The Bloodless Boy (33 page)

‘A task which you have neglected,’ Hooke said bitingly.

Harry looked hurt. ‘The deciphering has taken all of my attention. I bring with me part of Thomas Whitcombe’s notes, called
Observations
Philosophical
. A section of this he called
Observations of the Heart and Blood
.’

‘After William Harvey,’ Hooke noted.

Harry nodded. ‘
Observations of the Heart and Blood
studies the workings of the heart, and also the uses of the blood. Whitcombe was procured children for his trials. He had no use for bodies dead from age or disease, nor those of criminals hanged or shot. He required healthy bodies, uncorrupted. He describes his ways to extract and infuse blood from one body to another. He calls this commixture. These bodies allowed him to study an emerging pattern, and led him to the reasons for success and for failure.’

Harry noticed that his own voice was rising, sounding his excitement at Whitcombe’s findings, even though the cost of discovery had been considerable; he continued, finding a more measured pitch. ‘The Royal Society took sick men looking to be cured, and injected blood into them, to see the restorative effect upon their humours. Those who died added little to our investigations, as they may have died anyway, or they may have continued to live. We persuaded one healthy man, Arthur Coga, to accept the blood of a dog, in a small amount, and then the blood of a man. Mr. Coga was lucky. Thomas Whitcombe shows that by the laws of chance he was more likely to die from the taking of another man’s blood.’

Hooke stared unhappily into the fire. ‘The Society stopped all such trials, hearing of Professor Denis at the Montmort Academy, and his failures to cure the sick. Men died agonising deaths from blood being infused into them.’

Harry picked at a fragment of glass lodged under the skin on his wrist. ‘The reasons for his failure were not studied closely enough. Whitcombe discovered four categories of blood. Through microscopical study he found that some, on being introduced to another, immediately clot together; the red parts of the bloods binding, to make it useless, and harmful to any body it is infused into. He calls these conflux bloods. The new blood with the old results in convulsions and, if the quantity is sufficient, in death. A diflux blood does not do this, and so continues to flow freely.’

‘If a diflux blood had been used, Professor Denis’s patients could have been saved!’ Hooke said, at last becoming more animated, and less obdurate towards Harry, with the possibilities of a new science opening up before him. ‘Are the humours constant across these various bloods?’

‘Whitcombe tried to separate the humours from the blood, but could find no part which could be filtered away to produce alterations within a body. He studied the function of the liver, with its properties of sanguification. He identified boys with diflux bloods, and tried to convey one liver into the body of another, but he did not succeed. He supplanted spleens, and hearts also, but did not succeed in continuing a life. The boy found at Chelsea Physic Garden, it would seem, was such a death. The chymical circulation between the heart, the spleen and the liver, in imparting the vital spirits to continue around the body, is, he says, beyond the power of a man’s understanding, and must be left to the province of God.’

*

Harry succeeded in removing the last of the glass in his wrist, a long sliver that pulled at his skin. ‘There is much self-hatred in his pages. The
Observations
form a confession of his guilt.’

‘He at last became sensible to his own conscience,’ Hooke intoned.

‘At first he hardened himself to his feelings, determined to avoid squeamishness. He used the dead, and then the living, to investigate the workings of nature. He writes that our common state is death. Life is the exception, a brief visit to this temporal world. It was but a small step, taking life, to further his discoveries. Confronted by failure, though, he became sickened by the stealing of bodies, and of the kidnapping of children.’

‘Why would he set about such trials?’

‘His object was to infuse a child, and replace his heart. A special child. Whitcombe calls him the ‘recipient boy’, and those used for their blood, the ‘emittent boys’. He experimented upon them, some while they still lived, wanting fresh blood.’

Grace’s expression made plain her disgust, sticking out her tongue as if to rid herself of a bad taste.

‘Who is this special child?’ Hooke asked, sipping carefully at his drink.

‘He never says, nor who wanted him saved.’

‘Saved? Saved from what, though, Harry?’

‘Why, saved from death, Mr. Hooke. He is a dead child. Thomas Whitcombe sought to revivify him.’

‘Impossible!’ Hooke barked, his hot chocolate spilling as he thumped his fist onto the arm of his chair. ‘Bring him back to life! He is quite mad! Go to the King, Harry, and tell him all. Then at last we shall be done with it.’

‘Others think him sane. The boy found at the Fleet, kept preserved on the orders of Sir Jonas Moore, was the special child. The dates written on the body prove it, for they correspond with the dates of experiments detailed in the
Observations
. He was the recipient of infusions meant to revivify him. His weakened heart was to be replaced.’

‘Whitcombe met with the same limits of size of glass receiver as I did. He thought to watch the boy if he came back to life, to remove him from the vacuum.’

‘We surmised that the boy, having his blood taken, had been murdered for his blood. In truth, he waited for blood to be given. Twelve other boys were used; Thomas Whitcombe searching different methods, testing different ways. The recipient boy was preserved for a year or more, as he worked upon them.’

‘Who employed him? What callous, murderous mind would think one life worth the cost of so many?’

‘His
Observations
do not say, Mr. Hooke, at least as far as I have read them. My conjecture is this: Thomas Whitcombe went as a slave to the Barbadoes, where he worked on a plantation owned by the Earl of Shaftesbury – Shaftesbury, until recently imprisoned in the Tower, put there for his constant arguments with the King. The news-sheets say that he was released on New Year’s Day, the same day that we found the Fleet boy. If Shaftesbury came to know of Whitcombe’s skills, surely he would have taken him from the manufacture of sugar? As I say, this is conjecture only. I do know with certainty who found the emittent children for Thomas Whitcombe, or at least ordered them to be so; but I think that he, too, at the end, did not believe that one life outweighed others.’

Hooke looked at him, uneasily.

‘It was Henry Oldenburg, the Secretary of the Royal Society.’

Observation LIV
Of a Preparation

It was not an exact copy, the boy before her. This face was dull, and the lack of blood had hollowed the cheeks. Even though it was not him, for he had long left his body, it was such a strong reminder, like a brother, or cousin, of her son.

This boy’s face was serious, and solemn, as if he possessed a secret that weighed him down. His mouth was slightly drawn up at the corners, in disapproval of the attempts to revivify him. This mild reproach, as if he understood their choice but regretted it, affected her all the more. If he had looked angrily at her, she would have had a defence against him, some quick reply, but this gentle chastisement was implacable.

Frances Teresa Stewart, better known throughout the Kingdom as Britannia, for so she appeared on medals and coins, was dressed in mourning black. She gazed on the face of her son, and stroked his forehead, feeling the papery texture of his skin. Drained of blood, his skin had shrivelled, fine lines etching its surface, as if he had prematurely aged.

It was the eyes, blue, moving towards indigo, identical to hers, that showed unarguably, crushingly, that it was him. She had hoped they would be closed; she could then have pretended that his death was merely a form of sleep.

Hortense Mancini, Duchesse de Mazarin, had carefully lowered the boy onto the table, laying him onto his back. Anne Lennard, Countess of Sussex, had unwrapped him from her coat, a rich sea-green colour, in which they had carried him from Gresham’s College to Frances Stewart’s suite of rooms in Whitehall.

His eyes were open, and clear, still untouched by decay. The unblinking gaze was damning – what had they put him through?

They straightened out his legs, and placed his arms down each side of his body.

He could only have been indifferent to the processes and procedures, the experimental trials carried out upon him, but it looked as though he had experienced every cut, every piercing of his skin, and remembered every sensation of blood being moved in and out of his arteries and veins.

Her son’s eyes would not look away.

Frances took a cloth, and dipped it in water from a porringer on her table. She washed his face, and his hair, which slicked to his head. She quickly dried it, not liking the way it clung to the structure of his skull. She cleaned his body, gently, in every crease and fold, across every plane, over the sharpness of the hips and protruding ribs, along the length of each limb.

When she reached the wounds going into his legs, she carefully wiped away the last of his blood coagulated around them, the wet cloth pulled tightly around her finger, dabbing at them with the tip. She tried to remove the dates written onto him, but they would not entirely disappear, the ink blurring and smearing around each wound, making it look as if she bruised the flesh.

As if she had hurt him once more.

The constriction that she felt, as grief rose in her throat, overcoming her, made her fear that she would never breathe, or swallow, again.

She passed the cloth to Hortense, and placed her hands on the table, leaning her weight on them, thinking that she would fall. Hortense finished cleaning him, and when Frances had recovered some of her self-possession, together the three women took a large silk sheet, and wrapped him in it. Anne carefully stitched him into the shroud with thread.

Frances watched her son leave her again, disappear into the silk. What had led her to give his body over to Thomas Whitcombe? The failure of the procedure coloured her mind, she knew, for if Whitcombe had succeeded, and he had revivified her boy, she would have been forever grateful, and would never consider the difficulties, or the cost, of success.

She had been desperate – more desperate than at any time of her life – to recover him. Whitcombe had assured her that he would do so, bring him back from the dead, but he broke his promise. His initial self-belief had been absolute, but as the months had gone by he had become more and more deflated, and distracted; towards the end he had been unable even to look at her.

They lifted the boy into the small, simple coffin. It was wood, only, not lead-lined, and there was to be no embalming of him. He would be buried, and his human form would quickly dissipate into the earth.

Frances, hardly able to see, held his hand through the silk, a last touch, an appeal for his forgiveness.

They carefully placed the lid over him, and fastened it down.

Her boy had thrived, at first. But then, some fault in his fabric, some weakness, a misdirection in the growth of his heart, had brought him down.

Whitcombe had convinced her that he could return him to the living.

He could not.

Observation LV
Of a Burial

At Saint Hallows churchyard that evening, at seven o’clock, a crowd of mourners gathered. The black trails from each and every chimney fell into the sooty cloud hovering and swirling amongst them. The miasma forced coughs and sneezes from the congregation.

Many Fellows of the Royal Society, and those who gathered round Robert Hooke as his New Philosophical Club, attended. By the lamplight illuminating them all, Sir Christopher Wren, mathematician, anatomist, and architect, his fingers inky from drawing, inspected the stone of the church. Sir Robert Boyle, Hooke’s first patron – together they had built the first Air-pump – spoke with Thomas Henshaw, Original Fellow of the Royal Society as well as Envoy Extraordinary to Denmark. Dr. William Holder, inventor of a sign language for the deaf, stood with Sir William Petty, the designer of the
Experiment
, the ship whose drawings the King had displayed in his elaboratory. William Croon, Gresham’s Professor of Rhetoric, Abraham Hill, Council member, and Daniel Colwall, Treasurer of the Society, huddled quietly as a group. John Aubrey and Sir Edmund Wylde shared a flask of genever to keep away the ferocious cold. At the back of the congregation waited Sir Joseph Williamson, a keen experimentalist when he was not busy with his work as Secretary of State. He stood with Mary Robinson, who seemed to have adopted him, fussing round him, anxious to be doing something.

At the front, nearest to the small coffin, were Hannah and Robin Gyles, surrounded by their children. The husband held the wife; she leaned heavily against him.

Robert Hooke, Grace, and Harry stood just behind. Harry wore Mr. Hannam’s felt cap, pulled down low. He rolled the saliva in his mouth around his tongue, trying to get rid of the sulphurous taste from the burning sea coal.

Sir Jonas Moore, Surveyor-General of the Ordnance, leaned over and put his hand on Harry’s shoulder. ‘I must speak with you, upon a matter of some importance,’ he said quietly into Harry’s ear. He leaned closer in still. ‘Not now – you wish to concentrate upon Tom’s funeral.’

‘When, then, may we talk of this, Sir Jonas?’ Harry asked, feeling a stab of alarm, but suspecting that Sir Jonas had intelligence of Thomas Whitcombe.

‘Come to me, to the Board of Ordnance at the Tower. I shall find time for you.’ Sir Jonas melted back into the congregation.

Harry felt sure that Sir Jonas’s order to preserve the boys, and the King’s obvious anger with him when he had discovered it, meant that Sir Jonas knew more of the experiments on them.

The minister, satisfied that everyone was now ready to mourn, cleared his throat of the fumes and began his sermon.

‘There is a universal standard of truth that God hath set up over all the sons and daughters of men. He hath given the knowledge of it in and through Jesus Christ. This standard and measuring-rule is revealed and manifested in every man and woman, by the light that shines in their hearts, by which they are able to discern, and give a sound judgment, if they are but willing . . .’

Tom had light in his heart, a light now extinguished. Hooke’s rooms would seem horribly silent now. Tom never walked through a door quietly, but instead had to rattle the catch, or shake the handle, and crash it into its frame when closing it.