The Bloodless Boy (28 page)

He had to keep this beast away from Robert Hooke, and Grace, and Tom. He hoped to conceal himself in the maze of alleys towards Fish Street Hill.

He found a passageway with rubbish strewn along it, stinking of rotting vegetables. A dead cat, its body deflated and its fur matted and bloodied, lay on its side, kicked out of the way against the wall.

Harry snuffed out the lamp. He found some steps leading down to a basement doorway. He wavered for a short while, thinking what best to do, and then, tentatively, he descended, extending each foot into the blackness, depending on its cover to keep him from being found, worrying that he would not be able to escape should he be discovered, that he would be trapped in this little ominous space.

The running stopped. He could hear laboured breathing, and the crunch of boots above him at the level of the street. He could see the soft glow of a lantern playing over the surface of the brick wall above him, the frost on the wall reflecting its light, and he pushed himself down, further into his dark corner.

Then, the light went out. A man’s voice, with a loud curse, split the air, and Harry heard the lantern being shaken, his pursuer trying to bring it back to life.

Crouched down in the hole, Harry saw a dark shape. A hand grabbed at him, finding his ear, and pulled him out of his crouch and off his feet. He smacked down onto a hard step, his forehead hitting it, bouncing off it, sending white shoots of pain through him. His fall smashed Hooke’s lamp, and he swung its twisted frame out at his assailant. It connected with some part of him, for a harsh bellow sounded out, and the hand let slip of him.

Harry scrambled up off the ground, trying to shake the hurt from his head, and ran up the short flight of steps, treading over his attacker who had fallen across them. The man’s body recoiled from his weight, and Harry almost lost his footing, but he reached the top of the stairs.

He raced down towards the river, as fast as his sore body could take him. He could hear the man running after, still cursing, but falling behind.

Harry, convinced that the monster from the Angel tavern looked to bite him too, searched for more cover, somewhere else to hide, but these streets were so constricted and straight that he was sure he would be seen by the man chasing behind.

He headed towards Robert Hooke’s Fish Street pillar, the Monument to the Great Conflagration. Harry had the key in his bunch, for when he went there to conduct observational, barometric and hydrostatic experiments with Hooke. Reaching its door he tried one key, then another, frantically working through them, unable to see which was which. Finally he held the right one, and the door opened up into the black void inside.

*

He tried to push the door shut behind him, to lock it against his attacker, but with a great leap the man crashed against it, and forced it back. Both of them sprawled on the floor. Harry was first up: he twisted, and sprinted off up the steps, following their tight spiral inside the column of the Monument.

He ran upwards, his ankle forgotten, with the boots of the man behind him resounding on the marble steps. Harry used one hand to push against the curving wall, sliding it along the stone. He knew the tightness of the spiral and the pitch of the staircase. He sensed the reports of each boot-fall behind him drop further back. With pain burning his legs, he started to pace himself for the long climb of the steps. When he looked down, he saw only darkness. The muscles of his thighs and back screaming at him to stop, he followed the coil taking him up the column, winding ever higher and away from the monster.

When Harry reached the final step, and ventured out onto the narrow balcony surrounding the top of the column, the platform was slippery from the freezing rain. He gasped desperately for breath, his lungs feeling as if they were bursting through his ribs. In the back of his throat was a taste like blood. The rooftops of London, only dimly visible, looked far away and below; the Thames a malevolent black ribbon; the spire of Saint Olave’s threatening oppressively; and the welcoming lights by Gresham’s looking mockingly unreachable, separated from him by a hellish beast who bit throats.

Under the great copper urn with its flames reaching out, Harry tried to think of some plan. There was nothing up there to aid him, and no place to conceal himself. He realised he would have to meet the man face to face. He tried to think of who it could be that so chewed his victims, and who came for him now. His opponent had made no attempt to speak to him, had not shouted after him, except for his curses and his one shriek of pain.

Harry squatted against the wall, holding the longest key of his bunch out like a stiletto, wondering whether he would be able to push it into a man. He held Hooke’s broken lamp, preparing to swing it again. The rain ran from his hair and into his eyes; he wiped at them, staring at the narrow doorway for a head to appear. With his spectacles in his pocket, his view was blurred.

He waited.

Boots crunched on the top steps, and heavy breaths approached.

Aim for the eyes, the eyes with their strange lack of feeling, a single brow across them . . .

The man emerged through the little door, feet slipping slightly on the platform. The silhouette of his head turned cautiously each way. He chose the opposite direction around the platform, moving away from Harry. Harry let him go further, judging that he must have walked to the other side of the column, enough distance between them to creep back down the stairs. As quietly as he could, Harry made his move, relieved that he would not have to stab the man, at the same time apprehending that he had not breathed since first hearing the man’s entrance onto the high platform. He did not allow himself to exhale, as the steam of his breath would be visible; instead he enclosed the air inside his raging lungs.

As Harry bent his head to go through the low door, his opponent must have sensed him. Harry heard the scrape of his boots on the stone.

The man managed to engage a wrist, jerking Harry back from the door and swinging him about, out again onto the platform. Harry was forced into the railing, and his lungs emptied from the jolt, but instead of letting himself be stopped by the bars he continued to turn, taking his foe by surprise. Harry pulled him after and unbalanced him. The man, taller, hit his back against the top rail, and skidded on the icy platform, falling to his knees.

Harry swung out Hooke’s lamp frantically, but missed, and tried to return to the doorway, but turned too quickly and slipped again. He fell sideways to the platform, losing the lamp and his hat. He rolled, and crawled forwards on the ice, desperate for the grip and the safety of the stairway, but his attacker had managed to rise, and he pulled Harry slowly up, by his hair.

Harry let out a cry, as he felt the roots separate from his scalp. He fumbled for the keys in his pocket, and jabbed back at the man, obviously wounding him, as a roar came from behind. Even so, the grip on him became tighter, and he tried to jab again, but could not free his arm. The man twisted his wrist, painfully, and forced Harry to drop the bunch of keys; they fell with a jangle to the platform, and bounced, falling to the ground far below.

Harry kicked out at the frame around the open doorway, and was close enough that he could push back from it with his leg. They both pitched backwards, back to the rail.

Harry’s attacker hit it hard, and the impact released his hold.

He pulled violently at Harry’s coat, but his flailing found no purchase on the wet leather. With nothing to hold him, the man went over the rail. Harry saw a strong hand catch one of the vertical bars, wrapping itself around, and then the other, more slowly appearing, as it was all that the man could do to reach. The hands then slithered down, knuckles bone-white as the fingers sought desperate purchase on the wet iron, to keep from the abyss below.

After a second to consider, Harry put his arms through to hold on to the man, to rescue him, clasping his wrists, but the rain made this impossible. He looked into the man’s face, near enough to focus on him, watching his realisation that he was not to be saved.

It was not the murderer of Enoch Wolfe, but the man who had accompanied him to Alsatia. He was older, a tough looking man; an old soldier, perhaps. He had a pale face and a goatskin coat, the driver of the coach. Blood from a deep cut, where Hooke’s lamp had connected, streamed down one side of his head.

Harry felt the man’s weight release from his grasp, and drop away, slowly at first, and then faster, accelerating, disappearing into the darkness. The man made no sound – Harry would have expected a cry, but he went uncomplainingly to his death.

Two hundred feet above, Harry perceived the body hitting the ground as a vibration through the Portland stone.

*

Height had never worried him. Now, after his forehead hitting the step, and his exertions to climb the stairway inside the Monument, followed by the struggle to avoid and then to save the man chasing after him, Harry felt lightheaded, and sick. The coldness of the rain made the skin on his forehead feel ready to split.

He was not certain that he had done all he could to stop the man from falling, and the thought sickened him further. Feeling dizzy, his view across London, all blacks and silvers in the moonlight, had a nautical roll.

Below him, at the base of the pillar, people clustered around the body, which rested on its front, arms outstretched like angel’s wings, a quadrant of blood sprayed over the ground from the broken head. The black coach-and-four waited there, and Wolfe’s killer looked up at him from the dead driver’s seat. From this distance he looked more like a man than the monster he had become in Harry’s imagination, but Harry could still see the thick forehead and single eyebrow across it.

From the crowd gathering at the body a chant of ‘Papists!’ started up. Some saw the coach, and questioned its driver, taking him to be suspicious. They started to climb it, and rock the vehicle. The man produced a musket, and they stepped back. He turned the coach, still levelling his weapon at them, leaving his partner to them.

At last feeling steadier, Harry picked up Hooke’s dead lamp. He went from the high balcony and down the twisting stairway. All of the force in his muscles had been drained away, and the sensation of sleep filled his head. He did not have the energy to see Hooke, to tell him of Thomas Whitcombe’s
Observations
, of Colonel Fields’s story of the wartime, and of his attacker at the Fish Street pillar. He needed time to recover, and he would visit Gresham’s at first light.

He emerged from the column, into the lamplight cast by those who had run to the noise of the man’s body hitting the ground. They swarmed around the corpse, and watched Harry curiously as he walked through them.

Among their number was a pair dressed in long sea-green coats, holding back, careful not to attract his notice.

Felicity Tarripan, the Quaker, would have recognised them, and taken them to be female.

Harry, too, would have known them, for they were the ladies he had witnessed fencing together at Whitehall; Hortense Mancini and Anne, Countess of Sussex.

‘It was a pickpocket chased me to the top of the pillar,’ he told a threatening looking man. Roman Catholic malefaction had already been assumed, and the crowd heard what it had wanted to hear. ‘A pickpocket’ became ‘A Papist!’

Harry started in with the chant as the idea took hold. ‘Papists, yes, it must be!’

‘Jesuit!’

‘With a foreigner!’

‘Insurgents!’

Taking advantage of the wave of Protestant zeal he manoeuvred himself to the edge of the crowd, waving his fist and shouting.

‘Papists! There are Papists amongst us!’

The ladies in their sea-green coats followed after him.

Observation XXXXIV
Of Further Opinions

Seeing Robert Hooke’s troubled face, Dr. Gidley, pear-shaped and port-stained, agreed to accompany him to Gresham’s College, even though it was early in the morning. Hooke described to him the symptoms that his apprentice exhibited; Gidley’s face became graver as he heard.

‘Dr. Diodati is an excellent physician,’ he told Hooke, locking his door behind them. ‘A credit to our trade. And yet . . .’ His face contorted into an agony of professional difficulty. He did not share the satisfaction of most physicians at uncovering the mistakes of another, and besides, Hooke’s obvious worry and the perilous state of the boy made such pettiness doubly ignoble. ‘In this instance I must diverge from his understanding of the sickness. You say the boy pissed blood?’

Hooke confirmed that he did. The Curator had an umbrella with him, and together they sheltered from the rain, walking closely together.

‘The way that you describe it, Mr. Hooke, is more indicative of the smallpox. And bleeding in the smallpox is a mortal symptom, habitually fatal. Let us hope that Dr. Diodati is right, and that I am wrong.’

The two men turned from Broad Street into Gresham’s, where they saw Harry, without his keys, waiting in the quadrangle. No one had answered his knock.

‘Ah! Harry!’ Hooke greeted him morosely. ‘Tom is gravely sick, and we fear it to be the smallpox.’

Harry had walked to Gresham’s College from his lodgings feeling sore, stiff, and with a collection of tender bruises. All this pain was forgotten as he heard Hooke’s news, replaced instead by an urgent worry.

Harry moved deferentially behind the older men, the deciphered letters and the first of the
Observations
in his coat.

They all went solemnly to Hooke’s rooms, and then up to the servant’s bedrooms, where they were met by Mary, a paler version of herself, and also Diodati, there since daybreak. Dr. Gidley and Dr. Diodati bowed to one another.

‘Pissed blood, you say?’ Gidley went to look at Tom.

‘He did.’ Hooke’s eyes darted left and right, unable to look directly at the physician by the boy.

Harry’s heart seemed to double in weight.

‘You know,’ Gidley said gently, ‘there is little a physician can do for the smallpox. Only Nature may decide whether he will live, or whether he will die.’

He asked Diodati to join him, and together they discussed Tom’s symptoms. Tom was fast asleep after a morning of being bled by Diodati, and they spoke quietly, being careful not to disturb him.

Gidley turned to Hooke. ‘It is the smallpox. Without question.’

‘I am sorry, Mr. Hooke. So very sorry,’ Diodati said.

‘The boy is irrecoverable,’ Dr. Gidley said, as the doctors left together. ‘It would be a miracle beyond our doing if he were to survive.’

Harry, too, said his goodbyes to Hooke, the deciphered bundle of papers he had with him left untouched. With a squeeze for Mary, who could not control the shaking of her shoulders, he left them, to limp disconsolately back to Half Moon Alley.