The Bloodless Boy (16 page)

The finish, too, was mysterious: the taller of the pair held up a hand, signalling the conclusion of their duel. They both turned to the watching King, took off their masks, and curtsied.

To Harry’s astonishment, long hair spilled from inside the masks they wore – one had blonde hair, the other black – and as they lifted themselves, he saw the faces of two ladies, both breathing heavily; Harry recognised at last the outline of female forms under their shirts and breeches.

Clapping them enthusiastically, the King saw Sir Jonas, stood, and beckoned. When Hooke, Harry, and Sir Edmund stayed where they were, he waved to them as well. Harry felt a keen self-consciousness as he went forward, hotly aware that everyone in the room observed them.

Charles II was tall, over two yards high, with dark skin giving him a swarthy, Mediterranean appearance, a throwback to his Medici forefathers. Lines cut deeply into it, and the royal nose was large, long and sharply boned. He wore an imposing black periwig, a dark-blue Persian vest pinked with white silk, and a pale-yellow sash and stockings.

His manner was informal, and so immediately relaxed that Harry found himself completely at ease. The King’s face had a liveliness, and friendliness, that made it attractive. His large mouth added an impression of generosity and candour.

When he was not speaking, though, when his face fell into repose, a solemnity settled upon his features, and Harry wondered whether this might be a truer reflection of his character.

The two fencers still stood by the platform. ‘Madame,’ the King said, and introduced the taller of the pair to the Justice, the Curator, and the Observator. ‘Duchesse de Mazarin, Hortense Mancini.’

She smiled at them all, a flash of perfect teeth, her black eyes resting for an extra second on Harry.

Felicity Tarripan, the Quaker at Alsatia, making her way to Prince Rupert’s Land with her new husband, was beautiful. Grace Hooke was beautiful too. Hortense Mancini, though, had quite another style of beauty; severe, dramatic, aristocratic. She had raven hair, and olive skin unconcealed by whitener, only her red lips showing the use of colouring. This alone distinguished her from the other courtiers in Whitehall, who covered themselves in so much powder that they became uniform. She was in her thirties perhaps, but even so, Harry considered, amazingly striking.

Once more she looked at Harry, who could not believe his good fortune, then she asked her leave. The King turned back to the men, raising a complicit eyebrow at them. ‘The history of a nation is decided upon a woman’s whim,’ he said. ‘I proposed marriage to her, during my days in France. She would not have me.’

Anne Lennard, Countess of Sussex, the other fencer, did not wait to be introduced, merely nodding at them, and then moving off.

The King watched the departure of his daughter, as if wanting her to glance back, but she did not. Instead, after a sigh of discontent, he led them from the room, and they followed his rapid walk.

He strode down a corridor, turned, and swung open a door himself, despite the leaping forward of a servant, and ushered them through.

*

Harry found himself in the King’s elaboratory.

Spread over the main table were details of a ship, the
Experiment
, two hundred tons, eighteen guns, designed by Sir William Petty of the Royal Society and remarkable for its double bottom. The King invited them to admire its sweep. Knowing that none of them were sailors, he showed them around the drawings, naming and describing the
Experiment’s
functions, and the relationship between cordage and sails. He spoke of the science of working a ship, the sails acting upon it with reference to its centre of rotation, the wind acting upon the sails, and the water upon the rudder.

He showed them Sir Christopher Wren’s lunar globe, a piece of unicorn’s horn, ferns in a glass alembic releasing mysterious bubbles into the water, an alligator’s skull, and a mouldy armadillo, further curiosities in the royal knick-knackatory. A
lambricus latus
, taken from the guts of a man, some four times the length of its host and with over four hundred mouths, was coiled in a preserving jar. Also, a large piece of red volcanic rock, sent to him by Edmund Halley from Saint Helena; little clue remained as to the violence of its expulsion from the earth.

The King’s talent at showing his ease and putting others at ease – attained, people said, from his escape and long stay in France, where he had become quite used to mixing with the lower sort – did not work on the Justice. Harry noticed that of all of them, Sir Edmund was quietest, and the constant wiping of his mouth indicated some agitation. Sir Edmund only spoke when directly addressed, and an ungracious chill radiated from him, affecting the natural flow of the conversation.

Harry waited for the opportunity to ask him about the morning at the Fleet, and the falling of the snow, and why he had concealed his knowledge of the set of snowshoe prints. It would be better to speak of it when they were alone. The matter of stretching his promise to Hooke beyond its limit still stood, unable as he was to reveal it to the Curator.

On the wall hung a painting of the
Royal Escape
, originally called the
Surprize
, the little coal brig that had completed Charles’s dramatic flight from Worcester to France, renamed and brought into the Navy.

The King took Hooke to examine the Curator’s own gift to him, a fine clock using Hooke’s balance-spring mechanism, still keeping the royal time.

Harry, after considering the picture, took the chance to observe an object he had seen before, when it was first received by the Royal Society, smuggled to Henry Oldenburg from the Dutch Republic when the hostilities had begun. It sat in its own glass case. He studied the wax-injected veins and venules running through its fabric.

It was the uterus of a woman in labour with her child. Childbirth had killed them both; their remains had been dissected and preserved by Dr. Swammerdam. It looked as fresh as when they had died, the waxes and oils imparting a healthy lustre. Harry imagined the child pushing its way out, refusing to believe that its entry into the world was being denied, anxious to fill its tiny lungs for the first time with air.

It was not difficult to see the King’s interest in the exhibit. He was, after all, a man fascinated by women – some say he preferred their company and even their conversation to that of men – and he had fourteen acknowledged children. Who knew how many more secret children he had sired, or how many women he had been with?

Harry pictured the boy inside the Air-pump at Gresham’s College, struck by the fancy that the machine was a brass and glass womb, made by the hand of man, and so a crude facsimile of Nature’s work.

‘The truest microcosm,’ the King confided to him, having come to stand by him, seeing his own interest reflected in the young man’s eyes, ‘is the womb of a mother.’

Two servants brought in the body of the boy, laid out along a board. They placed him on the King’s table.

Observation XXIV
Of a Catholic Design

Robert Hooke having suggested the idea, it was Harry who performed the autopsy.

Ignoring the trembling in his hands and the queasiness he felt, trying to view the procedure as no different from his practise upon dogs and cats, he used the King’s tools to reopen the cut across the boy’s chest. He removed the breastplate, already cut away from the ribs, and announced that the heart had been taken.

‘The Lord shall send upon thee cursing, vexation, and rebuke,’ Sir Edmund quoted, appalled by the hole that Harry revealed.

Splashes of candle wax on the boy’s belly suggested that the draining of his blood and the taking of his heart was done at night or in a darkened room. It was the same expensive wax that Harry had unpeeled from the Fleet boy.

Sir Edmund wrote all of this into his notebook.

There were only two puncture marks, each with dates carefully written around it, fewer than on the body of the Fleet boy. He, too, must have been preserved, and judging by the oldest date for three months or more. He looked small for his age, perhaps to enable the preservation of him in a glass receiver, as Harry had thought might be the way with the boy stored at Gresham’s College.

One of the puncture marks, though, showed evidence of healing.

‘He was drained through a pipe when still alive,’ Harry noted.

The four men looked at one another, all aghast at the thought of this boy’s last days.

Having finished their work upon this boy the King asked Sir Edmund for a full account of the others. The Justice spoke of the boys found at Barking Creek and the Fleet, and of their preservation. After his report the King turned to the Curator and stood close, so that he towered over him. ‘Now, Robert, how far are you willing to aid Sir Edmund? We cannot have boys found murdered, and without their blood, being left about London. Hmm?’

Hooke’s expression, and the way that his eyes looked everywhere but at the King, showed that it was not far at all. ‘I can be of little use, surely; my skills are peculiar,’ he answered.

‘I believe that you, and Harry here, can assist the Justice greatly,’ the King replied firmly. ‘It would match the principles of my Society to do so.’

‘The many threads of this matter require a dextrous unpicking,’ Hooke persisted.

‘It can also be said,’ Harry offered, ‘that these threads may entwine to make their unravelling an easier task, like a cunning-man’s knot.’

‘Whereas a man killed with a single blow and left in the street leaves few clues to set apart his assailant from a hundred others!’ Sir Edmund was visibly buoyed by Harry’s unexpected assistance.

Hooke’s exasperated look showed that Harry did not help extricate them from the matter.

‘Valiantly said, Harry!’ The King clapped as he said it. ‘Good fellow!’

‘You may guide each other,’ Sir Jonas pressed the Curator. ‘Your knowledge of the natural philosophy makes you a useful ally.’

Hooke considered Sir Jonas’s words dejectedly. ‘You profess too much faith in our experimentalism.’

‘I am convinced of its usefulness,’ Sir Edmund said, ‘as you both have demonstrated, ’though if I were as exacting as you I should never catch a single malefactor.’

‘Some parts of Nature are too large to be comprehended, some too little to be perceived,’ Hooke replied. ‘Our most solid definitions are imperfect, only expressions of our misguided apprehensions, not the true nature of things themselves –’

‘You talk too generally, Robert!’ the King interrupted. ‘And reckon too little worth of your way of setting about the world. Your protests are
hyperbolical
, as Mr. Descartes would have it. We are all of us imperfect, and so must strive against our imperfections. Hmm? So, let us together consider anew this investigation.’

Hooke looked defeated, and performed an unhappy dip of his head.

‘Sir Edmund?’ Harry ventured, seeing his chance, half raising a hand as if for a teacher in a schoolroom.

The Justice regarded him expectantly, grateful for his new ally. ‘What is it, Mr. Hunt, that you desire to say?’

‘How was your being at the Fleet contrived?’

Sir Edmund’s expression quickly faded to a frown. ‘I was sent a letter the night before, asking to meet with me there at first light. It spoke of Jesuits infiltrating London, meeting at Holborn Bridge.’

‘Who sent this letter?’ Sir Jonas enquired.

‘There was no name on it. Perhaps another, unconnected with the boy, required the meeting. The Constable turned the curious away; perhaps he was one such refused.’ It sounded as if Sir Edmund tried to convince himself as much as the four men he addressed. ‘You feel that the boy was left for me?’

Harry felt his pulse quicken. He would answer to Hooke afterwards. ‘I wonder why you kept from us that you saw the boy being left there.’

The Justice gave Harry a flinty stare; his approval of this assistant had vanished.

‘I returned to the Fleet again, two days later, when the snow had nearly melted, which showed the way of setting down the body,’ Harry explained.

The displeasure in Hooke’s eyes made them seem like balls of metal.

‘I am sorry, Mr. Hooke, I have not spoken of this because of my promise to you.’

‘You must enlighten me, Sir,’ the Justice said, pulling himself up to his full height. ‘For I saw no such thing.’

‘There were clear tracks left, of frozen snow,’ Harry explained. ‘The snow above, softer, had melted away to reveal them. They showed the progress of a man wearing snowshoes.’ Harry did not flinch from Sir Edmund’s gaze, although the muscle of his thigh had started its tremble.

‘Snowshoes!’ Sir Jonas exclaimed. ‘Used to traverse the mud.’

‘Their wearer could not know they would be used for their more usual purpose until the snow began to fall,’ Hooke added.

‘Unless the man who bled the boy knew that it would snow then,’ Harry suggested.

Hooke regarded him sceptically. ‘I have made observations of the weather all my life – I could not have told you when precisely it would begin to snow.’

‘But the time of the falling snow is significant,’ Sir Jonas said.

‘I remember the moment, on that first morning, when the rain changed to snow,’ Harry said. ‘It was before I reached Gresham’s College. Sir Edmund had already sent a message to you. By the time I found you – a journey of only twenty minutes duration, or thereabouts – the snow had settled, covering the bank and the prints.’

‘And you, Mr. Hunt, believe that I was there before it, and before the body was left.’ The Justice wiped at his mouth again. ‘But I sent no such summons to Gresham’s! I did not expect Mr. Hooke to be there! I got there as the snow fell thickly, and was met by Gabriel Knapp my Constable, and the man Wolfe there with him.’

‘I remember I did not speak to you, Sir Edmund, of the message brought to me,’ Hooke said.

‘Do you recall anything of the messenger, Robert?’ the King asked.

‘It was still dark, Your Majesty, dawn was rising. The weather stopped me from going out to him. Such men are invisible! One thinks only of the message they bring! I have the impression in my mind of age. He was an elderly man.’

Hooke’s irritability stemmed from the realisation that he had been pulled inexorably into this design. ‘I was required to be there also.’

*

‘Sir Edmund, did you not speculate on Mr. Hooke’s presence there?’ Harry persisted, despite the dark expression on the Justice’s face.

‘I did not think to question my good fortune!’ Sir Edmund exclaimed. ‘I was too much preoccupied with the finding of the boy.’

His eyes blazed, and bored into Harry. Harry knew that this inspection was perfected from years of practise, dealing with men of far greater fortitude than he.