The Bloodless Boy (7 page)

Shaftesbury unleashed a snarl of contempt.

Locke, reflecting on the possibility of complete transmission of meaning between one man and another, perfectly exemplified by Shaftesbury’s response, answered him.

‘In the Wars he was for Parliament. During the plague, most left London, yet he remained, organising burials and prosecuting grave robbers. An intelligent man. A man of austerity, and of a melancholy disposition. He is known for his distrust of Catholicism. In his work as Justice of Peace there is no hint of abuse of his position.’

‘He keeps his counsel upon the boy’s death,’ Shaftesbury observed. ‘It has not hit the London gossip-yards yet.’

‘Sir Edmund must have reason for keeping quiet. We must have a care, especially if he has found allies.’

‘We have a way of keeping him from us. Titus Oates and Israel Tonge can be sent to him, to present their evidence against the Catholics. Sir Edmund is known for his dislike of Papistry – let him look, then, in entirely the wrong direction, as Lefèvre makes his preparations.’

Shaftesbury at last took off his wig, and threw it down onto the table in front of him. ‘Does that close our business?’

Lefèvre raised half of his long eyebrow at Locke. They had been dismissed, and they made their exit. Locke led out the bleeding Enoch Wolfe.

Left alone, Shaftesbury stood, and the pain of the hole in his side made him grimace.

He crossed to his automaton, and considered his own body, merging with the mechanical, his human identity extended and altered by the bag and the silver pipe. It was pain that separated them. The automaton, he thought, will never suffer.

Constant irritability is a property inherent in all tissue.

Observation X
Of Concealment

Tom held the lantern, his low height sending a shadow play of their movements over the ceiling.

Dr. Diodati studied the head of Henry Oldenburg, who sat in the study of his house in Pall Mall. The hole entered above the hairline over the temple, and exited through the opening of the occipital bone, where the spinal chord passed into the skull. The force of the ball had brought chips of bone and shreds of flesh out with it, and these resided in the fabric and stuffing of the chair – as did the ball itself, flattened against its thick wooden back. Blood misted the wall behind the chair, despite the distance between them.

‘This will be easy to conceal,’ Hooke remarked quietly.

Dora-Katherina arrived with cloths and a fresh nightgown, and Hooke observed her shudder as she saw again the pistol that killed her husband. It lay on the floor beside Oldenburg with its scouring stick and powder. Its box was left open, untouched since the old man had taken the weapon from it.

‘Do you wish us to take it?’

‘Yes, take it out of here, Mr. Hooke!’ she beseeched him. ‘An evil thing!’

‘Husband died peacefully abed,’ Diodati said to her. ‘That all world know. Cloths.’

Dr. Diodati was a small rat-like man whose old-fashioned beard emphasised the rodent cast of his features. His economy with words left few gaps for a patient to interject; nevertheless he was able to exude an air of kindliness and trustworthiness. He did not look at all worried by the deception he was asked to carry out.

Dora-Katherina fetched a small china bowl filled with water, and Harry took it from her. He carefully wiped down the back of Oldenburg’s neck. The middle finger of his right hand shook slightly, which exasperated him. The matter of his body was disloyal, refusing to be governed by his will. He did not want the older men to see his reaction to dead bodies.

Even Mr. Hooke, though, looked rattled by the Secretary’s choice.

Harry rinsed the cloth, and the water stained red. Steeling himself, he picked off the larger pieces from the chair, and put them into the bowl. The others, silent, watched his progress, until Diodati took an instrument from his bag and moved to assist him. It was a hollow scraping levatory, made to remove splinters from the skull after a trepanning. Hooke cut around the wound with a small knife, and Diodati produced some parrot’s bill forceps, and excavated all of the shards from the hole.

Harry wiped at the remaining matter in Oldenburg’s hair, and asked Tom to empty the contents of the bowl into an oilcloth bag that Hooke had thought to bring with them. The boy was overjoyed to be given such an important task.

‘Where are your husband’s papers, Dora-Katherina?’ Hooke asked thoughtlessly, looking about the room. ‘His correspondences?’

Dora-Katherina looked at the Curator in astonishment, having to reach her hand to the wall to steady herself. Her face went pale, and the muscles around her mouth pursed. Her voice went dangerously quiet. ‘He tidied them all away yesterday. He busied himself for most of the day.’

Oldenburg’s large oak chest, with ornately decorated wrought-iron bands and a heavy lock securing it, sat under the window.

‘I imagine you will be anxious to replace my Henry?’

‘We will need to peruse and catalogue them for the Society,’ Hooke continued obliviously.

The old lady flicked a look at the chest. ‘The Royal Society may have them when he is in the ground, and not before!’ The volume of her angry retort made them all jump, the lanternlight lurching as Tom did so. ‘I want all of his papers to go to the Society. I do not want
you
choosing what can and what cannot be published!’

‘It may help us understand the reason for his death,’ Hooke said, looking chastised, as he at last registered her upset.

He was unsettled that she knew precisely what he wanted to do: to have first look at the correspondences, and to see how his own interests had been reported to others.

Harry, quite used to Hooke’s lack of tact, continued to clean the body, scrubbing at the burns over the Secretary’s forehead. The powder had pushed itself into the skin, and so their removal was incomplete, but after the hole had been plugged with some quickly-mixed paste made from ingredients found about the house – beeswax, turpentine and some suet, with whitener rubbed liberally over the area – Henry Oldenburg looked acceptable.

They undressed him, pulling off his bloodstained clothes. Diodati held him while Harry turned the shoulders. Diodati and Hooke lifted Oldenburg; Harry dressed him in the nightgown, of cheese-coloured Irish linen, and, with Dora-Katherina leading the way up the narrow staircase, they carried him to the bedroom.

They lay him onto the bed, and drew the bedclothes up over him so only his face could be seen.

Diodati inspected the wounds. With an arrangement of Oldenburg’s long, thin hair, and a final polish of the suet mixture’s surface, he announced that he was done.

Clasping Dora-Katherina to him briefly, shaking Hooke by the hand, and acknowledging Harry’s assistance, the doctor scuttled off.

Hooke, staying with Dora-Katherina, directed Harry to further clean the study. Tom and his lantern followed, giving Harry the light he needed to inspect closely every surface in the room, looking for traces of Henry Oldenburg’s self-murder. When he had finished his scrutiny – and having wiped the chair, and the wall, and cleaned the gunpowder blown onto the floor with Oldenburg’s last breath – Harry carefully placed the pistol back into its box.

Before leaving he gave the chest a try, but it was firmly locked. He took the oilcloth bag from Tom, who still clutched it tightly. He saw the large coin, a copper farthing. Not having an extra hand, he put it in his pocket to take down to Dora-Katherina.

He picked up the pistol box and returned back down the stairs.

Observation XI
Of Deciphering

The last he sees, as the water turns from grey to green to black, are lines of fizzing air and water, like beams of light following after him. The last he feels is the lacing of his skin by the sand agitated in the churning water. The last he knows is the weight of saltwater in his chest . . .

Harry awoke with the convulsive movements of a drowning man, disturbed by the sound of his landlady climbing the stairs to his attic room. His rapid rise into consciousness confused him, taken from the depths of cold seawater in his dream to the heat of a sweat-damp sheet. A Norman barge, overburdened with stones to build the White Tower, had overturned, sending its load and its crew to the bottom of the sea.

He lay on his front, arms stretched forwards over the end of the mattress. The image of the sinking barge quickly faded. His hands were dead, and, as he shifted, pain prickled the flesh as the circulation returned.

Mrs. Hannam’s steps paused outside his door; a strip of candlelight leaked through the jamb. Did she press her ear against it, listening for any transgression of her firm house rules? It would be difficult to ever smuggle any girl past her, Harry thought, for all the attention she lavished upon him.

Or did she wish to break her own rules?

He heard her move away. If she wanted to enter, she had thought the better of it. Although she often caused him discomfort by her slightly desperate air of trying to please, the thought of her waiting on the other side of his door stirred his humours.

Mrs. Hannam was attractive, in a pinched, underfed kind of way. And who would not be pinched, suffering Mr. Hannam? Harry knew she often went without, for Mr. Hannam languished in the new gaol at Newgate, having instigated a brawl in a brothel, and he demanded money from his wife to keep the turnkeys sweet.

Harry sat up, sweat on his back despite the draught seeping through the casement. He pushed aside the blanket, fumbled for his spectacles, and lit a taper, which drooped limply in a small pot of water next to his bed. His tongue had a metallic taste. He took a mouthful of flat ale and rolled it around his gums.

Mrs. Hannam must have been curious about Tom’s arrival, and his going out to meet with Mr. Hooke. His late return, some hours later, would have done little to diminish her interest.

Harry shuddered again at the memory of the old Secretary sitting in his chair, the expression on Oldenburg’s face quite relaxed, looking as if he had merely dropped off to sleep, and that you might shake him awake again – until you saw the hole into his skull.

An eventful New Year’s Day: a boy found drained of his blood, his storing to preserve him at the Justice’s request, and the Secretary’s suicide.

He took the taper to his desk under the window. A board, with his tools hanging from it, was mounted on the wall, and on the floor beneath were boxes full of materials, stoppered jars, and smoothing papers. On the desk, chosen for its inbuilt and capacious drawers, sat his microscope, his small telescope pointed towards the sky, and his few books.

Also on it, the enciphered letters that Hooke had passed to him on their journey from Oldenburg’s house.

The Curator had been firm upon the need for secrecy. Harry was sure that the Justice, Sir Edmund Bury Godfrey, would not be best pleased to find Hooke passing to him the matter. Hooke, though, was concerned with the business of the Secretaryship of the Royal Society, canvassing support from the Fellows to replace Oldenburg.

Harry, nevertheless, felt pleased that Mr. Hooke trusted him and his skills so far.

But what of the Justice of Peace?

Harry distrusted Sir Edmund, but he had not yet determined why.

Some fact worked against believing him. Something to do with the finding of the boy yesterday morning, or with the way that he had pressed for the boy’s preservation, or with the cipher he had later presented to Hooke.

And then Mr. Hooke had received a second letter, looking as if it used the same system. Harry wondered whether the original letter left on the boy at the Fleet was written with the same regularity as the one he now held. The one Sir Edmund had showed them owned a similar seal in black wax, although Harry had not been close enough to see the image upon it.

This one, sent to Mr. Hooke, had a design of a candle; a simple rectangle, its flame shaped like a symmetrical teardrop.

The Curator had once described to him a catenary arch, the arch made by a chain suspended between two points, with only gravity and the forces pulling at the ends of the chain working upon it. It was Hooke’s belief that the eye perceived such an arch as flawlessly harmonic, as essentially true. No experience of architecture, or knowledge of mathematics, was required to appreciate the self-evident perfection of the shape.

This was the feeling Harry had about Sir Edmund, as if the arch was distorted.

Harry warned himself away from this insidious feeling, towards a healthier scepticism more worthy of the Royal Society: he had to concentrate on what he knew, he had to perceive the facts
as they were
, and not press his own feelings upon them. Otherwise he would warp and obscure the true way of things, becoming like a mildewed mirror, reflecting falsely the picture of Nature.

He had been hurt by Sir Edmund’s insistence on speaking to Hooke alone, after his viewing of the boy stored at Gresham’s – perhaps this suspicion of him sprang only from his damaged pride.

Wrapping the blanket around his shoulders, he sat down on the chair at his desk. He would study the cipher taken from the boy again. He had looked at Sir Edmund’s copy of it by the light of his taper when he first came in from Pall Mall; perhaps if he had not, a more restful sleep would have been easier to come by.

He picked up the letter, and took off the outside paper, which wrapped around a sheaf of separate papers inside. He opened it up.

He studied again Sir Edmund’s writing. The first page: