The Bloodless Boy

by Robert J. Lloyd

  He had also deciphered his copy of the letter delivered to Robert Hooke.

  Dr. Robert Hooke, this 23rd day of December 1677

  Sir: My guiding principle was discovery. I directed my time on God’s earth towards worldly concerns, with a singular interpretation of usefulness.

  I worked as chymist, operator, mechanic, natural philosopher; call them what you will. I studied physic, anatomy, geometry, astronomy, navigation, horology, astrology, statics, magnetizm, chymistry, alchemical and natural experiments, and knew them each and all more completely than most who profess themselves virtuosi.

  For the last year my employments, taking me away from my usual course, have stayed me upon one main stream, and so I have not wandered to follow mazy tributaries. I have uncovered much, whose foundations lie on excellent, diverse, substantial and noble experiments. I have worked secretly, without recourse to Intelligence or Society. I leave with you the flesh of these findings. You will ascertain quickly enough the reason for my secrecy and avoidance of the Club.

  God has made this great machine and placed us within a most inconsiderable part of it, and allowed us to survey his Creation through reflections of a glass, darkly; our limited senses and capacities. I presumed to penetrate the depths of Nature, to polish the glass, and to understand the whole constitution of the Universe.

  I leave my Observations with you. You are able to decide how my work shall best be used.

  Thomas Whitcombe,

  Natural Philosopher

  Who is – or was – this Thomas Whitcombe, making such claims for himself?

  I have incurred the anger of Heaven. Was he the murderer of the boys, and the taker of their blood?

  He may build upon my findings, however these were obtained. Would Hooke know of the name Thomas Whitcombe? He could not recall mention of it, although Hooke knew half of London.

  Looking across at the Bethlehem hospital, Harry wondered whether these letters merely showed the ravings of a lunatic. No one could have worked secretly, and alone, upon so many areas of knowledge, and known them each and all more completely than most who profess themselves virtuosi. Such a skilled experimentalist would have had to communicate with other natural philosophers, to share ideas, otherwise he would merely repeat the same trials and mistakes of others.

  Thomas Whitcombe’s grand claims could not be true.

  But the package, using the same Civil War cipher and in the same meticulous handwriting as the enciphered letter to Mr. Hooke, had been found with Henry Oldenburg. Perhaps Whitcombe had not needed to attend meetings, or correspond with other natural philosophers, if Oldenburg had sent him copies of the experiments in his correspondences, as well as those published in the Society’s Philosophical Transactions.

  Harry dressed, and placed the deciphered letters in the pocket inside his coat.

  He must take them to Mr. Hooke. And he must tell him of the murder of Enoch Wolfe.

  Pulling his boots on, he was still troubled by their return.

  They had discussed whether the boy had been preserved in glass, to allow for observation. Harry had been dogged by feelings of being observed, as if he were in a similar receiver.

  But by whom?

  He went out of his room, and Mrs. Hannam caught him at the bottom of the stairs, having just returned from the Green Yard white market. Her hair was wet from the rain, and it hung unflatteringly against her head. She clutched a chicken, which drooped forlornly, its neck reminding him of Sir Edmund’s on the wheel. He grasped the rail to steady himself, suddenly feeling light-headed.

  ‘You look pale, Mr. Hunt,’ she said. ‘Should you venture out? The weather is too cold, and this drizzle brings a melancholy with it.’

  ‘I must go to the College. I have pressing business there.’

  ‘I hope you are not short of time, for everywhere there are soldiers, and they stop everyone. I was questioned twice – a fine thought, me and my chicken Jesuitical assassins!’

  ‘Because of the rumours of a plan against the King’s life,’ Harry reasoned.

  ‘And more. A dead man was recovered from the waterwheels under the Bridge, and there is talk that he was the Justice of Peace, Sir Edmund. The last to see him heard him muttering of the Catholic plot. I pray that he is safe, for he is one who protects us.’

  Before Harry could think of the best response for her, some safe and reassuring remark, there was a booming knock at the door.

  Observation XXXVII

  Of the Wartime

  Harry stopped Mrs. Hannam, holding her by the shoulder, a contact between them that made her eyes widen with surprise.

  It was certainly not Tom’s knock, and the circle of Mrs. Hannam’s friends would not bash at the door in such a forceful manner. In more serene times Harry would not think twice about going to answer it. After seeing the murder of Enoch Wolfe by a monster, and then recover Sir Edmund – the best man to catch Wolfe’s murderer – from a wheel of the Morice waterworks, Harry had become far more wary.

  He stepped down into the narrow hallway, and placed himself in front of Mrs. Hannam.

  The knock came again, even louder.

  ‘Mr. Hunt! Are you in there?’

  Harry recognised the voice.

  He hurried to the door before the old soldier could launch another assault on it.

  Coming in, Colonel Fields clasped Harry firmly by the hand. He was unshaven, a beard beginning to extrude into the world, a stubble of hair surrounding his head, the top left bald and shiny.

  ‘It is good to see you once more.’ Fields followed Harry into the hallway, filling its width. ‘You have your boots! I wondered if the soldiers at Gresham’s College might have off with them.’

  ‘It was you who returned them, Colonel?’

  ‘I watched your endeavours upon the Morice waterwheel, to take the body from it.’

  ‘I am obliged.’ Harry ignored Mrs. Hannam’s incredulous expression, and her sudden letting-go of the chicken.

  ‘I did not call upon you then, as there were a great many soldiers about,’ the Colonel said. ‘Whose was the body you found? And who came to look at him at the College?’

  ‘Mrs. Hannam,’ Harry said. ‘This is Colonel Michael Fields. May I speak with him here?’

  ‘Of course.’ Her voice was tremulous with the news that Harry was the man who had climbed out onto the wheel. ‘Talk away!’ She then caught his meaning, and moved to the door of her parlour, and urged them in. ‘Are you hungry, Colonel, and Mr. Hunt? I shall search out what food there is.’

  ‘When a man does not know where his next meal is, he is always hungry, Mrs, Hannam,’ the Colonel replied gratefully.

  Mrs. Hannam found herself curtsying to him, before she could correct herself. Feeling a warm flush over her face, she fled off to the kitchen.

  Fields watched after her. ‘A handsome woman, Mr. Hunt!’ The soldier had a way of stating things that if you disagreed you would think twice before speaking up. ‘Is she a widow?’

  ‘Her husband is in a debtor’s gaol.’

  ‘Ah . . . life owns a way of disappointing most, does it not?’

  Harry waited until she was out of earshot. ‘Colonel, we know not who the dead man is, and I cannot divulge who came to Gresham’s.’

  ‘The King came to Gresham’s College. With Sir Jonas Moore. I shall answer that question for you, as I respect your duty to stay quiet on the matter. I imagine also that the man’s identity is known, but I shall not insist upon an answer, for we are friends. I have my suspicions. The Justice of Peace, Sir Edmund Bury Godfrey, for example, is a good candidate for the man upon the wheel.’ He inspected Harry. ‘I see that you have a card-playing face. It is no matter. I am here for quite another reason. We last met in Whitechapel, and discussed the wartime cipher. Have you advanced at all in its revelation?’

  Fields would be a powerful ally. As for what kind of enemy he would make, this old soldier turned preacher, it was difficult to decide. Fields certainly had more that he could say upon the u
se of the Red Cipher by Thomas Whitcombe.

  Harry made his choice.

  ‘I have.’

  ‘You found its key?’

  ‘Yes. The word was CORPUS.’

  Fields looked immensely satisfied.

  Harry took out his papers from his coat, resisting the urge to produce them with a flourish. ‘These are two letters from a man calling himself Thomas Whitcombe. He may be a boastful man, or else he may be the greatest natural philosopher who ever lived.’

  The Colonel clapped his hands, the sound alarming in the small room they were in. ‘With Thomas Whitcombe,’ he said, ‘there will be an aspect of both.’

  ‘You know him, as another user of the Red Cipher.’

  Fields nodded. ‘As well as your boots, I have another gift for you. I have kept it for many years, as a memento. It shall live a more useful life with you, I think.’

  He produced a small cloth bag with a drawstring round its neck, and took out what looked to Harry like a flat plate.

  ‘It is a cipher disk, the one I used when a soldier.’

  Made of brass, it was in fact three disks, one fitting inside the other; on two were the letters of the alphabet, and on the third were numbers. By turning the disks the two alphabets and the numbers could be made to align, or be shifted by any number of steps, until it returned to the starting position.

  ‘It is easy to use, and easy to carry, sturdy and simple in its construction. A perfect instrument for the field!’ Seeing Harry’s reluctance to take it, Fields insisted.

  ‘Take it! And I shall tell you more of Thomas Whitcombe.’

  Observation XXXVIII

  Of a Blood-Covenant

  They sat in the simply furnished parlour, each with beer and some cowslip tart.

  ‘So! You have many questions, Mr. Hunt,’ the old soldier stated, as he finished reading the letters.

  Harry found Fields’s bluff manner entirely trustworthy. The promise to Sir Edmund not to speak of the boys seeming no longer binding, he had passed the letters over.

  ‘The first being: what do you know of Thomas Whitcombe?’ Harry said.

  Fields stood to take off his coat, which he folded and placed on the small oval table in front of him. ‘Thomas served under me. In the Wars that split this nation apart. I told you before, when you came to me in Whitechapel, that I did not know the Solicitor, Moses Creed.’ Fields rolled up his shirtsleeve, revealing a still-powerful forearm, and indicated for Harry to come closer. ‘However, I did know of him, having met him as a child. I knew his father very well. We, Reuben Creed, Thomas Whitcombe, and I, all of us three, were for a time inseparable.’ Fields turned his arm, revealing to Harry his scar, a whorl of colourless skin. ‘We even made a blood-covenant with one another.’

  ‘Done with a pipe, Colonel?’

  ‘A quill, I think. It was quickly done, in a tent by Lostwithiel, in Cornwall. A juvenile enthusiasm, perhaps, but indicative of our bond. Thomas Whitcombe supplied the method. He was a field chirurgeon, his skills unsurpassed.’

  Fields lowered his arm, and replaced the sleeve. ‘Reuben was a glove-maker before he was a soldier, and so became useful to Thomas, in the stitching of men together. I told you of the last battle, at Worcester. Before that encounter, there had been ten years of wars.’

  The Colonel sat down again, very upright; his mind, back in the wars, allowing his body some of his younger self’s vigour and bearing.

  ‘I was with the London Trained Bands. These London regiments became a stout and trustworthy force, often called upon when Parliament had need, ’though they never liked to stray too far from home.’

  ‘And was Thomas Whitcombe with you?’ Harry asked. ‘And Reuben Creed?’

  The Colonel looked at him kindly. ‘No, no. Not yet. I did not meet with Reuben until I fought at Edgehill, near Banbury, by the side of the Roman Fosse Way. We faced a charge from their horse. It was the Prince Rupert who laid into us. My company, in amongst it, drew back . . .’

  Fields looked uncomfortable, and Harry suspected that his talk of ‘drawing back’ hid the true situation: that of a frightened mass of men spinning away from the oncoming horses, fleeing from the shaking of the earth.

  ‘Reuben moved through our men, pacifying them with his calmness, so very contrastingly with the majority. This is how he first came to my notice. The matter went to push of pike. The King’s standard bearer was killed, and the Royal standard captured.’

  ‘I have heard of this, Colonel,’ Harry said. ‘It was Sir Edmund Verney who held the standard; his dead hand had to be cut from it, so resolute was he.’

  Fields raised his cup above his head. ‘History from above, and history from below.’ He brought the cup back down, spilling some of his beer. ‘It has the air of myth about it. It is difficult to follow what happens on a battlefield; it is such a busy place.

  ‘After, now firm friends with Reuben, we faced the Royalists at Chelsea Fields. It was a stand-off, nothing more, but it gave us great heart. We spent the winter fortifying London. Men, women, and children worked to build up the Lines of Communication, the walls and sconces, and to dig the great ditch. Even on Sundays they worked! Eleven miles of fortifications ringed the City; the earth wall eighteen feet high.’

  He took a great bite of his tart, and then washed it down with half of his beer, and sighed his satisfaction. ‘Then, we went to relieve Gloucester, besieged by the Royalists. I was by now a Captain. Reuben was loath to leave his wife, and his new son Moses, both of whom he loved greatly, but what choice had he?’

  Harry assumed the question to be rhetorical, and quietly compared this story with his own little life, one untouched by such turbulence.

  ‘I cannot impart how cruel those times were. Conflicts, seemingly endless. Both sides feinting different directions, like a fairground pugilist showing one fist only to hit with the other. I lost many of my friends. To see the corpses of men, who just before had been animate and brave, can only be thought repugnant. To have a man burst in front of you makes you wonder about the nature of Creation itself.’

  Fields very deliberately looked at Harry, to see precisely what affect his words had.

  ‘At Alton we fought the Royalists, using the icy roads at the time of a night-frost to move quickly, and we surprised them in the town. Rueben led the way into the church there, and threw grenadoes in to kill the Royalist commander. I spent the following spring in London, recuperating from a wound.’

  Fields ran a finger along the scar running over the back of his head.

  ‘A combination of a musket ball and the chirurgeon’s efforts to remove it. Which did more damage is a moot matter, but I am pleased to inform you that I am still alive!’

  Harry smiled nauseously at the old man’s joking of a ball fired into his skull.

  ‘Do not look so pasty-faced on my account, Mr. Hunt; I was fainted away from the chirurgeon’s cutting, and remember not a thing of it.’ He raised Harry’s deciphered papers. ‘That was the first time that I met the author of these letters, for it was Thomas Whitcombe who cared for me, stitched me up, and healed me.’

  The old Colonel opened his mouth wide, pulling at his lips with his fingers, and presented his front teeth, slightly shorter than their companions, tapping at them hard. ‘I lost mine when hitting the ground from the ball. It was Thomas who found suitable replacements, taken from a dead man there upon the field. The roots took hold, and they remain to this day as firm as any of their companions.’

  Fields searched for his tobacco in a battered leather-covered box, an old cartridge box, hung from his belt. He spent some time pushing the tobacco into his pipe, looking at it doubtfully, as it was damp from the rain.

  After a couple of fruitless tries at ignition, he continued. ‘We then went to relieve Plymouth. After being defeated there, we were set upon by Royalists, beaten and robbed, and stripped of our clothes, which in the rainy weather was a cruel treatment. I was sadly diminished in body and spirit, and endured a fever lasting some two months. A
gain, Thomas cared for me, and brought me through. Reuben started to help him, preferring the work, and his skills with sewing were prodigious. It was around this time that we three became brothers-in-blood – as I have said, and shown you the scar.’

  The Colonel sucked stoically at the pipe, still trying to get the tobacco to catch. ‘The next occasion I saw battle was at Naseby, a great victory for us, but our Sergeant Major General, Sir Philip Skippon, was wounded. A ball passed through him, yet he fought on, clutching his saddle and white in the face. It was Thomas who plugged the hole in his side, with Reuben assisting him.

  ‘By the following year Charles gave up Oxford, and we had taken Bristol from Prince Rupert. The other Royalist strongholds were quick to follow into our hands; Basing House, at long last, Dartmouth, Torrington, Chester, and we then won a battle at Stow-on-the-Wold. Exeter and Newark surrendered, and the first War was over.’

  He waved the pipe in the air, in celebration of the memory.

  *

  ‘We returned then to London. Us three, and Reuben’s wife Abigail – Moses Creed’s mother, therefore – became interested in those calling themselves the Levellers. We followed John Lilburne, who was a Lieutenant-Colonel in our army, and also a man called William Walwyn. Their speeches moved our hearts. I felt as though my eyes were unpeeled of a misty covering, which had before obscured the world from me, from seeing it in its right relations.

  ‘Now at this time the King was captured, but soon escaped, fleeing to the Isle of Wight, where he made promise to the Scots that if they helped him he would make theirs the English religion, and that he would suppress any who dissented.’

  ‘Mr. Hooke has told me of the King’s time on the Isle of Wight, where he stayed at Carisbrooke castle. He was then a boy, and his father met with the King there.’

  ‘Mr. Hooke was then a boy . . . how time races along, for to me it seems freshly as yesterday. Yet I find myself to be an old man. Time is given out to us in mean and miserly portions!’

  The tobacco still refused to light, and with the constant trying to coax it to life Fields broke the tube of his pipe, the clay snapping in his grasp. He threw it into the fire in disgust.