The Bloodless Boy (31 page)

Perhaps, after the boy, whoever he was, had gone, Mr. Hooke would become more receptive to him, and be willing to listen to his story of Thomas Whitcombe’s work with the infusion of blood.

*

When the three men reached the door to the cellars, they found it already unlocked, and slightly ajar. A dark slit showed the way down into the subterranean level below them.

‘One of the other Professors must be down there,’ Hooke told the King, doubt apparent in his voice. ‘The lamp that hangs here is taken.’

‘No one else has the key to the heavy door, Robert? The one which blocks off the way to your Air-pump?’

‘Only I have the key, other than Mr. Boyle, who rarely comes to the College. Harry, will you bring a light from my lodgings?’ For the first time Hooke looked directly at his assistant, speaking to him as if he ate wormwood.

Harry went back across the quadrangle, and Mary let him in. Feeling suddenly anxious, a shudder working down his spine, he went to the drawer under the worktable. The package was as he had left it, not five minutes before. Reassured, he found a lamp, and lit it with a taper that Mary fetched for him. It was a poor relation to the fine lamp he had broken against his assailant, before his struggle with him at the top of the Fish Street pillar.

He returned to Hooke and the King waiting at the cellar entrance.

He passed Hooke the lamp. They descended the stairs, and went through the low corridor. The King’s head brushed the cellar’s roof, and he had to stoop going between the boxes and sacks, the models and various bits of apparatus, and past Hooke’s flying machine.

What they saw next brought them up short. The sturdy iron-clad door, which usually sealed off the end of the passageway leading to the Air-pump room, stood open, hanging eccentrically from one hinge. Scorch marks on its surface showed the force of gunpowder, and a line of black along the floor led to where somebody had stood to ignite the charge. The three men looked at one another, wondering whether they should go back, to safety, or forwards, towards the boy and the Air-pump. Was the King’s life in danger? Was the person – or people – still down there, in the dark of Gresham’s cellars?

‘Such a sound would have been heard, surely?’ the King whispered.

‘The charge has been carefully measured – only sufficient to break the door. I heard nothing, walking in to Gresham’s. Did you, Harry?’

‘I arrived only a short while ago, Mr. Hooke. And Mary mentioned nothing of an explosion.’

The King started forwards, advancing cautiously, his arms out to keep them behind him.

The door to the Air-pump room was also open, its wood splintered, attacked with an axe around its lock. The lock was wrenched from its mortise, and lay on the stone floor.

The King still led the way, walking vigilantly down the few steps into the room. There was no one else inside, awaiting them.

Rasping underfoot, tiny shards of glass lay scattered over the floor. In the centre of the cramped space, the Air-pump’s receiver had been obliterated as completely as possible. Where the receiver had been there remained only a few daggers of glass, forming a wicked collar. The body of the machine was bent, its brass cylinder smashed, the timber frame axed and ruined.

The blood-drained boy was gone.

Observation LII
Of Combustion

Hooke’s shock, showing itself in a speechless opening and closing of his mouth, like an automaton’s, and the sudden shaky light from the lamp he held, vacillated between its causes: the violence carried out against the apparatus, as if a singular abhorrence had been expressed upon it; and the taking of the boy.

‘Who knows of the placing of the child in here?’ the King asked, his face darkly clouded, and looking as stunned as Hooke.

‘Only Harry and I know of it,’ Hooke answered. ‘And you, Your Majesty. Did Sir Jonas know? Sir Edmund knew, and Sir Edmund’s man, who delivered him here.’

‘Welkin,’ Harry added. ‘His name was Welkin.’

‘No one here at the College? None of the professors? None of the Fellows of the Society?’

‘Sir Edmund swore us to secrecy. I lament ever becoming involved at all,’ Hooke said miserably.

‘And,’ Harry remembered, ‘Sir Edmund requested that Viscount Brouncker, the President of the Society, should authorise our assistance to the Justice. That aid included the storing of the boy.’

‘And who else has the key to the cellars?’ Harry noticed how easily and effectively the King asserted his authority when he wanted to. His tone of voice hardly changed, and yet became utterly commanding.

Hooke replied. ‘All of the professors have access. And we are granted permission to let our rooms to others.’

From far off, muffled by the bricks arching over their heads, the sound of a door’s closing reached them.

‘Someone has locked the outer door,’ Hooke explained to the King. ‘They cannot realise that we are down here.’

Another sound became audible to them; nearer, sharper. It was a curious fizzing sound. Harry could not think what it was.

The King, though, recognised it all too well.

‘Burning gunpowder!’ he cried.

‘Ah, yes,’ Hooke agreed, still distracted by his thoughts upon the broken Air-pump. ‘You are . . .’ His voice trailed off, as he at last comprehended what was happening.

Harry had already jumped up the few steps and outside the room, and he swung the heavy iron-faced door across the cellar’s passage. He did it unthinkingly, the movement taking only seconds, but in his mind taking far longer – too long. The door almost broke free of its remaining hinge, but stayed on sufficiently to close across the corridor. He leaned against its weight, ensuring as best he could that it fitted into its frame. He raced back, pushing Hooke, whose horrified face looked out at his rushed efforts to shield them, back down the steps.

As Harry tried to close the door to the Air-pump room, a great movement of air seized it from his grasp. It leaped back open in a wild arcing motion, and crashed into the wall behind. The iron-clad door flew past him, upside down, launched along the passage as if only thin board. It smashed against the wall, one corner hitting first, sending brick fragments flying from its impact.

It happened slowly; Harry’s thoughts ran so quickly that he had the time to watch the door float past him, as if it moved through water. A blow, and then a suck, then a vortex of wind sent the fragments of the receiver’s glass whirling up from the floor. The three men covered their heads with their arms, sheltering themselves from the angry air, glass slivers held in violent suspension.

After the initial detonation this all happened at once, in an instant, and strangely silently, Harry thought, not apprehending that his eardrums were shocked and useless from the blast. Even the pain from his lacerated forehead and the backs of his hands did not register, attuned as he was upon the immediate needs of survival. His leather coat protected him from a further slashing.

The light from the lamp was extinguished; they called out to one another, to check that they still lived. They fumbled for each other in the absolute darkness, all deafened, each seeking comfort that he was not the only one to survive.

‘Mr. Hooke!’ Harry shouted into the Curator’s ear. ‘Are you injured?’

‘Only cuts, Harry.’

Harry held on to his arm tightly. ‘The powder was a distance away. Your Majesty?’

‘By God’s Grace, I am alive.’

They shook out glass from their hair, and the King picked out a glass splinter from the back of his hand, licking the blood at the wound.

Then, another sound; with their hearing so injured it reached them as if through a wall of earth, but with enough force to make them comprehend that their danger was far from over.

It was the sound of combustion, the crackling of flame; it was the sound of all the materials stored along the corridor, the rolled papers, the stacked woods, the Curator’s models and the piled fabrics, beginning to burn. The noise of the fire gathered momentum as it enrolled new recruits to its cause, an invading army of heat, the blaze devouring everything in its way.

Harry got himself to the door, and the orange glow reflected from his spectacles; these two discs let Hooke and the King perceive clearly the difficulty they were in. They could see a monstrous thick black smoke hugging the arched ceiling of the cellar passageway, as if gripping the lines of mortar between the bricks to pull itself along.

*

‘We cannot go forward through that!’ Harry shouted at the others.

‘So, we must instead retreat,’ the King shouted back. ‘How long will this door last?’

‘The iron door would withhold if only it were not so broken,’ Harry answered. ‘This inner door will not last against the fierceness of the fire.’

‘Then all we can fight for is time. It may burn itself out. We must close that door.’

Fire filled the corridor, timber boxes collapsing as the flames ate them away. Hooke’s flying machine – the canvas disappearing in glowing bites across its length, the spindles of its delicate frame folding in on one another – fell from the wall.

The King pulled his shirt out from inside the waist of his breeches, and ripped a strip from it, to place over his mouth. Harry followed his example, even able to regret the tearing of his shirt. The iron-clad door, blown off its final hinge, thrown ten feet from its place, was fearsomely heavy. Harry picked up one side of it, and the King seized the other, and they dragged it back. They leaned it against its twisted frame, but the sheets of iron had buckled, and the timber inside them was splintered. It would be a modest barrier to the advancing fire. Already the metal began to warm; they left it, a meagre return for their efforts.

Back in the cellar room, they coughed from the smoke. Hooke was the worst affected, but he was able, as Harry closed the inside door – the last barrier between them and their immolation – to gasp: ‘The diachylon!’

‘Yes!’ Harry, exultant, scrabbled around the floor of the cellar, feeling in the dark for the box of paste they had used to seal the Air-pump. After ripping his hands again on more glass, his fingers knocked against the hard sides of the box. He then continued to search, running his hands over the walls, seeking the bucket of water used to cool the Air-pump’s brass cylinder.

He did not find the bucket with his hands. Instead, he kicked against it, resting at an angle against the wall. He reached into it, to see if any water remained. Only about a quarter had stayed in.

His heart was racing, the pulse in his neck feeling as if it would burst through. He carefully carried the bucket to the door, desperate that no more of the precious water would spill.

The King lent his height to the pushing in of the diachylon paste along the top of the door. Hooke frenziedly filled the sides and round the broken mortise, and Harry ran a line of the paste between the door’s bottom edge and the floor, fighting for mastery over his shaking hands. When the corners were finished, he soaked the little water left into the wood, pressed more of the paste from the box along the seal to reinforce it, and pushed a last wad into it, blocking out the finger of fire-cooked air which reached at them through the door.

After the hectic actions of sealing themselves in, awaiting the outcome of the fire’s approach brought a strange, dead time, in which all they could do was listen to the groaning of the iron plates of the outside door. The darkness pushed against them. It was eerie, and made Harry feel as if he floated in space. He touched the rough wall by him to feel its reassuring solidity. The smoke that had got in through the door tasted bitter.

They felt the intensity of the heat build up, further and further, the sweat running down inside their clothes. Sitting helpless in the dark, Harry, trembling, became aware of all the injuries he had recently sustained, each ache and soreness announcing itself to him.

From the blackness he felt a hand reach for him, taking his, and gripping it tightly.

Harry and Hooke embraced each other, their differences forgotten, Harry clinging to his mentor. Hooke stroked Harry’s hair, just as he had comforted Tom Gyles in his last hours.

The King sat apart from them, his knees brought up to his chin. Roasting carried a taint of indignity about it. It did not seem a very Royal way to go, he thought, wondering why it was that at moments like this he was at his most calm. He ran bloody fingers over his hair.

They listened to the amplifying crackle of the flames, waiting for the sound of a final screech of the wooden door to signal their end.

They waited.

They could hear the constant rustle and crackle of approaching fire coming from the corridor, and the thumps and rattles of the spilling of materials onto stone, as the sacks and boxes holding them burned away. Further crashes came to them, as more of Hooke’s constructions collapsed, and fell to the ground, consumed by fire.

The noise of iron incessantly ringing in their damaged ears clanked and echoed the whole length of the passage. It was as if they were trapped inside a vast, old, cracked bell.

The men shrank back, pressing themselves as far into the imaginary safety of the walls, at the huge, shocking, crashing noise as the iron door fell from its frame.

The sucking noise of the diachylon paste being expelled from the gaps between the door and its frame, a similar sound to the top of Sir Edmund’s skull being removed, made them realise that there was no hope for them. Their last desperate tries at saving themselves had failed.

Harry felt tears falling, and was surprised to find that they were his own. It was as if it should be the most unusual thing to cry at the moment of death. It took the sensation of this wetness on his cheeks, seeping from his stinging eyes, to realise that he did not want to die. In his light-headedness from all the smoke he was able to consider his realisation, as if from a distance away, feeling apart from himself. He wiped at the tears, the water turning the dust on his fingers to a gritty paste. He rubbed it between his fingertips.

You do not want to die
. It was his own voice he could hear, he was sure of it, but different. Aged. More experienced. The voice of his older self, allowed to live after this moment. Harry listened to him regretfully, knowing that he would never meet this man, who spoke so kindly, and gently, to him.

‘I do not want to die.’ He said it aloud.

Hooke squeezed his hand, weakly, his strength seeming to have almost gone.

Finally, the door landed with a resounding echo onto the cellar room’s flagstones, followed by a swirl of angry sparks and the inrush of black, choking smoke.