The Bloodless Boy

by Robert J. Lloyd

  Harry felt his pulse quicken. He would answer to Hooke afterwards. ‘I wonder why you kept from us that you saw the boy being left there.’

  The Justice gave Harry a flinty stare; his approval of this assistant had vanished.

  ‘I returned to the Fleet again, two days later, when the snow had nearly melted, which showed the way of setting down the body,’ Harry explained.

  The displeasure in Hooke’s eyes made them seem like balls of metal.

  ‘I am sorry, Mr. Hooke, I have not spoken of this because of my promise to you.’

  ‘You must enlighten me, Sir,’ the Justice said, pulling himself up to his full height. ‘For I saw no such thing.’

  ‘There were clear tracks left, of frozen snow,’ Harry explained. ‘The snow above, softer, had melted away to reveal them. They showed the progress of a man wearing snowshoes.’ Harry did not flinch from Sir Edmund’s gaze, although the muscle of his thigh had started its tremble.

  ‘Snowshoes!’ Sir Jonas exclaimed. ‘Used to traverse the mud.’

  ‘Their wearer could not know they would be used for their more usual purpose until the snow began to fall,’ Hooke added.

  ‘Unless the man who bled the boy knew that it would snow then,’ Harry suggested.

  Hooke regarded him sceptically. ‘I have made observations of the weather all my life – I could not have told you when precisely it would begin to snow.’

  ‘But the time of the falling snow is significant,’ Sir Jonas said.

  ‘I remember the moment, on that first morning, when the rain changed to snow,’ Harry said. ‘It was before I reached Gresham’s College. Sir Edmund had already sent a message to you. By the time I found you – a journey of only twenty minutes duration, or thereabouts – the snow had settled, covering the bank and the prints.’

  ‘And you, Mr. Hunt, believe that I was there before it, and before the body was left.’ The Justice wiped at his mouth again. ‘But I sent no such summons to Gresham’s! I did not expect Mr. Hooke to be there! I got there as the snow fell thickly, and was met by Gabriel Knapp my Constable, and the man Wolfe there with him.’

  ‘I remember I did not speak to you, Sir Edmund, of the message brought to me,’ Hooke said.

  ‘Do you recall anything of the messenger, Robert?’ the King asked.

  ‘It was still dark, Your Majesty, dawn was rising. The weather stopped me from going out to him. Such men are invisible! One thinks only of the message they bring! I have the impression in my mind of age. He was an elderly man.’

  Hooke’s irritability stemmed from the realisation that he had been pulled inexorably into this design. ‘I was required to be there also.’

  *

  ‘Sir Edmund, did you not speculate on Mr. Hooke’s presence there?’ Harry persisted, despite the dark expression on the Justice’s face.

  ‘I did not think to question my good fortune!’ Sir Edmund exclaimed. ‘I was too much preoccupied with the finding of the boy.’

  His eyes blazed, and bored into Harry. Harry knew that this inspection was perfected from years of practise, dealing with men of far greater fortitude than he.

  Then the Justice relaxed, and his expression moderated. ‘There are aspects of your search, Mr. Hunt, of which I know nothing. You have kept them from me, since the falling snow led you to think me implicated in the murder of the boy. You must believe me: I seek the man who so wickedly murdered these boys. It is a part of the Catholic plot against the life of His Majesty, I am sure. The letter I had on New Year’s Eve spoke of it. Also, I have had two men come to me, named Titus Oates and Israel Tonge, attesting to an intricate plan to kill the King. I know not how the blood of boys is to be used, but I believe it for some portent, that the Papists will see as their signal. It is to the treacherous Catholics we must look.’

  ‘You are a capable man, Harry,’ the King said. ‘Impressively so. You will all of you share your knowledge together, for apart you have only befuddled one another.’

  With this praise from the King, Harry dared to press the Justice further.

  ‘You have a cipher, left on the body of the boy, which requires a keyword. Does its sender believe you have the word?’

  ‘I have not. I have speculated that the word will be revealed to me at some later time.’

  ‘What did you know of the cipher before you passed it to Mr. Hooke?’ Harry asked.

  The King, Sir Jonas, and Sir Edmund all looked at one another.

  ‘Inside, I saw numbers, nothing more,’ Sir Edmund stated.

  The Justice saw Hooke and Harry exchange one of their own looks. His eyes narrowed at the thought that they did not believe him. He turned to the King, who signalled his permission to answer. ‘It is familiar,’ he said hesitantly.

  ‘I know its use,’ Hooke said. ‘It was a method employed in our country’s Wars, on the Parliament side, to get Your Majesty to France. This is the reason I returned it.’

  ‘You gave scant cause for giving up the task,’ Sir Edmund said. ‘I wondered upon it.’

  Hooke grimaced, and sniffed loudly. ‘If you had told us of the system, we would not have wasted so much time on it.’

  ‘I did not have the keyword. I thought you able to break into it, without its origin becoming known.’

  ‘It is true, there was some outside help to get me to France,’ the King interrupted gently. ‘The legend is more attractive, don’t you think? Who told you of this, Harry? It is an aspect of history never revealed.’

  ‘I went to Colonel Michael Fields, Your Majesty, in Whitechapel. He visited Gresham’s once, to show his ciphers.’

  ‘That old rabble-rouser?’ the King said incredulously. ‘Still alive?’

  ‘He told me of Cromwell’s assistance to you.’

  ‘It suited us all. My bread was baked, so to speak. I desire you not to bandy this about.’

  ‘We will not, Your Majesty,’ Hooke answered, and then corrected himself. ‘I am sorry, Harry, for I answer for you. You are your own man now, and so must answer for yourself.’

  ‘I shall be quiet, too, Your Majesty, upon the matter,’ Harry affirmed.

  The King looked satisfied with their promise. He turned to Sir Edmund. ‘You must go now to meet with Lord High Treasurer Danby, to discuss with him this Titus Oates, and Israel Tonge. He will subject their evidence to a more close scrutiny, pull at its weft and warp to see whether it comes undone. If their story of a Catholic plot becomes known, with these rumours of blood-drained boys, it will unsettle all of London. It takes but a little to stir up the mob. There is a danger that the innocent will fall as well as the guilty – if there be any guilty.’

  ‘I do not concern myself with the innocent,’ Sir Edmund pronounced. ‘The innocent have nothing to fear. That there is a Catholic plot I have no doubt. Of what Oates and Dr. Tonge know of it, we shall find. That these boys herald it, I am certain.’

  The Justice left them, bowing low to his King.

  Charles II looked at Sir Jonas Moore and at his philosophers, his face giving no sign of what he knew of a Catholic plot against him, or that he wished to discuss it with them. Hooke’s anxiety was evident in the way that he investigated the surface of the rug they stood on. Harry’s face was circumspectly neutral.

  ‘Jonas, Robert, Harry; we will observe the other boys. Robert, as we go, you may entertain me with stories of weighing the air, and whatnot.’

  Observation XXV

  Of Trust

  Their journey, by coach, was notable for the conversation between Robert Hooke and the King.

  Hooke spoke of his trials to send a whisper the distance of a furlong, and his hopes to multiply that ten-fold – ‘Why, we could have the whole of London speaking to one another in an instant!’ cried the King – and of conveying sound as swiftly as the passage of light through the air, along extended wires. He described signalling machines, utilising towers and telescopes, to relay messages across the country. He spoke of the movements of brush-horned gnats, their limbs and muscles making t
hem like little automata, and of the vital function inherent in their fibres – the movement of wings relying upon some signal from brain to muscle, like tiny gunpowder trails through their bodies.

  Hooke went on to explain the propagation of light corpuscles through the æther, original and connate properties of coloured lights, and the phenomenon of refrangibility, in which the least refrangibile rays tend to redness, and the most to a deep violet. His enthusiasm, reversing his earlier mood, as he discussed the wonder of all colours on being compounded producing purest white, and mentioning his correspondence on the matter with Mr. Isaac Newton of Trinity College, Cambridge – ‘…a capable man, although we disagree on some few particulars’ – became infectious, and it was a jovial party that arrived at the College of Physicians, despite the reason for their visit.

  The room they went into held specimens displaying disease or injury; and also deformity, growth that God had seemingly forsaken. Thin sheets, like winding sheets, placed over its windows, softly diffused the light.

  This boy, found at Barking Creek on Christmas Day, sat in wine vinegar and seawater.

  The liquid made him pale, more bleached of colour than his bloodless body actually was. His hands pushed against the glass, the flesh of their palms compressed flat and white on the inside of the jar. He was a similar size, and a similar age, to the boy left at the Fleet, being around three years old. Dates could be seen written by punctures going into the legs, the first being done over six months before.

  ‘An imperfect form of preservation, Your Majesty,’ Hooke observed. ‘Is it necessary to keep him?’

  ‘Sir Edmund keeps the boys, as evidence.’

  ‘Have not his parents come forward, to report their child missing? We would not need the boys at a trial.’

  ‘It is a sad fact, Robert, that there are many children in London who would not be missed. Perhaps this boy is one of them, for no alarm has been raised.’

  ‘Surely an autopsy, properly detailed and reported, is all the evidence required?’ Hooke urged.

  Sir Jonas looked uneasy. ‘I asked Sir Edmund to preserve them,’ he said quietly. ‘The boys are preserved on my order.’

  Harry and Hooke looked at each other. That was why Sir Edmund had been so adamant on the boy’s preservation in the Air-pump.

  The King regarded Sir Jonas, and seemed to weigh up whether he should make further enquiry of the Surveyor-General’s motivations in front of the two natural philosophers. He could sense their unspoken question.

  He made his decision. ‘Robert, Harry: take me to the other boy, at Gresham’s College. Sir Jonas, you may return to the Tower, and I shall meet with you there later.’

  Sir Jonas bowed, chastened, and seeming anxious. Harry could see that a dark blue vein throbbed in the King’s forehead, and realised that Sir Jonas had offended him in some way, by his order to keep the boys preserved.

  The King took a deep breath to recompose himself, and then, when ready, smiled at them. He ushered them out of the specimens room. An orderly locked the door behind them.

  Hooke, as they left the College of Physicians, designed by him and only recently completed, instinctively studied the wall, wiping his hand over its surface, noting the atmosphere’s effect upon it. It already blackened from London’s fumes. Satisfied with the stone’s resistance to the smoke, he paced after the others, leaving Warwick Lane to head to Bishopsgate.

  Observation XXVI

  Of Delegation

  Inside Gresham’s College, the King found himself walking over a threadbare carpet which wanted replacing. The walls of the corridor were a dark salmon colour, with a faded floral pattern on the peeling paper. The interior of the College, to his surprise, had become shabby.

  Portraits of College Professors and original Fellows of the Royal Society punctuated the walls. A portrait of Hooke, which at first the King did not recognise, as the Curator looked pink and healthy and wore his best perruke, was one of the last that they went by going to Hooke’s quarters.

  When the King was ensconced in Hooke’s drawing room, Mary Robinson had to be restrained from dusting around him. She looked on, horrified, as he pushed at tools and springs and weights to make space for the Royal posterior. He balanced on Hooke’s oak chest, one leg elegantly crossed over the other, surrounded by the clutter of the room. He removed his periwig, revealing short, grey hair and a surprisingly round head, which for Tom turned him into quite another person.

  Tom boiled tea for the King. He scalded himself in his carefulness, concentrating so hard that he shook, and he proudly showed to Harry the pink patch of skin on his hand. Mary scurried this way and that, convinced that the King’s mind would be permanently unhinged by the lack of tidiness around him; that the name Robinson would be despised throughout London, although she had pleaded with Mr. Hooke to let her clear the room on so many occasions. Oh, injustice! Oh, shame!

  After the King’s refreshment, Grace serving the tea and receiving lingering looks of approval from him, and after a conversation between the men regarding the forty genera of the classification system in John Wilkins’s Universal Character, the King was taken down to Gresham’s cellars, through the long corridor, and to the Air-pump.

  *

  He stared at the boy for a long while, and pressed his hand gently to the glass. ‘He will not decay?’

  ‘While the integrity of the seal is kept the boy shall remain just so,’ Hooke replied.

  ‘Let him stay here, Robert. It is the best place, until we choose what to do with him.’

  ‘In the talk around London of a Devil-boy, Your Majesty, Gresham’s is mentioned as the place of its keeping.’ Hooke’s expression showed his continued aversion to being involved.

  ‘I have heard the same at Whitehall. The Court is as full of prattlers as the City. Double up the locks on these doors. Let no one enter.’

  ‘Why does Sir Jonas wish these boys to be kept?’ Hooke asked unhappily.

  ‘That I must ascertain. Sir Jonas has done so without my knowledge – surely he has reason enough. Meanwhile, keep this boy here, where he is safest, until those who know him best may identify him.’

  The King took his hand from the glass and pulled Hooke close to him. ‘You will help Sir Edmund?’ he asked.

  ‘I have much Royal Society and City business to attend to,’ Hooke said slowly. ‘I fear my affairs press too much.’

  ‘These murders are a City business, Robert, and, by the curious nature of them, they are Royal Society business too.’

  ‘Perhaps Harry and I may share the work. You have seen his capacities already.’

  The King was visibly relieved at what he took to be the overcoming of Hooke’s resistance. ‘And what of the mysterious document left with this boy? The use of a cipher gives it the complexion of a philosophical matter. This must appeal to you, Robert. Hmm?’

  ‘Harry, are you willing to renew your efforts with the cipher? You will need to take back your copy from Sir Edmund.’

  ‘I made another, Mr. Hooke. It is in my keeping.’

  The sound of the King’s laughter filled the cellar room. ‘He is his own man, is he not, Robert!’ He clapped his hands, and gave Harry a satirical bow. ‘Harry, I have known you not yet a day, and you have impressed me more than most men over a year. I shall be thankful for a speedy translation. Bring it directly to me, and we will then inform the Justice.’

  ‘You are happy to do so?’ Hooke asked Harry.

  Harry admired the way in which Hooke had made great play of resistance, eventual acceptance, and then swift delegation of the undertaking.

  His own curiosity, and the wishes of his King, made his decision an easy one.

  ‘I shall be pleased to help, Your Majesty, as far as my capacities allow.’

  They left the cellar room, and the boy in the glass, and walked out to the quadrangle. Charles II, sweeping his hat on with an exaggerated gesture, mounted his horse and waved amicably at them.

  ‘The King guesses at the identity of the bo
ys,’ Harry said. ‘Sir Jonas knows more. And the King wants first look at the cipher.’

  Hooke’s eyes closed as if a bright light had been shone into them, and he shrugged, and then nodded his head slowly, a mixture of signals.

  He linked his arm with Harry’s, and together they walked back to his lodgings.

  Observation XXVII

  Of Albion

  What did these men know of life lived rawly?

  Under the Gatehouse at Lincoln’s Inn, the bald, liver-spotted head on the thick neck slowed almost imperceptibly; decision made, his momentum resumed.

  Colonel Michael Fields knew what it was to taste the earth, and have its coldness pierce the marrow of his bones. To feel the fear as a cannon ball flew, furrowed the terrain, searched greedily its victim. To grasp a knife as it vanished into another man’s flesh, as if the spirit of the blade led the hand, hitting rib but sliding on, through tight muscle into lung.

  He knew what it was to watch the light become dull in another man’s eye; the tightest contract of all.

  These Solicitors drew things out. Every argument had its equal and opposite, every statement led to a hundred more. They punned in Latin, and laughed at their own cleverness, enjoying the fruits of expensive education.

  He did not despise them, for they were men like himself; but he would not accept the system that they represented. They were the progression from Norman law; an inhumane justice, an imposition upon the common run of humanity.

  He desired the universal adoption of the English tongue, to give back the law to the people it should serve.

  Michael Fields stemmed from Albion.

  He had lied to the young man from the Royal Society – so careless, so ignorant of the story enveloping him. He rubbed at the scar on his forearm, a lump of pale senseless skin where the pipe had been inserted. They were all blood-brothers; all had willingly agreed to their Covenant. They followed the same teachings, the same men; Overton, Walwyn and Lilburne, whose words had wrought such change in them.