The Bloodless Boy (3 page)

‘True enough, although I find the Justice to be difficult, like rubbing up against a smoothing paper. Why does he press to keep the boy preserved?’

‘In truth, I cannot say, Mr. Hooke.’

Hooke looked anxiously down at the scene by the water, the Fleet flowing past them, and past the body of the boy, being steadily covered by the snowfall. ‘Sir Edmund assumes a Catholic cause for this murder. The finding of this boy may lead us into an unfathomable matter, like sailors dragged down after their sinking ship. We must take a care to keep our eyes steadily fixed upon the facts of Nature, and so receive their images simply, as they are.’

Harry nodded pensively. ‘You must return to the warmth, otherwise we will have a second death. Sir Francis Bacon died from his trial to preserve the chicken with snow.’

‘You are entirely right, Harry.’ Hooke’s stuffed head and lungs made his words sound as if they are expressed through treacle. ‘Let us return now to the College.’

‘I shall meet with you there presently. I must attend to something first.’

Harry watched Hooke saying his farewells to the Justice, who was pushing the sequestered tumbrel back towards the bridge. Seeing his curved spine, and hearing his wheezing breaths and sniffs fading as he moved off along the quayside, he wondered how far the Curator would want to help Sir Edmund. Hooke lived for his natural philosophy and for his building, and had enough demands for his time; he was not a politicker.

The Justice had powerful allies, though – perhaps Hooke had no choice but to extend his assistance.

The snow blustering around him, Harry, in the doorway, at last allowed his body to react to the finding of the murdered boy. He scooped up a handful of snow to take the bitter taste from his mouth, and kicked some over his breakfast, the undigested pastry and biscuits.

‘Get yourself to Bishopsgate, Mr. Hunt!’ the Justice called. ‘I shall wait with the boy. My man will deliver him to you. I shall meet you there at Gresham’s College, to see him preserved.’

Observation II
Of Saltpetre, Sulphur, & Charcoal

The closed box waited on his desk, a candle on its lid. Wax dripped where the flame’s heat breached the rim.

The old man put down his pen and stared into the swaying light, thinking of the anxious time when he first sailed from Bremen. It was then he had met John Milton, Latin Secretary to the Council of State.

Milton, as his sight diminished, had depended on an amanuensis to assist him in his work.

Observing the flame, Henry Oldenburg, Secretary of the Royal Society of London for Improving of Natural Knowledge, imagined blindness, wondering at the loss his friend must have felt.

Now, Milton was dead. An even more unfathomable state.

The sounds of his wife moving about the house cut into his thoughts.

He had always loved her. His Dora-Katherina. Her love for him was undemanding; she understood him, that his passions flowed first towards the New Philosophy.

Everyone who knew of the Royal Society knew of him. He was its Secretary, its Intelligencer, promoter of the New Philosophy, and producer of the
Philosophical
Transactions
, publishing contributions from
virtuosi
throughout the world.

He rolled a coin, a milled copper farthing, along the arm of his chair.

One side, the figure of Britannia. The other, a portrait of the King.

Oldenburg lifted the candle, and rested it carefully down onto the desk’s surface. He opened the lid of the box.

His correspondences drew together hundreds of natural philosophers, mechanics and experimentalists. Famous in elaboratories and workshops across Europe and the New World, he had advanced the design of the Royal Society: to take to task the whole Universe, unfettered by partisan zeal, devoted only to truth and human welfare.

Pulling away the pistol from its box, Oldenburg opened the pan and blew into it softly. The weight of the weapon, a relic from the Civil Wars, caused a tremor in his elbow. He poured in the priming powder and replaced the cover. He blew away the loose grains. He tipped powder into the muzzle, and reached again into the box. He inspected the ball, an imperfect sphere of lead, then dropped it down the muzzle. Hearing its sibilant slide, the click of its landing, he pushed in the wadding with the scouring stick.

He listened to Pall Mall and Westminster, to the sounds of the morning. The rain falling. The sash window rattling in the wind. He observed the line of dawn sky brightening between the curtains.

He tried to stand, but his legs would not respond. So, remaining in his chair, he lit the match and placed it in the cock. He blew on the match, opened the pan, turned the barrel towards himself and with barely a pause pulled the trigger.

The explosion sent the ball clean through the front and back of his skull.

At the roar of the pistol Dora-Katherina screamed, and ran from her bedchamber.

She saw the powder-charred skin of his face, his expression stilled at the moment of the shot.

The blood pumping from the wound.

The candle’s flame, guttering in the draught from the window.

Britannia looking up from the arm of the chair, impassive to the act she had witnessed.

These impressions squeezed chaotically into Dora-Katherina’s mind, sending it reeling, bringing her the sensation of a painful shrinking, a narrowing to a point.

Her legs folded. She had to kneel. Her cries were harsh, a vixen’s shriek. She held her hands imploringly towards Heaven.

Her beloved Henry was dead.

Observation III
Of Infusion

The yellow wallpaper of the drawing room made for a startling contrast with the view through the window, the wet slate colour of the sky over Bishopsgate, and the anaemia of the falling snow.

More strong colours fought for domination. A crimson rug leaked between the legs of blue wooden chairs. Their orange seat covers, imported grogram, clashed with the cerise of the table. At the windows hung purple velvet curtains, reaching to the floor. Sturdy linings reinforced their fabric for the nights when Robert Hooke required complete darkness. A vase of Christmas roses, placed at the table’s centre by Mary Robinson the housekeeper, added bright whites and pinks.

Never afraid to make himself the subject of his own
experimentum
crucis
, Hooke had chosen the colours for medicinal effect, to nourish his weak frame. Constructing with Harry a half-scale model of a gliding machine, he had suggested that such retinal stimulation might hinder the choking of his nerves, and discourage black bile.

Everything about Hooke’s appearance, on the other hand, was grey. He sat near the fire, trying to warm after his return from the Fleet to his rooms at Gresham’s College. His skin was pallid and lustreless. His grey hair, prone to breaking off, was now tied back with a charcoal-coloured ribbon. His silver eyes, which never settled, zig-zagged about the objects in his drawing room.

The drawing room also served as Hooke’s elaboratory. The table behind him was covered by his plans and constructions for demonstrations at the weekly meeting of the Royal Society. His large diary, detailing his busy life, weather observations, the precarious state of his health and medications used to improve it, his finances and experimental ruminations, lay open across them, next to his microscope.

A glass-fronted cabinet displayed his collection of fossils, the traces of creatures long since disappeared from the Earth; many from the cliffs near his childhood home on the Isle of Wight, some from excavations for buildings in London, given to him by the workmen who knew of his interests. Clocks stood everywhere about, most disembowelled, their innards spilt as if Hooke sought to anatomise the grand complication of time itself. Stalagmitic piles of books grew from the floor. Inserted into them were hundreds of loose sheets, observations written across them in his tiny scrawl. More books filled the shelves lining the whole of one wall.

All his tools were organised on a large board, each with its own place, either hanging from a nail or on a small shelf. This neatness was not their natural state of rest. Harry had designed the system when he was Hooke’s apprentice, and their temporary discipline was due to the previous morning’s hunting and sorting by his replacement, young Tom Gyles.

A door led up to Hooke’s observational turret, which housed a pair of his larger telescopes, and his selesnoscope. Harry used to sit up there with Hooke, both of them wrapped in blankets, sipping hot chocolate.

Now it was Tom who learned the mysteries of the constellations, the names of stars and planets, and the mysterious attractions between them. The boy, just ten years old and already apprenticed, sat in amongst Hooke’s things, mixing plaster for a model of the surface of the moon. ‘I shall blow air through the plaster, from beneath the model, before it has set,’ he explained to Harry, smearing plaster across his forehead, ‘to emulate its craters.’

For five years this was my place as much as Mr. Hooke’s, Harry remembered, feeling an unsettling nostalgia for times spent at the table, or crouched on the same bit of floor that Tom now occupied, shaping, carving, brazing, gluing. Now he came by invitation, and the tools he knew so well subtly altered to his perception. He had his own workshop, his own tools, and his own methods of taxonomy and keeping to hand.

Grace Hooke, visible through a doorway, stood in the kitchen, as Mary enticed a hare to leave its skin with a pull of her forearm. Its pelt slid from the animal, a sheath of pink-lined fur; a satisfying ripping sound accompanied her movement. The two spoke quietly, laughing often, but Harry could hear little of their conversation. Grace had the habit of talking behind her hand, secretively, and so it was impossible to guess at the topic.

‘How go the springs, Mr. Hooke?’ Harry enquired of him, but surreptitiously watching her. Hooke’s niece was too grand for him – she had been engaged to marry the Lord Mayor Sir Thomas Bloodworth’s son, until Sir Thomas had intervened. ‘Will you be ready with your paper?’

An expensive education paid for by her uncle, and the manners of a lady. No thoughts for a lowly Observator.

Hooke grunted at him. ‘I have stopped setting times for such things, Harry. I hope to have it in
Philosophical
Transactions
soon enough.’

On the floor between them was a wooden stand, simply constructed, a cross-member extending from its head. A copper spring wound around a cylinder, twisted at the lower end into a claw, hung from it. A pile of brass weights sat by.

Hooke’s tone was despairing. ‘I have considered the spring-like behaviour of the air; a man might fly on the end of a sound-spring, but how would such a craft appear? I am too bogged in fantasy. My tendency is to dwell upon such thoughts instead of the writing of my results. I am like a cripple climbing stairs, my progress slow and painful to observe.’

‘And the world intrudes as ever, Mr. Hooke. Sir Edmund’s man will be here presently.’

‘Yes, yes,’ Hooke said wearily. ‘Come closer by the fire yourself. Mary has prepared me an infusion of catmint to fend off the rheum. Somewhere I have some steel wine. It is no wonder that my understanding of this world proceeds so slowly. Do my headaches and voidings of jelly signal the slipping of my faculties?’

Hooke took any medicine described to him by helpful associates, and had never yet found health. Harry skilfully kept him away from expounding further upon his ailments by offering to write an account of the meeting at the Fleet. ‘We will be asked pertinent questions should there ever be a trial,’ he said.

Harry called Tom over to the window, and instructed him to watch for Sir Edmund’s man. Tom carefully carried the board with his section of lunar surface, and some tube to blow through, as the plaster was starting to stiffen.

Hooke brought across the pan of steaming green liquid, and carefully poured it into a bowl. The bowl had a chip on its rim, which he avoided; it would not have occurred to him to replace it. He took a chest-full of the steam before swallowing any of the catmint.

‘It resembles that which it seeks to drain out, Harry, a happy coincidence of signatures auguring well!’

Harry, his own clothes still damp, would have appreciated the offer of at least a sip of this tincture.

*

Hooke sat with his drink and stared up towards the ceiling. He achieved this by tilting back his chair and straightening his spine as far as possible, his stiff neck moving back with it. His eyes did not see joists and plaster, but recalled instead mud, snow, and the body of the boy.

‘To take the blood so completely is a difficult undertaking,’ he mused. ‘To infuse it into another is more difficult still. It demands knowledge of blood, and the course it takes about the body, its flow, its pulsation, of the fabric of its conduits, of its sticky coagulation and methods to prevent it stick. Of use of quills, capillary tubes, and funnels. Dr. Lower performed trials with dogs, infusing the blood of one dog into another. Mr. Coga survived, but had only small amounts infused. Professor Denis in France, some ten years ago, placed the blood of a calf into a man who had suffered from a frenzy. The man pissed out black urine, then died.’

‘He is the reason that the Society has forbidden the continuance of infusion.’

‘Yes, Viscount Brouncker our President put a stop to it.’

‘Witches are drained of their blood to take away their power,’ Harry observed.

‘It is not Christian to persecute superstitious people.’

‘There will always remain a broken line dividing religion, magic and philosophy. I test all things according to my own yardstick. You have taught me to do that, Mr. Hooke, over our years together.’

For a moment the two natural philosophers of the Royal Society sat comfortably, quietly, enjoying this talk of blood. Hooke produced a pipe and some tobacco. Harry looked over at Tom, to check whether he found their conversation too grisly. The boy looked happy enough, blowing down a thick length of tube, forcing the almost-set plaster into strikingly crater-like forms.