They followed the line of a flint wall, which reflected the lights from its edges. Fields guided them to an iron gate halfway along it, where a barrel of whale oil burned brightly, extending tongues of flame as tall as a man. Here the lights converged, as the people funnelled through the gateway into a large courtyard.
From inside Harry could hear the noise of a crowd, packed closely in, but it was the noise of hundreds of people speaking calmly to one another, rather than shouting or jostling. A man stood at the gate, greeting Fields with a firm grasp of his hand.
The place they entered was built on a square, and the arrangement of its buildings, looking like run-down outhouses leaning together, gave it the feel of a farmyard. They were grateful for the warmth from all these bodies pressed together. Hanging lamps and torches sent scoops of light across the sea of heads. Everyone looked towards a makeshift stage, with a canvas roof and a single chair at its centre.
Most of these heads were grey-haired, elderly, at least fifty years old, and Harry felt out of place, and slightly foolish. He wondered if Creed felt the same, for the other man, although fifteen or so years older than him, was similarly outlandish. Nobody showed them any suspicion, though. In fact, he was conscious of nothing more than an immense goodwill shared throughout the crowd. A calm murmur spread through them, with no one voice taking precedence. Some had brought food, and shared it out. If one had brought bread and a neighbour had meat, they combined; and a third offered beer. Others had blankets with them, and these too were shared, and draped over the shoulders of the watchers. Despite the proximity of bodies there was no pushing, even as more people flowed in through the gate. Some sat on chairs brought with them, at no risk of being shoved aside.
The three men stood towards the back of the crowd, but the slope of the ground meant that they could easily see across all of the grey heads to the stage. Harry felt the growing expectancy amongst them all, as the various conversations around him died down. He saw Fields and Creed beside him hold the same expression as everyone else; rapt concentration, anxious to witness the precise moment that they all gathered and waited for.
He could not see why, for nothing seemed to have changed, and nobody mounted the stage, but there was suddenly the creak of ageing limbs as everyone craned for a better view. It was like the turning of a school of fish; it was done before realisation that the moment had come.
Then, onto the stage, accompanied by an elderly woman, shuffled an even more elderly man. He used a stick to support himself; the woman held him by the other arm.
The air thinned as the crowd inhaled a collective breath.
‘It is, isn’t it?’ A woman just in front of them asked her companion.
‘It is.’
Harry recognised the old couple; he remembered them from Alsatia. The old man’s tremors, that he had seen when seeking Enoch Wolfe at the Angel, were quite gone.
Harry looked across at Colonel Fields, whose eyes were moist with emotion. On the stage, a man as old as the century, who had seen the last Tudor and three of the Stuarts, pulled himself straight to look at them all.
It was William Walwyn, the Leveller.
He gave the crowd a shy smile, his lips twitching with his pleasure at being welcomed by so many; a spontaneous outburst of clapping greeted him back. The first impression of decrepitude as Walwyn had come up onto the stage disappeared.
The clapping finally receded, the strange logic of a crowd dictating its length.
They craned forwards to catch the speaker’s words. Walwyn did not welcome them, but delivered straight away his message to them.
‘I am sure there was no man born marked of God above another,’ he began, his voice unwavering and clear, cutting through the night. ‘For none comes into the world with a saddle on his back, neither any booted and spurred to ride him.’
The crowd acknowledged the creed of the Levellers, and again Walwyn waited until their applause died down. Fields, like many standing with him, openly let the tears fall, down his face and onto his old soldier’s coat. This is what he had fought for, for all those years. This, for him, was the way, the truth, and the light.
It was listening to Walwyn more than thirty years ago that had led him to challenge all of his deepest-held beliefs, beliefs soaked up unthinkingly from his parents and peers, beliefs concerning government, property, the Church and clergy, of the way that he conducted himself amongst his fellows. Walwyn spoke of communism, of establishing equality between men and women, of a universal toleration between the sects and religions. Whatever is erroneous, he said, will in time whither and perish.
Walwyn even refused to condemn the Catholics, saying that they should keep their alters, priests, and their Pope, as long as they were loyal to their sovereign, and lived quietly together amongst those who preferred other forms of worship.
Fields remembered his reaction when he had first heard the Leveller’s words. The shock of hearing such a militant tolerance had given way to the excitement of a profound realisation: the striving to be a good and compassionate man had little to do with ceremony. A Hindoo or a Musselman had a clear idea of their place within the world; and who was Michael Fields to disparage them?
William Walwyn spoke again.
‘Love is the balsam that often and well rubbed in may cure your gangrene, and though at first your distemper may cause you to loathe it, yet take a little and a little of it, use inwardly and outwardly, constantly, and you will find your disposition to alter, until you become a strong and healthful Christian.’
Harry, although he listened to the sermons at his Anglican church, comprehended that he believed in nothing. Nothing he took to be true had been hard-won. He had been content to unthinkingly assume a customary religion. He was no better, no different, to a superstitious man of the woods worshipping Jack-in-the-Green.
Most people were drawn into their religion by custom. It was far easier not to resist this pressure, ever running with the stream, following the fashion of belief. Within this elderly multitude quietly listening, eagerly accepting the message of Walwyn’s words, he was surrounded by so many who could not simply follow the religion of the times, but instead sought the true word of God.
Harry could see the Solicitor Moses Creed watching the old Leveller, spellbound, his hand to his mouth, his eyes wet too. This man on the stage – old now but his spirit still burning brightly, his righteous anger still channelled to the cause of his fellows – was the man Moses Creed’s father Reuben had believed in.
This was why Fields had brought the Solicitor here. For him to know his own father.
‘Look about you!’ Walwyn’s voice became louder, more forceful, and the crowd swayed forwards, towards his message, as if pulled closer in by the force of his words.
Walwyn paused. His silence made the crowd breathless, as if high on a mountaintop where the air was scarce. They willed him to continue.
When he did, there was a collective sigh.
‘We have many, now-a-days, who are doubly unjust and think not of it. They are favourable in examining themselves, and severe towards others. They ought to be severe towards themselves, and favourable towards others! It is a fault not easily mended. It requires a greater power of religion to do it than most have yet attained. Either renounce the name, or let your practice demonstrate that you are a Christian!’
Again, a crackle of applause from the crowd. He did not need to pull them away from their own beliefs; he was too subtle a man to try. He only described what they knew to be true, what they saw every day.
‘He who is glad of his neighbour’s defamation would not be sorry at his ruin. A slanderer would be a murderer but for fear of retribution. Therefore, every honest and virtuous man should shun a slanderer, as he would shun a serpent.’
How far they had failed. Their responsibility was not to any authority, but to themselves and one another.
It was a bright light that he shone upon them.
Harry heard clearly why Fields was so in thrall to this m
an, and why the Colonel had asked him to come with them. It was as if by the clarity of his words, expressed with a freedom from zeal, Walwyn unleashed the powers of Nature to entice everyone there.
‘More of the deeds of Christians, and fewer of the arguments, would do a great deal more good. If I have all faith and have not love, I am as sounding brass, or as a tinkling cymbal. If faith works, it works by love. Let us all therefore walk in love, even as Christ loved, and gave himself as an offering and a sacrifice for us.’
Colonel Fields had brought Harry here so that he could understand more of the Levellers, and the beliefs that sustained them, Michael Fields, Thomas Whitcombe, and Reuben Creed, through the horrors of the Civil Wars.
The smell of sugar in the air, from the warehouses that stretched down almost to the Tower, reminded him of Whitcombe’s being taken as a slave to the Barbadoes, on the Earl of Shaftesbury’s plantations. How had he made his return, and become such a skilled natural philosopher and experimentalist? His letters spoke of his employments – employments by whom?
Whitcombe wrote of two lights, the light of Nature and the light of God. Why had he felt the need to write a last confession to Sir Edmund? To atone to him? What spiritual hold could Sir Edmund have held over him? Had he betrayed the Justice in some way, perhaps after the battle of Worcester?
Why, if he had been in London, had he never approached his old comrade, Colonel Fields? Was it shame that had prevented him?
The lamplight reflected from the tears on the Colonel’s cheeks. Moses Creed, standing on the other side of the Colonel, his eyes trained unwaveringly upon the image of William Walwyn on the stage, looked as though he had run for a distance, the breaths coming hard from his lungs as clouds of vapour.
As for Harry, though, Walwyn’s words did not touch him.
The voice spoke to him again: What hope have you? You have no faith and no love. You are not even a tinkling cymbal.
Observation XXXXII
Of Sickness
Robert Hooke’s nose dripped in the cold. The ground was frosty, making his journey precarious. Wishing he had not loaned his lamp to Harry, as he slipped again, he called upon Dr. Diodati at his house on Puddle Dock Hill.
Hooke’s various ailments had forged a relationship profitable to both – pecuniary for the physician, remedial for the natural philosopher. Like steel wine, Diodati was an acquired taste, but no less restorative. Hooke admired the economy of Diodati’s means of expression, and doodled ideas of universal languages based upon it. He knew that others were not so taken, and that the lack of a soothing bedside manner would never bring the most fashionable to Diodati’s door.
Despite the lateness of the hour Diodati agreed to return with him, and once they were back at his rooms in Gresham’s College Hooke led him up to the servant’s bedroom.
Tom lay with his face pressed to the pillow, his hands clenched over his head.
‘The sickness moves quickly,’ Hooke told Diodati.
The doctor turned Tom, observing red eyes, a nose swollen and running, and a rash forming over the skin. He pulled the sheets up around Tom’s chin, and led Hooke out to the landing, beyond the boy’s hearing. Mary was there, pale and frightened.
‘Measles,’ Diodati told them.
‘Not the smallpox?’ Hooke asked him anxiously.
‘Measles.’
Hooke looked at Mary, his mouth a thin-lipped O, in his relief at the diagnosis.
‘Should we let blood?’
‘Four ounces, arm, boy being small.’ Diodati returned to Tom, who did not notice him and did not stir, as he produced a bowl and a lancet from his small bag. ‘Cloth.’
Hooke sent Mary, who sobbed gently with the relief that it was not the smallpox, as she had thought, ’though the measles was quite grave enough, poor lamb, to fetch some linen. When she returned, Diodati pressed the point of the lancet into Tom’s flesh, making him cry out pitifully; the cut brought a steady flow. By a skilled pinching of the wound the doctor directed the blood into the bowl. Tom lay still, not moving his arm away from the cutting.
‘Good, Tom, good,’ Hooke told him, stroking his forehead. ‘Brave child.’
With enough blood taken, Diodati made a compress with the cloth, and gently wiped Tom’s arm until the blood thickened at the cut.
‘Again, morning,’ he told Hooke.
When Diodati had gone, Hooke and Mary sat with Tom, whose raw and swollen throat prevented him from talking. Instead he made low animal-like sounds, deep from his belly. Hooke tried to soothe Mary, promising that if Dr. Diodati could not help then there was Dr. Gidley, also Dr. Whitchurch, and old Dr. King. There was also John Mapletoft, professor of Physic there at Gresham’s College. Any of these alone would be able to save Tom; all together they would certainly pull him through.
Observation XXXXIII
Of Falling Bodies
The pain in his ankle, cracked on the beams of the Morice waterwheel, troubled him most of all, especially after the duration of Walwyn’s speech. He walked stiffly, feeling all aches and sores, watching carefully for loose stones that could trip him. Sending its powerful beam into the darkness before him, the weight of Hooke’s lamp pulled at his arm, and Harry transferred it from one hand to the other.
The show of the constellations he had seen in Whitechapel was snatched away; clouds had returned over London, bringing a fine rain, freezing as it hit the ground, which made the way treacherous underfoot.
He welcomed the visibility that the lamp gave, but wished that it did not draw so much comment, and so many covetous looks. It might be taken from him – he could imagine Hooke’s displeasure should it be so. Away from the shared generosity of the Levellers, he was back to the incivility of the London night. He took off his spectacles and carefully folded them inside his pocket. There, he had his bunch of keys, and he held them inside the pocket, between his fingers, ready to pull them out. It was the nearest thing to defence that he had.
Through Aldgate, leaving Whitechapel, he decided to take the better-lit Leadenhall Street, rather than the darker and more menacing way by the Roman wall. He would go to Gresham’s; Hooke would undoubtedly still be up, as was his habit. Harry wanted to speak to him of the Observations, and of their author, Thomas Whitcombe.
He concentrated on the sound that his feet made on the pavement. He could hear the irregularity of his step caused by his limp, and he whiled away his journey by endeavouring to make the pattern of his strides more even, watching his feet land in the pool of light thrown ahead on the frost.
A ghost owl screeched behind him, from Saint Botolph’s churchyard.
By Africa House he heard another noise, at first faint and then getting louder, and it took him some time to realise that it was the sound of tramping feet. He saw a patrol further down the way, their pikes held upright, led by an enormous man dressed as a curate, whose features all crowded into the centre of his face. Harry slowed, anxious not to be noticed, and he watched them all assemble outside a house, one officer pounding on its door. It opened to loud complaints coming from the man inside.
Harry was shocked to see them ended by a hard cuff from one of the soldiers.
This astonishment, and the curious sight of a Church official leading soldiers, stayed with him for all of the length of Leadenhall Street, and until another sound reached him: the clatter of coach wheels on cobbles.
There was little to separate its sound from that of other coaches that went by – perhaps the number of horses – and yet he turned. By the light of a torch mounted high on a wall, he saw the same black coach-and-four that had taken the monster to Alsatia. It was driven by the pale-faced man in a goatskin coat.
Harry could not move. The coach gradually expanded in his vision, inflating like a sinister balloon, the horses pacing implacably towards him, their heads dipping and rising like mechanical hammers.
He needed the safety of Gresham’s College.
His muscles unlocked, and he edged backwards, away from the coach, hoping that
the driver had not seen him. He broke into a jog, trying to ignore the pain in his ankle and shins, but the slipperiness of the ground meant that he lost his footing, his leg shooting out sideways, painfully twisting his knee.
The clopping of the horses’ shoes increased in tempo, but he dared not look round to see whether the driver had urged them on. He had to find a turn too tight for the coach to follow, and hope that it passed on by. His heart pumped hard, and a rushing sound started in his ears, unhelpfully, making it more difficult to discern the progress of the coach-and-four.
He turned into Lyme Way, and found a dark narrow alley heading towards the markets. Behind him, the horses stopped. He went through into the fish market, and slowed, his breath steaming in the cold night. He stayed by an arched doorway through a wall, pressing against the door, which had sheets torn from a pamphlet pasted to it. The Saviour of the Nation, it said. No more sounds from the coach. He tried to convince himself that he had not been seen, that the driver had been only going about his business, but still he found himself waiting. His breathing returned to a more normal rate, but the sweat on his back had started to cool, making him shiver.
Harry persuaded himself to go on.
By the bare stalls of the hide market, he heard footsteps following behind. He swung the lamp around him, looking for their source, but could see no one there. The footsteps stopped as he did. He wondered whether to extinguish it – he knew the landmarks in the dark well enough – but the distance to Gresham’s was not so far. He moved on, more hurriedly, and the steps did not start up again.
In his mind Harry saw the face of Enoch Wolfe, at the moment that his neck was bitten away. Then he heard running, getting louder, coming towards him. His heart lurched, as if loose inside his chest. He turned, going instead towards the river, hurrying as fast as he could on his injured ankle and knee, wincing at each stride.
The Bloodless Boy Page 22
