It is generally held that any convocation of individuals immured is a microcosm of the wider world; and certainly, that was true of our pox party, if it is to be observed that misfortune fell upon the knaves and good alike.

In the foyer, tables had been assembled, and the Young Men were seated about them, playing at faro and whist. Servants stood against the wall, awaiting demands for port or biscuits. In the experimental chambers, Mr. Gitney delivered addresses on our expedition to witness the Transit of Venus and the determination of natural law.

In the parlor, the women gathered, waiting for the contagion to enflame their chaste frames. My mother sat among them, speaking pleasantries, though some did not mark her speech; their disapproval being a curious mixture of awe at her beauty, suspicion for her capacities to charm, and repugnance at her frowardness in mingling.

Mr. Goff, once 07-03, had taken to executing portraits at the top of the stairs, with prospects out the window of the garden and the meadows of Canaan, advertising that he should limn the gentlemen and ladies in all their smooth and unruffled beauty before the pox descended, and, were they unlucky, curdled them forever. When he had not a sitter, he would circulate through the gaming tables and the women’s parlor, quivering with his palsy, murmuring, “Madam? Insurance against the blight of your face? The blasting of hopes and future years?”

With such a street cry, he did not lack subjects.

Among the servants, too, there was some opportunity for social pleasantry, we being drawn from so many houses. Aina, the cook, was delighted to discover another of the Benin nation among the visiting maids, both of them being marked on the face with the scars of their kingdom. They spake to one another in a tongue Aina had not heard in long years; and I could tell that they related stories of places they had been as children. There was the quickening of the voice, the molten flurry of excitation, the motion of the hand — an affirmation, as if to say, “Yes! Yes!”— related to the appearance in their discourse, perhaps, of some citadel, or the cloth of some village, or the way the merchants of some certain city habitually treated boatmen.

Only a few days had passed when Intrigue in her shuttered gown was seen skulking through the corridors, as must be expected when numbers of the young, full of high animal spirits, are placed into confinement together.

I shall not dilate upon these intrigues; they were washed away by all that followed. Suffice it to say, there was a love triangle, and one who, to seek revenge, went spreading tales of having licked a breast. No further details were offered to me, and I requested to hear none of it.

Suffice it to say also that there were intrigues among the parental generation, as well — most mischievous, perhaps, to the peace of the gathering was the flirtation of the painter, Mr. Goff, with one of his lady sitters, who felt his queasy palpitations to be the thrumming of energies divine. Though there had been as yet no infidelity, her husband stormed about for some days, requesting the ejection of “that damned dauber,” saying that such a one had no business in a gathering of respectable and successful men of the better sort; that painting was, after all, nought but deception one paid for dearly.

So our little intrigues played out while women whispered over the backs of the sofas and men, after supper, passed the port and listened to tales of the wars against the French and the Indians. An elderly veteran of the provincial forces in the late war recounted the peremptory cruelties and unmerited debaucheries of his officers in the King’s Army, sparing no cruel details of the lash and noose. The company hung upon his every word.

In the evening, we held dances in the experimental chambers. Three of us among the servants made a little consort of music — I on the violin, an indentured Irishman who also played the fiddle, and a slave from another house who played the flageolet. The Irishman taught us jigs and country tunes, and it was one of the rare pleasures of that party, to learn from his divisions and variations upon those tunes, our strings speaking back and forth to each other while the gentry did their contra-dances, skipping and turning in lines.

I watched them dance before me — the young and the wealthy, their parents, full of knowledge of the ways of trade and profit — delicate in the light of candles and fire — while behind them, the metal orbs of Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, and Sol hung unused from their orrery gears, and in their cages, the raccoon and serpent surveyed the hornpipe frisking with superstitious gaze; a skeleton was hanging, face turned to the wall; and while those dainty dancers skipped it on the polished floors, they brushed against engines that could produce the sparks of electrical virtue that brought thunder and lightning battering from the skies.

And this sublimity of danger around which we danced suggests perhaps the final scene in our geography of the festivities: At the top of the house, in the eaves, three of the Young Men were posted at all hours in rotation, with the guns of many houses stacked between them. I did not perceive why they were there, nor why many who had survived the pox in its last visitation were present, master and servant alike. When I trod to the top of the stairs with their meals, I noted only the sentinels’ air of watchfulness. They looked out at the windows; one smoked. They watched the coming day; they watched the laborers turn in from the fields.

They watched the servants in the yard.