The Bloodless Boy (4 page)

‘What of Sir Edmund’s view, that the boy suffered a Papist murder?’ Harry asked. ‘The Catholics believe in transubstantiation, the changing of wine into the blood of Jesus, in their observance of the Eucharist.’

Hooke inhaled deeply from the pipe, looking directly at his assistant. The smoke circled around him, catching the light, a halo missing its saint. ‘It is not my blood that makes me an Anglican, Harry. It is my childhood, my history, and that of my parents. It is learnt; it is not a thing innate. The Royal Society dictates modesty of aim and expression. We depend neither on Revelation, nor Epiphany. Too many before have used this pretence. We have learnt through this century how such dogmatisers hold a grip on our imaginations, urging men to unpardonable acts.’

‘And yet belief has been shown to alter the flesh,’ Harry persevered. ‘To be brought up a Catholic is to be brought up to believe. Belief in a cure, for example, may lead to recovery, ’though nothing medicinal resides within the palliative. Sailors tell of voodoo spells of the Western Indies, where to tell a man that he is dead is enough to kill him, and then to show him that he can live again is enough to revivify him.’

‘Perhaps, then, Sir Edmund’s fears are not to be so easily dismissed. We are left with the questions: Why was this boy murdered? Why was his blood taken? How was it used? If for infusion, into whom was it infused?’

‘And who killed him?’ Harry added simply.

‘The Justice kept the letter left on the body. I am sure that will tell us all.’

‘Not if he chooses to keep it from us. The eeler-man spoke of seeing just numbers.’

‘I will not speculate, Harry, with such little information. I have only
imagination
.’

Hooke used the word as if it were something to despise. Harry fell silent, seeing again the boy lying in the snow, seeming to be pushed up from the earth. His mouth began to water again, his own imagination making his nausea return.

The noise of Tom Gyles disturbed them, as he dropped his model onto one of the piles of books, which rocked perilously before finally settling.

‘A carriage arrives, Mr. Hooke,’ he announced.

Observation IV
Of Presentation

One of Sir Edmund’s horses released a piss stream into the snow, a hot fog rising behind it. His man, Welkin, rested his arms over the handles of the tumbrel, summoning the strength for another push. A crust of snow worked into the folds of his coat. His face shone from the effort of bringing down the trader’s tumbrel from the carriage, tied on it the body of the boy, covered by a cloth.

He was older than Harry expected, and looked too frail to be doing such business in such weather.

‘The Justice is delayed,’ Welkin managed. ‘He will come later for the anatomising.’

Hooke had never agreed to an autopsy, only to store him in the Air-pump, as Sir Edmund well knew; Harry wondered how the Curator would respond.

Together they steered the tumbrel around the College, no more talk between them, following the trail of Hooke’s footprints.

This trail disappeared in front of a door. Hooke had left it unlocked; Harry took the lantern, already lit, hanging inside. He led Welkin down the stairway, into the maze of passages and cellar rooms spreading like roots beneath the College.

Their boots slipped on the stone, and the lantern, suspended over Harry’s elbow, swung awkwardly before them.

Welkin’s face showed no sympathy for the load that they carried, but he was the Justice’s man, and so quite used to the carrying of bodies, Harry supposed.

He took a care to keep his own feelings from his face – so what did Welkin presume of him?

Harry led him through a long, low corridor, under the brick arches supporting the floors above. They passed various doors, signifying rooms behind. Whatever else was kept inside them, the corridor itself was used as a storeroom; along its sides hung various tools and pieces of machinery, and more of Hooke’s models and machines, those that there was no room for in his rooms or in the College’s repository. Woods, hides, ropes and yarns, fabrics of all thicknesses, and different grades of papers, were boxed and stacked along the walls. Sacks of plasters, minerals, pigments and ores leaned against one another. With only the single light’s illumination, to navigate the tumbrel needed patience and determination. The flying machine, in which Harry had fractured a foot when making its maiden voyage across the quadrangle, was slung on the wall; they skirted around its frame, canvas, and the springs that powered its wings.

The subterranean coolness was different in quality to the outside air; in the separate category of cold reserved for such places, which had never been warm and never would be.

They went through a solid-looking iron-faced door going across the passage, heavy studs protruding from its surface. At the top of a short flight of rough wooden stairs, Harry called down:

‘Mr. Hooke?’

‘I am ready.’

Harry gently placed his hands beneath the dead boy, and lifted him, carefully descending the few treads. The lack of blood made him light. They should not have been so overly fastidious as to bring him on the tumbrel, the effort more trouble than it was worth. Welkin followed him down the steps, and the three men stood in a tall narrow room, the floor dug down to give the height needed for the apparatus standing in its centre.

This philosophical instrument left only a tight margin around the claustrophobic space to give the room to work it. Two bulky lamps hanging on opposite walls provided the means of seeing, their lights reflecting dully, glancing off glass and brass.

The apparatus was the
Machina
Boyleana
, more commonly referred to as the Air-pump, sometimes as the Pneumatical Engine. Robert Hooke and his patron Robert Boyle had used it to investigate the properties of air, and its absence.

Its base was a bulky frame of oak; two equilateral triangles at right angles to one another formed a skeletal pyramid. On it sat a hollow globe fabricated from thick glass. This was the receiver. The thickness of the glass varied slightly across its surface – viewing Robert Hooke through it, Harry observed a grotesque version of him, his bent form exaggerated, features and limbs stretched into impossible curves.

The top of the receiver was cut away, a glass lid fitting the gap. Through this aperture experimental apparatus could be placed. The globe, as Hooke had suggested at the Fleet, was just large enough to hold the boy, and its aperture was wide enough to lower him through.

From the lower part of the receiver, a thick brass tube, with a stopcock key protruding, joined another brass cylinder. This had inside it the sucker, a wooden cylinder with a thick piece of leather glued to its top, the leather completing the necessary tightness of fit inside the tube. A rotating handle driving a rack and pinion forced this piston up and down, to clear the receiver of air.

Welkin coughed, and held out a note to the Curator. ‘A missive for Mr. Hooke,’ he said gruffly. ‘From Sir Edmund.’

Hooke took it from him, and nodded to Harry for him to lead Welkin back out.

The man bade Harry a curt farewell, and walked to the Justice’s carriage. Harry took a draught of the Bishopsgate air, and turned back for the cellars, relocking the outer door. He returned through the corridor to the Air-pump, where Hooke had unwrapped the cloth covering the boy.

*

Harry climbed onto a small stool placed next to the apparatus, and Hooke gently lifted the boy to him.
Rigor
mortis
had long relaxed its grip upon the body, and the boy’s arms and legs splayed loosely. Harry perceived with a jolt how thin and fragile the boy was.

They balanced him on top of the globe, and Hooke reached up to assist Harry in lowering the legs through the aperture. Harry held them by the shins; they felt as if they would snap from only the pressure of his fingers. The papery flesh was a soft milky colour. Harry’s distaste rose in his throat, and he castigated himself for it, being careful not to betray his squeamishness to the Curator.

Harry dropped the boy’s feet into the receiver. The knees went in, and then, with a squeeze through the aperture, the thighs and pelvis. He took the boy under the armpits, repositioned him, and carefully finished the stowage of him inside the glass.

He jumped down off the stool, with a steadying hand from Hooke, and the slap of his landing reported against the walls of the cellar room. Its loudness shocked them both. Each man’s concentration on the placing of the boy into the receiver had transported him into a dreamlike state, in the solitude and silence of the cellar room, deep under Gresham’s College.

The boy sat, his back against the glass following its curve, his head resting on his knees. With his arms extended by his sides, hands resting on the floor of the globe, palms upwards, he looked like a beggar appealing for a coin. With the boy’s head bowed forwards, there was just enough height to the receiver to be able to replace its lid.

Observing the boy’s body, Harry became acutely aware of the fabric of his own, conscious of the workings of his stomach and the way that his lungs pressed the insides of his ribs.

An idea occurred to him, but he was not yet ready to have it scrutinised by Robert Hooke.

The Curator opened up a box containing a smooth grey paste. ‘The diachylon. We will seal him inside.’

They spread the diachylon, a blend of olive oil, vegetable stock and lead oxide boiled together, into the crack between the receiver and its lid. Next they prepared a mixture of pitch, which they melted on a small stove kept there in the room, rosin turpentine, and wood ash. They smeared it around the stopcock, and completed the integrity of the Air-pump by pouring oil into the valve containing the cylinder, to lubricate and seal it.

Rotating the handle, Harry drew the piston to the top of the cylinder. He brought the piston back down the tube with the stopcock opened, sucking air from the receiver into the cylinder. He closed the stopcock, removed the valve, and raised the piston back up inside the cylinder.

The air was brought from the receiver in this laborious way, time after time, the pumping becoming more difficult as air vacated the glass. Each man took his turn at the handle, and as the air inside the globe got thinner the glass began to groan. Soon the handle required the strength of both. Inside, although the boy was oblivious to the change in atmosphere, he swayed as if in protest with the rocking of the machine as its handle was wound.

At last, a great creak emanated from the Air-pump.

‘Enough!’ Hooke declared.

Hooke inspected the brass cylinder, and the glass, looking through at the bloodless, huddled figure of the boy.

‘We are close enough.’

*

The snow still fell, and an adjusted eye would have recognised grey rather than white. The two men stood back in the quadrangle, squinting in the morning’s brilliance. Down in the cellars the door to the Air-pump room, and the great iron door across the passageway, had been securely locked.

The College clock showed that it was just half past ten.

‘Mr. Hooke. Sir Edmund’s man brought a note,’ Harry reminded him.

Hooke took the paper from his pocket and studied the seal. It bore the impression used by Viscount Brouncker. He broke it and unfolded the message.

Ordered, that the Services and Apparatus of the Royal Society of London, including Robert Hooke, M.A., Fellow and Curator of this Society, be at the Use of Justice of Peace Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey, that the Boy he speaks of be stored, and that his Dissection be continued at the Convenience to that said Justice.

January 1. 1677/8 Brouncker. P.R.S.

‘Sir Edmund busies himself,’ Hooke said. ‘He
is
persuasive. He sends direction from the President.’

‘You would expect Sir Edmund to be busy. It is rare for the President to respond with such speed.’

‘The Justice’s influence takes many forms, Harry.’

‘I wonder what else Sir Edmund arranges? Still he has not arrived.’

Hooke locked the door leading down to the cellars, and they returned to his rooms, fatigued after their long efforts with the pump.

Leaving behind the boy in the cellar, Harry felt the pull of a subtle shame.

Observation V
Of Release

From having been the seat of the monarchs, the Tower of London was now a prison, and home to the Board of Ordnance. For
his
residence, Charles II preferred Whitehall.

Charles II was why he had been kept here.

The Earl of Shaftesbury looked up at the rooms that had been his gaol. The windows were dark, empty for the first time in a year. Candles and lamps sent their flickering lights from other windows, each glow indicating a prisoner reading or writing, or, as he had spent so much time doing, preparing.

His hand rested on the wall, as he surveyed the snow falling around him, blown about at the mercy of the wind. He moved down the timber steps, through the Jewel House and on past the decayed remnants of the Hall. A deferential yeoman led him past the stores keeping the munitions, ropes, masts, and tackle.

Wearing a long bottle-green coat, which brushed the snow as he went through it, Shaftesbury walked through the gate of the inner wall, where the warden left him. Another man took him through the Wakefield Tower, and to the Watergate. Then through Saint Thomas’s Tower. They reached the last portcullis, and it was raised for him.

He stood outside on the Wharf.

A black coach-and-four waited there. Its driver wore an oiled goatskin coat to protect him from the weather. The wood of the coach, lacquered and polished, reflected the released man’s image back to him. He studied it: a pale long face tapering past fleshy lips to a small chin, jowls grown more apparent during his imprisonment.

He leaned back, brought back his fist, and punched his reflection hard, the noise making one of the horses start, its hooves sliding on the snow. He studied the damage he had made, a crack in the lacquer and a dent in the wood.

The driver soothed the horse, making low sounds to calm it. He made no attempt to stop the Earl from committing further violence to the coach. It was not his place, and it was not his coach.

His sounds seemed to calm the Earl too. Shaftesbury raised his hand, which stung from the blow, in apology to his driver. He smiled, at himself as much as at his man.

He threw back his head and opened his mouth, letting the snowflakes descend onto his tongue. He relished the taste. His new freedom made his senses sharp.

The door of the coach was swung open, and an arm extended from its interior to help him step up.

Inside, he settled himself on the cushioned seat, revelling in the smell of his own coach. The window was a sheet of tin pierced with holes, and he put up a hand to its coldness to steady his view. Through these small points of brightness he observed the Lion’s Tower shrink, as the coach lurched, transporting him away. He listened intently for the sounds of the Royal Menagerie held there, but heard only the thudding of the hooves in front, as his horses struggled for grip.

The animals remain while I leave, he thought, feeling pity for them.

He could still feel the churning in his stomach. The travel of the coach soothed him. From incarceration to home: Thanet House in Aldersgate Street.

When he was at last entirely calm, and breathing regularly, he turned from the tin window, and looked towards his companion, a lady dressed in a long, intricately-patterned dark-blue coat, for the first time regarding her directly.