The Bloodless Boy (21 page)

Where was the boy to be taken?

To the monster?

Did this monster kill the boys? Did he feed on their blood?

Was he the one who wrote on them, noting the days he took blood through the holes he had made?

Was he the wearer of the snowshoes?

Was he the one who wrote out the Red Cipher in a letter left on the Fleet boy, and in a letter delivered to Robert Hooke?

Expensive candles had been used at the draining of the boys, presumably to provide light for the procedure. The coach carrying the murderer of Enoch Wolfe had been expensive too. If Harry’s notion – an idea that Mr. Hooke disagreed with – that the boys were preserved in the glass receivers of Air-pumps was true, this, too, required money.

A business funded by Catholics?

Harry wondered whether Sir Edmund had been right all along.

Catholics were said to be conspiring against the King. Sir Edmund had spoken with the King of the threat, having had evidence from two men named Oates and Tonge.

Did they know of the blood taken from boys? The King had sent Sir Edmund to the Lord High Treasurer Danby, to examine their evidence. Harry supposed that he would hear soon enough whether it was truthful, for the news-sheets were full of stories of Papist insurgency, and would be quick to report any new proofs against the Catholics.

Harry went to the table by the window, where the package from Oldenburg’s chest sat.

Who were the two in sea-green coats? They had also looked for Enoch Wolfe in Alsatia, and had taken the enciphered letter for Robert Hooke to the Solicitor, Moses Creed, in Lincoln’s Inn. Were they, as Felicity Tarripan had thought, ladies?

What was the relationship between the boys? The connection between them? They were all young. Innocent – Sir Edmund would take this to be a Catholic requirement. They were small – perhaps so that they could all be stored in glass receivers.

Sir Edmund had noted that this meant they had to be observed, for otherwise glass would not have been used for the material of the chamber.

The boy at the College of Physicians, found at Barking Creed on Christmas Day, had not been studied closely enough. Harry would need to look at him again. When he had visited there, with the King, Mr. Hooke, and Sir Jonas, they had left him in the jar, and spoken generally of the search into the killings. Indeed, they had spent more time dwelling on why Sir Jonas Moore had required their preservation.

He would also need to see Sir Jonas. But what if Sir Jonas did not wish to be asked? Not even the King had known of his decision to keep the boys preserved.

Harry sat cautiously down at his desk, and ran his hands over the package, feeling the texture of the rough sailcloth.

He knew that he had to do something, even if he could not leave his lodgings. He could try the cipher again, while he felt sore. He could guess at keywords.

The old soldier, Colonel Fields, had told Harry of the cipher from the Civil Wars, and of the King’s escape to France. The Colonel did not say, and Harry had not thought to ask, who else knew of the cipher, and who might use it, all these years after.

The cipher was used again, left with the bodies of boys drained of their blood.

Fields might know of the monstrous man, if he too used the Red Cipher.

To try to guess at the word which unlocked the meaning of these numbered grids would be fruitless. Even if the word was English, that was still all English words to choose from. And there were many other languages that it could be. It could be more than one word. It did not even have to be a word, just a collection of letters put together randomly. His chance of success was infinitesimal.

His mind still full of questions, Harry decided he would leave the package. Instead, he took some smoothing paper, and used it to smooth some wood that he had, the repetitive action calming him as he considered the events of the last few days, and how he should continue.

What best to do?

Observation XXXIII
Of the Morice Waterwheels

The following morning found the old Constable, Gabriel Knapp, clinging to a narrow buttress under an arch of London Bridge, the nearest to the north bank. He was drenched with spray. Water poured from his montero.

The Morice waterwheels, nearly three times his height, powering the great pumps that delivered water to the City, dripped with slime, their blades trawling filth from the water. Their smell made the bile rise in his throat.

Looking down at the water made him feel as if he was transported upriver, up against its rush. Curling like the backs of maddened porpoises, the waves owned a compelling attraction, enticing him to join them in a last, fatal leap. This attraction made him grip more tightly the slippery stone on which he found himself.

The noise of the Thames, crashing through the gap between the wooden starlings that supported the bridge, deafened him. Shaped like the prows of ships, the points of the starlings knifed through the flow. The water, forced between them, rocked the whole structure.

Knapp’s foot slipped as he inched along the stone, and he pulled himself further in towards the fantasy of protection offered by the curving wall.

Two watchmen stood on the bank, refusing to follow him along the beams that led to this narrow shelf.

The wheel nearest to the north bank was still, deliberately stopped, and the reason for its halting hung above him. As he moved towards it he wondered how he would ever pull it away. He beckoned again, half-heartedly, to the watchmen, knowing that they would not follow him. They had watched him on his hair-raising scramble across the timbers supporting the wheel to get to this spot.

Gresham’s College was no distance away.

‘Gresham’s!’ he mouthed exaggeratedly, and pointed north along the line of Fish Street. They stared at him, confused. Although only yards separated them his words were whipped away by the thrash of the waves. He crooked a finger, and with his other hand pointed to it. ‘Hooke! Hooke!’

Enlightenment spread across their faces. ‘Gresham’s!’ they called back. ‘Hooke!’

‘Yes!’ And then quietly, directed at himself: ‘Old fool!’

The watchmen moved off, glad to be away from the bridge, away from the water.

The wet stone was too treacherous to move forwards along, but Knapp could not muster the courage to take himself back. Hooke would bring the younger man Hunt with him, he hoped, and they would assist him. It would have been better to bring a boat for the purpose of removal – but no waterman would relish tying a wherry to the starling.

He tried not to watch the water.

Instead, he looked up at the body of a man, whose back was arched over the topmost blades of the waterwheel. He had been jammed into the mechanism, fixing him as firmly as a prisoner in the stocks. Knapp gazed into the upside-down face.

The wait seemed interminable, and Knapp’s eardrums rang from their constant battering. He tried to think of ways to take the dead man down from his perch; most he rejected as too whimsical, especially as he doubted whether he could propel himself, either forwards or backwards, from his own place of transfixion.

The inverted figure above him, with his black coat hanging down, arms spread beseechingly, looked as if he flew to take him from this dangerous spot.

‘I should have served you better,’ the Constable said sadly.

*

From Saint Magnus the Martyr, Harry had to push his way through the crowd gathering at the Morice waterworks. He limped, his falls in Alsatia making him wince, shins and tailbone still sore, heel tender, pain now stiffening a shoulder. Robert Hooke scuttled along behind, wondering what had happened to make Harry so unwieldy in his movements.

Harry had been about to tell Hooke of his nightmarish visit to Alsatia, and of witnessing the bestial murder of Enoch Wolfe, but the watchmen coming to Gresham’s College and demanding their assistance at London Bridge had interrupted him.

Through the network of beams the Constable was only partly visible. More easily observable was the man hanging from the wheel. The crowd swayed up and down the bank, fluctuating between a better view of the Constable and a better view of the dead body. Some people positioned themselves higher up on the hill, to see more over the crush. One waterman took a brave group of onlookers out on the river, rowing against its flow to keep the same position. Animated gesticulating from them conveyed their excitement at what they saw.

‘He is crucified! Held there by nails!’

The story took a hold of the crowd. ‘The Jesuits are among us!’

Harry and Hooke pushed through, past the vendors and their baskets of goods, leaving their fetchers, the two timid watchmen, behind. By a telepathic understanding the crowd let them through, aware that they had something to do with the unfolding drama.

Hooke tugged at Harry. ‘I will go to Saint Magnus!’ he told him urgently. ‘The men there work to finish the inside. I shall seek their help.’

‘They need tools to release him from the wheel, Mr. Hooke.’

Reaching the Bridge, Harry saw Knapp; the part of his face that showed was an ashy colour. As Harry looked at him, the old man’s foot slipped; he recovered his balance, and hugged even tighter the wall of the arch.

Harry, resignedly, recognised that he must help him; the dead body looked more firmly situated, in no danger of being swept away by the Thames.

Harry searched out a route across the jumble of beams. He had to get to the Constable before he fell; he could not wait for Hooke to return with the workmen. He took a first careful step, testing how slippery the wet timber was. It offered no friction for his boot. The distance to the far side of the arch, and to the stone ledge holding the Constable, seemed impossible to traverse. Harry’s woollen glove held the beam more effectively, and so he bent to take off his boots. He put them carefully down, not expecting to see them again, for they would disappear into the crowd.

Stepping out once more, the rough material of his woollen stockings provided more grip on the wood. This seemed safer, but in the cold his toes immediately became numb, feeling as if they retracted into little stubs. Shards of pain stabbed under his toenails.

He moved onto the beam, and the safety offered by the bank rapidly seemed far away. The excited babble of the crowd – they marvelled at his decision to do what none of them would have done, and they wondered who this slight youth was to go to the aid of the Constable – merged with the reverberation of the water, and by the time he brought his other leg up onto the beam and moved nervously along it their voices had disappeared altogether.

Now all he heard was water. Below him, the Thames raced through the arch. Harry’s feet refused to shuffle along the beam. He slid his hand along, and clutched the end of a purlin above his head, further along, until the weight of his body forced him to move his feet to adjust. Traversing the beams and rafters this way, slowly, little by little, his hands leading his reluctant feet, he reached a vertical spar, round like a ship’s mast. The spar extended the height of the arch, and the way round it was blocked by the machinery behind.

He was now closer to Gabriel Knapp than he was to the crowd.

‘Mr. Hunt!’ Knapp’s pale face moved out from the wall. ‘Go back! I was foolish to venture so far. Leave me to my fate.’

‘How did you pass this spar?’

Knapp forced himself to remember. ‘A strut adjoins it,’ he shouted. ‘Projecting out, below the surface of the water. I fell and chanced upon it. But what will you gain by reaching me? We will then both be marooned on this spot.’

‘Mr. Hooke summons help,’ Harry answered, attempting a tone of assurance.

He searched for the support, dropping down so his leg entered the Thames. The water snatched it and banged it against the wood, cracking painfully his anklebone, making him bite his lip. He tried again. This time he located the little ledge of timber below the surface. He scraped a strand of slime flailing from it, and then rested his weight onto it. He encircled the spar with his arms; his hands almost touched behind it. Knapp, he was sure, whose arms were longer, would have been able to clasp his hands together. He could not, and the lack of safety almost brought him to a standstill. He could not believe that the old man had got so far.

One . . . two . . . three. Go! On round, straining to maintain the almost-circle of his arms, his right foot scrabbled its way to the next beam. The whole movement was performed smoothly, misleading the crowd on the bank, who cheered him on, thinking him far braver and more skilful than he was.

He inched further towards Knapp, who watched him frantically, the conviction too evident on his face that Harry would fall. Harry reached the wheel, and looked at the cogs and the mechanism of the pump, working out a way of climbing up and then across the wheel, to get closer to the body. He summoned the courage to take the long stride onto the side of the wheel, over the rushing water, and reached for one of the blades. There was no way of getting to Knapp without his weight pressing the dead body between the top of the wheel and the beam it passed under. He pulled himself up, and traversed the length of the blade. He had to avoid the inverted body, carefully stepping over it, and he descended the other side of the wheel. The gap between the wheel and the bridge was crossed, a second tall spar circumnavigated in the same way as the first. His feet, the cold eating its way through them, sensed nothing; he had to watch them to check their hold before transferring his weight. His upper body shivered violently, and he had trouble keeping his hands on the beams.

At last, the journey was done, and Harry pulled his knees up onto the little stone ledge alongside Knapp. The Constable extended his hand to help him up, and they stood together, both too frozen and frightened to enjoy a sense of triumph.

‘Mr. Hunt, you are a fool. A brave fool, but a fool.’

‘Will you return with this fool, Mr. Knapp?’

The old man looked at him with intense and weary sadness.

Now Harry looked up, and into the face of the dead man.

The man’s mouth was wide open as if he shouted to them, to get him off from the wheel. His eyes were bloodied, and they looked accusingly at the two men under the bridge with him.

It was the Justice of Peace for Westminster, Sir Edmund Bury Godfrey.

His body was caught where the waterwheel ran under the arch, a blade sliced into his back, the beam above crushing his belly. Sir Edmund quivered, as the force of the water vibrated the wheel. Upside-down, his arms hung down, as did his head, loosely, the neck looking stretched. His neck had a deep weal from a ligature, and Harry could see clearly where a knot had pressed into the flesh. A gash went across his ear. The Justice’s skin was red, and mottled with dark purple bruises.

‘I knew Sir Edmund for over thirty years,’ Knapp told Harry. ‘He escaped death so many times I thought he would live forever. But, we are all of us mortal.’

‘We must find a way from here, Mr. Knapp. Mr. Hooke summons help from builders. They shall assist us, and release Sir Edmund – .’

A scraping sound stopped him. The end of a thick rope descended past them, from a window way above them overlooking the side of the bridge. Attached to it, appearing like a phantom from the sky, dangled a small man wearing the worn clothing of a carpenter. Harry recognised him from the building site of Saint Magnus.

‘A rope would have been simpler for us both, Mr. Knapp,’ Harry told the Constable.