The Bloodless Boy (40 page)

Harry picked up a small black leather-bound book from the table, with loose papers held between its pages.

‘This book I recognise, being that of the Justice of Peace for Westminster, Sir Edmund Bury Godfrey. In it he wrote the progress of his investigations, into the finding of boys left at tributaries into the Thames, and his searching for Catholics plotting against the King. He had it with him on every occasion that I met him. These sheets, though, within Sir Edmund’s book, held between its pages, have writing on them that is unsteady, and untidily done; a tremulous hand.’

Harry held up the sheets to Moses Creed. With the cipher written across it, although it was arranged in blocks of letters, twelve along and twelve down, its lines rose and fell like a wave, and they were irregularly spaced. Sir Edmund’s copy was far neater than this scrawl, and did not bear the blots of ink that this one did.

‘This is the original cipher of Thomas Whitcombe’s letter to Sir Edmund, left on the body of the boy at the Fleet. It has the same seal of black wax, with the symbol of a burning candle, but it is written poorly. I only ever saw Sir Edmund’s copy, which I later returned to him.’

Harry put the book, and the papers, back down on to the table.

Creed made as if to move away, through the door, but checked himself, as the sounds of footsteps across the elaboratory reached them. It was Sir Jonas Moore’s heavy stride, accompanied by another lighter rhythm.

‘I wonder why,’ Harry continued, ‘this enciphered letter should be here upon this table, within the Justice’s book.’ He looked through the dissecting room, to see if the two men approaching were there. ‘I think it means you were with Colonel Fields at Whitechapel, when Sir Edmund was poisoned by the fire, as the chapel burnt down.’

‘Fields was not there!’ Creed said, mockingly. ‘Sir Jonas returns, and my business is done. For if you have Thomas Whitcombe’s papers, then my searching here is futile.’

‘It was you who killed Sir Edmund?’

Creed looked at Harry contemptuously. ‘That old man would not have killed the Justice! Fields never did before, ’though he had reason enough to do so. He trembled at Lincoln’s Inn, in case he was taken, or killed.’

Harry put his hand into his pocket, to hide its shaking from the Solicitor. ‘Was Sir Edmund the man who killed your father, after the battle at Worcester?’

‘My father did not even threaten to tell of it. Sir Edmund himself strung him from a branch. He seemed pleased to tell me, at the end . . .’

‘Why did he go to Whitechapel?’

‘I asked to meet him there. I told him I had witnessed the boy you found at the Chelsea Physic Garden being carried from the Queen’s rooms, in Somerset House. It was an easy fit into his certainty of Catholic insurrection, Queen Catherine following the Romish way.’

‘A lie? You witnessed no such thing.’

‘I took the boy there. He was the last that Thomas Whitcombe had worked on.’

‘I thought their leaving in tributaries significant, but apart from the boy left at the Fleet, and the boy you left for him at Chelsea, it was only chance where they were deposited.’ Harry nodded his head slowly, understanding coming to him. He wiped his mouth with his hand, a gesture reminiscent of the Justice. ‘The others disappeared into the Thames forever, taken from this room, thrown from the Tower,’ he surmised. ‘Only the boy found at Barking Creek re-emerged.’

‘Exactly so. I begin to see why Sir Jonas asked you here.’

‘But you did not know Sir Edmund had swallowed the keyword to the cipher.’

‘I did not. You are clever, but not so clever as to break such a cipher yourself.’

From Whitcombe’s elaboratory, they heard Sir Jonas calling. ‘Mr. Hunt! Are you there?’

‘I am here, Sir Jonas. And I have my answer to you!’

*

Harry turned his attention back to Moses Creed. ‘Why would you deliver the letter from Thomas Whitcombe to Robert Hooke?’

‘I was Whitcombe’s amanuensis, writing out his notes and correspondences for him, throughout his last years. I did not know the meaning, copying out only the numbers. He found me; he searched out Reuben Creed’s son.’

‘I believed you when you told me of the pair in sea-green coats. You yourself wrote out the letter for Mr. Hooke.’

‘I told you what you wished to hear. You made mention of a pair wearing the colour sea-green for their coats; and so I furnished a pair in sea-green. You asked whether the deliverers could be female; I said,
conceivably
. I laughed at you. I did not know that Whitcombe planned to disappear, and I did not know where he had lodged the
Observations
, with his findings on blood. He kept that from me.’

‘As he kept from you that Sir Edmund killed your father.’

‘He used me as his instrument,’ Creed said brusquely. ‘He never told me, for he knew what I would do. It was the Colonel who acquainted me with the story. Your visit to him with the cipher reawakened his conscience.’

Creed studied Harry dismissively, seeing a slight young man, bruised, bumped, with a slashed leather coat. ‘I wonder what secrets Robert Hooke keeps from you.’

Outside, still in the large elaboratory, Sir Jonas conversed in his soft voice with somebody. The sound of their talking, mostly Sir Jonas with an occasional interjection from another, came through the dissecting room, but too muffled and indistinct to make out.

‘You were not only Thomas Whitcombe’s amanuensis, though, were you Mr. Creed?’ Harry unbuttoned his coat, as if to make himself comfortable. He tried to present a confidence that was not there, for it leaked away as the blood of boys had leaked away along the grooves of the anatomy table. ‘The old man who wrote this letter was not the man who performed these experiments. He did not have the strength or the steadiness of hand to infuse blood from one boy to another. He would have missed an artery, and missed a vein by more. Your hand, though, as your writing shows, is unusually steady. As was your father’s, the glovemaker and stitcher of wounds. It was you who held the knife, was it not, Mr. Creed? It was you who killed the boys. You murdered them. All for an experiment that failed.’

‘You are hypocritical!’ Creed scoffed. ‘If we had succeeded, the boy brought back to life, you would give not a jot for these deaths.’

Harry pressed his eyelids together, and gave a little nod of his head, as if accepting the full truth of Creed’s words. ‘There is one death I care very much about.’ His face had gone completely white, leaving red spots of anger in his cheeks. ‘Mr. Hooke’s apprentice, Tom Gyles, did not deserve to die, as all of these boys did not. He was worth no more than each of them, yet it is his death that I mourn, for he was close to me, like a brother. Did you kill him too?’

‘It was to save your life, Mr. Hunt.’ Seeing Harry’s look of incredulity, Creed sniffed, unconcerned by Harry’s opinion of him. ‘Sir Jonas Moore desired that you be kept alive. The boy’s death was a warning to you, to keep you under control.’

‘Sir Jonas had a hand in this?’

‘Does Sir Jonas not offer these rooms to you? Is that not why you are here? You are the same as Thomas Whitcombe, who was brought here and offered the same choice. He was brought back from the Barbadoes by the Earl of Shaftesbury, who noticed him on his sugar plantations. Shaftesbury installed him here to work for Cromwell, and here he remained, his employer changed but his work the same.’

‘You failed to revivify a boy, and murdered a dozen others. And then you killed one more. I am not the same.’

‘To be a chirurgeon, to cut into a body, familiarises the heart to a necessary inhumanity. We take Nature to task, putting aside our scruples, in order to glorify not the Light of Nature, nor of God, but ourselves! We are vain men, but the world needs such vanity; it is the vain, conceited men who have the desire and the appetite to succeed.’

*

Sir Jonas Moore entered through the dissecting room.

‘What talk is this of vanity?’ he asked. ‘They sound wise words, ’though I caught but the end of them.’

Harry looked beyond Sir Jonas, at the other man following him, tall, dark-skinned, with a large black periwig.

‘Your Majesty,’ Harry said, bowing low. Creed did the same.

‘Harry! It is good to see you. You have seen the elaboratory? And you have met Mr. Creed.’

‘I have, and I have spoken with him of Thomas Whitcombe.’

‘You say you have made your decision,’ Sir Jonas said. ‘Then what is it to be?’

Harry spoke flatly, mechanically. ‘I have found the man who killed the boys. It was not Thomas Whitcombe, as I had thought, although he directed their killing. It was Moses Creed. He was Thomas Whitcombe’s assistant. His amanuensis. His operator.’

‘I know this, already, full well,’ Sir Jonas answered breezily. ‘He is to leave us, and you will have the place to yourself soon enough.’

‘There were twelve boys killed for these experiments,’ Harry persisted. ‘The boy we kept at Gresham, as I suspect you realised, Your Majesty, was to be revivified. The recipient boy.’

The King looked contritely at him. ‘It is a bad business. I guessed at the boy, when I saw him in the Air-pump. I did not know of the nature of these experiments, nor of the other boys used. I have spoken to Sir Jonas of it. I have chastised him.’

The King walked forward to Harry, and put his arm around his shoulder, pulling him close. ‘But imagine if these experiments had worked, Harry. Hmm? It would have been a marvel of the New Philosophy.’

‘Who was the boy, Your Majesty? Who was seen to be worth the lives of so many?’

The King winced, and let out an exaggerated sigh. ‘It was not just about one boy. It would have been a way of keeping alive our soldiers, and our sailors. In war, we would have been invincible. In peace, it would have brought hope to all of my Realm. You cannot ignore the greater good.’

Harry could feel the heat in his cheeks, and he realised his eyes were filling with angry tears. ‘Who was the boy, Your Majesty?’ he repeated.

‘You are direct,’ the King observed. ‘It is one of the qualities I have observed in you. It is a tendency you must guard against.’

That this boy, Robert Hooke’s assistant, had got so far surprised him, this boy with such a slight frame and spectacles, in his long leather coat that swamped him, making him appear even smaller.

The King shrugged. ‘He was the son of Britannia. Frances Teresa Stewart, the Duchess of Richmond and Lennox. She was the woman I loved above all others, once. He was the son of the Earl of Shaftesbury, too, who sought to continue the experiments, after she had put a stop to them.’

‘Whitcombe had tried for a year,’ Sir Jonas explained. ‘She gave him until New Year’s Day, deciding that her son had been through enough. His father disagreed.’

‘I delivered the boy to Shaftesbury’s man at the Fleet,’ Moses Creed said. ‘But instead he went to Gresham’s College. Thomas Whitcombe told Sir Edmund to be there. And, presumably, Robert Hooke.’

‘He wanted all his work to go to Mr. Hooke,’ Harry said.

‘He is too timorous a man, we think,’ the King said. ‘He is better situated as Secretary of my Society.’

Sir Jonas looked at Creed, and nodded at him in acknowledgement of all he had done for them. ‘Is your pinnace ready, Mr. Creed?’

‘It is moored at Saint Katherine’s stairs.’

‘Your work for us is completed?’

‘I have done all that I can do. There is nothing here of Whitcombe’s work on the boys, for Mr. Hunt has it – .’

‘Sir Jonas. Your Majesty,’ Harry interrupted. ‘This is also the man who killed Sir Edmund Bury Godfrey. He tied him, tortured him, and locked him inside a burning chapel, until he was overwhelmed by the smoke. Then he put his dead body upon the Morice waterwheel.’

‘He was not killed by Catholics?’ The King’s face took on a calculating look, and he splayed his fingers as if running them through new alternatives that presented themselves.

Sir Jonas’s features assumed a closed expression. ‘Did Sir Edmund die by your hand, Mr. Creed?’

Creed backed away, edging through the door. For the first time he seemed worried, and vulnerable.

‘For if you killed the Justice, then I fear we are unable to protect you.’ Sir Jonas flashed a look at the King, who held up his hand, for more time to reflect.

Creed continued to back away.

The King nodded at Sir Jonas. They stood, and watched Creed disappear into the darkness of the dissecting room.

‘No!’ Harry shouted, and jumped forwards, out from the office and into the dissecting room. ‘We cannot let him go!’

Creed broke into a stumbling run, around the dissecting table. Harry jumped straight over it, and nearly caught him, extending out a hand to grab at him, but fell to the floor instead. Starting to straighten, he felt a point in the back of his neck. Creed had taken a long dissecting knife from its place on the wall, and pressed it into the space at the very top of Harry’s spine, cutting into the flesh between the tendons.

‘You will let me go, as the King and Sir Jonas let me go.’

Harry raised his hands, as if in supplication. The pressure of the knife lessened, and Creed reversed into Thomas Whitcombe’s elaboratory.

‘And now all of this will be yours,’ he told Harry. ‘I wish you only happiness in your employments.’ He gave Harry a last sour look, and then he turned, to make his way out of the Armouries building, away from the Tower, and to his pinnace at the river.

Harry got up from the dissection room’s floor, reached inside his coat, pulled out Henry Oldenburg’s pistol, checked the charge, and pulled the trigger.

The explosion of gunpowder was not loud by the standards of the Armouries, but it was enough to fill the small dissecting room, and the smoke from the pistol drifted through into the elaboratory, following the path of the ball, reaching towards its victim.

As the smoke cleared, Harry pulled the trigger again, and the pistol, worked on in his rooms at Mrs. Hannam’s house, at his little table there, fired again, and once more, swiftly after.

Moses Creed lay sprawled on his back by one of Whitcombe’s Air-pumps, his pierced head resting against its frame, a streak of blood showing his slide down the wood. Blood sprayed over the floor, a second shot into Creed’s throat sending it into the air, covering Creed in it, soaking his clothes. A third shot had gone into his chest, and the blood pulsing from his neck soon slowed, as the pumping action of his heart came to a stop.

Harry shakily lowered the modified pistol, feeling light-headed and sick.

‘We thought we had the measure of you, Harry,’ the King told him. ‘I see that we had not.’