The Bloodless Boy (30 page)

After musing briefly on where Whitcombe might have got a lion, Harry selected the largest of all the bundles,
Observations of the Heart and Blood
. A hundred or so sheets, it was these pages that rustled in the icy draught from the window.
Observations Of Water
,
Observations Of Fire
,
Of Air
,
Of Breath
,
Of the Soul
,
Of Animals
,
Of Minerals
,
Of Vegetables
,
Of Homunculii
, and the last, smaller bundle making up
Observations Philosophical
,
Observations of Miscellaneous Species
, all remained untouched, pushed under his bed, resting on the same rough canvas cloth that had wrapped them in Henry Oldenburg’s oak chest.

Observations of the Heart and Blood
explained Whitcombe’s experimental trials endeavouring to understand the circulatory apparatus, and the blood and lymph flowing around it. The heart, the arteries, the veins, and the capillaries between them, were all studied and described in fatiguing detail. It showed the movement of the vital spirits in the blood away from the heart, to the lungs, and returning to the heart again. It followed the route of the blood nourishing a body, and cleaned in the kidney. It studied the work of the liver, and the effects to the body of damage upon it. The blood moving around the heart was explained. It showed the growth of new blood vessels, and how this stopped with age; unless the body was wounded, when it worked to repair itself.

It included an account of Thomas Whitcombe meeting with William Harvey during the Civil War, when Harvey had been physician to Charles I. They had met on a cold day, and discussed the blueness of their extremities, as the blood stagnated because of the chill. Distant from their hearts, the blood’s vitality was lost, demonstrating the crucial nature of the pumping action of the heart to provide heat to the blood. Without this continual motion, it would become congealed.

Harry uncovered Whitcombe’s trials of the dissection of living animals, opening their chests, revealing their hearts; moving, then resting, to move again. As the animals died, their hearts moved more slowly, a benefit to Whitcombe, more easily able to perceive their motions.

Toads, frogs, snakes, eels, fish, cats, dogs, pigs and wolves: nothing was spared from Whitcombe’s attentions. The heart of an eel beats without auricles, and if cut up the different pieces can be seen to pulse. Even if skinned and disembowelled, an eel can still move. Zoophytes such as the sea anemone have no heart at all, and their material and structure fascinated Whitcombe, as he sought to endow the human frame with this same ability, to do without a heart.

Observations of the Heart and Blood
also clearly stated Thomas Whitcombe’s desire to comprehend the measureless difference between dead matter, and living; the mysterious processes and energies animating a body.

He imitated the heart’s structure with models, and reproduced its function with machines. Its pumping action was easily copied, but his attempts to use such a pump to enable a creature to live had ended in failure, as size was an insurmountable problem, unless kept outside the creature, necessarily attached to the machine. This tethering had been unacceptable, Whitcombe seeking a freely moving subject. At smaller sizes, the power of his pumps diminished, until too weak to propel blood around the body.

Whitcombe left his experimentation with mechanical pumps, and instead transplanted hearts from one animal to another, but these had all died, either during the chirurgy or immediately after. It was as if the recipient body was repulsed by its new organ, seeking to kill it off. He had dissected pigs, convinced that the similarity of a pig’s heart to a human heart would enable him to successfully keep a human alive, although he never attempted – at least in these
Observations
– to place a pig’s heart into a person.

Harry rubbed his head gingerly, exploring the damage to it. A patch of skin where his hair had been pulled was raw, and weeping moisture.

The letters squirmed on the page, stretching and compressing, collapsing in on themselves, to reinflate again. The lines of writing undulated, like observing the last rays of the sun through the evening atmosphere, as he had done in the Crown tavern when waiting for Robert Hooke.

Just a bit more, before he went down to find Mrs. Hannam, to see if she had anything for a late breakfast. He would have wished for bacon, until the reading of Whitcombe’s experiments. He opened the window a little wider, took a deep inhalation of icy London air, and then sat back on his chair, its joints flexing as they took his weight.

He started on the next page of numbers, to turn them into more of Whitcombe’s account of his studies into blood.

The paper, the cipher wheel, the pen . . .

The next part of Whitcombe’s
Observations
revealed itself laboriously, turning from numbers into Harry’s own careful lettering, a transformative alchemy. One by one, the letters accrued, forming yet further words, the meandering sentences having to be made sense of, and needing to be organised, as the Red Cipher allowed for no punctuation.

One by one – thirteen in all – he uncovered the next of Thomas Whitcombe’s experiments. All of these trials furthered the knowledge of blood; all sought the replacement of a defective heart. All required the use of human blood and the use of human children. Thirteen children, all boys, had been dissected, studied, transplanted, infused. Some had been stored in an Air-pump, kept so that more trials could be performed upon them. None of these boys had survived the procedures, and most, but not all, were dead before Thomas Whitcombe set to work upon them.

At last, aching, exhausted, Harry knew for certain.

He put the papers down, and to help him consider his discoveries he absent-mindedly picked up a file, and rasped at some metal on his work table.

He knew why the boys found at the Fleet, at the Westbourne, and at Barking Creek, had been drained of their blood.

Observation XXXXIX
Of Expiration

The miracle did not happen; their prayers had not been answered.

At fourteen minutes after noon, with a muffled rattling sound in his throat, Tom died.

Mary removed all the stained blankets and sheets, and Grace folded Tom’s hands across his chest. One of his eyes stayed slightly open, from his last look at them, and Hooke squeezed it shut. Tom looked as if he still shivered from the cold, his features contorted and pinched. Hooke coaxed the muscles of his face, stroking them, massaging them softly until Tom’s expression relaxed.

Grace cried silently, her mouth pressed into her hands.

Great bellows of grief overwhelmed Mary.

Hooke hoped that his words of Heaven and angels had brought some comfort to Tom before he died.

He went down the stairs, sat at the table in his drawing room, and poured a glass of restorative steel wine.

That such vitality should have so completely disappeared, and that all of Tom’s noise should be so utterly silenced, placed Hooke into a numbed shock of misery. The pain of Tom’s death attacked him, filling his heart.

He sat, surrounded by all of his instruments, drawings, and models, and sobbed.

Observation L
Of Maternity

The following morning Robert Hooke went slowly by the brothels of Love Lane and into Silver Street. He went past the ruins of St. Olave, burned in the Great Conflagration, but did not spare it a glance. He had his umbrella, and the rain splashed from it in a jittering circle around him.

Everywhere there were soldiers, but none of them stopped him, either recognising the famous philosopher or realising that he was not to be bothered.

He was there to acquaint Hannah Gyles of the arrangements he had made. He summoned the strength from somewhere to complete his mission, but he was so weary. Everything in him felt heavy.

He had put everything in order for the funeral, to be held that evening, and then he had met with the Society Council at the College repository. There they had confirmed Viscount Brouncker’s message. The overwhelming motion of the council had been to accept him as Secretary
pro
tempore
after Henry Oldenburg’s death, and for him to write the Journals, as yet without payment. There had been several assurances that the position would become fully ratified, and that his campaigning would soon be properly rewarded.

What had meant so much to him only days ago now seemed entirely trivial.

A crowd of children played outside the door as he approached, and he waded through them. They stared at his long, wet nose and his hunched back, and his eyes that had been crying.

Hannah stood awkwardly in her kitchen. He wished that he could show more affection to her, hug her to him, but instead for a difficult moment they stood apart, both frozen by their separate griefs.

Tom had been one of many, yet his mother collapsed in her sorrow, her knees giving way from under her. Now Hooke could move forward to her, and they held one another without any thoughts of self-consciousness, and they were, for a short time, unaware that anything existed outside this small dark room with its rickety chairs, its bitter-smelling smoke from a fire made of willow logs, and the only thing of value a small silver candle branch.

Observation LI
Of the Air-Pump

‘Come and stand by the fire-place, Harry, and warm yourself.’ Mary listlessly stirred the coals, sending sparks into Hooke’s drawing room. Shadows around her eyes and a tightness of her features showed her suffering. Over the flames she hung a large iron kettle, filled with water from the Bishopsgate pump.

‘Mr. Hooke has me making tea, for he expects the King,’ she informed Harry, her voice flat, when in happier times it would have been loud in her excitement. ‘His Majesty must like the College better than Whitehall, even though Mr. Hooke will not let me rid this room of all this
stuff
. How can any monarch endure such a space?’

Harry fiddled with the cuff of his coat, not answering her question, knowing that it was half-heartedly posed.

Mary lowered herself wearily for a rare sit on one of the chairs by the fireplace. She put out a hand to take his. ‘You are cold, like an icicle!’

‘Has Mr. Hooke said why the King returns?’ Harry asked her.

‘To look at the Air-pump, he says. With the threat upon his person, it is a wonder the King ventures forth at all. It is to be kept a secret – Mr. Hooke left me in no doubt of that. The Curator is an ingenious man, Harry, but it wonders me that His Majesty should seek his company here. More than ever since news of the Popish plot. It is said that the King has been given poisoned wine, which he thought looked tainted, and so he dipped it into bread, and fed it to one of his dogs which then fell down stone – oh!’

The King might be poisoned here at Gresham’s, and she would be blamed; she would go into the history books as the housekeeper who did not take a care to mind the King’s life when he came to visit. The name Robinson would be forevermore taught to children as synonymous with heedlessness and neglect.

‘The King is well looked after,’ Harry reassured her. ‘Soldiers are everywhere in London, seeking out those against him.’

Mary looked gratefully at him. ‘Have they stopped you too? Praise be for men such as Titus Oates. If he had not come across this devilish business . . . I have heard him called the Saviour of the Nation.’

Mary noticed the papers that Harry had brought with him, and she blew her red cheeks out, as if playing an invisible trumpet, and shook her head sadly at him. ‘Mr. Hooke will not have a mind for your business, Harry. He has done little since poor Tom left us for a better place. He sits and stares into the fire. This morning he went to Hannah Gyles. Otherwise, not even for a coffee-house has he left here.’ She placed the back of her hand on Harry’s cheek. ‘Get closer to the fire.’

There was a loud knocking at the door, and a loud call of ‘Robert!’ through it.

‘I shall bring the King inside,’ Harry said.

Before he left Mary, he was careful to put his papers away, in a drawer under Hooke’s worktable.

Opening the door of Hooke’s lodgings, Harry saw that the King was on his own. There were no soldiers with him. Not even Sir Jonas Moore, who had come with him on his last visit to Gresham’s, accompanied him.

The King wore a plain dark coat, scuffed boots, no wig, and a pleased expression.

‘Your Majesty!’ Harry’s look, combining confusion and concern, signalled clearly his astonishment.

‘You expect a squadron with me, eh, Harry? Well, let me tell you, I am
not
the King! For even my own guard did not recognise me! Therefore I
cannot
be their King. I have gone through two blocks of the road. I even announced myself to them as William Jackson, to see if they knew their history.’

‘You come in the same guise as when you escaped to France, after Worcester, Your Majesty.’

The King clapped Harry on the arm. ‘Lord Danby forbade me to leave Whitehall until this Catholic design is all finished with – one way or the other, I suppose – and so the
King
rests in his chamber.
William
Jackson
, however, is out and about the town. What fun, Harry! What fun!’

‘Come inside, then, Mr. Jackson. We await Mr. Hooke’s arrival.’

‘You do not, Your Majesty, Harry; for I am here.’ Robert Hooke’s hunched form was behind them, in his grey coat and a hat. His silver eyes were edged with pink, the blood vessels prominent, giving him the appearance of an albino. ‘This is a sorry business, and I will be glad to have done with it.’

‘I have arranged for a coach for the boy,’ the King said. ‘It shall be here presently.’

‘Welcome news,’ Hooke replied. ‘For it has made me fretful keeping him here.’

‘Let us then prepare the way for his removal, Robert, and take him from the vacuum.’

Hooke turned around and took them towards the cellars, back across the quadrangle. He had hardly acknowledged Harry – the merest of nods – but expected him to follow. Harry said nothing to him, and did not suggest that they delayed to have Mary’s tea, although Hooke looked chilled through.