The Bloodless Boy (12 page)

Tripping down a couple of rough steps, his hasty entrance deposited him into a surprisingly bright and clean room. The only inhabitants, a couple occupying a booth, hardly looked up at him, concentrating instead on their earnest conversation. Harry noticed that the woman – little more than a girl – was malnourished; her bony wrists extended pitifully from the sleeves of her dress. The man was large, but he also looked meagre, especially so under the generosity of his hat. This he kept on despite the heat from the blazing fire.

They reminded Harry of the old couple shuffling down the street. The effects of ageing upon the face made him think of a predictive science, one able to foresee the physiognomic outcome of living within a particular place, of suffering a poor diet, of harbouring emotions which necessarily had to be contained – as Hooke suggested must be the way of living after the Civil Wars – .

He recoiled from these thoughts, which had flashed into his mind unbidden. The New Philosophy did not limit itself to passive observation; instead it sought to improve, alleviate, and ease the burden of living. How best should he continue as a natural philosopher? What need did this thin woman have of Torricellian spaces? How could this couple benefit from his knowledge of hydroscopy, selesnography, civil arithmetic, or from his rough abilities as an anatomiser?

At this moment of self-doubt the girl looked up, directly at him. Seeing his stricken expression she released a slow and beautiful smile. The smile only started with her mouth: her eyes shone, her cheeks radiated friendliness, her forehead wrinkled happily. Her companion also looked across at him, in awe of the beauty of her, narrow though she was.

Harry could not help himself from smiling back at her, at first awkwardly, self-consciously, but then freely, and at the man with her. He filled with a happiness that reversed all of his faint-heartedness and his self-questioning. Simply from a thin girl’s look an intoxication seized him; he found himself bewitched. Or rather, bewitched by the possibility she represented; that there was a deep seam of fellowship between people. This cascade of emotions confused him, this bout of fanciful wonder.

He went to a booth close to the couple, low boarding surrounding three of its sides. He peeled off his coat, and dropped it onto the table. He fumbled in its pockets to check the money he had, and was startled to find the copper farthing that had been left on the arm of Henry Oldenburg’s chair. He must have slipped it into his pocket when they were concealing the manner of the Secretary’s death. He could not remember doing so: one of those automatic movements the body makes, the brain insensible of its workings or reasons.

Still elated after the girl’s smile, Harry spun the coin – just as, although he could not know it, Secretary Oldenburg had done. Charles, Britannia, Charles, Britannia. They became one and the same, obverse and converse melding the flat metal into an illusory globe, each face bound inextricably with the other. The coin landed in his palm. Britannia. He knew that she was a portrait of some favourite of the King’s, but he could not remember which.

Sir Edmund had approached Robert Hooke for help to investigate the murder of a boy drained of his blood, thinking it a Catholic business. Turning the coin over, looking again at Charles’s face, Harry wondered whether Sir Edmund worked for the King himself. He had helped him escape to France, and there was not much that happened in London without the King’s knowledge – or at least the knowledge of his man, the Lord High Treasurer Danby, who had a network of spies reporting to him.

Did the King know of him? The notion stunned Harry. It was as if the face on the coin watched him directly, following his every move. He looked around; at the couple, sitting so rapt in one another, through to the kitchen, where he could hear movement but from where no one had yet emerged. He looked out at the street through the dirty windows, but did not see anything to suggest he was spied upon.

He sat here, in the Angel coffee-house in Alsatia, and the King sat somewhere in Whitehall Palace, or walked around his Privy garden, or rode out in Saint James’s Park.

Why had Sir Edmund insisted that they preserve the boy? And why had he lied? He must have been at the Fleet at the same time that the body was deposited there.

What had Sir Edmund told Mr. Hooke, after viewing the boy in the cellar? Hooke had kept that information from him.

Busy after Oldenburg’s death, Hooke was unwilling to involve himself in Sir Edmund’s business, and he had passed over the enciphered letters, ensuring Harry’s closer involvement. Why had the Curator then been so easily dissuaded from the enquiry?

And why was Enoch Wolfe’s box so big? It could not have been full of lampreys; their weight would have been too much for a man to carry.

*

‘Tea, betony, sherbet, chocolate, coffee?’

The owner had at last appeared from the back of the house, flourishing a cloth in front of him as if pestered by a swarm of flies. He did not wait for Harry’s answer. ‘Do you read? We have the
Gazette
.’ His voice dropped at the end of his sentences, giving a mournful slope to his information. ‘There is talk of an alliance with Holland, and Spain, and Austria. The King asks for Parliament to give him money and arms. There could be war against France.’

‘Yes, the news, please. And coffee would serve me well,’ Harry replied.

‘I ask payment first. Thru’pence for a bowl.’ The man clenched his cloth tightly, its sudden stillness adding a sinister overtone to his request.

Harry searched for the correct money, and found three silver pennies. He carefully folded Henry Oldenburg’s farthing away into his handkerchief, and put the bundle in his pocket, to return it to Mrs. Oldenburg.

When at last the coffee and the news-sheet were placed in front of him, Harry reached for the owner’s arm, checking his retreat.

‘I look for someone – a man,’ he told him.

‘There are better places than here if that is what you are about.’

‘No, no; a singular man.’ His cheeks warmed at the man’s insinuation. ‘I need to find him, to convey to him a message. It is in his interest,’ Harry added, seeing guardedness descend upon the Angel’s owner.

‘Is it? Would it be in my interest, now?’ The man pulled his cloth taut, as if about to strangle Harry with it. Involuntarily, Harry inched back on the bench, but he pressed on with his interrogation.

‘His name is Enoch Wolfe.’

The owner looked puzzled for a brief moment, but then made his face go blank. He was aware that Harry had caught this fleeting expression, and he pushed aside further questioning. ‘I know not this man.’

‘I wonder,’ Harry said carefully, ‘if I may leave a notice in your window, with the others there, asking him to meet me. He is likely to see it, or someone will tell him, as he assured me that he is well known here. How much would you charge for its display?’

The man seemed to be settling in his mind a computation, an intricate equation involving Harry’s appearance and the fact that the man sought was Enoch Wolfe.

‘Five shillings, and that includes no questions. Just a notice in my window.’

Harry gasped at the price, and sensed the same reaction from the couple behind him. ‘I have only four.’

‘That is all your money?’

‘All of it.’

‘Four, then.’

He watched Harry count out the four shillings, in various coins, and then placed his hand on Harry’s shoulder, pressing uncomfortably on it. ‘I saw you with a farthing.’

Unwillingly, Harry unwrapped Oldenburg’s coin from the handkerchief, and placed it with the pile of money on the table.

‘You were dishonest with me, be it just a farthing. I could end our agreement.’

‘I require only the show of a card.’

‘So you do. So you do.’ With that the man picked up the farthing, and returned it disdainfully to Harry, and disappeared back to his kitchen.

The young couple looked at him curiously, and Harry nodded self-consciously at them. The girl coughed nervously, and made as if to speak, but her companion attempted to silence her with a warning look. Ignoring him, she began again, and spoke quietly to Harry, leaning conspiratorially forward to close the distance between them. ‘He knows of Enoch Wolfe, and thou art not the first to ask for him here today. He asked just two shillings then. This Wolfe lives in Alsatia, and I am sure he will see thy sign. If he answers to it, well, that is something else.’

‘I am obliged,’ Harry replied, adding: ‘I am sorry, I have only a farthing.’

The girl looked at him in some surprise. ‘We ask not for thy money,’ she said simply, and the mildness in her voice chided Harry more effectively than if she had spoken sharply.

The owner returned with a pen and paper.

‘Write out your notice, and I shall display it. Then drink down your coffee. I am closing.’

A flicker of obstinacy sparked up, but Harry realised that he had no choice but to do as the man required, or he ran the risk of wasting the four shillings altogether. He took the pen held out to him, wrote upon the paper, and drank down the coffee; the coffee-house owner all the while looked sternly down at him.

*

The others left with him, and together they stood outside, watching the notice being added to the collection in the grubby window, fitted into the slot between the loosely fitting pane and the frame, the paper curling away from its anchor. The owner’s face loomed forwards behind the glass, stared at them balefully, and then withdrew into the dimness beyond.

Mr. Enoch Wolfe, we met at the Holbourne Bridge. Please find me at Gresham’s College, or meet me here the evening of Friday Janry. 4th.

From Mr. Henry Hunt.

‘Thou art Mr. Henry Hunt?’ asked the man with the hat.

‘I am more usually Harry.’

‘Happy to meet you, Harry. I am Invincible Tarripan, and this is my wife Felicity. We await others to join us, for we leave by coach to Plymouth. We sail for the New World, to Prince Rupert’s Land.’

‘I wish you well in your new life together,’ Harry replied, taken aback. ‘It is important that I find this man. Tell me, who was the other man seeking him?’

‘I made no mention of any man,’ Felicity answered. ‘There were two who asked after your Enoch Wolfe. We had a disagreement concerning them, did we not, my love?’ She smiled happily at her husband.

‘A disagreement?’ Harry prompted.

Invincible answered ahead of his wife. ‘They were well covered against the cold, and being so, they were obscured. They both looked to me like young men. We discussed them as thou camest in.’

‘On what did you disagree?’

The couple looked at each other, and Invincible allowed his wife to answer with a resigned shrug. ‘The manner of dress appeared as any prosperous men of the town,’ she told Harry. ‘Long coats, both of the same colour. A sea-green colour, or perhaps nearer the colour of a turquoise. Swords hanging from their belts. But, I am sure of it . . .’ She looked at Invincible, who held up his hands as a shield, distancing himself from what he knew she was about to say. ‘They were women. Ladies, more like.’

She turned to look directly at Harry, and, even through his confusion at her words, he felt his tongue go dry.

Invincible looked apologetically at Harry. ‘Why, though, should any women dress in such a way? I am sure they were young gentlemen.’

His wife dimpled her divergence from him. ‘Thou needst allow that I am more likely to discern my own kind, my own sex; and women, thou must know, are more sharply observant than men.’

‘But who can these ladies be?’ Harry asked.

‘There, neither of us can help thee, Mr. Hunt. We wish thee well in thy search.’

They took their leave of him, and went to look for shelter now that the Angel was closed. The grace and generosity of the Quakers struck him, their formal speech reinforcing rather than undermining the impression of their good-heartedness. Both turned and waved, and then walked on, Harry becoming just a memory for them as they concentrated upon their future together.

If Felicity was right, then who were these ladies dressed so incongruously, who searched for the same man that he did? What did they want with Enoch Wolfe?

Lacking the fare for a wherry to Westminster, Harry walked on to Sir Edmund’s house in Hartshorne Lane, to deliver Hooke’s letter disassociating them from helping the Justice, and the bundle of his workings upon the cipher.

He took the papers from his pocket, sorted them, and carefully separated them from the copies that he had made.

Observation XVIII
Of Illumination

The sun’s lower curve flattened, as in the cloudless sky it changed from yellow, to orange, to red. Its underside became ragged, like the teeth of a saw, and the teeth fluctuated, moving like the waves of the sea. The unequal thicknesses of the air inflected and refracted its multiple rays. As Robert Hooke had demonstrated at Gresham’s College, it was the same phenomenon that caused the twinkling of the stars.

The leaded panes of the windows, each sitting at a different angle from its neighbour, scattered this last light of the day across the green interior of the Crown Tavern, on Threadneedle Street.

Robert Hooke was yet to arrive.

Harry took off his spectacles, and played with the light shining through them, controlling the way that it fell upon the table. An almost empty glass of wine, left by a previous customer, served him well as a lens, and he splayed his fingers behind it, watching their tips magically appear as if from the air, as it reversed and bent the light passing through.

Harry tried to get the serving maid to notice him, but she was busy attending to another man sitting at the next table. She bent towards him, pushing her fleshy breasts at him, laughing with him. This man was much older than her, and despite the warming fire wore a goatskin coat. Harry wondered whether he would ever understand the vagaries of the attraction one sex had for the other.

She at last lifted herself away and turned towards Harry, bearing a jar of beer. She compared poorly to the golden appearance of Hooke’s niece, Grace. Grace’s skin was clear of freckles, moles or birthmarks, with no signs of childhood infections. Her teeth, unlike this serving girl’s, were all present, straight and evenly spaced, and her gums gleamed pinkly. Grace had always been particular about keeping them clean, using soda salts to enhance their whiteness.