The Bloodless Boy (36 page)

‘To fall for the demonic tricks of Papistry is to become a half-man!’ the cricket screamed as he came through the Gate. ‘A stunted homunculus, duped by the cruel lies of the anti-Christ! They would yoke us under the tyrannical absolutism of Rome, in diabolical partnership with the French King! Jesuitical spies infiltrate healthy Protestantism, infecting its body with doubts and misgivings, turning its head with diseased evasions and maintenances of grim fictions that fly in the face of reason! Their blasphemous rites, profane, sacrilegious, irreverent, immoral, corrupt, depraved, disrespectful . . .’

It was Titus Oates, Harry realised, the Saviour of the Nation, and that must be Israel Tonge with him. Around them they had their own bodyguard, a small group of militia, watching around them constantly for imminent attack.

They went through the arch, Tonge still ranting, his hands held aloft, fingers splayed out as if to grasp the sky itself, eyes wide and hair shaking, and Oates’s great bulk beside him.

Behind them came more of the targets of Tonge’s vitriol, to jeers and hisses from the crowd.

They pointed at the Catholic priests, robes decorated with skulls and bones, holding huge silver crosses, giving out pardons to those who would murder Protestants. They punched the air at the Carmelites and Grey Friars. The Bishops, clad in purple, the breeze flapping their lawn sleeves, ducked as the crowd forgot this was spectacle, and hurled eggs and vegetables at them. They sang songs for Queen Bess, and songs calling for the King’s wife to bear children, as scarlet Cardinals, and the Pope’s physician holding Jesuit’s powder, and two boys, red crosses on their white silks, swinging incense-pots, walked past. The boys were just in front of the Pope himself, whose robes and the chair he sat on were a glory of red and gold and ermine.

Larger than life, he would have been at least ten feet tall if he were to miraculously stand from his chair. He lurched on his platform, which was skirted by a curtain decorated with Saint Peter’s keys. Lit torches ringed him with fire. Men carried him, handles projecting from each side of the platform.

His giant hand was raised to bless them all.

At each stop and start, the Pope rolled forward or back, the ropes holding his chair becoming taut or slack as he moved. His face, garishly-painted plaster and wood, looked angry; he was made furious by such Protestant zeal surrounding him, such Enthusiasm, such hatred for him and his way of worship.

A clamour of shouts and roars filled the street, as people were pushed one way and another, against one another, eddying and swirling against the buildings around them. For Harry, strapped to his bar, the noise became deafening, the Pope stopped by the arch of Aldgate, the sound echoing from its stones. The crowd pressed up to the Pope, and his bearers nearly collapsed under the weight. The men with green ribbons came to his rescue, as the shoving threatened to topple him.

The Pope towered above them all, his golden crown shining against the night sky. His wild swinging settled, as more people came to assist, taking the platform he was on.

Harry caught a glimpse of one of the faces among the crowd, belonging to a man moving smoothly out to the Pope’s platform, taking one of the handles at the back. Something about the shape of the forehead had caught his eye, but when Harry looked again, he had gone.

He pulled hard at the leather holding him, trying to spot the face again.

The man had been dressed in the black of a Jesuit, with a black, wide-rimmed hat.

Harry was sure he had just seen the murderer of Enoch Wolfe.

*

He pulled once more, the leather digging into his wrists, looking for anything sharp to cut it through. The stone was too smooth, and no edge presented itself.

There, again, under the Pope. Now towards the front of his stage.

The man was unmistakeable, even under his hat. The shape of the forehead, the same one long eyebrow across it. The quietness and stillness of him, when all around were shouting, animated, writhing in their displeasure at wicked Papistry, at the iniquities that the Procession showed them.

Harry was gripped by a certainty that this man, who before had worn a soldier’s coat and bucket boots, and who now assumed the appearance of a Jesuit, was a threat, but to whom? That he was a killer, Harry knew, but who in amongst this crowd was in danger?

The man only looked in one direction, down Aldgate High Street; he was not scanning the crowd for a particular face.

Harry screamed out, but his noise only joined the noise of everyone there, barely adding to the whole. No one gave him any attention; all focus was on the Pope and his entourage.

He quietened, bowing his head in his frustration. All he could do was wait to be released by the soldiers.

*

The crowd was so dense that further movement forward, to bring the Pope under Aldgate’s archway, was impossible. The music and the shouting continued, but everything else stopped still. People still tried to gain access from Whitechapel, to get ahead of the Procession, and Harry found himself pressed up against the wall, until his ribs felt as if they could surely no longer hold. Tied to the bar he had nowhere to go, and his wrists bled from the bite of the strap.

‘Is this the one?’

The sergeant had arrived back at the Gate, forcing his way through, and the big trooper, carrying a lantern, nodded. Both men looked frayed, breathing heavily, and Harry was the opportunity for them to leave the crush.

‘Says he has news of the death of the Justice.’

‘I have seen another in the crowd, a killer!’ Harry gasped.

The sergeant raised an eyebrow. ‘Get him in, we may talk in peace,’ he said to his man, producing a large key. ‘His Holiness goes nowhere for a while.’

The trooper took out a knife, and cut the leather strap.

The soldiers opened up a thick door, leading to the interior of Aldgate, and pushed Harry up the dark staircase and into a murky room, the light from the street hardly able to enter through its narrow, barred windows. The Pope’s great face, glowing orange from all the fire around him, stared in at them from the Whitechapel side. Stains and patches mottled the walls, spreading across the ceiling from a corner, and the redolent plaster smelled like rotten seaweed. The trooper’s lantern showed that the room had once been lived in, but now just a few pieces of furniture remained; a dull table with a couple of broken chairs stacked on it was pushed up against the wall. Otherwise there was only a long-disused fireplace, a broken fire-guard lying in it.

The squalid reek of the room signalled that its main use was for the soldiers to relieve themselves, and one corner showed their usual place to do so.

Although the room was small, the sudden space around him, and with the tang in his nose, made Harry dizzy, as he had felt on the Monument after the man’s fall. His hands were sweaty, and although the soldiers had not yet started their questioning he feared it would go badly. All he wanted was for them to believe him, but he expected the sergeant’s response to echo that of the trooper’s.

The sergeant took one of the upside-down chairs, and flipped it easily over to place it down. Wiry, steady-eyed, he sat and leaned interrogatively to Harry.

‘I remember you, from this afternoon,’ he said. ‘I cannot recall your name.’

‘I am Henry Hunt, of – .’

‘– the Royal Society. So you said, when I let you out of the City.’

‘I wish only to return to Gresham’s College, to see Mr. Hooke there.’

The sergeant cocked his head. ‘I shall tell you what I know: you went to Colonel Fields in Whitechapel. A philosophical business. Coming back, you made trouble, and claimed to know of Justice Godfrey’s murder.’

‘It was the Colonel who killed the Justice. Going to his burnt chapel proved it to me, for Sir Edmund was killed by fire.’

The sergeant stood, and the chair scraped loudly on the wooden floor. ‘Yet the Justice was found upon the wheel, under London Bridge.’

‘But he died by fire,’ Harry insisted. ‘I helped Mr. Robert Hooke with the autopsy. His other wounds did not kill him.’

‘This news has not come out.’

‘The King swore us to secrecy.’

The sergeant took off his cap, and wiped the sweat from his hair. What the boy claimed could not be true; and opinion was against him – for everyone spoke only of the Papist murder of Sir Edmund. ‘And now you’ve seen another killer, in the mob.’ He flicked the sweat off his fingers. ‘I start to think you a rabble-rouser. Or else, your reason slips in these fearful times, like a poor creature of the Bethlehem hospital.’

‘I report what I observe, nothing more. I saw a murder! The killer stands under the Pope, holding him up. He is dressed as a Jesuit.’

‘Dressed as what he is? A Jesuit assassin?’ The sergeant looked at his trooper, rolled his eyes, and stood up. ‘Enough of this, boy…I shall tell you what will happen. You will stay here. Mr. Robert Hooke shall be fetched, after the Procession. If he vouches for you, then he may take you away. Of your story of Colonel Fields, I believe you to be wrong, but it will be looked into. Of your story of the Jesuit, I fear you are overcome by the passions of the day, for an assassin would not work so openly. He would make himself invisible, in amongst the mob. You may watch the Procession from here.’

He motioned to the trooper, who moved to retie Harry with the strap.

‘No need,’ the sergeant told him, picking up the lantern. ‘This boy’s no danger, unless to himself. We must go, for His Majesty is due to meet with the Procession.’

They did not look back at him, and Harry, after the door was firmly locked, heard their heavy descent of the stairs.

*

Harry let out an anguished howl, and crossed the room to the barred window, to look down upon the crowd, and those dressed as Catholics in the Procession, and the Mock Pope, whose eyes stared blindly at him.

He heard a great noise behind him, from the direction of Aldgate High Street. He went to look through the opposite window, on the other side of the Gate.

From Fenchurch Street, avoiding the route of the Procession, came horses and a bodyguard of militia.

The King rode, rather than took a carriage, the better for his people to see, the more to show him unafraid of threats made to his person, and the greater to convince them that he held no sympathies for the Romish way. The cheering was tumultuous for their monarch, and Charles II, waving, smiling, merged into the people by the Aldgate Pump. He appeared to float through them, his horse half-submerged in them. They reached out their hands to touch his, and he held his out too, extended to each side, touching them, riding just with his knees.

The soldiers around him, all chosen for their height, looked nervously about them, peering for the sight of a drawn weapon, or a grenado, wishing the King more careful of his safety.

His Majesty insinuated himself into the line of the Procession, his men surrounding him, just behind Sir Edmund Bury Godfrey, and in front of Titus Oates and Israel Tonge.

The drums beat more loudly, with a quickened pace, and the King’s arrival made the crowd more mutable, for the whifflers were able to start forwards, slowly parting the sea of people. The bell-ringer recommenced his doleful chime, and Sir Edmund went forward on his mount. All of the churchmen, between the King and the Pope, advanced. Israel Tonge resumed his customary torrent, and Titus Oates preened beside him.

Carefully, just clearing its height, the Pope was taken through the arch, under Harry’s feet, and he reappeared into Aldgate High Street, delivered into the City like an immense birth.

Harry could see, directly below him at the front of the Pope’s platform, just by the boys swinging their incense, the black-robed Jesuit. In amongst the frenzy, this man’s face was completely still, similar to an automaton’s that Harry had once seen.

Enoch Wolfe’s killer moved his arm along the handle of the platform, as again the Pope was settled down. Before he had time to readjust it, his sleeve dropped.

Harry was sure he saw the glint of a blade.

Observation LX
Of Assassination

Harry banged frantically at the window glass, between its iron bars, but the crowd’s cheering was so loud that he knew it was futile. Even when some of the panes fell from their leading, and crashed onto the people below, they barely turned or looked up, intent on the King and the Papists.

He ran to the door, but hitting it with his fist and kicking at it brought no answer from the soldiers, and had little effect on the door, which hardly moved in its frame.

He tried the window’s bars, shaking them with all his strength. Below him to his left he could see a canopy, over the entrance to a shop, and he thought that he might be able to climb along the timbers of the old building that butted up to Aldgate, if he could traverse the stone of the arch itself to reach it.

If he could only get through this window.

The bars were firmly fixed, so he inspected the stone around them by the little light that came through, looking for weakness in it, or cement that had become soft. He looked for something to dig at it with, and found that the fire-guard, although made of wood, had a metal frame which he carefully prised apart, giving a serviceable edge. He dug at the stone around the base of one of the bars, but quickly realised that he could scrape all afternoon and all night and not get through it, let alone remove all of the bars that blocked his way.

Outside, the Procession had halted again, the height of the Pope causing a problem with a balcony projecting over the street, and he was being carefully lowered and steered under it, which needed the crowd to oblige. The requisite reshuffling of people to allow him through needed co-ordination, and this was done by the scarlet Cardinals, who shouted instructions to the whifflers and the men with green ribbons, who tried their best to shove the spectators aside, out of the way of the Pope’s progress.

Harry tried shouting down though the broken window, but no one could hear. There were so many calls of ‘Your Majesty! Your Majesty!’ that he may as well have been calling to the moon. Inexplicably, the King turned, and Harry thought he saw him listening, as if he had subconsciously recognised his voice in amongst so many – but it was not so, for he started to move his horse towards the Pope, to see whether he could take command of his moving.

Harry screamed down to the crowd below, dementedly, as loud as his lungs would allow, as the King came nearer to Aldgate, and closer to the Jesuit. Harry had seen the man adjust the object under his sleeve, and again he saw the sheen of metal, lamp-light glancing off it, some kind of contraption on his forearm, which appeared to have a blade fitted into it.

The Pope, tipped carefully sideways, people holding him by his ropes, finally cleared the underside of the balcony, and edged forwards again. The King swung his horse slowly back around, hampered by the crowd, oblivious to the fact that a man with a weapon, a brutal killer, was kept from him only by the distance of some men pretending to be Cardinals, Bishops, and Monks.

Harry looked around at the room he was in. He went to pick up the table to hurl at the bars, hoping that even if they did not give way there would be enough sound from the impact to catch the crowd’s attention, but it was far too solid and heavy to lift. He struggled to move it. The two chairs were too flimsy to have any effect. Nevertheless, he hurled them at the window, which only achieved the splintering of two chairs. He threw their legs down into the crowd, but so many objects were being thrown at the Procession that most people had been hit by something, and so many objects were airborne that it was difficult to tell from which direction they arrived from. The remains of the fire-guard followed. There were a few disgruntled turns of heads, but no one thought to look directly upwards, to the window above the Aldgate archway.