‘I cannot say, Mr. Hooke, for Sir Edmund’s undertakings are unknown to me. The Colonel told me of the use of the cipher in a historical matter: our King’s escape to France after the last battle of the wars, at Worcester.’
Hooke stopped still, open-mouthed, gaping like one of the lampreys in Enoch Wolfe’s box.
‘Sir Edmund himself took the King to safety,’ Harry added.
‘What!’ Hooke roared, his eyes bulbous in his dismay. ‘Go no further! Say nothing more! Harry, for your own safety, tell not a single soul of it! Forget all that you have heard from Colonel Fields. We must end our association with Sir Edmund, and with this cipher. Burn all of your workings – let no one see them.’
‘Not to tell Sir Edmund may do him great disservice, for his interest may be far wider than only this boy. For all that we know, he may be investigating a Catholic plot to use the blood from boys.’
‘To what end? I never took you to be so credulous – I am greatly surprised at you.’ Hooke flapped his hands at Harry, as if pushing him away. ‘We helped him at his request. We must now draw back from this, for we are men of philosophy, of natural knowledge, not of politicking. You are a young man, Harry, and you do not know what living through the Wars was like. They were supposed to change so much, yet ever since we have all had to assume a second face. The fire dies down. Let it cool.’
Hooke looked expectantly at Harry, demanding his agreement.
‘I will keep my silence. As I kept it before.’
Appeased, Hooke placed his hand over Harry’s wrist. ‘I will write a letter to the Justice. You wish to help him . . . do not burn your notes. Deliver them instead to him, to demonstrate our helpfulness. You know where he lives, along Hartshorne Lane, near Scotland Yard? I shall at last be able to concentrate upon the workings of the Society and the Secretaryship. Let us think and speak no more of this – I have no desire to wake up dead!’ Hooke smiled thinly at his bleak joke, and looked beseechingly at Harry for his complete agreement.
‘Colonel Fields remains alive, and he has known of this for nearly thirty years.’
‘You will go to Sir Edmund’s house tomorrow with your notes and his copy of the cipher,’ Hooke said peremptorily. ‘He already knows of the system; he may continue with its uncovering alone.’
‘But, Mr. Hooke –’
‘Harry! If you are wise you will take my advice: think no more upon it.’
Observation XV
Of Snowshoes
The next morning was bright and warm. The icy skin over the pavement was still hard, but beneath it the movement of melt-water could be heard under the pressure of his steps. White cracks branched out from the landing of each stride. Harry considered his footfalls to make a sound similar to the hitting of a stretched copper wire.
He could not take Hooke’s advice. The thoughts persisted, round and round, and there was nothing he could do to expel them from his head. The boy drained of his blood had some connection with the Wars fought before Harry’s birth, ending a quarter of a century before, and the King’s escape to France. At least, a cipher used then had resurfaced again, as if pushed up through the snow with the body of the boy.
Who else knew of the Red Cipher? He should have quizzed the Colonel further. Did Sir Edmund have the keyword? Why, then, pass the letter left with the boy to Mr. Hooke? Sir Edmund suspected a Catholic involvement. Did he know more, or was it merely hatred of Popery that so directed his thoughts?
Schooled by Robert Hooke to accept only the evidence of his senses, to examine first causes without trusting only the word of others, and to make trials for others to repeat and share, the intuition that there was something more, something deeper to distrust about the Justice, still troubled him.
Harry took the lower road, Throgmorton Street. It was early, and few people were about. He felt the bundle inside his coat: Sir Edmund’s copy of the cipher left with the boy, his own notes to show his working upon it, and a letter from Hooke severing them from the search. He paced quickly, a feeling of exhilaration quickening in his veins. He aimed towards Holborn, his excitement wrought by disobedience.
Harry had been careful to promise only that he would keep his silence. Nevertheless, he knew that Hooke had understood a more complete compliance, and his deception brought a flush to his skin.
His steps took him back to the bridge where the boy had been left.
He made a mental list of reasons why he should not just comply with Hooke’s wishes.
Firstly, he wanted justice for a small and innocent boy, so gruesomely misused. This was the noble aim, but he knew he had other, less praiseworthy motives for continuing in the direction that he did.
Secondly, and recognising his childishness, he noted that he was no longer Hooke’s apprentice, but the Royal Society’s Observator. Tom Gyles now had that role, yet Hooke still seemed to treat him as his servant.
Thirdly, he found himself intrigued by the Civil Wars. He knew of them only through the stories of older men such as Hooke. The Wars had made a whole generation fearful, even men such as the Colonel, impressive though he was. This was a disposition Harry was determined to resist, despite his natural inclination to be so.
Fourthly – and this reason was simple resentment – Hooke had accused him of spreading word of the boy.
Fifthly, Harry realised he had a more selfish reason: he was excited by the freedom of working without Hooke, of taking responsibility for his own actions, and not simply complying with the requests of another.
*
As he stood on the bank, where he had been with Hooke, Sir Edmund, and the body of the boy, the only sounds were the cries from a couple of gulls, the chatter of some people crossing the bridge above him, and the flow of the tributary. There were no skiffs or wherries, yet, on the water, although downstream he could see lighters and packet boats below the Fleet bridge.
The Fleet flowed thickly, as if filled with a fluid more resembling oil than water. The melting of the snow had revealed patches of wet mud, dark, almost black. Without Hooke to meet him here, or meeting the Justice, and with no box of lampreys, or the boy, the landscape appeared empty and featureless. The sun cast stronger shadows than on that dull, snowy morning, just two days ago, subtly readjusting his memory.
Harry traced where they had staggered about around the body of the boy, although the marks closest to the water had gone after the intervening tides. Their feet had left deep sloughs in the softness of the ground. Snow still lodged in some of their footprints, those closer to the quay and away from the strongest sunlight, but most were now empty. He could see the trails of their arduous journeys back up to the quay, to question the angler Enoch Wolfe, and also later trails, presumably of Sir Edmund’s man Welkin helping the Justice load the boy onto the sequestered tumbrel, and of Wolfe reclaiming his big box of bait.
Along the bank, following the line where the edge of the receding snow exposed the mud, another trail could be seen. It reached where the body had been left and continued upstream, away from the Thames.
It was broken, faint, but easy to identify.
*
The New Philosophy championed a controlled method – as Francis Bacon had decreed, Nature should be put to the torture, and made to yield its reluctant secrets. Its approach set it apart from the Greeks, the Rationalists, the Idealists, the Schoolmen. In seeking to discredit these old ways of thinking, it had to offer an alternative, from observation and experiment.
And yet . . . did not all the New Philosophers rely also upon their instincts, upon inspiration, flashes of brilliance that seemed revealed to them, allowed them?
Harry, in his own small way, felt just such a moment of epiphany. What he saw, the trail there along the riverbank, confirmed his suspicions about Sir Edmund; it proved his anxiety, although bubbling up from the darkest, unknown parts of his mind, to have been well founded.
As Harry had walked to Gresham’s College on the morning of New Year’s Day, the weather had turned from rain to snow. He remembe
red the way that the rain stuck to the glass of his spectacles just before. Hooke had left his rooms near this time to make his own journey to Holborn; Tom had said that Harry had only just missed him.
Sir Edmund had called for Hooke: therefore the Justice had stood here before the snow fell.
The distance between Gresham’s College and the Fleet Bridge was a mile. It had taken Harry barely twenty minutes, even through the snow, to walk it.
No time, surely, for Sir Edmund to send his message, even by a courier on horseback.
The eel-fisher had told them that when he arrived with his bait and line there were no marks to be seen and no one there to be seen.
Yet Harry now observed in front of him, disappearing away northwards towards the gardens and ruins of Hatton House, a series of cross-shapes, left by compressed, icy snow within their depressions, slower to melt than the snow around them. Sometimes a plane of compacted snow, shaped according to the angle of landing and forming part of a square, remained precariously on the mud. These marks were so shallow that the falling snow had quickly hidden them.
At Hooke’s New Philosophical Club, the regular meeting of like-minded Fellows away from the Royal Society, William Wynde had once demonstrated the shoes of the Eskimo, describing the spreading out of pressure across the large sole of the shoe, so as to traverse across the softest snow.
Harry deciphered the tracks.
A man wearing snowshoes had walked across here after the snow began, and the marks he made had disappeared under the snow that followed. Only now, as the snow retreated, the snow compressed under the snowshoes being slower to melt, had his trail become visible.
Why had Sir Edmund and the eel-fisher lied to them?
There was another alternative: that Sir Edmund had known that the body would be here, and so sent his message to the Curator, and had then come to the Fleet. Either way, he had been untruthful to them.
Sir Edmund may well have good reason to keep secrets from them, as he went about his judicial business. He must have recognised the cipher, if the Colonel was to be believed. Perhaps Sir Edmund quite rightly suspected who had killed the boy, and Mr. Hooke was wrong to dismiss his suspicions against the Catholics.
What best to do?
He could not tell Hooke in his current fearfulness, and he had promised the Curator that he would withdraw from the matter. He could not confront the Justice with his new knowledge until he knew more of Sir Edmund’s activities, and what his search involved.
Should he continue to investigate the death of the boy? Or should he honour his promise to Robert Hooke?
He would continue his walk, Harry decided. Over the bridge, over the Fleet ditch, and into Alsatia, to find the eel-fisher Enoch Wolfe. Sir Edmund’s questioning of him at the Fleet had been brief. Only then would he act as postman, to deliver Hooke’s letter and his own workings upon the Red Cipher to Sir Edmund.
Observation XVI
Of Enthusiasm
This fellow, Titus Oates, repulsed him, with his fat face, and his fat flesh hanging over each side of his seat as if liquefying like a burning candle. This other one, Israel Tonge, perched on his chair, his hands doing a feral dance in front of him as he spoke, seemed possessed by a malignant spirit.
‘. . . and the devilish stinks of the Papists, with their unholy waters and their cloudy smokes, their blasphemous masses led by snuffling genuflecting monkeys garbed in the clothes of harlotry, their Satanic artifices, their Baalish methods, these bladder-puffed-up wily men! Their canting effusions, a landskip of horror so contrary to Christ, their reliance upon the scratching of beads to bring them closer to God, their slavish devotion to the whore of Rome, their exorcisms and tricks and conjurations, their untrusty deviance and constant bloodthirsty plotting . . .’
‘I have not heard one rant so madly since the days of Solomon Eagle!’ the Earl of Shaftesbury muttered.
John Locke clasped and unclasped his hands impatiently. He had never heard Eagle’s famously apocalyptic speeches during the Plague, and then the Conflagration, but he agreed entirely with his master’s sentiment.
The ranter stood up alarmingly, and began to move around the Earl’s library, fingers clawed as if looking for handholds into the air.
Tonge was fifty years of age, and small and thin – a head shorter than Locke and barely reaching Shaftesbury’s chest. Long dry hair, his own, protruded from his flaky scalp like silver wires. When he moved a snow-shower of skin-flakes fell from it, and when he passed his hand through it he created a blizzard. His eyes were the wide eyes of an Enthusiast; he was a dreamer of dreams and a seer of visions, of Jesuits gliding through the air, of their sanctifying of daggers for the killing of Protestants, and their seeking to put London to fire again.
‘. . . their Romish lies and dastardly machinations against the Protestant sons of martyrs, their extravagances, intolerances, and persecutions of patriots, their cruelties, and malice, and enmity to Truth; their antipathy to purity and sobriety, their contemptible sneaking away from right-thinkers as if afraid of God’s bright Sun. Strawberry-preachers! Text-splitters! Their faulty benedictional and schismatic aposticals, agends and mannals . . .’
‘My father was a chaplain of the New Model Army,’ Titus Oates told Shaftesbury, in a sleepy, and curiously high-pitched, sing-song voice, ‘and he did not carry on so.’
‘It would have exhausted the troops before any encounter,’ the Earl replied.
‘Tonge is all red-rag, wiggle-waggle, a brainsick Tom a’Bedlam!’
Oates’s mouth, a small round hole, had lips that creased together like the strung neck of a bag. His features all gathered to the middle of his face, getting away from his enormous chin. His eyes remained half-closed as Tonge’s tirade went on.
Oates had endured three hapless days deprived of sleep, leaving Saint Omers on horseback, riding with Dr. Locke to Cap Gris Nez. They had then crossed to Hythe – further discomfort in an old smack, whose every surface speared splinters into his behind. Around the coast, north to Foulness Island, then to Gravesend, then the great dockyards at Woolwich, where they had met with the brute, Aires, and transferred to a tiny, pinching, rowing boat. Now, after another restless night at Thanet House, lying on an overstuffed mattress in an underlength bed, he was being subjected to Israel Tonge.
‘Dr. Tonge,’ Shaftesbury called, and then louder. ‘Dr. Tonge!’
‘. . . their foul deeds, affronts and afflictions . . . eh?’ Tonge’s train of vituperation was finally halted. ‘What’s that?’
‘Your great zeal brings credit to you, Dr. Tonge, but we progress not in our enterprise. Mr. Oates is to perfect his lines. We have our own plotting to continue. Please, Dr. Tonge, you must concentrate upon the task at hand.’
Tonge’s eyes swept the room, an invisible congregation populating it. ‘By the Powers of the Air!’ he cried. ‘I concentrate upon it fully!’
‘You must perfect the Articles, Dr. Tonge, to memorise them, so that you may take them to the Justice, Sir Edmund Bury Godfrey. Are you ready to continue, Oates?’
Oates shrugged wearily, and poured himself some brandy from the pitcher on Shaftesbury’s table. ‘I am ready now,’ he answered. ‘You know, I too am Doctor…’
‘Let us continue with our practise, Oates,’ Shaftesbury said. ‘We must see off these perfidious Catholics, hiding in London like maggots in meat. Article eighteen . . .’
Observation XVII
Of Angels
The new churches, replacing those swept away by fire – Sir Christopher Wren’s Saint Benet in Thames Street, and his Saint Bride in Fleet Street, yet to be spired, but its bells in place – were the nearest and loudest. Temple Church, of the Crusaders, on the very edge of the fire and spared its destruction, and likewise Saint Dunstan-in-the-West, were further off, but the notes of their bells rang clear.
It was as if Harry’s arrival set them all off, an alarm to those who lived here.
He peered up at the chipped walls and blankly menacing windows, thinki
ng of his lack of courage as he had gone through the crowds of Whitechapel to find Colonel Michael Fields.
Alsatia’s reputation was crueller. A sanctuary from the law, by Royal decree, it was a low place, a refuge for villains. He looked back at Hooke’s quayside, newly-built and neatly finished. These places were the Janus-faces of London, kept apart only by a narrow tributary and a low ditch.
He saw few people here, though, although nine o’clock had come, and he found the relative peace unsettling. The people of Alsatia seemed to use a different timetable, preferring the night to the day.
Who watched him through these windows as he entered their domain? Which of these façades hid Enoch Wolfe? ‘Go down to Alsatia. Anyone there will know me.’ Wolfe’s words now sounded like a challenge, their apparent helpfulness mocking Harry’s ignorance of the place.
He descended through Salisbury Court, and the burnt ruins of Sackville’s House, down towards the Thames. The river’s tangle of masts, spars, and rigging etched the sky. Barques, brigantines, and sloops, pressed stern to prow, appeared blue in the distance, lighters moving between them and the quays like drones attending their queens.
Harry met a woman’s stare; she did not break it. Ensnared by her unblinking gaze, his mind only slowly pulled her husband into focus with her. Their bent bodies and the old fruit texture of their faces instructed him on the negative possibilities of Alsatia. They shuffled, making cautious way over the rough ground and the dirty melting slush lying between the stones. The old man suffered disobedient tremors, and held his wife’s arm to steady himself.
Before Harry had summoned the courage to ask them whether they knew anything of Enoch Wolfe, the woman turned indifferently away, taking the old man by the elbow to steer his shaky progress.
A man, bare arms mapped with veins and sheathed with muscle, walked easily by, with a child bouncing high on a shoulder-ride, its tiny grasp in his splayed fingers. Harry approached him, and the man swerved his body, unwilling to pass the time of day. After his failure with the old woman, Harry was determined, and he too changed direction. The man, unwillingly, stopped. The child on his shoulders watched Harry curiously, resting its chin on the top of the man’s head.
The Bloodless Boy Page 9
