The Bloodless Boy

by Robert J. Lloyd

  He slid from his horse, looking unused to being carried by such transport.

  ‘The King ordered that I should meet with you here, to be shown the body. He asks that we take him to Whitehall. Show me the boy.’

  ‘If you grasp the tree-root it is an easy climb down,’ Hooke told him. Harry helped him as he joined him at the level of the water.

  The lapwing complained again. ‘It is the Tiddy Mun!’ Sir Jonas observed. ‘He follows me here, as he follows me since my work in the fens.’

  Harry’s evident confusion encouraged Sir Jonas to explain further. ‘The bog-dwellers tell the legend of the Tiddy Mun, whose voice is the cry of the lapwing.’

  Hooke joined them. Sir Edmund preferred to watch from above, as the others gathered next to the boy, the water of the Westbourne splashing around their calves.

  ‘God’s blood!’ Sir Jonas exclaimed.

  ‘The others were the same,’ Hooke informed him.

  Others? Harry shot a look of enquiry at Hooke. This was the first time he had heard of more than one boy. Hooke, seeing his assistant’s expression, coughed into his hand.

  ‘This boy is not decayed. Might the freeze have stilled his rotting?’ Sir Jonas asked.

  ‘It has slowed it, true enough,’ Hooke told him, ‘but if you observe the boy’s eyes, they are fresh. This frost would damage them. I do not believe he was left before yesterday.’

  ‘You, Mr. Hooke, know best of such things,’ Sir Jonas said.

  ‘There was a gap of one week between the other findings,’ Hooke told him. ‘This comes sooner.’

  ‘Do you make surmise, Mr. Hooke, upon this frequency?’

  ‘I cannot see patterns within so small a number. You, being more mathematical, may care to do so.’

  Sir Jonas waved the suggestion aside. ‘The other boys are kept preserved?’

  Sir Edmund, on the bank, rubbed his hand across his face. ‘The first found is pickled at the College of Physicians, and the second is at Gresham’s College, in the Air-pump there.’

  ‘Your famous Air-pump!’ Sir Jonas patted Hooke on the shoulder. ‘We are to study this boy in the King’s elaboratory at Whitehall. Then, I wish to see both of the other boys.’

  So, two other boys, then. Perhaps Mr. Hooke tried to protect me, Harry mused, but what else did he hide?

  Hooke, reluctantly, and Harry, readily, signalled their assent. Sir Edmund was more reticent even than the Curator.

  ‘Good!’ Sir Jonas exclaimed, noting Harry’s reaction against those of the older men with him. ‘We will lift out the boy from this place. Put him over my mount – I will happily walk the distance back.’

  Sir Jonas climbed out of the riverbed, assisted by Sir Edmund. The two men together helped Robert Hooke. Harry carefully lifted the boy from his cradle amongst the roots of the birch, off the covering of lungwort clinging to its lower bark.

  He offered him up, and Sir Edmund and Sir Jonas took the body to his horse to begin strapping him over the saddle.

  ‘Come on, and we shall leave this bird with her nest in peace.’

  With that Sir Jonas heaved himself up onto the horse.

  ‘Give up your coat, Harry,’ he said, when Harry climbed back to them. ‘Cover this boy.’

  Observation XXIII

  Of Ingenious Pursuits

  Oliver Cromwell’s head, boiled and tarred, still rested on its spike after all these years. He looked peaceable enough, Harry observed, as they went past Westminster Hall, although black from the weather and London soot. The Lord Protector had the perfect vantage point to survey the capital that once was his.

  ‘I knew him,’ Sir Jonas said, noticing the focus of the younger man’s attention. ‘He was against the draining of the fens, being from those parts, and spoke against the scheme. During the wars, I prepared a model of a New London for him. He was for liberty of conscience, with which I could never disagree.’

  *

  It was in the nature of Charles II’s court that people wandered freely about its grounds, walking through the Privy Garden and past the buildings of the Cockpit, the Banqueting Hall, and even Whitehall itself, without challenge.

  Both Sir Jonas and Robert Hooke were frequent visitors there, and the few guards waved them though. At the King Street Gate, Sir Jonas explained what was to be done with the boy, and two servants took him, and Sir Jonas’s horse, away.

  The four men walked through into the Privy Garden, and past the towering pyramidical sundial, its brass and glass glinting dully. It had nearly three hundred dials, all made ineffective by the thick mist. Entering the palace, they walked through a long gallery, Sir Jonas leading them quickly on.

  Harry tried to assume an air of importance to match his environment, imitating the manner of a chameleon against Madagascan rock. Reunited with his brown coat, the condescending stares, and the fact that every inhabitant of this place was richly dressed, colourful, and had the expensive smell of cleanliness rising from them, made him feel that he stood out like a spot against the sun.

  Sir Jonas took them through another gallery, where they could hear the noise of a crowd and the clatter of sword blades. They were admitted through a lofty doorway.

  Inside, everything was red. The walls, the silks, the leathers, the hangings, the carpets, the furniture; all were chosen to match perfectly with one another. An edge showed a flash of gold, a corner a glimpse of silver, but red wholly dominated. The only painting in the room was a fiery depiction of Eos, goddess of dawn; its light threw red over its landscape, drenching it in violence.

  The King resided on a long duchesse brisée, also red, with gold eagles embroidered across its fabric. This was placed on a platform to improve his view. Around him, careful not to obstruct his vision, courtiers shouted encouragement to two masked figures practising their fencing. Both employed thin light swords, tips foiled with leather, moving forwards and backwards across the width of the room. The speed of their blades created a swoosh of sound with each thrust, their arcs leaving trails as if painting the air behind them. The audience jumped, and swayed, and shouted, with a fervour suggesting that bets had been placed.

  Harry considered whether each combatant was near the limit of their ability, for their swordplay was so quick, each parry and riposte so expertly done, that he was sure that one or other must soon be injured, even with blunted points. The taller of them moved more languidly, seeming to keep perfect balance as he deflected the other’s thrusts, and Harry judged him the better of the two. He saw that as one attacked, the other defended, and he realised that they played by some system, as neither lunged forward at the same time, although the rules were too subtle for him to fathom exactly the etiquette of the bout.

  The finish, too, was mysterious: the taller of the pair held up a hand, signalling the conclusion of their duel. They both turned to the watching King, took off their masks, and curtsied.

  To Harry’s astonishment, long hair spilled from inside the masks they wore – one had blonde hair, the other black – and as they lifted themselves, he saw the faces of two ladies, both breathing heavily; Harry recognised at last the outline of female forms under their shirts and breeches.

  Clapping them enthusiastically, the King saw Sir Jonas, stood, and beckoned. When Hooke, Harry, and Sir Edmund stayed where they were, he waved to them as well. Harry felt a keen self-consciousness as he went forward, hotly aware that everyone in the room observed them.

  Charles II was tall, over two yards high, with dark skin giving him a swarthy, Mediterranean appearance, a throwback to his Medici forefathers. Lines cut deeply into it, and the royal nose was large, long and sharply boned. He wore an imposing black periwig, a dark-blue Persian vest pinked with white silk, and a pale-yellow sash and stockings.

  His manner was informal, and so immediately relaxed that Harry found himself completely at ease. The King’s face had a liveliness, and friendliness, that made it attractive. His large mouth added an impression of generosity and candour.

  When he was not spe
aking, though, when his face fell into repose, a solemnity settled upon his features, and Harry wondered whether this might be a truer reflection of his character.

  The two fencers still stood by the platform. ‘Madame,’ the King said, and introduced the taller of the pair to the Justice, the Curator, and the Observator. ‘Duchesse de Mazarin, Hortense Mancini.’

  She smiled at them all, a flash of perfect teeth, her black eyes resting for an extra second on Harry.

  Felicity Tarripan, the Quaker at Alsatia, making her way to Prince Rupert’s Land with her new husband, was beautiful. Grace Hooke was beautiful too. Hortense Mancini, though, had quite another style of beauty; severe, dramatic, aristocratic. She had raven hair, and olive skin unconcealed by whitener, only her red lips showing the use of colouring. This alone distinguished her from the other courtiers in Whitehall, who covered themselves in so much powder that they became uniform. She was in her thirties perhaps, but even so, Harry considered, amazingly striking.

  Once more she looked at Harry, who could not believe his good fortune, then she asked her leave. The King turned back to the men, raising a complicit eyebrow at them. ‘The history of a nation is decided upon a woman’s whim,’ he said. ‘I proposed marriage to her, during my days in France. She would not have me.’

  Anne Lennard, Countess of Sussex, the other fencer, did not wait to be introduced, merely nodding at them, and then moving off.

  The King watched the departure of his daughter, as if wanting her to glance back, but she did not. Instead, after a sigh of discontent, he led them from the room, and they followed his rapid walk.

  He strode down a corridor, turned, and swung open a door himself, despite the leaping forward of a servant, and ushered them through.

  *

  Harry found himself in the King’s elaboratory.

  Spread over the main table were details of a ship, the Experiment, two hundred tons, eighteen guns, designed by Sir William Petty of the Royal Society and remarkable for its double bottom. The King invited them to admire its sweep. Knowing that none of them were sailors, he showed them around the drawings, naming and describing the Experiment’s functions, and the relationship between cordage and sails. He spoke of the science of working a ship, the sails acting upon it with reference to its centre of rotation, the wind acting upon the sails, and the water upon the rudder.

  He showed them Sir Christopher Wren’s lunar globe, a piece of unicorn’s horn, ferns in a glass alembic releasing mysterious bubbles into the water, an alligator’s skull, and a mouldy armadillo, further curiosities in the royal knick-knackatory. A lambricus latus, taken from the guts of a man, some four times the length of its host and with over four hundred mouths, was coiled in a preserving jar. Also, a large piece of red volcanic rock, sent to him by Edmund Halley from Saint Helena; little clue remained as to the violence of its expulsion from the earth.

  The King’s talent at showing his ease and putting others at ease – attained, people said, from his escape and long stay in France, where he had become quite used to mixing with the lower sort – did not work on the Justice. Harry noticed that of all of them, Sir Edmund was quietest, and the constant wiping of his mouth indicated some agitation. Sir Edmund only spoke when directly addressed, and an ungracious chill radiated from him, affecting the natural flow of the conversation.

  Harry waited for the opportunity to ask him about the morning at the Fleet, and the falling of the snow, and why he had concealed his knowledge of the set of snowshoe prints. It would be better to speak of it when they were alone. The matter of stretching his promise to Hooke beyond its limit still stood, unable as he was to reveal it to the Curator.

  On the wall hung a painting of the Royal Escape, originally called the Surprize, the little coal brig that had completed Charles’s dramatic flight from Worcester to France, renamed and brought into the Navy.

  The King took Hooke to examine the Curator’s own gift to him, a fine clock using Hooke’s balance-spring mechanism, still keeping the royal time.

  Harry, after considering the picture, took the chance to observe an object he had seen before, when it was first received by the Royal Society, smuggled to Henry Oldenburg from the Dutch Republic when the hostilities had begun. It sat in its own glass case. He studied the wax-injected veins and venules running through its fabric.

  It was the uterus of a woman in labour with her child. Childbirth had killed them both; their remains had been dissected and preserved by Dr. Swammerdam. It looked as fresh as when they had died, the waxes and oils imparting a healthy lustre. Harry imagined the child pushing its way out, refusing to believe that its entry into the world was being denied, anxious to fill its tiny lungs for the first time with air.

  It was not difficult to see the King’s interest in the exhibit. He was, after all, a man fascinated by women – some say he preferred their company and even their conversation to that of men – and he had fourteen acknowledged children. Who knew how many more secret children he had sired, or how many women he had been with?

  Harry pictured the boy inside the Air-pump at Gresham’s College, struck by the fancy that the machine was a brass and glass womb, made by the hand of man, and so a crude facsimile of Nature’s work.

  ‘The truest microcosm,’ the King confided to him, having come to stand by him, seeing his own interest reflected in the young man’s eyes, ‘is the womb of a mother.’

  Two servants brought in the body of the boy, laid out along a board. They placed him on the King’s table.

  Observation XXIV

  Of a Catholic Design

  Robert Hooke having suggested the idea, it was Harry who performed the autopsy.

  Ignoring the trembling in his hands and the queasiness he felt, trying to view the procedure as no different from his practise upon dogs and cats, he used the King’s tools to reopen the cut across the boy’s chest. He removed the breastplate, already cut away from the ribs, and announced that the heart had been taken.

  ‘The Lord shall send upon thee cursing, vexation, and rebuke,’ Sir Edmund quoted, appalled by the hole that Harry revealed.

  Splashes of candle wax on the boy’s belly suggested that the draining of his blood and the taking of his heart was done at night or in a darkened room. It was the same expensive wax that Harry had unpeeled from the Fleet boy.

  Sir Edmund wrote all of this into his notebook.

  There were only two puncture marks, each with dates carefully written around it, fewer than on the body of the Fleet boy. He, too, must have been preserved, and judging by the oldest date for three months or more. He looked small for his age, perhaps to enable the preservation of him in a glass receiver, as Harry had thought might be the way with the boy stored at Gresham’s College.

  One of the puncture marks, though, showed evidence of healing.

  ‘He was drained through a pipe when still alive,’ Harry noted.

  The four men looked at one another, all aghast at the thought of this boy’s last days.

  Having finished their work upon this boy the King asked Sir Edmund for a full account of the others. The Justice spoke of the boys found at Barking Creek and the Fleet, and of their preservation. After his report the King turned to the Curator and stood close, so that he towered over him. ‘Now, Robert, how far are you willing to aid Sir Edmund? We cannot have boys found murdered, and without their blood, being left about London. Hmm?’

  Hooke’s expression, and the way that his eyes looked everywhere but at the King, showed that it was not far at all. ‘I can be of little use, surely; my skills are peculiar,’ he answered.

  ‘I believe that you, and Harry here, can assist the Justice greatly,’ the King replied firmly. ‘It would match the principles of my Society to do so.’

  ‘The many threads of this matter require a dextrous unpicking,’ Hooke persisted.

  ‘It can also be said,’ Harry offered, ‘that these threads may entwine to make their unravelling an easier task, like a cunning-man’s knot.’

  ‘
Whereas a man killed with a single blow and left in the street leaves few clues to set apart his assailant from a hundred others!’ Sir Edmund was visibly buoyed by Harry’s unexpected assistance.

  Hooke’s exasperated look showed that Harry did not help extricate them from the matter.

  ‘Valiantly said, Harry!’ The King clapped as he said it. ‘Good fellow!’

  ‘You may guide each other,’ Sir Jonas pressed the Curator. ‘Your knowledge of the natural philosophy makes you a useful ally.’

  Hooke considered Sir Jonas’s words dejectedly. ‘You profess too much faith in our experimentalism.’

  ‘I am convinced of its usefulness,’ Sir Edmund said, ‘as you both have demonstrated, ’though if I were as exacting as you I should never catch a single malefactor.’

  ‘Some parts of Nature are too large to be comprehended, some too little to be perceived,’ Hooke replied. ‘Our most solid definitions are imperfect, only expressions of our misguided apprehensions, not the true nature of things themselves –’

  ‘You talk too generally, Robert!’ the King interrupted. ‘And reckon too little worth of your way of setting about the world. Your protests are hyperbolical, as Mr. Descartes would have it. We are all of us imperfect, and so must strive against our imperfections. Hmm? So, let us together consider anew this investigation.’

  Hooke looked defeated, and performed an unhappy dip of his head.

  ‘Sir Edmund?’ Harry ventured, seeing his chance, half raising a hand as if for a teacher in a schoolroom.

  The Justice regarded him expectantly, grateful for his new ally. ‘What is it, Mr. Hunt, that you desire to say?’

  ‘How was your being at the Fleet contrived?’

  Sir Edmund’s expression quickly faded to a frown. ‘I was sent a letter the night before, asking to meet with me there at first light. It spoke of Jesuits infiltrating London, meeting at Holborn Bridge.’

  ‘Who sent this letter?’ Sir Jonas enquired.

  ‘There was no name on it. Perhaps another, unconnected with the boy, required the meeting. The Constable turned the curious away; perhaps he was one such refused.’ It sounded as if Sir Edmund tried to convince himself as much as the four men he addressed. ‘You feel that the boy was left for me?’