The Hellfire Club(19)

It was the Saturday night before New Year’s Eve. Most Columbia and Barnard students had fled campus for the winter break, and the library was exactly as Margaret preferred it: empty and hushed. Balancing four heavy textbooks, she staggered into her favorite spot, a quiet nook tucked under the staircase from the fourth to the fifth floors that nobody else seemed to have discovered. Tonight, however, she was unhappy to turn the corner and see her usual desk occupied: a young man wearing white cotton gloves was peering closely at a book so old and fragile it looked as though a sneeze might cause it to explode into dust. Her shoe squeaked on the floor and he looked up sharply.

Caught in mutual surprise, Margaret and the interloper considered each other. He was broad-shouldered and bookish—not an uncommon breed on campus. The window rattled as the wind outside the library howled. The heater next to Charlie’s table began to clank and hum.

“Hello,” she said finally.

He seemed to shake himself out of a mild stupor and smiled.

“Hello yourself.” He motioned, somewhat possessively, she thought, toward the official sign on the wall. “What brings you here to ‘Colonial Manuscripts and Letters Archives—Recent Acquisitions’?”

Margaret shifted her arms to alleviate the strain of the books she was carrying. “I imagine the same thing as you—research? Homework?” She was accustomed to the men she met on campus assuming her studies were a token effort in her pursuit of an Mrs. degree.

But Charlie actually blushed, something she was less accustomed to seeing. “Sorry, I meant what are you studying?”

Margaret relaxed and deposited her books on the unoccupied corner of the desk with a small sigh of relief. She shook out her arms and began to unwind her heavy scarf. Charlie pulled out the other chair for her and she resisted informing him that he was playing host in a place she considered her own.

“These books are for exams, but I’m also here looking for some ‘Recent Acquisitions’ having to do with these wild ponies in Maryland. No one knows where they came from,” she explained.

“You’re a history major?”

“Zoology,” she said. “There are these new journals the library obtained from the Colonial era from rural Maryland, from the estate of the Carroll family. Kind of a crapshoot, but I wanted to see if there was any mention of the ponies from around that time.”

“Fascinating,” Charlie said.

“Yes, they’re an amazing string,” she said.

“String?”

“That’s what you call a group of ponies,” she said. “Like a pride of lions or a flock of geese.”

“Or a murder of crows.”

“Precisely,” she said. “Or a congregation of alligators. Or…an obstinacy of buffalo. A crash of rhinoceroses. A gaze of raccoons.” She was showing off, but she enjoyed it.

“I think you’ve got me beat.” He smiled. “But wait—something you were saying about your research. I think…”

He paused and she looked at him expectantly.

“I think I remember reading a diary of a doctor who’d been visiting that family—the Carrolls?—around that time. This was a few months ago. Let me check. Don’t go anywhere! I’ll be right back!”

“Okay,” Margaret said. “But only because I have to study, and this is where I always do that.”

Margaret watched him retreat into the darkness of the stacks and smiled. His eagerness to please was hard to resist. She turned to the shelves and began her hunt for items from the estate of Maryland delegate Benjamin Carroll, which had yet to be categorized and labeled.

When she returned to the table, roughly forty-five minutes later, Charlie was back in his seat reading an old journal—one, he explained, that was kept by a physician, Dr. Solomon McClintock, who had been called to the Carroll estate during the Maryland smallpox epidemic of 1750. He was there to infect the Carrolls, Charlie explained. Margaret took a seat and wondered what this had to do with her research, but soon she was swept up in his enthusiastic account of the doctor’s discovery.

“It was groundbreaking medicine at the time,” said Charlie, “the concept of inoculation. Infecting those who didn’t have smallpox with a small dose of the disease. Cotton Mather popularized it, after learning about it from—”

“Mather from the Salem witch trials?” Margaret interrupted.

Charlie nodded. “One and the same. Mather’s slave taught him about the concept of inoculation, and then Mather shared it with the rest of the colonies. McClintock learned about it from Mather, and he was summoned to the Carroll estate to save them after a cousin contracted smallpox in Baltimore and returned to rural Maryland and infected them all.”

“And you just happened to have been reading this a few months ago? Is this your field of study? Are you premed?”

“No, history. But this wasn’t part of that either. I was doing a favor for my dad, actually, during that smallpox outbreak in Queens earlier this year. He was working with the mayor and the commissioner of health on a mass inoculation.”

“Oh, interesting,” said Margaret. “I lost money on a bet after the smallpox inoculation in April.”

“Because Bevens got sick?” Charlie asked. The Yankee pitcher’s inoculation had temporarily put him on the disabled list.