The Speckled Monster Read Online Free PDF

left nothing at all.
    Her grandmother’s death, though, gave Lady Mary something far more valuable than cash: escape to her father’s famously magnificent household. While Lady Evelyn was shuttled off alone to priggish Aunt Cheyne’s, presumably to learn the finer points of being an Evelyn, even if only by first name, the other three children stayed together. Like tides drifting after the moon, they began following the seasonal pull of their father. Instead of shuttling between their grandmother’s house in West Dean and Aunt Cheyne’s in Chelsea, they now spent summers up north at Kingston’s grand country estate of Thoresby House—an architectural cousin of Hampton Court and Chatsworth—on the edge of Robin Hood’s old haunt of Sherwood Forest, outside Nottingham. From the Christmas holidays through the daffodil-fringed days of spring and early summer, they lived in his town house at the edge of the park, in one of the most fashionable neighborhoods west of London.
    As a result, Lady Mary danced through her father’s field of vision more frequently than before, at an age when she might have seemed both a pretty toy and a partner in mischief; from then on, she lived within easy reach of his whims.
    That same year, the Kit-Cat Club had first skittered through London gossip. Its fame as a stronghold of Whig loyalties, however, was forged in the shadow of catastrophe, a year and a half later.
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    Queen Mary’s death had left King William a childless widower, due to be succeeded by his wife’s younger sister, Princess Anne. Following her marriage to Prince George of Denmark, Anne had at first seemed bountifully, blessedly, mind-bogglingly fertile, but by 1700, after seventeen pregnancies, only one sickly child remained alive. On this son, William, duke of Gloucester, the Whigs had pinned all their hopes for the future of the Stuart dynasty.
    On June 24 of that year, Gloucester’s eleventh birthday party was drawing to a close amid the sparkle of fireworks and the snap of military parades at Windsor Castle, when he felt a flush of heat and complained of a headache, sore throat, and chills. Two days later, the velvety purple rash of hemorrhagic smallpox crept across his skin. Three days after that, he was dead.
    His mother was inconsolable. The Whigs, with cold political judgment unclouded by personal sorrow, were just plain stunned. Rampaging through a child’s birthday party, smallpox had once again swatted its way into the councils of the great, to shift the course of history.
    In smaller towns, smallpox was an all-or-nothing terror: there were either no cases, or a full-blown epidemic. But with half a million souls thronging together along the banks of the Thames, London was large enough for smallpox to fester as an ever-present threat. For the most part, the disease stalked through the city’s overcrowded, unsanitary tenements, plucking at the children of the poor. Every so often, though, it would throw its head back and roar, storming through the streets to fell young and old, rich and poor, alike. In 1694, Queen Mary had been one of 1,683 dead and upwards of 10,000 ill; in 1700, smallpox was not quite that strong, but it was strong enough: the child duke of Gloucester was one of a thousand dead.
    To the Whigs who had put him in line for the throne, Gloucester was the one who mattered most. In their eyes, he had been the last acceptable heir to the House of Stuart.
    In the weeks following Gloucester’s death, rumors muttered that King William would bring his dead wife’s half-brother James, Prince of Wales, back from his long exile in France. A Roman Catholic who idolized the absolute monarchy of the French Sun King, Louis XIV, the exiled prince was nobody’s notion of an ideal heir, but in King William’s eyes, he was family. To the Whigs, he spelled disaster. Twelve years earlier, they had ousted the prince’s petulant fool of a father, King