The Bloodless Boy

by Robert J. Lloyd

  He was there to acquaint Hannah Gyles of the arrangements he had made. He summoned the strength from somewhere to complete his mission, but he was so weary. Everything in him felt heavy.

  He had put everything in order for the funeral, to be held that evening, and then he had met with the Society Council at the College repository. There they had confirmed Viscount Brouncker’s message. The overwhelming motion of the council had been to accept him as Secretary pro tempore after Henry Oldenburg’s death, and for him to write the Journals, as yet without payment. There had been several assurances that the position would become fully ratified, and that his campaigning would soon be properly rewarded.

  What had meant so much to him only days ago now seemed entirely trivial.

  A crowd of children played outside the door as he approached, and he waded through them. They stared at his long, wet nose and his hunched back, and his eyes that had been crying.

  Hannah stood awkwardly in her kitchen. He wished that he could show more affection to her, hug her to him, but instead for a difficult moment they stood apart, both frozen by their separate griefs.

  Tom had been one of many, yet his mother collapsed in her sorrow, her knees giving way from under her. Now Hooke could move forward to her, and they held one another without any thoughts of self-consciousness, and they were, for a short time, unaware that anything existed outside this small dark room with its rickety chairs, its bitter-smelling smoke from a fire made of willow logs, and the only thing of value a small silver candle branch.

  Observation LI

  Of the Air-Pump

  ‘Come and stand by the fire-place, Harry, and warm yourself.’ Mary listlessly stirred the coals, sending sparks into Hooke’s drawing room. Shadows around her eyes and a tightness of her features showed her suffering. Over the flames she hung a large iron kettle, filled with water from the Bishopsgate pump.

  ‘Mr. Hooke has me making tea, for he expects the King,’ she informed Harry, her voice flat, when in happier times it would have been loud in her excitement. ‘His Majesty must like the College better than Whitehall, even though Mr. Hooke will not let me rid this room of all this stuff. How can any monarch endure such a space?’

  Harry fiddled with the cuff of his coat, not answering her question, knowing that it was half-heartedly posed.

  Mary lowered herself wearily for a rare sit on one of the chairs by the fireplace. She put out a hand to take his. ‘You are cold, like an icicle!’

  ‘Has Mr. Hooke said why the King returns?’ Harry asked her.

  ‘To look at the Air-pump, he says. With the threat upon his person, it is a wonder the King ventures forth at all. It is to be kept a secret – Mr. Hooke left me in no doubt of that. The Curator is an ingenious man, Harry, but it wonders me that His Majesty should seek his company here. More than ever since news of the Popish plot. It is said that the King has been given poisoned wine, which he thought looked tainted, and so he dipped it into bread, and fed it to one of his dogs which then fell down stone – oh!’

  The King might be poisoned here at Gresham’s, and she would be blamed; she would go into the history books as the housekeeper who did not take a care to mind the King’s life when he came to visit. The name Robinson would be forevermore taught to children as synonymous with heedlessness and neglect.

  ‘The King is well looked after,’ Harry reassured her. ‘Soldiers are everywhere in London, seeking out those against him.’

  Mary looked gratefully at him. ‘Have they stopped you too? Praise be for men such as Titus Oates. If he had not come across this devilish business . . . I have heard him called the Saviour of the Nation.’

  Mary noticed the papers that Harry had brought with him, and she blew her red cheeks out, as if playing an invisible trumpet, and shook her head sadly at him. ‘Mr. Hooke will not have a mind for your business, Harry. He has done little since poor Tom left us for a better place. He sits and stares into the fire. This morning he went to Hannah Gyles. Otherwise, not even for a coffee-house has he left here.’ She placed the back of her hand on Harry’s cheek. ‘Get closer to the fire.’

  There was a loud knocking at the door, and a loud call of ‘Robert!’ through it.

  ‘I shall bring the King inside,’ Harry said.

  Before he left Mary, he was careful to put his papers away, in a drawer under Hooke’s worktable.

  Opening the door of Hooke’s lodgings, Harry saw that the King was on his own. There were no soldiers with him. Not even Sir Jonas Moore, who had come with him on his last visit to Gresham’s, accompanied him.

  The King wore a plain dark coat, scuffed boots, no wig, and a pleased expression.

  ‘Your Majesty!’ Harry’s look, combining confusion and concern, signalled clearly his astonishment.

  ‘You expect a squadron with me, eh, Harry? Well, let me tell you, I am not the King! For even my own guard did not recognise me! Therefore I cannot be their King. I have gone through two blocks of the road. I even announced myself to them as William Jackson, to see if they knew their history.’

  ‘You come in the same guise as when you escaped to France, after Worcester, Your Majesty.’

  The King clapped Harry on the arm. ‘Lord Danby forbade me to leave Whitehall until this Catholic design is all finished with – one way or the other, I suppose – and so the King rests in his chamber. William Jackson, however, is out and about the town. What fun, Harry! What fun!’

  ‘Come inside, then, Mr. Jackson. We await Mr. Hooke’s arrival.’

  ‘You do not, Your Majesty, Harry; for I am here.’ Robert Hooke’s hunched form was behind them, in his grey coat and a hat. His silver eyes were edged with pink, the blood vessels prominent, giving him the appearance of an albino. ‘This is a sorry business, and I will be glad to have done with it.’

  ‘I have arranged for a coach for the boy,’ the King said. ‘It shall be here presently.’

  ‘Welcome news,’ Hooke replied. ‘For it has made me fretful keeping him here.’

  ‘Let us then prepare the way for his removal, Robert, and take him from the vacuum.’

  Hooke turned around and took them towards the cellars, back across the quadrangle. He had hardly acknowledged Harry – the merest of nods – but expected him to follow. Harry said nothing to him, and did not suggest that they delayed to have Mary’s tea, although Hooke looked chilled through.

  Perhaps, after the boy, whoever he was, had gone, Mr. Hooke would become more receptive to him, and be willing to listen to his story of Thomas Whitcombe’s work with the infusion of blood.

  *

  When the three men reached the door to the cellars, they found it already unlocked, and slightly ajar. A dark slit showed the way down into the subterranean level below them.

  ‘One of the other Professors must be down there,’ Hooke told the King, doubt apparent in his voice. ‘The lamp that hangs here is taken.’

  ‘No one else has the key to the heavy door, Robert? The one which blocks off the way to your Air-pump?’

  ‘Only I have the key, other than Mr. Boyle, who rarely comes to the College. Harry, will you bring a light from my lodgings?’ For the first time Hooke looked directly at his assistant, speaking to him as if he ate wormwood.

  Harry went back across the quadrangle, and Mary let him in. Feeling suddenly anxious, a shudder working down his spine, he went to the drawer under the worktable. The package was as he had left it, not five minutes before. Reassured, he found a lamp, and lit it with a taper that Mary fetched for him. It was a poor relation to the fine lamp he had broken against his assailant, before his struggle with him at the top of the Fish Street pillar.

  He returned to Hooke and the King waiting at the cellar entrance.

  He passed Hooke the lamp. They descended the stairs, and went through the low corridor. The King’s head brushed the cellar’s roof, and he had to stoop going between the boxes and sacks, the models and various bits of apparatus, and past Hooke’s flying machine.

  What they saw next bro
ught them up short. The sturdy iron-clad door, which usually sealed off the end of the passageway leading to the Air-pump room, stood open, hanging eccentrically from one hinge. Scorch marks on its surface showed the force of gunpowder, and a line of black along the floor led to where somebody had stood to ignite the charge. The three men looked at one another, wondering whether they should go back, to safety, or forwards, towards the boy and the Air-pump. Was the King’s life in danger? Was the person – or people – still down there, in the dark of Gresham’s cellars?

  ‘Such a sound would have been heard, surely?’ the King whispered.

  ‘The charge has been carefully measured – only sufficient to break the door. I heard nothing, walking in to Gresham’s. Did you, Harry?’

  ‘I arrived only a short while ago, Mr. Hooke. And Mary mentioned nothing of an explosion.’

  The King started forwards, advancing cautiously, his arms out to keep them behind him.

  The door to the Air-pump room was also open, its wood splintered, attacked with an axe around its lock. The lock was wrenched from its mortise, and lay on the stone floor.

  The King still led the way, walking vigilantly down the few steps into the room. There was no one else inside, awaiting them.

  Rasping underfoot, tiny shards of glass lay scattered over the floor. In the centre of the cramped space, the Air-pump’s receiver had been obliterated as completely as possible. Where the receiver had been there remained only a few daggers of glass, forming a wicked collar. The body of the machine was bent, its brass cylinder smashed, the timber frame axed and ruined.

  The blood-drained boy was gone.

  Observation LII

  Of Combustion

  Hooke’s shock, showing itself in a speechless opening and closing of his mouth, like an automaton’s, and the sudden shaky light from the lamp he held, vacillated between its causes: the violence carried out against the apparatus, as if a singular abhorrence had been expressed upon it; and the taking of the boy.

  ‘Who knows of the placing of the child in here?’ the King asked, his face darkly clouded, and looking as stunned as Hooke.

  ‘Only Harry and I know of it,’ Hooke answered. ‘And you, Your Majesty. Did Sir Jonas know? Sir Edmund knew, and Sir Edmund’s man, who delivered him here.’

  ‘Welkin,’ Harry added. ‘His name was Welkin.’

  ‘No one here at the College? None of the professors? None of the Fellows of the Society?’

  ‘Sir Edmund swore us to secrecy. I lament ever becoming involved at all,’ Hooke said miserably.

  ‘And,’ Harry remembered, ‘Sir Edmund requested that Viscount Brouncker, the President of the Society, should authorise our assistance to the Justice. That aid included the storing of the boy.’

  ‘And who else has the key to the cellars?’ Harry noticed how easily and effectively the King asserted his authority when he wanted to. His tone of voice hardly changed, and yet became utterly commanding.

  Hooke replied. ‘All of the professors have access. And we are granted permission to let our rooms to others.’

  From far off, muffled by the bricks arching over their heads, the sound of a door’s closing reached them.

  ‘Someone has locked the outer door,’ Hooke explained to the King. ‘They cannot realise that we are down here.’

  Another sound became audible to them; nearer, sharper. It was a curious fizzing sound. Harry could not think what it was.

  The King, though, recognised it all too well.

  ‘Burning gunpowder!’ he cried.

  ‘Ah, yes,’ Hooke agreed, still distracted by his thoughts upon the broken Air-pump. ‘You are . . .’ His voice trailed off, as he at last comprehended what was happening.

  Harry had already jumped up the few steps and outside the room, and he swung the heavy iron-faced door across the cellar’s passage. He did it unthinkingly, the movement taking only seconds, but in his mind taking far longer – too long. The door almost broke free of its remaining hinge, but stayed on sufficiently to close across the corridor. He leaned against its weight, ensuring as best he could that it fitted into its frame. He raced back, pushing Hooke, whose horrified face looked out at his rushed efforts to shield them, back down the steps.

  As Harry tried to close the door to the Air-pump room, a great movement of air seized it from his grasp. It leaped back open in a wild arcing motion, and crashed into the wall behind. The iron-clad door flew past him, upside down, launched along the passage as if only thin board. It smashed against the wall, one corner hitting first, sending brick fragments flying from its impact.

  It happened slowly; Harry’s thoughts ran so quickly that he had the time to watch the door float past him, as if it moved through water. A blow, and then a suck, then a vortex of wind sent the fragments of the receiver’s glass whirling up from the floor. The three men covered their heads with their arms, sheltering themselves from the angry air, glass slivers held in violent suspension.

  After the initial detonation this all happened at once, in an instant, and strangely silently, Harry thought, not apprehending that his eardrums were shocked and useless from the blast. Even the pain from his lacerated forehead and the backs of his hands did not register, attuned as he was upon the immediate needs of survival. His leather coat protected him from a further slashing.

  The light from the lamp was extinguished; they called out to one another, to check that they still lived. They fumbled for each other in the absolute darkness, all deafened, each seeking comfort that he was not the only one to survive.

  ‘Mr. Hooke!’ Harry shouted into the Curator’s ear. ‘Are you injured?’

  ‘Only cuts, Harry.’

  Harry held on to his arm tightly. ‘The powder was a distance away. Your Majesty?’

  ‘By God’s Grace, I am alive.’

  They shook out glass from their hair, and the King picked out a glass splinter from the back of his hand, licking the blood at the wound.

  Then, another sound; with their hearing so injured it reached them as if through a wall of earth, but with enough force to make them comprehend that their danger was far from over.

  It was the sound of combustion, the crackling of flame; it was the sound of all the materials stored along the corridor, the rolled papers, the stacked woods, the Curator’s models and the piled fabrics, beginning to burn. The noise of the fire gathered momentum as it enrolled new recruits to its cause, an invading army of heat, the blaze devouring everything in its way.

  Harry got himself to the door, and the orange glow reflected from his spectacles; these two discs let Hooke and the King perceive clearly the difficulty they were in. They could see a monstrous thick black smoke hugging the arched ceiling of the cellar passageway, as if gripping the lines of mortar between the bricks to pull itself along.

  *

  ‘We cannot go forward through that!’ Harry shouted at the others.

  ‘So, we must instead retreat,’ the King shouted back. ‘How long will this door last?’

  ‘The iron door would withhold if only it were not so broken,’ Harry answered. ‘This inner door will not last against the fierceness of the fire.’

  ‘Then all we can fight for is time. It may burn itself out. We must close that door.’

  Fire filled the corridor, timber boxes collapsing as the flames ate them away. Hooke’s flying machine – the canvas disappearing in glowing bites across its length, the spindles of its delicate frame folding in on one another – fell from the wall.

  The King pulled his shirt out from inside the waist of his breeches, and ripped a strip from it, to place over his mouth. Harry followed his example, even able to regret the tearing of his shirt. The iron-clad door, blown off its final hinge, thrown ten feet from its place, was fearsomely heavy. Harry picked up one side of it, and the King seized the other, and they dragged it back. They leaned it against its twisted frame, but the sheets of iron had buckled, and the timber inside them was splintered. It would be a modest barrier to the advancing fire. Already t
he metal began to warm; they left it, a meagre return for their efforts.

  Back in the cellar room, they coughed from the smoke. Hooke was the worst affected, but he was able, as Harry closed the inside door – the last barrier between them and their immolation – to gasp: ‘The diachylon!’

  ‘Yes!’ Harry, exultant, scrabbled around the floor of the cellar, feeling in the dark for the box of paste they had used to seal the Air-pump. After ripping his hands again on more glass, his fingers knocked against the hard sides of the box. He then continued to search, running his hands over the walls, seeking the bucket of water used to cool the Air-pump’s brass cylinder.

  He did not find the bucket with his hands. Instead, he kicked against it, resting at an angle against the wall. He reached into it, to see if any water remained. Only about a quarter had stayed in.

  His heart was racing, the pulse in his neck feeling as if it would burst through. He carefully carried the bucket to the door, desperate that no more of the precious water would spill.

  The King lent his height to the pushing in of the diachylon paste along the top of the door. Hooke frenziedly filled the sides and round the broken mortise, and Harry ran a line of the paste between the door’s bottom edge and the floor, fighting for mastery over his shaking hands. When the corners were finished, he soaked the little water left into the wood, pressed more of the paste from the box along the seal to reinforce it, and pushed a last wad into it, blocking out the finger of fire-cooked air which reached at them through the door.

  After the hectic actions of sealing themselves in, awaiting the outcome of the fire’s approach brought a strange, dead time, in which all they could do was listen to the groaning of the iron plates of the outside door. The darkness pushed against them. It was eerie, and made Harry feel as if he floated in space. He touched the rough wall by him to feel its reassuring solidity. The smoke that had got in through the door tasted bitter.

  They felt the intensity of the heat build up, further and further, the sweat running down inside their clothes. Sitting helpless in the dark, Harry, trembling, became aware of all the injuries he had recently sustained, each ache and soreness announcing itself to him.