The Bloodless Boy (29 page)

Observation XXXXV
Of Bleeding the Tongue

The apprentice lay still, staring upwards, tucked tightly into his bed by Mary to prevent him from kicking away the layers of blankets.

The whites of his eyes had turned red.

Dr. Gidley, returned to Gresham later that morning, pulled away the bedclothes and prodded the boy. The rash had become firmer, and was spreading down from Tom’s face, over his neck and chest, the pimples multiplying over the surface of his body until they began to join in large patches of raised skin. Tom looked as if he had been badly beaten, and bruised, where the blood collected under the skin.

Gidley got out his bowl, and an evil-looking needle from his medical bag.

‘I can ease his suffering by bleeding from the tongue. It is palliative only: I pretend not that it will cure him.’

Gidley asked Mary to hold Tom’s mouth open. She was pleased to do something for the boy, but she grimaced when the point went into Tom’s tongue.

‘Hold him forwards, Mr. Hooke, so he does not choke.’

Tom’s breathing became irregular as he panicked at the sensation of his tongue’s root being pulled. The bowl filled, the physician so well practised that little spilled from it. Finally satisfied, Gidley stopped the blood’s flow with a press of his fingers. ‘About seven ounces,’ he informed Hooke. ‘No more.’ He stood and motioned them back down the stairs.

In Hooke’s drawing room, he told them that there would be little longer to wait.

‘All you can do now is to make his last hours as comfortable as can be.’ He pulled on his coat to leave. ‘Mr. Hooke?’ he said enquiringly. ‘You have inspected closely the boy’s arm?’

‘His arm, Dr. Gidley? I have not.’

‘Let us talk of this outside.’

The two men walked together out into Gresham’s quadrangle, until Gidley was far enough from Hooke’s rooms, and Mary, to feel comfortable, not wishing to cause her more upset.

‘I saw a lump there which does not resemble a pustule. It shows the sign of injection.’

‘Injection?’ Hooke repeated the doctor’s word stupidly, looking disbelievingly at him.

‘You know of the Chinese way, of mothers warding off the smallpox? Fluid from a pustule is mixed into the child’s blood, and then scraped into the skin. They believe that it helps them in staving off the disease in later life, although how many of their children they also kill by this method I cannot guess. Tom has been deliberately infected.’

Hooke could not speak, the doctor’s information taking words from him. Gidley, seeing the distress on his face, shook Hooke’s hand, as consolation and as goodbye, and set off towards Bishopsgate.

Hooke appeared to watch him go, but his eyes did not see him, as his vision was blurred. Why was he to be punished so? He had wanted no part of this. The use of injection, and obvious medical expertise – used not to cure but, despicably, to bring to an end the life of a boy – was surely indicative of the same man who had drained the boys found at the Fleet, the Westbourne, and Barking Creek.

He groaned, the sound seeming far away, as if heard from another’s throat.

Who would be so cruel as to take the life of an innocent young boy to warn him away? It would have taken far less to stop him.

It was his assistant who had continued. Was it Harry being warned? Or, even, was it Harry who was to have been injected?

Harry had gone to the Fleet and seen the prints of snowshoes, despite his personal promise to leave off the matter. Harry had disobeyed him by working on the cipher after being instructed to return it to the Justice, even making his own copy to do so. And now Sir Edmund was dead, left stuck upon the Morice waterwheel. Harry had gone to Alsatia to meet Enoch Wolfe. He had not yet said whether Wolfe was helpful to him.

By the time Hooke was back at his front door, after his slow walk across the quadrangle, the Curator’s question to himself had been answered, and the idea had become certainty. The injection was meant for Harry, administered instead mistakenly to Tom, when Harry so obliviously went ahead with his searching in Holborn, Whitechapel, or Lincoln’s Inn, or Alsatia, unmindful of the dreadful consequences of his pursuit.

‘Some strong waters, please, Mary,’ he said, weakly, once back inside. ‘Anything that we have. I am aghast.’

It should have been Harry, he was sure. To his great shame, Hooke caught himself momentarily wishing that it were.

Observation XXXXVI
Of a Proposal

‘Aires is dead. The Curator’s assistant has killed him.’

The pain from the silver pipe going into his side made Shaftesbury’s words over-emphatic, and his breath laboured.

‘You should have let me take him when I took Wolfe,’ Lefèvre said smoothly, giving no hint of his feelings. On the table in front of him was an array of armaments: pistols, swords, granadoes, vicious-looking knives of various lengths, and a spiked glove. He also had a steel contraption made to fit along the forearm, which had a long thin blade, more like a skewer, mounted on a powerful spring. More blades to fit the mechanism were stored in a leather sheath. He adjusted, cleaned, and oiled this apparatus as they talked.

‘Wolfe was the more pressing concern,’ Shaftesbury answered brusquely. ‘He wished to tell everything. And so we silenced him . . . but yes, Monsieur Lefèvre, now I lament that you did not.’

‘Most men would have left off, after seeing the demonstration.’ John Locke looked as pained as his master. He took no pleasure in such acts, although sometimes it was a proper means to an end. They had moved from a state of nature to a state of war. He observed Lefèvre reassembling a section of his weapon, and speculated upon whether the man took pleasure in carnage, or whether he committed such violence disinterestedly. Did such a man feel emotion by the same gauge as others? Such apparent calm could hide the most turbulent of spirits. ‘Aires found out, to his cost, that Henry Hunt is resilient to the direct approach.’

‘I shall do what Aires could not.’ Lefèvre directed his blank stare at the Earl, as if challenging him to give the order.

‘I know fully that you are able!’ Shaftesbury barked. ‘This is why we employ you, for your capabilities, and why we so amply pay you.’ He turned to his secretary. ‘John, is it time to unleash Monsieur Lefèvre at the assistant?’

‘We must find Thomas Whitcombe. And we must find his
Observations
. Without them we have no chance of our plan succeeding. We must also kill the King. Hunt threatens to unmask us.’

‘But I ask you, John: should we kill him?’

Locke leant forward, and placed his elbows on his knees, and clasped his hands together.

‘And I say to you: the King first. The assistant after.’

Observation XXXXVII
Of the Power of Prayer

Tom was now covered with blackened patches as if drawn over with charcoal. They washed the sweat from him, and brought boiling water for him to inhale its steam. All afternoon they saw to him, administering cawdles and broths, trying to cool the heat in him.

Hooke bled him again. Mary held his tongue, and Grace clutched his hand.

Tom’s mother, Hannah Gyles, Robert Hooke’s cousin, came to see her son; he did not seem to realise that she was there. She hummed songs softly to him, through the cloth that Hooke had given her to tie over her mouth, and she sang lullabies she had sung to him when he was an infant. Although afraid of the pustules that covered him, she held his hand and stroked his hair.

Later, as the evening came, she returned to feed the others of her family.

Tom bled from his nose and throat, but he sat up in bed, anxious to talk. They could not understand what he was trying to say, his throat so constricted that he could only form unintelligible sounds. The boy wept with frustration.

Hooke held him tightly, until he gradually calmed, and fell asleep. He laid him carefully back on his bed, tenderly pulling the sheets and blankets up over him.

After their meal, a sad supper of cold meats and potatoes, Harry arrived to see Tom, and the four of them went up to Tom’s bedchamber with more broth, fearfully opening the door. Harry kept his woolly cap on, to hide the lump on his head.

Tom’s candle was the only light for the room. It revealed the tops of the sheets around his chest, soaked and rimmed a deep red colour.

Tom opened his eyes, which oozed with blood, and gave a sketch of a smile to them through his pain. Hooke squeezed his hand for a while, telling him of his mother’s visit, and talking of Tom’s considerable help to him as his apprentice, their experiments together, promising to help Tom with his glider, when he was well again.

‘What happens to a body after it is dead?’ Tom said the words clearly, although his shivering made his voice tremble.

Mary clutched him to her. ‘Is this the miracle?’ she cried. ‘Tom, you will be well again!’

‘The soul is taken to the Kingdom of Heaven, which is the best of all places,’ Hooke replied to Tom’s question, his heart lifting.

‘It is not this cold in Heaven?’

‘It is as warm as you require. I do not believe there is anything in Heaven to cause you unhappiness. Mary, would you find him more covers.’

All the blankets in the house were already spread over Tom’s bed. Mary went and stripped the sheets from her own, and put these across him. Grace followed her example. ‘And mine also, Mary,’ Hooke instructed his housekeeper.

When the two women had gone, Hooke brought Harry closer to the boy. Harry stroked Tom’s hair, and tears filled his eyes, as if to protect him from too stark the sight of Tom Gyles so perilously ill.

When Grace and Mary returned, Tom, buried under the pile of sheets and blankets, managed some of the broth that Hooke gently spooned to him.

‘And I will see him in the best of all places?’ Tom became agitated, kicking at all the bedclothes. Harry clasped his hand.

‘Who, Tom? Who will you see?’

‘The boy in the cellar.’

His legs kicked out under the covers, as if swimming away from the thought of the preserved boy trapped in the Air-pump.

To calm him, Hooke talked of angels, telling Tom of the Archangel Michael; of the angel who told Abraham, as he prepared to kill Isaac his son, that his faith was shown and that his son would be spared; of Jacob’s dream of the ladder between Earth and Heaven, the angels standing upon it; of the angels who witnessed the birth of Adam. He told him of the seven angels who guarded God’s throne.

Little paroxysmal motions shook Tom’s body. Eventually, he settled himself to go to sleep. Hooke, Harry, Grace, and Mary continued their watch over him, still hoping for the miracle of his recovery.

They knelt by his bed, and held hands, praying as fervently as they ever had.

‘
Our Father, who art in Heaven…
’

Observation XXXXVIII
Of the Heart and Blood

The frame banged thunderously, the panes rattled, and the rollers under the sash cords complained with their habitual squeak.

The pages rustled, lifted by cold morning air from the open window.

Harry raised his spectacles to ease his nose. His forehead was aching, the bruise vehement purple and sickly yellow, lined with blues and greens, like veins in a decadent cheese. He sat in his room, at the little table, Thomas Whitcombe’s papers and his own covering its surface, spreading across the bed, and covering the floor.

The window was open to keep him awake. Whitcombe’s long, repetitious
Observations
gradually revealed their meaning to him, as he worked painstakingly on, keeping to a relentless rhythm of deciphering – the reading aloud of the next number along the page, the clicking rotation of Colonel Fields’s brass cipher wheel, the noting of its position, the flexing of his knotted fingers, the necessary computation, the writing of the resultant letter. He ignored the aching of his neck and shoulders, and the way that the letters blurred in and out of focus, and he willed himself on despite the increasing frequency of his mistakes. Using the same letter from the keyword
CORPUS
twice in succession, or missing out letters from the cipher, throwing out the sequence of substitution, reducing the next few letters to gibberish, he had to find his way again, trace the source of his error.

It seemed an apt self-punishment, a form of penance, to continue with this task. It eased him, more selfishly, assuaging his battered conscience.

When Grace and Mary had gone to fetch blankets, Hooke had shown him the mark on Tom’s arm. He had pointed towards it silently, his lips pressed together, his silver eyes unwaveringly looking into his.

Hooke had not said another word to him.

Once more Harry picked up his pen, his hand shaking slightly, the tip of his finger concave where the pen pressed against it. All night he had been deciphering the pile of papers,
Observations Philosophical.
The first bundle he had chosen,
Observations of The Light of Grace
, had proved to be a long discussion, relying heavily on the works of Aristotle and of Thomas Aquinas, and including much Biblical quotation, especially of the Old Testament, as to whether without Grace man could know any truth at all, could wish or do good, or merit everlasting life. As Harry had used the brass cipher wheel, getting ever faster with its operation, he uncovered a preoccupation with sin and guilt, and a self-lacerating tone. As in the deciphered letters, the unhappiness of Thomas Whitcombe was evident.

Having laboured through this first pile of papers, Harry had ignored
Observations of The Light of Nature
, fearing even more of the same, as he also left
Observations Concerning Experience
,
Astronomical Magic
,
Theological Cabala
and
Medicinal Alchemy
.

Instead, he had chosen to study the pile of papers entitled
Observations of the Body
, which, in great detail and with less recourse to existing philosophies or self-pity, set out meticulous programmes of microscopical study and anatomical method applied to a whole chain of being, from the fine structure of a gnat’s wings to the hollowed bones of a bird’s skeleton, a detailed autopsy of a lion, and studies of human anatomy, male and female.