The Bloodless Boy

by Robert J. Lloyd

  ‘As he kept from you that Sir Edmund killed your father.’

  ‘He used me as his instrument,’ Creed said brusquely. ‘He never told me, for he knew what I would do. It was the Colonel who acquainted me with the story. Your visit to him with the cipher reawakened his conscience.’

  Creed studied Harry dismissively, seeing a slight young man, bruised, bumped, with a slashed leather coat. ‘I wonder what secrets Robert Hooke keeps from you.’

  Outside, still in the large elaboratory, Sir Jonas conversed in his soft voice with somebody. The sound of their talking, mostly Sir Jonas with an occasional interjection from another, came through the dissecting room, but too muffled and indistinct to make out.

  ‘You were not only Thomas Whitcombe’s amanuensis, though, were you Mr. Creed?’ Harry unbuttoned his coat, as if to make himself comfortable. He tried to present a confidence that was not there, for it leaked away as the blood of boys had leaked away along the grooves of the anatomy table. ‘The old man who wrote this letter was not the man who performed these experiments. He did not have the strength or the steadiness of hand to infuse blood from one boy to another. He would have missed an artery, and missed a vein by more. Your hand, though, as your writing shows, is unusually steady. As was your father’s, the glovemaker and stitcher of wounds. It was you who held the knife, was it not, Mr. Creed? It was you who killed the boys. You murdered them. All for an experiment that failed.’

  ‘You are hypocritical!’ Creed scoffed. ‘If we had succeeded, the boy brought back to life, you would give not a jot for these deaths.’

  Harry pressed his eyelids together, and gave a little nod of his head, as if accepting the full truth of Creed’s words. ‘There is one death I care very much about.’ His face had gone completely white, leaving red spots of anger in his cheeks. ‘Mr. Hooke’s apprentice, Tom Gyles, did not deserve to die, as all of these boys did not. He was worth no more than each of them, yet it is his death that I mourn, for he was close to me, like a brother. Did you kill him too?’

  ‘It was to save your life, Mr. Hunt.’ Seeing Harry’s look of incredulity, Creed sniffed, unconcerned by Harry’s opinion of him. ‘Sir Jonas Moore desired that you be kept alive. The boy’s death was a warning to you, to keep you under control.’

  ‘Sir Jonas had a hand in this?’

  ‘Does Sir Jonas not offer these rooms to you? Is that not why you are here? You are the same as Thomas Whitcombe, who was brought here and offered the same choice. He was brought back from the Barbadoes by the Earl of Shaftesbury, who noticed him on his sugar plantations. Shaftesbury installed him here to work for Cromwell, and here he remained, his employer changed but his work the same.’

  ‘You failed to revivify a boy, and murdered a dozen others. And then you killed one more. I am not the same.’

  ‘To be a chirurgeon, to cut into a body, familiarises the heart to a necessary inhumanity. We take Nature to task, putting aside our scruples, in order to glorify not the Light of Nature, nor of God, but ourselves! We are vain men, but the world needs such vanity; it is the vain, conceited men who have the desire and the appetite to succeed.’

  *

  Sir Jonas Moore entered through the dissecting room.

  ‘What talk is this of vanity?’ he asked. ‘They sound wise words, ’though I caught but the end of them.’

  Harry looked beyond Sir Jonas, at the other man following him, tall, dark-skinned, with a large black periwig.

  ‘Your Majesty,’ Harry said, bowing low. Creed did the same.

  ‘Harry! It is good to see you. You have seen the elaboratory? And you have met Mr. Creed.’

  ‘I have, and I have spoken with him of Thomas Whitcombe.’

  ‘You say you have made your decision,’ Sir Jonas said. ‘Then what is it to be?’

  Harry spoke flatly, mechanically. ‘I have found the man who killed the boys. It was not Thomas Whitcombe, as I had thought, although he directed their killing. It was Moses Creed. He was Thomas Whitcombe’s assistant. His amanuensis. His operator.’

  ‘I know this, already, full well,’ Sir Jonas answered breezily. ‘He is to leave us, and you will have the place to yourself soon enough.’

  ‘There were twelve boys killed for these experiments,’ Harry persisted. ‘The boy we kept at Gresham, as I suspect you realised, Your Majesty, was to be revivified. The recipient boy.’

  The King looked contritely at him. ‘It is a bad business. I guessed at the boy, when I saw him in the Air-pump. I did not know of the nature of these experiments, nor of the other boys used. I have spoken to Sir Jonas of it. I have chastised him.’

  The King walked forward to Harry, and put his arm around his shoulder, pulling him close. ‘But imagine if these experiments had worked, Harry. Hmm? It would have been a marvel of the New Philosophy.’

  ‘Who was the boy, Your Majesty? Who was seen to be worth the lives of so many?’

  The King winced, and let out an exaggerated sigh. ‘It was not just about one boy. It would have been a way of keeping alive our soldiers, and our sailors. In war, we would have been invincible. In peace, it would have brought hope to all of my Realm. You cannot ignore the greater good.’

  Harry could feel the heat in his cheeks, and he realised his eyes were filling with angry tears. ‘Who was the boy, Your Majesty?’ he repeated.

  ‘You are direct,’ the King observed. ‘It is one of the qualities I have observed in you. It is a tendency you must guard against.’

  That this boy, Robert Hooke’s assistant, had got so far surprised him, this boy with such a slight frame and spectacles, in his long leather coat that swamped him, making him appear even smaller.

  The King shrugged. ‘He was the son of Britannia. Frances Teresa Stewart, the Duchess of Richmond and Lennox. She was the woman I loved above all others, once. He was the son of the Earl of Shaftesbury, too, who sought to continue the experiments, after she had put a stop to them.’

  ‘Whitcombe had tried for a year,’ Sir Jonas explained. ‘She gave him until New Year’s Day, deciding that her son had been through enough. His father disagreed.’

  ‘I delivered the boy to Shaftesbury’s man at the Fleet,’ Moses Creed said. ‘But instead he went to Gresham’s College. Thomas Whitcombe told Sir Edmund to be there. And, presumably, Robert Hooke.’

  ‘He wanted all his work to go to Mr. Hooke,’ Harry said.

  ‘He is too timorous a man, we think,’ the King said. ‘He is better situated as Secretary of my Society.’

  Sir Jonas looked at Creed, and nodded at him in acknowledgement of all he had done for them. ‘Is your pinnace ready, Mr. Creed?’

  ‘It is moored at Saint Katherine’s stairs.’

  ‘Your work for us is completed?’

  ‘I have done all that I can do. There is nothing here of Whitcombe’s work on the boys, for Mr. Hunt has it – .’

  ‘Sir Jonas. Your Majesty,’ Harry interrupted. ‘This is also the man who killed Sir Edmund Bury Godfrey. He tied him, tortured him, and locked him inside a burning chapel, until he was overwhelmed by the smoke. Then he put his dead body upon the Morice waterwheel.’

  ‘He was not killed by Catholics?’ The King’s face took on a calculating look, and he splayed his fingers as if running them through new alternatives that presented themselves.

  Sir Jonas’s features assumed a closed expression. ‘Did Sir Edmund die by your hand, Mr. Creed?’

  Creed backed away, edging through the door. For the first time he seemed worried, and vulnerable.

  ‘For if you killed the Justice, then I fear we are unable to protect you.’ Sir Jonas flashed a look at the King, who held up his hand, for more time to reflect.

  Creed continued to back away.

  The King nodded at Sir Jonas. They stood, and watched Creed disappear into the darkness of the dissecting room.

  ‘No!’ Harry shouted, and jumped forwards, out from the office and into the dissecting room. ‘We cannot let him go!’

  Creed broke into a stumblin
g run, around the dissecting table. Harry jumped straight over it, and nearly caught him, extending out a hand to grab at him, but fell to the floor instead. Starting to straighten, he felt a point in the back of his neck. Creed had taken a long dissecting knife from its place on the wall, and pressed it into the space at the very top of Harry’s spine, cutting into the flesh between the tendons.

  ‘You will let me go, as the King and Sir Jonas let me go.’

  Harry raised his hands, as if in supplication. The pressure of the knife lessened, and Creed reversed into Thomas Whitcombe’s elaboratory.

  ‘And now all of this will be yours,’ he told Harry. ‘I wish you only happiness in your employments.’ He gave Harry a last sour look, and then he turned, to make his way out of the Armouries building, away from the Tower, and to his pinnace at the river.

  Harry got up from the dissection room’s floor, reached inside his coat, pulled out Henry Oldenburg’s pistol, checked the charge, and pulled the trigger.

  The explosion of gunpowder was not loud by the standards of the Armouries, but it was enough to fill the small dissecting room, and the smoke from the pistol drifted through into the elaboratory, following the path of the ball, reaching towards its victim.

  As the smoke cleared, Harry pulled the trigger again, and the pistol, worked on in his rooms at Mrs. Hannam’s house, at his little table there, fired again, and once more, swiftly after.

  Moses Creed lay sprawled on his back by one of Whitcombe’s Air-pumps, his pierced head resting against its frame, a streak of blood showing his slide down the wood. Blood sprayed over the floor, a second shot into Creed’s throat sending it into the air, covering Creed in it, soaking his clothes. A third shot had gone into his chest, and the blood pulsing from his neck soon slowed, as the pumping action of his heart came to a stop.

  Harry shakily lowered the modified pistol, feeling light-headed and sick.

  ‘We thought we had the measure of you, Harry,’ the King told him. ‘I see that we had not.’

  Observation LXIV

  Of Conclusion

  The snow fell thickly, covering the quadrangle, the wind blowing it against the walls of Gresham’s College, flakes sticking to the windows, working their way in between the bricks.

  Harry stood with Grace, her fingers squeezing his hand rhythmically, as if sending him a message, and to the other side of him was Robert Hooke, a drop of liquid gathering at the tip of his long nose.

  They huddled around a brazier, set up in the quadrangle; the papers curled, and scorched, and burned.

  Harry committed to his memory the smell of the burning paper and ink.

  Colonel Fields, in his tattered buff coat, patched where it had grown thin, also watched with them, witnessing the burning of the Observations, thinking of his friend Reuben Creed, of whom he could never think without the picture of him swinging slowly from a rope coming into his mind, and Thomas Whitcombe, of whom he could not remember without bringing his hand up to his scar, where Whitcombe had sewn his flesh together over his skull.

  Behind them waited a black coach, its driver in a woollen coat holding the reins of four black horses, shiny from the moisture in the air.

  Lord Shaftesbury stood by it, looking pale, his face wet with tears. With him was Frances Teresa Stewart, wearing black, whose image was known throughout the nation as Britannia.

  Hortense Mancini, Duchesse de Mazarin, who many believed to be the most beautiful woman in the land, and Anne Lennard, Countess of Sussex, the King’s daughter, conceived upon the night of his Coronation, also watched there, standing hand in hand. They were dressed in their sea-green coats, a colour striking against the whiteness of the new snow.

  They had sought the body of the boy for Frances, and reclaimed it from the men of the New Philosophy.

  Long after Harry had put the last of the Observations into the brazier, and gone into the warmth of Gresham College, with Robert and Grace Hooke, and his new friend the Colonel, the remaining quartet continued to watch the flames. As the flames at last began to die down, they turned and stepped up into the Earl’s carriage.

  On Bishopsgate Street, a man sheltered in a doorway. He was wrapped warmly against the bitter chill. His face was hidden; his hat and scarf left only his eyes showing. His trembling hands betrayed his age, as he watched the carriage go by him.

  The horses slowly moved off, the sound of their hooves muffled, out into London.

  END

  Author’s Note

  I have attempted to bring characters back to life. I have also created characters.

  Events of 1677 and 1678 have been compressed into a busy January.

  I have used events recorded in Robert Hooke’s diary, such as the death of Tom Gyles from smallpox (at first thought to be measles), the fall of a pickpocket from the ‘fish street pillar’, Grace Hooke’s engagements, Hooke’s campaign to replace Henry Oldenburg as the Secretary of the Royal Society, and Harry Hunt’s cataloguing of Oldenburg’s correspondences after the Secretary’s death.

  Henry Oldenburg’s suicide, and the disguising of it, are my invention.

  The Earl of Shaftesbury’s influence in the Popish Plot, and therefore of his Secretary, John Locke, I have placed more centrally than history usually allows.

  There is some debate concerning an illegitimate child of Frances Stewart’s. This is usually thought to be a girl, rather than a boy. Her relationship with the Earl of Shaftesbury is fictitious.

  Thomas Whitcombe’s Observations are organised in a very similar way to John Locke’s Animadversions.

  William Walwyn’s words are his, but edited.

  Sir Edmund Bury Godfrey’s body was found on Primrose Hill, rather than on the Morice waterwheel.

  Acknowledgments

  Acknowledgements and thanks are very due to those who read versions of the manuscript, reacted, advised, and encouraged: Caroline Davidson, Sharon Gregory, Grace Hancock, Victoria Kwee, Rob Little, Sonia Little, Geoff Lloyd, John Lloyd (my father – I miss him), Mark Skinner, Richard Torr, and Jenny Verney.

  They are also due to Sonia Land and Gaia Banks at Sheil Land Associates. Gaia spotted the original submission, requested the rest, suggested many changes, and she has championed the book with astonishing energy and attention. I am extremely grateful to her, and rather in awe of her professionalism.

  To all at Peach Publishing.

  Finally, thank you Kate, my wife, who has tolerated much, encouraged always, researched unpaid, and always with more sense than I have. I am a lucky, lucky man.