horses, and camels, all frozen into a grisly, glistening tableau.

At the village appointed, their Turkish escort turned up with one hundred too many unsmiling soldiers. Hatred was far keener than the cold; no one wished to linger. Circled by turbans and scimitars, the British ambassador, his lady and son, and their retinue were soon speeding south and east, while the relieved Austrians retreated north.

Wading through thick snow, the British party’s horses dragged them uphill into heavily fortified Belgrade on February 5. They expected to stay only one night, but the pasha, or military governor, sent a polite but firm invitation for them to remain until he heard from the grand vizier in Adrianople. Regretfully, that might take as long as a month. Surrounded by several hundred heavily armed soldiers, they were in no position to refuse his request. They were lodged with a qadi, or religious judge, named Achmet Bey, in one of the most splendid houses in the town.

They were awarded a whole chamber of Janissaries—the crack troops of the Ottoman army—to guard them, but whether they were being guarded from enemies or as enemies remained disconcertingly vague. The Janissaries, Achmet Bey confirmed, were slave soldiers just as Lady Mary had heard. But in their case, he said, the word slave was misleading: they were indeed slaves of the sultan, but the Janissaries were among the most powerful men in the empire. The wiliest and most ruthless rose to become pashas (a title for generals and governors) or even the sultan’s chief executive officer, the grand vizier himself.

“They owe loyalty to nothing and no one but the sultan,” said Achmet Bey, “and sometimes, they force that formula in the other direction.” Seized as young boys from among the empire’s non-Muslim population—mostly Balkan Christians, he said—they were marched to Constantinople, where they were circumcised, converted, and mercilessly trained. Lady Mary tried to pity them, but whenever she glimpsed them through the door, their scorn dried her pity to dust.

Their host spent much of the day in his library, but he supped with the ambassador and his lady every evening. Unaccustomed to the free ways of Western women, he delighted to spend hours sitting cross-legged on cushions with Lady Mary, discussing poetry, religion, and philosophy. She began by telling him—in Italian, the language they shared—a Persian tale she had read in French; he paid her the compliment of assuming she was cultured enough to have learned it directly from the source, and went on to stir her with the bright delicacy and searing sensuality of Arabic and Ottoman love poetry. At her request, he taught her the rudiments of Arabic grammar and scansion; at his, one of the ambassador’s secretaries taught him the Roman alphabet. Lady Mary sparred with him in lively debates about their differences in religion and day-today life, especially the confinement of women in harems and veils. “There is but one advantage in it,” he teased her. “When our wives cheat us, nobody knows it.”

He both entertained and educated her with inexhaustible grace, but still, she yearned to be back on the road and moving. To Pope, she chalked it up to the weather: colder than it had ever been anywhere but Greenland, she groused. Despite the hardworking stove, the windows kept freezing up on the inside. Faintly audible between the lines of her letter was a hum of nerves pulled taut, and a stubborn refusal to acknowledge the whisperings of inadmissible fear.

At last, three weeks later, official summons to Adrianople arrived. Assured that the route was plague free, they headed for the town of Nissa (modern Nis, in Yugoslavia). Their guard of Janissaries swelled to five hundred: against the thieving Serbs, they were told. For seven days, they traveled at breakneck speed through narrow mountain valleys, with dark fir forests pressing down on all sides. The horses foundered and died in their traces, or stumbled lame; in compensation, their peasant owners were beaten for slowing the company down. Lady Mary wanted to empty her pockets in payment, but Wortley stopped her: the aga, or general, of their Janissaries would only take the money as soon as it left her hands. When they came to villages, the Janissaries seized whatever they fancied, no matter how ill the peasants could spare it or how little sense it made in terms of husbandry. “Lambs just fallen, geese and turkeys big with egg: all massacred without distinction,” she mourned. Watching this grinning cruelty, but helpless to stop it, Lady Mary wept tears of rage every day.

At one village, their second cook fell ill; the Janissaries would have left him to freeze alone on the road, but their surgeon, Mr. Maitland, insisted upon staying behind with him. They would catch up, he assured Lady Mary in his Scottish burr, as soon as the man recovered. As long as the ambassador did not threaten to slip from their grasp, the Janissaries were indifferent. Lady Mary pressed the surgeon’s hand in gratitude, and the Wortleys sped on. After a brief stop in Nis, they pushed up and over yet another range of peaks and rumbled down to the city of Sofia (now the capital of Bulgaria) on the banks of the River Iskar, in the midst of another large and beautiful plain. There, she had the luxury of one free day.

The hamam or bathhouse was a pale cluster of domes like opaque bubbles that had settled into the ground. In the outer dome, Lady Mary slipped off her shoes and tipped the portress a crown. An interpretress and two maids in tow, she ducked inside.

Small round skylights pierced the high marble curve of the ceiling, so that the air itself, moist and faintly redolent of sulfur, gleamed faintly with the sheen of pearl. A sinuous Turkish melody wound languidly through the vault overhead. In the center of the tiled room, four scented fountains of cool water plashed and sang, arcing into basins that spilled smoothly into streams running into inner rooms. Around the edges of the room ran two sofas: not Western couches, but built-in ledges of marble, one set above the other like a wide stair, the lower spread with crimson carpets and cushions. Reclining on these, braiding each other’s ebony and honey-gold hair with pearl and ribbon, drinking the bittersweet earth of thick Turkish coffee and the sweetened fruit juice called sherbet, lounged two hundred women.

For a moment, all movement ceased. Long before, Lady Mary had startled the Kit-Cat Club into silence for being dressed up like a lady. Now, it was simply for being dressed: save Lady Mary and the servants stepping in behind her, every woman in the room was naked.

They drew her farther into the room and tried to help her out of her clothes, but thankfully, they had a little trouble with the flaring jacket and fitted waistcoat of her riding habit. At last, though, she let a black-haired young beauty who was also the highest-ranking lady among them slide the jacket from her shoulders and reach in with slender fingers to unbutton her waistcoat.

At the sight of her tightly laced stays beneath, all the Turkish ladies blanched and stepped back aghast, but curiosity and civility soon drew the black-haired lady back again. “Englishmen,” she informed her companions after inspecting the boned corset, “lock up their wives in little boxes shaped like their bodies.” Inch by inch, the others crept near. European women, they all assured Lady Mary through her interpretress, were to be pitied for being such slaves as to be kept prisoner in their own clothing; no man of the East would dream of such barbarity.

Lady Mary shed no more than her jacket and waistcoat; unwilling to endure the sight of more savagery, her hostesses pressed her no further. All around her, though, women sat, knelt, and walked with a majestic grace that made her think of Milton’s Eve, clad in nothing but proud honor. They were beautiful in face and slender of body, and their long, lustrous falls of hair were unlike anything she had seen among the rarely washed, oft powdered and pomaded heads of Europe. But what entranced her more than anything else was the shining expanse of smooth skin, all of it un-marred, as she was all too aware that hers was, by the red pits and twists of smallpox scars.

She left earlier than she would have liked: she had only one day to play tourist and thought a visit to the ruins of Justinian’s church should not be passed up. The ruins were a disappointment; she longed to return to the baths, but Mr. Wortley and the Janissaries were relentless. Their cavalcade left the next morning, toiling up and over the last mountain range that blocked their way to Constantinople.

Every step toward Turkey swathed her more luxuriously in a warm Mediterranean world scented with lemon, wild thyme, and cedar. Vines grew wild over the hillsides, and the very air was spiked with paprika and mint, softened with olive oil, and sweetened with honey. Cypress speared the sky and music twined like serpents swimming through the trees. Lithe, long-haired boys danced, sunlight rained gold upon an infinite carpet of flowers, and everywhere shone the color blue. From the dome of the sky, to smooth jewel-stones set in gold, to the tiles poured across walls, the Ottomans washed their world in the intense brilliant blue still known simply as “Turkish,” in its old French form: turquoise.

On March 24, they at last reached Adrianople (modern Edirne), the jewel of western Turkey and Sultan Achmet III’s favorite home away from the splendors of Topkapi Palace in Constantinople, as well as the staging ground for invasions of Austria. As the sultan found it pleasing to be in Adrianople that spring, so did all his ambassadors. The Wortleys were housed in one of the grand signior’s palaces on the banks of the Maritza River. As Wortley impatiently awaited his audience with the sultan, Lady Mary sat day after day in a marble kiosk in the garden, listening to the dance of the river and sipping sherbet or coffee as nightingales sang in the cedars. Poetry was everywhere: fine ladies at their looms made her think of the Iliad; Greek children playing upon Pan pipes and adorning lambs with flower garlands brought to mind the pastoral worlds of romance.

With the perfectly recovered second cook in tow, Mr. Maitland caught up with the ambassador’s party in Adrianople late one night a week after his employers’ arrival. Lady Mary was greeted with this joyous news when she awoke the next morning—and also with the information that the man’s illness had not been a bad cold. He had gone down with the plague.

“If you ask me, Cook’s illness was nothing more than a Turkish hoax—an excuse for a leisurely jaunt through the mountains,” grumbled Lady Mary to the surgeon when he came to pay his respects. “I thought the plague killed everyone by the village-load, but I glimpsed him flailing knives in the kitchen just an hour ago, fat and jolly as ever. Are you quite sure that plague was the problem?”

“You are proving yourself an even more miraculous healer than Dr. Arbuthnot and Mr. Kennedy claimed. . . . But I tell you, in the matter of marvelous medicine, I am quite catching up with you, Mr. Hare, and if you are not careful, I shall speed by like the plodding but patient old Tortoise. In your absence, I have been investigating this inoculation business.”

“Don’t be dismal. It sounds quite promising. Except that they do go on about ‘engrafting’ and ‘transplantation’ distressingly like the king talking up his orchards of pineapples and oranges—a sure way to ruin the taste of pineapple, if you think about it too long. I hope you have a strong stomach: I should like your help in delving into the matter farther. Locate this Dr. Timonius, for example, and sound him out.”