The Bloodless Boy (35 page)

Was the Earl of Shaftesbury Whitcombe’s patron? Were Whitcombe’s ‘employments’ carried out for him?

‘I am Harry Hunt, of the Royal Society,’ Harry told the soldier. ‘I am the Observator there. I visit a man in Whitechapel on private business.’

‘So, not a philosophical business . . . Do you carry anything with you? There is a design upon the King’s life. We must search everyone.’

‘Only some papers.’

‘Let’s have them!’

Harry produced them from the deep pocket inside his coat and gave them to the man. The sergeant looked with incomprehension at the first, topmost sheet, with the title
Observations
Philosophical
. He rummaged quickly through the remaining sheets, not untying them, but peering under the corners of the papers.

‘What is the nature of this private business?’

Harry lied to him. ‘Do you know of Mr. Robert Hooke? He is the Curator of Experiments at the Royal Society. I deliver these from him, to a man named Colonel Michael Fields.’

‘I do know of Robert Hooke. His reticle is employed in the aiming of guns. I know Colonel Fields better. A great man, in his time. So, is it private business, as you say, or, more rather, Royal Society business?’

‘I am sorry, it is Royal Society business.’

The sergeant, seeing the crush of people behind and the mild looking, bespectacled youth before him, moved aside, giving back the deciphered notes. ‘Tell the Colonel it was his name that took you through.’

*

His thoughts still almost entirely of Grace Hooke, Harry went against the tide of people going in to the City, having to keep to the edge of the way, and reached the Saracen’s Head. He turned from Whitechapel Street. He went through the archway, grimacing at the smell of horse manure, and crossed the small meadow in front of the Colonel’s chapel.

As he approached closer to where he had first met Colonel Fields, he slowed, and then stopped.

The landscape before him had changed.

Looking over the meadow, the Anabaptist chapel, which had stood down in the dip on the other side of the fence, was no longer there. Harry could see only its charred foundations and a few beams. Its two columns, which had supported the Colonel’s hammock between them, still stood upright, looking like broken ship’s masts. The wood was flaked by fire, its texture a black mould covering it.

Harry climbed over the fence and walked onto the ashy site of the chapel’s destruction. The roof had fallen in, its emaciated beams folded between the walls. Climbing over them, he knocked against one of Fields’s burnt chairs, disintegrating it. The noise was loud; he looked around, suddenly aware that eyes might be watching him. The sensation of being observed unsettled him, and he searched into the lines of bushes and along the wall of the stables, to verify that he was alone. There was no sound other than those he made. Not even a bird stirred. No cows loomed in the fields.

Reassured, he went back to inspect the two scorched columns. The wood crumbled to his touch. There was no trace of the ropes or canvas in which the Colonel had lain. Harry kicked at the thick grey ash on the floor, which soggily bound together, the rain of the past few days soaking and flattening it. There was nothing of Fields’s Bible, or his candle. And there was no trace of a body, no smell of it, and no signs of its removal. At least, Harry thought, Fields had escaped.

Harry sniffed at the air again. He could not smell the burning of the chapel – the smell of horse manure was far stronger. No smoke rose from the fire; no cinders glowed. Kneeling down to touch a charred beam, he felt it to be completely cold. If this had been a recent fire then even with the recent rain the ashes would still be warm. Yet only four days ago Fields had come to him to tell him the story of Reuben Creed and Thomas Whitcombe.

Surely he would have mentioned the burning down of his chapel?

A bright edge of something in the ash attracted his notice. He reached for it, and then pulled back his hand quickly. He sucked at his finger, cut by the Colonel’s razor. The stool it had rested on must have been burnt away. He wrapped it in his handkerchief; he would return it to him, as the Colonel had returned his boots.

The Colonel had returned his boots, after watching him under London Bridge, on the Morice waterwheel.

He had come to Half Moon Alley, and told of Thomas Whitcombe and Reuben Creed.

He had presented the cipher disk.

The Colonel had been too helpful.

And he had known that it was Sir Edmund on the wheel.

Harry remembered that Colonel Fields’s head and chin had been covered with stubble.

Sir Edmund’s dead body was red, discoloured by the proximity to a fire, in an enclosed space; was this chapel, as it burned, left locked to prevent his escape? The body carried the marks of stinging nettles; Harry saw a patch of nettles against where the wall of the chapel had stood, by a low section of fence leading to the fields beyond.

There could be a dozen such places in London, recently burnt down, Harry surmised.

He continued to search the site of the fire, seeking evidence in the ash, under the fallen beams, moving aside sections of the remaining roof. There was little left of the door, and the fire had removed any evidence of it being locked or barred to imprison the Justice. By the collapsed wall of the chapel, near where the door used to be, he discovered, wet, dirty, singed, a strip of fine lawn cloth. Sir Edmund’s arms had been tied. Harry picked up the cloth from the ash and wound it round his own wrists, not pulling at the material too strongly in case it shredded after its roasting.

Still, he would not allow himself to be certain. Carrying the lawn cloth with him, he further examined the ruins. After a search which would have been abandoned, were it not for his resolve to inspect every inch of the place, as he pulled aside the scorched remains of a chair, one of the horseshoe of chairs that had been arranged for the Colonel’s congregation, he found a shiny, yellow strip of cloth.

It was the gold band from Sir Edmund’s hat.

Here was where Sir Edmund had died, after swallowing the piece of paper with
CORPUS
written on it. After the fumes and the heat of the fire overcame him, his body had been dragged from the burning chapel, redressed, delivered to the Thames, and engaged in the mechanism of the Morice waterwheel.

Sir Edmund had come here to see the Colonel, either about the cipher or about their time in the Wars, when Thomas Whitcombe and Reuben Creed had been covertly employed to help escort the King to France. Was it Sir Edmund who had hanged Reuben Creed from a tree, anxious that he should not reveal the details of the scheme?

Why had the Colonel waited until now, over twenty-five years later, to take his retribution?

Harry pulled his coat tighter to him, more to comfort himself rather than for warmth, feeling again that eyes watched him.

What best to do? Who should he go to, to tell of the death of Sir Edmund at this chapel?

He left the site of the devastated chapel, crossed the stretch of meadow and walked back to Whitechapel High Street. He would return to Gresham’s College.

Mr. Hooke was the only man to ask, even if Harry had lied to the Curator again.

Observation LIX
Of Simulacra

At the Aldgate arch the decision had been taken, and the barrier removed. It was impossible to search everyone in the crowd. They all pressed through to the City, aiming for vantage points along Aldgate High Street, or Bishopsgate Street, or Leadenhall Street. Word was that there was no use going down to the Thames for a wherry to Temple Bar, where the Mock Pope was to be burned, as the queues at the quayside were worse. Fights had broken out, and wherries tipped. Passengers had been cast into the River.

Harry kept his hands, their lacerations stinging when exposed to the air, deep in his pockets. In the late afternoon, the sunshine had grown weaker, the temperature dropping sharply, and the waiting chilled him; his bruised legs shivered as well as ached.

‘Imagine the City aflame!’ a man shouted, agitated, his thin voice half carried away by the breeze. ‘Imagine all of the great buildings of London blazing by the same Popish cruelty that before set it afire! Imagine your father and your mother tied to a stake, as they are cooked by Jesuits; imagine their heart-wrenching screams in their torment . . .’

Harry tried to block the noise from his mind. Nearly everyone he saw had their mouths open, talking excitedly of the Procession. They held bags of vegetables, or baskets of eggs, or pockets bulging with pebbles, ammunition to hurl at the Mock Pope. He thought of the contents of his own pocket, and how much pain it had brought, and how much trouble it could still bring him. He felt for Whitcombe’s
Observations
, in case the guard wanted to search him.

‘Protestant flails!’ a man yelled, too close to his ear. ‘Have a care against the damnable Papists!’

Harry brushed him off.

The man looked affronted. ‘Are you a one to be wary of?’

Harry turned, and grabbed him by his elbow. The trader howled, surprised by the force of the young man’s grip. Seeing dark intent on Harry’s face, he picked up a flail from his tray with his free arm and held it in front of him.

‘Have a care yourself, Sir,’ Harry hissed at him. ‘You speak out of turn. Your question is malicious.’

The man gripped his flail as if trying to ward Harry’s words away with it. ‘I meant nothing by it.’

‘Then you merely prattle. Talk such as yours is dangerous, and should not be let loose.’

Made nervous by the zeal on his face, the man could not hold Harry’s gaze, and he dropped his eyes. ‘I am sorry,’ he mumbled contritely.

Harry released him. A trooper looked hard at them, but settled down as the confrontation seemed to have ended. Those around gave Harry a little more room, wary of the spots of anger on his cheeks.

He stood, waiting, every so often shuffling forward with all the others, hoping that nothing more would draw attention to himself. Word had started that Houndsditch was to be the way, and those who believed it took a gamble, turning to go north by St. Butolph’s.

The smells from the people pressing against him, and jostling him, were almost overpowering; of sweat, something like old bread, wine, smoke, and fat. He only wanted to be at Gresham, by the fire, talking to Mr. Hooke, talking with Grace, away from this gathering crowd.

His shoulders slumped. The flail seller was speaking with one of the soldiers, and pointing straight at him.

He could hear the sound, like a heartbeat, of drums approaching, low and booming, beating a slow and solemn rhythm. The pageant approached. Everyone pushed forwards or backwards, trying to work out which side of the Gate they should be. The guards went up and down, breaking up the worst of the crush with the lengths of their pikes.

At last, as the gloom of dusk descended, Harry reached Aldgate.

The trooper moved in front of him, his voice gruff. ‘What was that? With the man and his flails?’ The flail-seller stood there, still looking aggrieved.

‘I did not want one, and so he took against me.’

The soldier, large and doughty-looking, inspected him. The crowd pushed past their conversation, oozing slowly around them like tar. ‘Empty your pockets. Take off your hat. There is fear of regicide.’

‘I have only papers.’ Harry bridled at the man’s close scrutiny, extending to a prodding of the bump on his head that made him flinch. He produced the package of Thomas Whitcombe’s
Observations
. ‘I am no assassin – I am known to the King, and he considers me a friend.’

The trooper considered. He was surrounded by Enthusiasts, and this one looked no less earnest; wide-eyed, sweaty, taken up by the same fervour that gripped all at Aldgate. He had papers, which could not be dangerous.

‘Please let me through,’ Harry said. ‘I have news of the killing of Sir Edmund Bury Godfrey.’

The soldier narrowed his eyes doubtingly, and then looked around to the others with him. ‘Where’s the sergeant?’

*

Along Houndsditch, over the heads of the crowd, the Pope’s crown was spotted, to shouts of ‘the Whore of Rome!’ The crowd seemed to swell, as if a great lung taking a breath. The way along Shoemaker Row had been too constricted, and the pageant instead had gone outside the Roman Wall, along the broader way. As realisation spread, some turned to come back through Aldgate, as others resisted. Those still on the Whitechapel side saw their chance, and rushed up Houndsditch to see.

A harsh voice came across them, aimed at the trooper with Harry. ‘Push them back! Keep them back!’ The sergeant, his voice ruined from shouting, waved angrily. The trooper saluted, muttered to himself, and took a strip of leather from his pouch. ‘Put out your hands, like this,’ he said, with the insides of his wrists together in front of him. Harry looked beyond him, wondering whether to run, but the size of the man and the push of the crowd gave him nowhere to go. Slowly, he extended his hands, as Sir Edmund must have done for Colonel Fields, and the soldier tied him firmly to a bar set in the wall.

A man dressed as the Devil whirled by, knocking those around him, blowing unmusically into a flute. The trooper pushed him away, and left Harry restrained against the wall, trying to avoid the suspicious looks from those who pressed through.

Now, winding its sluggish progress from Moorgate, came the Mock Papal Procession, with drums beating steadily and a slow and doleful ringing of a bell. At its head were six whifflers, bulky men wearing bright red waistcoats. Harry, pulling against his strap, having to twist to look over his shoulder, could see the red seeping through the crowd, inexorably forwards, the men moving from side to side, swinging sticks to discourage those before them.

To the sides of the pageant walked men wearing green ribbons on their sleeves, carrying flambeaux and lamps, which in the fading light flickered orange over the scene.

They were the Earl of Shaftesbury’s men.

Behind the whifflers walked the bell-ringer, whose shout could now be heard: ‘Remember Justice Godfrey!’

Sir Edmund Bury Godfrey, dressed completely in black, rode on a white horse. The effigy was skilfully made, a good likeness of him, even down to the thinness of the lips and the saturnine expression. Only the way that he rode, stiff in the saddle, showed that he was of wood, straw, and wax. He was kept on the horse by a black-robed Jesuit behind him, holding up a bloody dagger theatrically to the crowd. They gasped as they saw the murder of the Justice represented, they all knew of the journey he must have taken to the wheel under London Bridge, and they gasped again as they saw the blood-stained clothes and the deep red weal across the neck.

They started to chant along with the bell-ringer, ‘Remember the Justice! Remember Sir Edmund!’

A whiffler, as the procession reached Aldgate, tried to move Harry out of his way, but realised that he was tied. He looked at the young man, confused, and guided the Procession around him. At the constriction of Aldgate, the pageant slowed to a crawl, and Harry could see clearly by all the flambeaux and lamps every detail of those who went by.

Behind Sir Edmund and his assassin went a tall fat man, dressed in the gown of a Protestant curate, with a large black wig on his head. A strange cricket of a man, tiny by comparison, walked with him. His hips swayed and jerked, and his silver hair stood on end as if tipped with Saint Elmo’s fire.