The Bloodless Boy Read online

  ‘You are the illustrious Mr. Robert Hooke, of the Royal Society?’ the Solicitor enquired, as if to distinguish him from a dozen others. ‘Creator of the famous Micrographia, of the weighing of the air, and of the building of the new London?’

  Hooke was now even more cautious, alarmed at the intensity of the man’s obsequiousness. ‘I am Mr. Robert Hooke, Curator of Experiments for the Royal Society, and Professor of Geometry here at Gresham’s College,’ he replied.

  ‘It is an honour, Mr. Hooke, to meet you – a most skilled natural philosopher, known throughout the Kingdom for your prodigious interests and ingenious pursuits!’

  ‘Your words are welcome, and kind.’ Hooke raised his hand to stop the Solicitor going further. ‘What is it, Sir, that I may do for you?’

  ‘You may take this letter, Sir, that I am engaged to deliver.’

  Creed took from a bag slung over his shoulder a small letter, bearing a seal of black wax, and held it towards Hooke.

  Hooke, startled, took it hesitantly. It certainly had the appearance of the letter that Sir Edmund had shown them briefly at the Fleet, having lifted it from the body of the boy.

  He looked at it more closely. On it was his name, and the address of his lodgings at Gresham, written in a remarkably steady and controlled hand.

  ‘Who charged you with conveying this to me, Mr. Creed?’ Hooke asked, his voice puzzled.

  ‘I was engaged for my discretion. You understand, I hope, Mr. Hooke.’

  ‘When was it left with you? Will you say that?’

  ‘Do not press me on this. I am not one who betrays the terms of his commissions. I bid you good night, Sir.’

  *

  Hooke, back in his drawing room, surrounded by his tools and equipment, asked Mary to prepare him some tea. He sat at his table, and broke the black seal, which bore a simple image of a candle and its flame. He opened the letter. He was hesitant in all his movements; for some reason he could not explain even to himself this letter made him more nervous than all of the business with Sir Edmund.

  He would not tell Harry; it was an unphilosophical sensation.

  It was more pages covered by grids of numbers, arranged in a square on one side only of each sheet, twelve numbers along by twelve numbers down.

  Sir Edmund’s writing was ordered, but the writing on these sheets was astonishingly neat. Each number was perfectly sized for its neighbours, and perfectly reproduced each time it appeared. Only occasionally was it discernible that this was not printed, when the character of the pen’s nib, as the ink on it dried, betrayed itself, before being redipped, and the regularity continued. Hooke did not think he had ever seen numbers so perfectly done.

  Grace’s voice called up from the lobby.

  ‘Mr. Hooke, all of London calls upon you this evening,’ Mary said, putting down his tea.

  Observation VIII

  Of Assistance

  Grace let in the visitor, and led her up to the drawing room. The woman wore an enveloping headscarf, whose dryness showed that it had finally stopped snowing.

  ‘Mrs. Oldenburg?’ Hooke said doubtfully. Then, when he was sure: ‘Good evening to you, Dora-Katherina.’

  The old lady’s resolve crumpled. Seeing her distress, Hooke took her by the elbow. He apologised to her for all the clutter, pulled out a chair from by the table, and poured her a small amount of the remaining claret.

  ‘Mr. Hooke,’ she said to him, once she had recomposed herself, removed her scarf and coat, and was holding the glass he offered to her. ‘I have the most terrible news, and I come for your assistance, and your counsel.’ Her accent revealed her Irish origins.

  ‘Tom, will you go to your room?’ Hooke said. They heard the crashes of his footsteps above.

  She took a long sip of the wine, and then carefully placed the glass down on the table in front of her. ‘Henry committed self-murder this morning.’

  ‘Merciful God!’ Hooke put his hand to his mouth.

  ‘I wish not the manner of his death to become known. I think that you, also, would prefer such shame a secret.’ She said the words in a monotone, her mouth moving stiffly.

  ‘How did he do it, Mrs. Oldenburg?’ Hooke looked even greyer than usual.

  ‘A ball fired from a pistol,’ she replied. ‘I forgot he even kept the thing.’

  Hooke sat down heavily, and stopped to think, to draw himself together. ‘We cannot allow this to tarnish his good name.’

  The old lady, despite her grief, was clear-headed enough to know that Hooke meant the good name of the Royal Society. She had calculated this, and relied upon it. She picked up her glass again.

  The threat of scandal made his decision a swift one. ‘Your house is secured, and empty?’

  ‘Yes . . . the servants do not live in . . . none other knows of his death.’

  ‘No neighbours heard?’

  ‘Those we have are out of the town. He was at the top of the house, and I am sure that no one on the street heard the shot. Certainly, none came to investigate.’

  Looking thoughtful, Hooke poured her more of the claret. ‘I know a man to write the certificate. We will call upon him. It shall be our own little intrigue, Mrs. Oldenburg. We did often disagree, your husband and I, on philosophical and pecuniary matters, but the Society owes him much. Will you lead me to him? I need first to call upon my assistant, to rouse out the physician.’

  He found a quill and paper and wrote out a note. He sanded the ink dry, left Dora-Katherina to finish her drink, and climbed the stairs to Tom’s room.

  Tom was thrilled by the importance of the mission, made clear by the extraordinary visit Hooke made to his room, and the solemnity of the Curator’s tone. The boy took the note, addressed to a Dr. Diodati, along with a small lantern that Hooke, after spiking a candle into it, gave to him.

  ‘Talk to no one, Tom, and be as quick as you can. Go with Harry to find Dr. Diodati, and I shall see you in Pall Mall.’

  The boy ran off into the dark, a diminishing point of light.

  Hooke joined Dora-Katherina, who waited for him looking shrivelled, her sorrow seeming to have made her retract into herself.

  The enciphered papers were behind her, up on the bookshelf. Glancing at them, Hooke decided that he would not have the time to peruse them. He had to see to Henry Oldenburg, to disguise the manner of his death.

  And what of the Secretaryship? He would campaign for the vacant position.

  And what of the boy found at the Fleet and preserved in the Air-pump? And the other, stored at the College of Physicians, along Warwick Lane?

  Hooke tried to push it all from his mind: his life was too stuffed with all the things that competed for his time.

  He would be too busy to unravel a cipher. There must be no distraction – the Secretaryship was what he had desired so much for so long.

  Sir Edmund, though, would continue to press for assistance.

  Perhaps instead he could offer Harry? Harry had the ability to unravel its meaning.

  If only he could remember where he had seen this cipher before . . .

  Beginning to feel the press of a headache in his temples, he took Dora-Katherina by the arm and led her out of the College. They walked south to the river, to London Bridge, to find a late-working wherry-man to take them to Pall Mall, and to the body of the Royal Society’s Secretary.

  Observation IX

  Of Distraction

  His realism was both unnerving and comforting, a mirror for his audience to marvel at themselves by. The automaton’s skin, moulded in wax, was perfectly rendered. The eyeballs had a watery sparkle. Fine hairs, painstakingly transplanted into the brows, ears and nostrils, perfected the illusion of life. Sitting at his desk in a corner of the large library, his right hand gripped a quill halfway between an unfinished letter and a china inkpot, ready for mechanisms to be wound, and for gears to be engaged.

  This evening three men, other than the mechanical scribe, inhabited the library of Thanet House. Illuminated by at least a dozen
candles sputtering in ornate silver candlesticks on the table, and more held in candle-branches on the walls, the gilded titles of the books glittered along every wall.

  The Earl of Shaftesbury, the man newly released from the Tower of London, shifted uncomfortably in his seat. A silver tube connecting his bile duct to the bag under his waistcoat, a conduit fitted with a brass tap to drain his diseased liver, pulled the skin at its exit. A heavy perruke matted his thin hair, making his scalp itch.

  The wig, descending low either side of his long head to his shoulders, and his large eyes, glassily expressionless and unreadable, made him resemble an exotic reptile. This reptilian aspect was enhanced by the slack skin hanging from his jaw, age endowing him with impressive jowls, swinging pendulously as he talked.

  Shaftesbury’s Secretary, Dr. John Locke, a man who rarely smiled, was lean and spare-framed. Wearing a rust-coloured waistcoat and a brown jacket, making him resemble a robin, he wore no wig but kept his hair tied back. He fiddled with his pocket watch, resetting it to the clock in the library. Shaftesbury looked to his Secretary for calm advice and logical reasoning. He had often thought of himself as being too feminine, too far the victim of his emotions; Locke provided a more masculine rationality – it was a marriage, of sorts.

  It was Locke who had designed and inserted the silver tube going into Shaftesbury’s side, to restore the balance to his humours. A little discomfort was but a small cost to bear. The constant irritability, Locke had explained to him, was a property inherent in all tissue, independent of the nerves.

  The other man with them, Lefèvre, was so still, with a gaze so steady, that he might have been a cousin of the mechanical amanuensis. He owned a strangely shaped forehead, a single long eyebrow across it. Shaftesbury was entranced by Lefèvre’s economy of motion. Wearing a military coat of a deep plum colour, and French bucket boots, his progress into the library had seemed that of a body falling in a horizontal gravity, bringing him to his seat as if pulled by an external attraction. He walked without discernible effort from his muscles, perfectly balanced and with no movement of his head.

  His services were as effective as they were expensive.

  ‘. . . his investigators will then find a great deal of mischief as they pan for gold amongst the slurry,’ the Earl was saying. ‘We have the names of Jesuits, in France and also in Ireland. We have an infiltrator of the Jesuits, a spy within their midst. Titus Oates. An ambitious man, and pliable. He is to be a grand distraction from my own revenge against the King.’

  Shaftesbury looked pleased with himself, and spread out some papers before him, across a low table by his feet.

  ‘Oates’s evidence needs to be neither consistent nor complete; it gains potency from not being so. Hastily seen documents, scribbled digests surreptitiously made in fear of being found out, with seeming digression, omission and negligence, will appear more genuine than events perfectly recalled.’

  Shaftesbury gestured at them, miming this layering of details, one upon the other.

  ‘We know of Catholic families here in London and in the country,’ he continued, ‘holding sympathies to an uprising. They will find it difficult to deflect all of the points we prick against their skins, the opinion of the judiciary being so firmly against them. The King will charge Lord High Treasurer Danby to put in motion a search.’

  Shaftesbury relaxed a little, the pain in his side easing away from his conscious mind as he revealed more of his plan. ‘I am like a crafty fellow, whose showy manifestations with one hand divert attention from the hidden work of the other. For while everyone looks to the Catholics, Monsieur Lefèvre will busy himself with the killing of the King.’

  There was no reaction from Lefèvre. The magnitude of the Earl’s plan seemed entirely unimpressive to him. Shaftesbury checked for the response of his Secretary, some fleeting expression of disapproval. Locke, he knew, entertained doubts, but more concerning the means than the end.

  Never mind him, a year of planning was time enough.

  ‘Details, details . . .’ Shaftesbury continued. ‘Oates overhearing a wager that the King will eat no more Christmas pies. Opinions divided as to use of poison or gun. Tell of Oates being shown weapons to kill the King; a knife, some fire-balls and mustard-balls. A silver bullet to bring him down. French landings in Ireland. Irresolute priests replaced by more fanatical assassins. Catholic whisperings infecting the prisons, the Navy, the Army, lawyers, the guilds, the India Companies. Jabberings against Protestantism; morale-building stuff, broken open by our interloper. An attack upon Westminster, and the water companies – plans to poison the supply. Include the names of taverns and coffee-houses where plotters meet with one another – the King seeks to limit these places, and so let his suspicions work for us . . . .We can add further as we lengthen our campaign.’

  He stopped, leaned back in his chair and spread the palms of his hands enquiringly. ‘What of Titus Oates?’

  At Shaftesbury’s question, Locke and Lefèvre looked at one another, a look communicating a shared exasperation. For Locke, this feeling was based on a journey from Saint Omers, spent unprofitably and tediously with the man. Lefèvre had only met him the previous day, but that was time enough to form an impression of the man as a blabberer; weak, conceited, possibly unstable.

  Shaftesbury caught the look between them. ‘He comes highly recommended,’ he said. ‘We wind him up, and he will perform.’

  ‘He is too much the rooster,’ Locke offered, ‘when we need more the mole, able to stay beneath the ground unobserved, until ready to appear.’ Locke sat forward in his chair. ‘Nevertheless, if you have confidence in him . . . I have found a man who is the key to the winding, the teacher of his lines.’

  ‘Who is he?’

  ‘His name is Dr. Israel Tonge.’

  ‘Introduce him to Oates as soon as possible. We will test him, and proceed when he is ready.’

  A pattern of knocks sounded at the double doors. Lefèvre reached them without seeming to have left his chair, so swiftly and smoothly did he accomplish the movement.

  He allowed in the coach driver with the goatskin coat, Shaftesbury’s man Aires.

  Aires brought with him a fraught-looking Enoch Wolfe.

  Wolfe blinked haplessly in the relative darkness of the candlelit library from the brightness of daylight outside.

  He was transformed from early that morning, when he had waited at the Fleet for the boy to be delivered. Shaved, hair freshly powdered, resplendent in a wheat-coloured suit, those who had questioned him then would be hard-pushed to identify him as the unkempt eel-fisher.

  ‘Mr. Wolfe.’ Shaftesbury motioned him to sit in one of the empty chairs by them. ‘Mr. Wolfe: for what do we pay you?’

  ‘A Constable came down from the quayside,’ Wolfe complained. ‘I never heard him on the mud and the snow.’

  Another man might have solved the problem by dispatching the Constable into the Fleet, weighed down by stones to ensure that as his body bloated it did not re-emerge to tell its tale. Wolfe told himself that he was just such a man, and that only the approach of Sir Edmund had stopped him, but he knew that he lied to himself.

  Shaftesbury’s man Aires would not have hesitated.

  As Wolfe sat down, Shaftesbury stood up, disconcertingly, picking up the papers with his notes of the purported Catholic plot, and rolled them into a tube. His face contorted, and turned a deep red colour. ‘I have had no report from you!’

  His sudden bellow made Wolfe cringe in his chair. The Earl’s spittle landed on his cheek, and he did not dare to wipe it away.

  ‘Sir Edmund’s man, Welkin, reported early this afternoon!’ Shaftesbury twisted the papers, and rolled them tighter still, as if strangling a chicken. ‘Our boy is now kept at Gresham’s College, in the Air-pump there. You were charged with fetching him, but were too incompetent, and you have neglected to tell of your failure!’

  ‘I rely upon a network of spies, Your Grace; each of them verified one against the other before I present
their intelligence to you.’ Wolfe’s voice shook as the Earl leaned towards him. ‘You may well use the same people – everyone in London sells information – but my reports to you are the result of much enquiry. They are proficiently done.’

  Shaftesbury dropped his voice, almost to a whisper. ‘That is well, Mr. Wolfe, all very well. Most men have a higher notion of their abilities than their actual worth. I myself am prone to conceit; we need such self-delusions to keep our spirits up, as a mechanism feeds on grease.’

  Shaftesbury studied Wolfe’s face, observing the physiological changes as fear made the blood leave his cheeks. ‘Although, if I require new footwear,’ he continued reasonably, ‘I do not pay the boot-maker for simply trying his best. I expect the leather to meet the sole and be well stitched, and resist the entry of water.’

  Wolfe had to stifle a choking sensation and a desire to prostrate himself before the Earl.

  Shaftesbury shifted his weight from foot to foot, side to side, in a mechanical motion. ‘I am told that the Justice Sir Edmund Bury Godfrey has made it his business, and that he brought help from the Royal Society, engaging two of their number to assist him. Robert Hooke himself, the Curator. I know of Robert Hooke from his work on the new quayside. An ingenious man. He brought with him an assistant. Much younger. Bespectacled. In a brown leather coat. These two together stored him at Gresham’s College, in a vacuum to preserve him. It is the best place for our boy, until we find our man. Do you know where he is, Wolfe?’

  ‘I do not, your Grace. It is his disappearance that delayed me, for he seems to be nowhere in London.’

  Shaftesbury put the end of the tightly-rolled tube of papers against the side of Wolfe’s nose, and rammed his hand against its other end as forcefully as he could. Wolfe’s nose cracked, and blood spattered from it. Wolfe let out a shriek, and sat huddled, holding his head and sobbing.

  ‘Take a care you do not drip upon my carpet,’ Shaftesbury warned him, sitting himself back down. ‘You agree, John, that until we find him, our boy is safest with Robert Hooke?’