Harry had gone to the Fleet and seen the prints of snowshoes, despite his personal promise to leave off the matter. Harry had disobeyed him by working on the cipher after being instructed to return it to the Justice, even making his own copy to do so. And now Sir Edmund was dead, left stuck upon the Morice waterwheel. Harry had gone to Alsatia to meet Enoch Wolfe. He had not yet said whether Wolfe was helpful to him.
By the time Hooke was back at his front door, after his slow walk across the quadrangle, the Curator’s question to himself had been answered, and the idea had become certainty. The injection was meant for Harry, administered instead mistakenly to Tom, when Harry so obliviously went ahead with his searching in Holborn, Whitechapel, or Lincoln’s Inn, or Alsatia, unmindful of the dreadful consequences of his pursuit.
‘Some strong waters, please, Mary,’ he said, weakly, once back inside. ‘Anything that we have. I am aghast.’
It should have been Harry, he was sure. To his great shame, Hooke caught himself momentarily wishing that it were.
Observation XXXXVI
Of a Proposal
‘Aires is dead. The Curator’s assistant has killed him.’
The pain from the silver pipe going into his side made Shaftesbury’s words over-emphatic, and his breath laboured.
‘You should have let me take him when I took Wolfe,’ Lefèvre said smoothly, giving no hint of his feelings. On the table in front of him was an array of armaments: pistols, swords, granadoes, vicious-looking knives of various lengths, and a spiked glove. He also had a steel contraption made to fit along the forearm, which had a long thin blade, more like a skewer, mounted on a powerful spring. More blades to fit the mechanism were stored in a leather sheath. He adjusted, cleaned, and oiled this apparatus as they talked.
‘Wolfe was the more pressing concern,’ Shaftesbury answered brusquely. ‘He wished to tell everything. And so we silenced him . . . but yes, Monsieur Lefèvre, now I lament that you did not.’
‘Most men would have left off, after seeing the demonstration.’ John Locke looked as pained as his master. He took no pleasure in such acts, although sometimes it was a proper means to an end. They had moved from a state of nature to a state of war. He observed Lefèvre reassembling a section of his weapon, and speculated upon whether the man took pleasure in carnage, or whether he committed such violence disinterestedly. Did such a man feel emotion by the same gauge as others? Such apparent calm could hide the most turbulent of spirits. ‘Aires found out, to his cost, that Henry Hunt is resilient to the direct approach.’
‘I shall do what Aires could not.’ Lefèvre directed his blank stare at the Earl, as if challenging him to give the order.
‘I know fully that you are able!’ Shaftesbury barked. ‘This is why we employ you, for your capabilities, and why we so amply pay you.’ He turned to his secretary. ‘John, is it time to unleash Monsieur Lefèvre at the assistant?’
‘We must find Thomas Whitcombe. And we must find his Observations. Without them we have no chance of our plan succeeding. We must also kill the King. Hunt threatens to unmask us.’
‘But I ask you, John: should we kill him?’
Locke leant forward, and placed his elbows on his knees, and clasped his hands together.
‘And I say to you: the King first. The assistant after.’
Observation XXXXVII
Of the Power of Prayer
Tom was now covered with blackened patches as if drawn over with charcoal. They washed the sweat from him, and brought boiling water for him to inhale its steam. All afternoon they saw to him, administering cawdles and broths, trying to cool the heat in him.
Hooke bled him again. Mary held his tongue, and Grace clutched his hand.
Tom’s mother, Hannah Gyles, Robert Hooke’s cousin, came to see her son; he did not seem to realise that she was there. She hummed songs softly to him, through the cloth that Hooke had given her to tie over her mouth, and she sang lullabies she had sung to him when he was an infant. Although afraid of the pustules that covered him, she held his hand and stroked his hair.
Later, as the evening came, she returned to feed the others of her family.
Tom bled from his nose and throat, but he sat up in bed, anxious to talk. They could not understand what he was trying to say, his throat so constricted that he could only form unintelligible sounds. The boy wept with frustration.
Hooke held him tightly, until he gradually calmed, and fell asleep. He laid him carefully back on his bed, tenderly pulling the sheets and blankets up over him.
After their meal, a sad supper of cold meats and potatoes, Harry arrived to see Tom, and the four of them went up to Tom’s bedchamber with more broth, fearfully opening the door. Harry kept his woolly cap on, to hide the lump on his head.
Tom’s candle was the only light for the room. It revealed the tops of the sheets around his chest, soaked and rimmed a deep red colour.
Tom opened his eyes, which oozed with blood, and gave a sketch of a smile to them through his pain. Hooke squeezed his hand for a while, telling him of his mother’s visit, and talking of Tom’s considerable help to him as his apprentice, their experiments together, promising to help Tom with his glider, when he was well again.
‘What happens to a body after it is dead?’ Tom said the words clearly, although his shivering made his voice tremble.
Mary clutched him to her. ‘Is this the miracle?’ she cried. ‘Tom, you will be well again!’
‘The soul is taken to the Kingdom of Heaven, which is the best of all places,’ Hooke replied to Tom’s question, his heart lifting.
‘It is not this cold in Heaven?’
‘It is as warm as you require. I do not believe there is anything in Heaven to cause you unhappiness. Mary, would you find him more covers.’
All the blankets in the house were already spread over Tom’s bed. Mary went and stripped the sheets from her own, and put these across him. Grace followed her example. ‘And mine also, Mary,’ Hooke instructed his housekeeper.
When the two women had gone, Hooke brought Harry closer to the boy. Harry stroked Tom’s hair, and tears filled his eyes, as if to protect him from too stark the sight of Tom Gyles so perilously ill.
When Grace and Mary returned, Tom, buried under the pile of sheets and blankets, managed some of the broth that Hooke gently spooned to him.
‘And I will see him in the best of all places?’ Tom became agitated, kicking at all the bedclothes. Harry clasped his hand.
‘Who, Tom? Who will you see?’
‘The boy in the cellar.’
His legs kicked out under the covers, as if swimming away from the thought of the preserved boy trapped in the Air-pump.
To calm him, Hooke talked of angels, telling Tom of the Archangel Michael; of the angel who told Abraham, as he prepared to kill Isaac his son, that his faith was shown and that his son would be spared; of Jacob’s dream of the ladder between Earth and Heaven, the angels standing upon it; of the angels who witnessed the birth of Adam. He told him of the seven angels who guarded God’s throne.
Little paroxysmal motions shook Tom’s body. Eventually, he settled himself to go to sleep. Hooke, Harry, Grace, and Mary continued their watch over him, still hoping for the miracle of his recovery.
They knelt by his bed, and held hands, praying as fervently as they ever had.
‘Our Father, who art in Heaven…’
Observation XXXXVIII
Of the Heart and Blood
The frame banged thunderously, the panes rattled, and the rollers under the sash cords complained with their habitual squeak.
The pages rustled, lifted by cold morning air from the open window.
Harry raised his spectacles to ease his nose. His forehead was aching, the bruise vehement purple and sickly yellow, lined with blues and greens, like veins in a decadent cheese. He sat in his room, at the little table, Thomas Whitcombe’s papers and his own covering its surface, spreading across the bed, and covering the floor.
The
window was open to keep him awake. Whitcombe’s long, repetitious Observations gradually revealed their meaning to him, as he worked painstakingly on, keeping to a relentless rhythm of deciphering – the reading aloud of the next number along the page, the clicking rotation of Colonel Fields’s brass cipher wheel, the noting of its position, the flexing of his knotted fingers, the necessary computation, the writing of the resultant letter. He ignored the aching of his neck and shoulders, and the way that the letters blurred in and out of focus, and he willed himself on despite the increasing frequency of his mistakes. Using the same letter from the keyword CORPUS twice in succession, or missing out letters from the cipher, throwing out the sequence of substitution, reducing the next few letters to gibberish, he had to find his way again, trace the source of his error.
It seemed an apt self-punishment, a form of penance, to continue with this task. It eased him, more selfishly, assuaging his battered conscience.
When Grace and Mary had gone to fetch blankets, Hooke had shown him the mark on Tom’s arm. He had pointed towards it silently, his lips pressed together, his silver eyes unwaveringly looking into his.
Hooke had not said another word to him.
Once more Harry picked up his pen, his hand shaking slightly, the tip of his finger concave where the pen pressed against it. All night he had been deciphering the pile of papers, Observations Philosophical. The first bundle he had chosen, Observations of The Light of Grace, had proved to be a long discussion, relying heavily on the works of Aristotle and of Thomas Aquinas, and including much Biblical quotation, especially of the Old Testament, as to whether without Grace man could know any truth at all, could wish or do good, or merit everlasting life. As Harry had used the brass cipher wheel, getting ever faster with its operation, he uncovered a preoccupation with sin and guilt, and a self-lacerating tone. As in the deciphered letters, the unhappiness of Thomas Whitcombe was evident.
Having laboured through this first pile of papers, Harry had ignored Observations of The Light of Nature, fearing even more of the same, as he also left Observations Concerning Experience, Astronomical Magic, Theological Cabala and Medicinal Alchemy.
Instead, he had chosen to study the pile of papers entitled Observations of the Body, which, in great detail and with less recourse to existing philosophies or self-pity, set out meticulous programmes of microscopical study and anatomical method applied to a whole chain of being, from the fine structure of a gnat’s wings to the hollowed bones of a bird’s skeleton, a detailed autopsy of a lion, and studies of human anatomy, male and female.
After musing briefly on where Whitcombe might have got a lion, Harry selected the largest of all the bundles, Observations of the Heart and Blood. A hundred or so sheets, it was these pages that rustled in the icy draught from the window. Observations Of Water, Observations Of Fire, Of Air, Of Breath, Of the Soul, Of Animals, Of Minerals, Of Vegetables, Of Homunculii, and the last, smaller bundle making up Observations Philosophical, Observations of Miscellaneous Species, all remained untouched, pushed under his bed, resting on the same rough canvas cloth that had wrapped them in Henry Oldenburg’s oak chest.
Observations of the Heart and Blood explained Whitcombe’s experimental trials endeavouring to understand the circulatory apparatus, and the blood and lymph flowing around it. The heart, the arteries, the veins, and the capillaries between them, were all studied and described in fatiguing detail. It showed the movement of the vital spirits in the blood away from the heart, to the lungs, and returning to the heart again. It followed the route of the blood nourishing a body, and cleaned in the kidney. It studied the work of the liver, and the effects to the body of damage upon it. The blood moving around the heart was explained. It showed the growth of new blood vessels, and how this stopped with age; unless the body was wounded, when it worked to repair itself.
It included an account of Thomas Whitcombe meeting with William Harvey during the Civil War, when Harvey had been physician to Charles I. They had met on a cold day, and discussed the blueness of their extremities, as the blood stagnated because of the chill. Distant from their hearts, the blood’s vitality was lost, demonstrating the crucial nature of the pumping action of the heart to provide heat to the blood. Without this continual motion, it would become congealed.
Harry uncovered Whitcombe’s trials of the dissection of living animals, opening their chests, revealing their hearts; moving, then resting, to move again. As the animals died, their hearts moved more slowly, a benefit to Whitcombe, more easily able to perceive their motions.
Toads, frogs, snakes, eels, fish, cats, dogs, pigs and wolves: nothing was spared from Whitcombe’s attentions. The heart of an eel beats without auricles, and if cut up the different pieces can be seen to pulse. Even if skinned and disembowelled, an eel can still move. Zoophytes such as the sea anemone have no heart at all, and their material and structure fascinated Whitcombe, as he sought to endow the human frame with this same ability, to do without a heart.
Observations of the Heart and Blood also clearly stated Thomas Whitcombe’s desire to comprehend the measureless difference between dead matter, and living; the mysterious processes and energies animating a body.
He imitated the heart’s structure with models, and reproduced its function with machines. Its pumping action was easily copied, but his attempts to use such a pump to enable a creature to live had ended in failure, as size was an insurmountable problem, unless kept outside the creature, necessarily attached to the machine. This tethering had been unacceptable, Whitcombe seeking a freely moving subject. At smaller sizes, the power of his pumps diminished, until too weak to propel blood around the body.
Whitcombe left his experimentation with mechanical pumps, and instead transplanted hearts from one animal to another, but these had all died, either during the chirurgy or immediately after. It was as if the recipient body was repulsed by its new organ, seeking to kill it off. He had dissected pigs, convinced that the similarity of a pig’s heart to a human heart would enable him to successfully keep a human alive, although he never attempted – at least in these Observations – to place a pig’s heart into a person.
Harry rubbed his head gingerly, exploring the damage to it. A patch of skin where his hair had been pulled was raw, and weeping moisture.
The letters squirmed on the page, stretching and compressing, collapsing in on themselves, to reinflate again. The lines of writing undulated, like observing the last rays of the sun through the evening atmosphere, as he had done in the Crown tavern when waiting for Robert Hooke.
Just a bit more, before he went down to find Mrs. Hannam, to see if she had anything for a late breakfast. He would have wished for bacon, until the reading of Whitcombe’s experiments. He opened the window a little wider, took a deep inhalation of icy London air, and then sat back on his chair, its joints flexing as they took his weight.
He started on the next page of numbers, to turn them into more of Whitcombe’s account of his studies into blood.
The paper, the cipher wheel, the pen . . .
The next part of Whitcombe’s Observations revealed itself laboriously, turning from numbers into Harry’s own careful lettering, a transformative alchemy. One by one, the letters accrued, forming yet further words, the meandering sentences having to be made sense of, and needing to be organised, as the Red Cipher allowed for no punctuation.
One by one – thirteen in all – he uncovered the next of Thomas Whitcombe’s experiments. All of these trials furthered the knowledge of blood; all sought the replacement of a defective heart. All required the use of human blood and the use of human children. Thirteen children, all boys, had been dissected, studied, transplanted, infused. Some had been stored in an Air-pump, kept so that more trials could be performed upon them. None of these boys had survived the procedures, and most, but not all, were dead before Thomas Whitcombe set to work upon them.
At last, aching, exhausted, Harry knew for certain.
He put the papers down, and to help him consider
his discoveries he absent-mindedly picked up a file, and rasped at some metal on his work table.
He knew why the boys found at the Fleet, at the Westbourne, and at Barking Creek, had been drained of their blood.
Observation XXXXIX
Of Expiration
The miracle did not happen; their prayers had not been answered.
At fourteen minutes after noon, with a muffled rattling sound in his throat, Tom died.
Mary removed all the stained blankets and sheets, and Grace folded Tom’s hands across his chest. One of his eyes stayed slightly open, from his last look at them, and Hooke squeezed it shut. Tom looked as if he still shivered from the cold, his features contorted and pinched. Hooke coaxed the muscles of his face, stroking them, massaging them softly until Tom’s expression relaxed.
Grace cried silently, her mouth pressed into her hands.
Great bellows of grief overwhelmed Mary.
Hooke hoped that his words of Heaven and angels had brought some comfort to Tom before he died.
He went down the stairs, sat at the table in his drawing room, and poured a glass of restorative steel wine.
That such vitality should have so completely disappeared, and that all of Tom’s noise should be so utterly silenced, placed Hooke into a numbed shock of misery. The pain of Tom’s death attacked him, filling his heart.
He sat, surrounded by all of his instruments, drawings, and models, and sobbed.
Observation L
Of Maternity
The following morning Robert Hooke went slowly by the brothels of Love Lane and into Silver Street. He went past the ruins of St. Olave, burned in the Great Conflagration, but did not spare it a glance. He had his umbrella, and the rain splashed from it in a jittering circle around him.
Everywhere there were soldiers, but none of them stopped him, either recognising the famous philosopher or realising that he was not to be bothered.
The Bloodless Boy Page 24
