The Bloodless Boy

by Robert J. Lloyd

  He moved onto the beam, and the safety offered by the bank rapidly seemed far away. The excited babble of the crowd – they marvelled at his decision to do what none of them would have done, and they wondered who this slight youth was to go to the aid of the Constable – merged with the reverberation of the water, and by the time he brought his other leg up onto the beam and moved nervously along it their voices had disappeared altogether.

  Now all he heard was water. Below him, the Thames raced through the arch. Harry’s feet refused to shuffle along the beam. He slid his hand along, and clutched the end of a purlin above his head, further along, until the weight of his body forced him to move his feet to adjust. Traversing the beams and rafters this way, slowly, little by little, his hands leading his reluctant feet, he reached a vertical spar, round like a ship’s mast. The spar extended the height of the arch, and the way round it was blocked by the machinery behind.

  He was now closer to Gabriel Knapp than he was to the crowd.

  ‘Mr. Hunt!’ Knapp’s pale face moved out from the wall. ‘Go back! I was foolish to venture so far. Leave me to my fate.’

  ‘How did you pass this spar?’

  Knapp forced himself to remember. ‘A strut adjoins it,’ he shouted. ‘Projecting out, below the surface of the water. I fell and chanced upon it. But what will you gain by reaching me? We will then both be marooned on this spot.’

  ‘Mr. Hooke summons help,’ Harry answered, attempting a tone of assurance.

  He searched for the support, dropping down so his leg entered the Thames. The water snatched it and banged it against the wood, cracking painfully his anklebone, making him bite his lip. He tried again. This time he located the little ledge of timber below the surface. He scraped a strand of slime flailing from it, and then rested his weight onto it. He encircled the spar with his arms; his hands almost touched behind it. Knapp, he was sure, whose arms were longer, would have been able to clasp his hands together. He could not, and the lack of safety almost brought him to a standstill. He could not believe that the old man had got so far.

  One . . . two . . . three. Go! On round, straining to maintain the almost-circle of his arms, his right foot scrabbled its way to the next beam. The whole movement was performed smoothly, misleading the crowd on the bank, who cheered him on, thinking him far braver and more skilful than he was.

  He inched further towards Knapp, who watched him frantically, the conviction too evident on his face that Harry would fall. Harry reached the wheel, and looked at the cogs and the mechanism of the pump, working out a way of climbing up and then across the wheel, to get closer to the body. He summoned the courage to take the long stride onto the side of the wheel, over the rushing water, and reached for one of the blades. There was no way of getting to Knapp without his weight pressing the dead body between the top of the wheel and the beam it passed under. He pulled himself up, and traversed the length of the blade. He had to avoid the inverted body, carefully stepping over it, and he descended the other side of the wheel. The gap between the wheel and the bridge was crossed, a second tall spar circumnavigated in the same way as the first. His feet, the cold eating its way through them, sensed nothing; he had to watch them to check their hold before transferring his weight. His upper body shivered violently, and he had trouble keeping his hands on the beams.

  At last, the journey was done, and Harry pulled his knees up onto the little stone ledge alongside Knapp. The Constable extended his hand to help him up, and they stood together, both too frozen and frightened to enjoy a sense of triumph.

  ‘Mr. Hunt, you are a fool. A brave fool, but a fool.’

  ‘Will you return with this fool, Mr. Knapp?’

  The old man looked at him with intense and weary sadness.

  Now Harry looked up, and into the face of the dead man.

  The man’s mouth was wide open as if he shouted to them, to get him off from the wheel. His eyes were bloodied, and they looked accusingly at the two men under the bridge with him.

  It was the Justice of Peace for Westminster, Sir Edmund Bury Godfrey.

  His body was caught where the waterwheel ran under the arch, a blade sliced into his back, the beam above crushing his belly. Sir Edmund quivered, as the force of the water vibrated the wheel. Upside-down, his arms hung down, as did his head, loosely, the neck looking stretched. His neck had a deep weal from a ligature, and Harry could see clearly where a knot had pressed into the flesh. A gash went across his ear. The Justice’s skin was red, and mottled with dark purple bruises.

  ‘I knew Sir Edmund for over thirty years,’ Knapp told Harry. ‘He escaped death so many times I thought he would live forever. But, we are all of us mortal.’

  ‘We must find a way from here, Mr. Knapp. Mr. Hooke summons help from builders. They shall assist us, and release Sir Edmund – .’

  A scraping sound stopped him. The end of a thick rope descended past them, from a window way above them overlooking the side of the bridge. Attached to it, appearing like a phantom from the sky, dangled a small man wearing the worn clothing of a carpenter. Harry recognised him from the building site of Saint Magnus.

  ‘A rope would have been simpler for us both, Mr. Knapp,’ Harry told the Constable.

  ‘The deuce on this place!’ said the carpenter as he landed next to them. Sawdust clogged the pores of his skin. ‘You’ve got more stomach than brains, eh!’ He looked up at Sir Edmund on the wheel, matter-of-factly, thinking of his removal from the wheel rather than the wrong of his murder.

  He unravelled the knots from his waist, and turned to consider them. ‘I shall tie you first, Constable.’

  He secured Knapp expertly, and gave the rope a couple of sharp pulls to signal its readiness; it tautened, pulled by brawny arms from the bridge. Knapp was hoisted up into the air. He stepped onto the blades as he ascended; the wheel turned a degree, until stopped by the blockage in its mechanism.

  Knapp pushed himself away from the underside of the arch of the bridge, and disappeared from view.

  The carpenter, whose name was Latham, looked shrewdly at Harry. ‘Wager your heart’s panting! What you want with the rescuing of old Heavyrakes here?’ He started to tie Harry with a second rope he had brought with him. ‘Better people than the Justice to go about salvaging. Let the Devil take him!’ He pointed at Sir Edmund. ‘A Papist business?’

  Here on the ledge, trying to reply through clattering teeth, Harry could not formulate an answer.

  ‘Mr. Latham,’ he managed, shivering vehemently, ‘can you cover him before you bring him up? We would not want it yet known that Sir Edmund is dead.’

  ‘We?’ asked the carpenter suspiciously. ‘You and Mr. Hooke, you mean?’

  ‘Mr. Hooke. But most of all the King.’

  Latham looked unimpressed. ‘I will do it for Mr. Hooke. I give not the fig for the King.’

  *

  Back on the safety of London Bridge, they were surrounded by curious onlookers, all of them asking about the Popish leaving of the man on the wheel. The wild rumours of nails and crucifixion circulated around them. Robert Hooke tried to be authoritative, and calm the crowd, but they only hushed when the twisted body of the man appeared over the wall, feet first, rope wrapped round the legs and under the arms. Sir Edmund’s black coat had been tied to cover the face. Latham guided the body as it swung towards them. The carpenter looked pleased with himself, having worked to release Sir Edmund by cleverly disengaging the wheel and cutting into the blade that pierced him, to great cheers from the crowd.

  Hooke directed the hauling, up over the parapet of the bridge and in through the window of a small tannery, the place immediately above the waterwheel.

  A dray was brought up. Hooke ordered the dead man to be carried away to Gresham’s College. When Sir Edmund was laid out on the dray, Hooke tried valiantly to prevent the crowd gathering around it, but they pressed in against them. Calls of ‘Another Protestant martyr!’ went up, and ‘Where hide the Papists who murdered this man?’

  �
�This is hopeless!’ Hooke decided. ‘Return him inside!’

  The workmen pushed and heaved at the dray, fending off the crush of onlookers, and manoeuvred it back into the tannery.

  Skins, in piles or stretched from frames, mostly cut but some still bearing the outlines of their original wearers, were everywhere around the dingy room. The stink of tannin from the stringent gelatine made them choke.

  The owner followed them in, protesting that they trespassed in his property. Hooke’s reputation and the looks from his burly workmen persuaded him to clear his staff from the place. ‘Until we have an escort, or the crowd dies away,’ Hooke assured him, the watchmen having taken Gabriel Knapp to the Tower to get him dry and warm, and to fetch reinforcements.

  The owner went to prevent anyone else from entering his shop, leaving only Hooke, Harry and the small group of builders inside. Noble Fisher, their foreman, directed them to wait outside, to make sure that none of the crowd tried to force their way in.

  Harry removed his breeches and socks, took one of the skins from a pile, and used it to dry his legs. He had no sensation in them even as he rubbed at them vigorously. To stop his shivering he wrapped himself in more of the skins, ignoring the smell.

  Now came their chance to look at the body. They studied Sir Edmund’s long black coat, his black woollen trousers and waistcoat, the conspicuous silver buttons with a design showing a three masted schooner under full sail, his glossy shoes, glossy belt, and his rapier.

  ‘This was no common robbery, and has not been made to look so,’ Hooke observed.

  ‘He is without his notebook, Mr. Hooke,’ Harry informed him.

  ‘I never saw him without it. It may have been taken.’

  ‘Or it fell into the Thames from his spot upon the wheel.’

  Hooke made a non-committal sound, and swabbed the river water from Sir Edmund’s face with his handkerchief. He studied the dark and mottled skin.

  ‘Does he rot?’ Noble Fisher asked.

  ‘These are not the signs of putrefaction,’ Hooke answered him. ‘Sir Edmund was a lean man. Putrefaction takes time in such men to show.’ He looked at the dark ring of bruised flesh around Sir Edmund’s neck. ‘He was brought here after death.’

  ‘Captain Huff was not stuck in the wheel to kill him?’ Fisher’s rough hands rubbed together with a grim satisfaction.

  ‘The Coroner’s Office will say the same. He was hit about the ear, and his neck was pressed. An autopsy must be performed before we know the fullness of it. Will you turn him?’

  Harry and Fisher lifted Sir Edmund onto his front, and pulled off the coat and shirt to reveal his back. Hooke indicated the pattern of lividity, where the blood had settled. ‘You see the shoulders are pale where he pressed on them? When he died – or shortly after – he faced upwards.’

  They waited, with the clamour from the crowd outside and the force of the Thames shaking the tannery, until at length the guard arrived from the Tower. One of the soldiers gave a half-salute to Hooke, unsure whether the philosopher was of sufficient social standing for the full gesture.

  ‘The King will see you at Gresham’s College, Mr. Hooke. You are to study the body there, with him.’

  ‘It looks like you are to be Coroner, Mr. Hooke!’ Noble Fisher told him.

  Hooke’s face showed no enthusiasm for the role.

  Observation XXXIV

  Of Anatomizing

  ‘Harry, why should you climb out onto the wheel? The recovery of the body was straightforward. Why did you follow the Constable? I am exasperated!’

  The two men sat in the drawing room at Gresham’s College. Hooke wrote in his diary, playing with a sequence of letters while he talked. Wrapped in layers of Hooke’s blankets, Harry looked like a pupa ready to hatch. The fire had been kindled as fully as the little grate would allow, and Mary busied around him, providing cordials and brews.

  At last, his shivering had stopped.

  Hooke pointed his pen. ‘You expose yourself to danger, despite my wishes and against good sense. Wandering across the Morice pump, ignoring the threat of being swept away into the Thames? From where do you find such disregard for self-preservation? It is not from me, I avow. I instructed you to leave off Sir Edmund’s search, yet you persisted. Do you wish not to see old age?’

  ‘In truth, Mr. Hooke, events push themselves upon me.’

  ‘Nonsense!’ Hooke looked angrily at him. ‘You choose to bring them on yourself. And you have lost your boots!’

  Harry took a bowl of steaming liquid from Grace, who gave him a look of, could it be, admiration? Hooke’s chiding continued, but Harry thought only of this look from her. Not only admiration, he decided. A look more of complicity. She had often faced such lectures from her uncle.

  The crowd had waited, no less curious after the delay, for them to re-emerge from the tanning shop. There had been more calls of ‘Papists!’ Never a single Papist, Harry thought, as they picked their way over Cornhill to Gresham’s. He had walked beside the dray, trying to promote the movement of blood in his legs and feet. The soldiers, brought from the garrison at the Tower, authorised by the Board of Ordnance, had made their weapons conspicuous, showing the business ends of their pikes to the more fervent of the crowd. The soldiers accompanied them to the College, and some still stood outside, their pikes impaling the sky, guarding the entrances to the quadrangle.

  Up Bishopsgate Street a procession had formed, and a tense atmosphere overtook them all. The mood turned ugly against such Romish outrages in their City. It had been a relief to be back in Hooke’s rooms. After an hour or so, the noise had abated, and the crowd finally melted away back into London, after the entertainment of the dead man’s recovery.

  They had no clue that it was the Justice of Peace for Westminster, Sir Edmund Bury Godfrey, who had been jammed into the Morice waterwheel, even when he had been unloaded from the dray and wheeled into Gresham on a handcart by some troopers.

  ‘You are a fool, Harry!’ Hooke banged down his cup. ‘No man’s life is worth more than another’s, but I would be very sorry to see you lose yours.’

  ‘A man’s life may well be worth more than another’s, depending upon what he knows.’

  Hooke looked sharply at him, but before he could reply Tom interrupted them.

  ‘Mr. Hooke!’ he cried. ‘The King arrives!’

  ‘Thank you, Tom. We will be there presently.’

  Hooke put down his pen. He had rearranged the letters of Sir Edmund Bury Godfrey’s name: I fynd murder’d by rogues.

  *

  The King, his expression severe, came into the College in a plain sprung carriage, drawn by two equally nondescript horses. Only Sir Jonas Moore was with him. Hooke and Harry took them through Hooke’s rooms into the College. Harry limped along silently in a borrowed pair of Hooke’s stockings, Hooke’s shoes being too large to wear, and Tom’s too small. Going past the repository along a corridor with casements overlooking the quadrangle, they could see the guards patrolling Gresham’s.

  The cellar room housing the Air-pump was dedicated to one purpose; the room they entered was similarly focused. One centrally placed object dictated its use: a black marble slab, sloped on two hefty trestles. Grooves chased into the marble’s top followed its perimeter, angled to a wooden sink, for the blood draining from them.

  Instruments were stored on the walls, racked ready to hand. Dismembering knives and saws, incision shears, razors, scissors, lancets, extractors and probes lined up next to one another. A large chisel and mallet, a pair of stork’s bills and a set of strainers were placed by a large polished brass basin, along with various sizes of sponge and a blood porringer.

  Sir Edmund waited on the handcart. An unbleached calico cloth covered him, apart from his feet, hanging stiffly over the cart’s end. Harry thought of callous Procrustes and his bed, his victims shortened or lengthened to fit its length.

  The King signalled that he was ready for the anatomising to commence.

  Hooke put on a simple le
ather apron, and passed another to Harry.

  Harry pulled away the cloth, embraced Sir Edmund, and then lifted him roughly from the cart. Their faces touched; Harry’s living warmth automatically jerked away from the coldness of the dead flesh, like the repulsion of two lodestones. He laid the body onto the marble. His strong movements surprised the King and Sir Jonas, for the Justice was far broader and taller than this assistant’s slight frame. Harry removed and carefully folded the expensive coat and suit, struggling with the obstinate rigidity of the man.

  ‘He is inflexible,’ the King remarked. ‘As he was in life.’

  Hooke answered him. ‘It is not only rigor mortis. Do you see this all-over redness of him? I believe he was exposed to heat, which rigidifies him.’

  The King lifted a quizzical eyebrow. ‘A trial by fire and water, hmm? A Catholic conspiracy is assumed by most; I did not believe it. Titus Oates came to me, this morning, with another, a strange cricket of a man, and told of the plot against me. I am to be brought down with a silver bullet! The wound does not heal, apparently. The news of Sir Edmund’s death will feed the frenzy.’ He looked at Sir Jonas. ‘This is a ticklish thing.’

  Sir Edmund’s flannel shirt was already removed after their cursory examination in the tanning shop. Harry finished undressing him, and put all of the clothes and the shoes into an oilskin bag.

  They noted the contusion on the left ear, and the line around the neck, and redness of the flesh as though Sir Edmund had just emerged from a deep hot bath.

  They inspected more closely the marks of the Morice waterwheel, where his chest had been crushed into the mechanism.

  ‘Turn him, Harry,’ Hooke instructed.

  Harry turned the body onto its front, and a darker hue presented itself; blood drawn by gravity to the lowest parts of the body. This lividity clearly showed that the Justice had lain on his back immediately after his death. Pale patches on his shoulders and buttocks showed where his weight had compressed the flesh against the ground, and forced the blood from the vessels.