The Bloodless Boy (23 page)

‘He ran through nettles,’ Hooke said, ‘without breeches, his legs exposed to their stinging actions. If walking, nettles would spring back after his progress to sting him on the backs of his legs. He displays no such marks. He held his hands curiously, touching together, in front of him.’

‘Making his escape perhaps?’ Sir Jonas suggested.

‘He could have been forced through the nettles by his captor,’ the King offered. ‘Could the nettles have killed him, Robert?’

‘Diverse plants in foreign parts have the power to kill from a brush to the skin. The juice from nettles may be gathered, perhaps, and in sufficient quantity may infect the fluid or vital parts of a person, being of sufficient pungency.’

‘Would he have died, though, from the nettles’ sting?’

Hooke shook his head. ‘Unlikely. Some, though, are more sensitive to such poisons.’

He removed a small instrument from his pocket. ‘This I made using Leeuwenhoek’s method, melting the end of a glass rod to form a small sphere. It achieves a powerful lens.’ Hooke held the little microscope to one of Sir Edmund’s wrists. He then transferred his attention to the other arm. He motioned to the King, who peered through the glass, and then passed it to Sir Jonas. The hairs on Sir Edmund’s wrists appeared as thick, smooth cylinders, and they observed the individual flakes and fissures on the surface of his skin.

Also, there were long fibres attaching themselves to the skin.

‘A wide band of material, very fine, was used to bind him,’ Hooke observed. ‘The fibres have remained on his skin. You can see they are different in colour to those of his shirt, which are grey and white; bleached cotton.’

‘They are much finer,’ the King said. ‘Are they silk?’

‘When magnified, silk fibres look round and hard, transparent and reflective. These are flat, with a brownish hue. They are those of a fine lawn cloth.’ Hooke took the microscope from Sir Jonas, and passed it to Harry, who studied the exposed arm. ‘It is this material which tied the man.’

‘A fine lawn?’ Sir Jonas asked. ‘As a priest might wear?’

‘Sir Edmund, had this body not so unhappily been his own, might assume Catholic practises, following the furrow of his thinking. He felt that the fine wax on the bodies of the boys might also show a priestly hand, indicative of liturgical candles. We cannot assume that this shows Popery. The lawn cloth fibres are equally indicative of Anglican practise; perhaps they release themselves from the sleeves of a Protestant Bishop, rather than a Catholic Priest.’

The King allowed a merry expression at the picture of his bishops tormenting the Justice so, but looking back at Sir Edmund on the slab his face quickly turned serious again. ‘Still we know not the manner of his killing – or if he is a victim of murder at all!’

‘I think that the all-over redness of him shows the way of it. We have a superfluity of signs. His was a complex death.’

Hooke’s silver eyes looked over the table, then through and beyond the wall in front of him.

*

‘Do we commence with the cutting, Mr. Hooke?’ Harry prompted. The muscle in his leg had started to twitch again, and his distaste thickened his tongue. He was determined that they would not see his queasiness.

Hooke started, and gave Harry an almost imperceptible nod of the head.

The Curator took a leather sheath from its place on the wall, and withdrew a knife nearly half a yard long and tapering to a malicious point, a serration along the middle third of the blade’s edge. He had had the tool manufactured for him, of best London steel, to suit his own demands.

He took it to the body, and rapidly opened up two incisions to form a large crucifix across the torso. He cut the first incision across the lower part of the breastbone, reaching from the left side of the rib cage to the right; the second reached from the throat down to the pubic bone, a neat curl of the slit avoiding the navel.

‘Over the years I have refined my methods, ’though I am nowadays more used to the incising of dogs and porpoises.’

He peeled the tissue from the chest, twisting the point of his great knife to release strands of the more awkwardly sticking flesh. He nodded to Harry, who pulled the large flaps to each side, exposing the ribcage and the strap muscles of the front of the neck.

The King noticed, as Sir Edmund had, that as these two worked they tended to communicate with one another silently, Hooke directing his assistant using these small nods and tiny lifts of his hands. It was like watching a private language, or a language for the deaf. Although he viewed the opening of bodies with distaste, the King enjoyed watching their proficiency. Hooke’s frailty disappeared, and he became as agile in his actions as the young man. Their easy movements, he thought, the certainty and economy of them, resembled the motions of a clock.

Hooke, working through the front of the throat, set about the windpipe and larynx. ‘There is some damage. No obstructions remain within.’

‘This man’s blood is as red as a cherry!’ The King exclaimed. ‘What explains such a hue?’

‘I have seen such redness before, Your Majesty,’ Hooke answered. ‘I have seen it in people burnt in fires. Yet as we can see, there are no burns on the body, no singeing of the hair, branding of the skin or roasting of the parts.’

Hooke moved lower, cut out the breastplate, and pulled a section of lung. ‘Full of bubbly liquor. I have observed cooked bodies, which tend to stiffen and remain stiff; the last time after the conflagration at Southwark two years since. I watched it from the Fish Street Pillar. I stood with Grace, my niece, and we overlooked its progress throughout the evening. I have worked on their new Town Hall.’

Hooke lowered his knife into the body, twisting it, and then repeated the motion a little further over, angling the tool slightly. ‘The diaphanous medium of the air, when made sufficiently hot, produces the action of light, or fire. Something in it, a volatile, nitrous spirit, tends to the violence of burning. When heating wood within a closed vessel, a vessel inhibiting the access of air, it is not consumed. Instead, it moves to become charcoal – .’

Hooke held up Sir Edmund’s heart.

It was, the King thought, surprisingly small. ‘Is this really where we feel our most subtle and unsubtle thoughts and passions?’ he asked. ‘Our sense of grace, our knowledge of religion and sin?’

Hooke, his knife held before him, considered the King’s question.

‘William Harvey, famous for his
De Motu Cordis
, showed the heart to be only for moving the blood around the body, and then around again. It can be explained as a pump. When, however, you study the heart to find hate, or charity, or a fondness for sin, it becomes a more enigmatic organ.’

Hooke placed the Justice’s heart down onto the bench beside him. ‘Your Majesty, I shall cut open the bowel to inspect it.’

Sir Jonas and the King moved as near to the wall as they could get. Harry opened the window.

‘There is something strange within . . .’

Hooke took out a ball, dirty with blood. He placed it onto the surface of the bench, and proceeded to straighten it out.

It unfolded into a rectangle. With the flat of his knife, he wiped the surface of what revealed itself to be a small piece of paper.

‘What is it?’ demanded the King.

On the paper was written a single word:

CORPUS

‘He swallowed the keyword for the cipher,’ Harry observed.

‘He knew he was about to die,’ Sir Jonas said.

‘It is Sir Edmund’s own writing,’ Harry said. ‘I remember his hand from his copy of the cipher.’

The King looked pale. ‘
Corpus
? Meaning body? A dead body? The body of Christ? Or a body of work?’

‘Was he killed for this word? Did he hide it from his persecutor?’ Harry asked them, speculating aloud. The other men offered no answer.

‘See if any more such messages inhabit him,’ the King commanded.

Hooke placed the sectioned bowel to one side, onto the surface of the bench beside them, and nodded to Harry.

Harry folded some sacking under Sir Edmund’s head to lift it from the marble. Hooke cut over the crown of the head from behind one ear to the other, a shear of toothed steel on bone. Harry gripped the edges of the flap and pulled it over the face; the muscles of his forearms strained with the effort. Then he pulled the flap at the back down to the nape of the neck.

The dull sheen of the top of the skull was exposed. With the handsaw Harry worked around its equator, and pulled the top away. It released with a sucking sound and the grating of bone on bone.

Their work eventually had due effect upon the King. The unpalatable odour of the body, and the sights and sounds of the head being scooped forced him to go from the room. Most repellent of all was the rawness – the very meatiness – of the edges of the separated scalp.

The other three men looked after him, and then at one another, with some curiosity. The King had been exposed to violence and death many times in his life. They assumed that it was because the body was that of his Justice of Peace for Westminster, the man who had assisted him in his escape to France, that he suffered this attack of squeamishness.

They heard him outside pulling in heaving gasps of the smoky London air.

Its coolness and relative freshness invigorated him. Recomposed, he returned inside.

Hooke held up his wet knife, and showed it theatrically to the King. He used the razor-sharp blade to shave the fine hairs from the back of his own wrist. ‘This can be a superior tool of enquiry than the mind, Your Majesty, even if it means getting the hands dirty.’

‘Are you well again, Your Majesty?’ Harry asked, feeling pleased that it was the King who had succumbed to his feelings, and not him.

‘I have recovered, Harry, thank you.’

‘I shall return the head to its right relations.’

‘I should like that of all things.’

Harry refitted the top of the skull – reminding the King of the lid of the Air-pump’s receiver – into place, and pulled the flesh of the head back together. He stitched the scalp with some waxed twine, clamping the two edges together with his left hand and sewing with his right. He then moved to the chest, Sir Edmund’s ribs gaping open like a great mouth, and replaced the breastplate. Rapidly, he sewed up the long incisions across the torso with a simple blanket stitch, which left the fatty edges meeting in long undulating lines. He draped some linen to cover the body. He set to with cleaning the floor around the slab, which was slippery, and then the top of the bench.

*

The four men left the dissecting room together and crossed the grounds of the College. The church bells of Saint Martin’s Outwich pealed one o’clock.

‘Keep him here, Robert, secure at Gresham’s. I must speak with my Council, to decide upon the letting loose of the news of Sir Edmund’s death. He will be fetched shortly. Again, I rely upon your discretion.’

Leaving Gresham’s in his simple carriage, the King with Sir Jonas Moore, and the remainder of his guards following them, did not glance back.

‘The keyword is left with us, to reveal the contents of the cipher,’ Harry said.

Hooke looked up at the sky. ‘Again, we are expected to keep secrets.’

‘There is a threat upon the King’s life. When the news spreads that Sir Edmund was on the wheel it will provoke outrage against the Catholics.’

They moved to go in, Harry wondering what the documents left on the boy and delivered to Mr. Hooke by the Solicitor, and the package from Henry Oldenburg’s study, held for them, now that they had the keyword.

‘Harry, look there,’ Hooke said, pointing down at the ground by the low step of the threshold of his lodgings.

There, placed neatly, side-by-side, stood Harry’s boots.

Observation XXXV
Of a Flea

Cold fresh air and the sound of the bells of Saint Butolph’s came in through the library window. Shaftesbury sat reading Robert Hooke’s
Micrographia
, studying one of its illustrations, Hooke’s engraving of a flea.

He waited for the bells to finish, and Aires waited with him.

Aires made no great show of deference to his master. The two men had known each other for over thirty years, when Aires, then a boy with Parliament’s troops in Dorset, had served under him, after the Earl had changed sides from the Royalists. The Earl – then plain Anthony Ashley Cooper – had noticed him for his youth, loyalty, and bravery. He had used Aires as a messenger, and then, when the wars were over, had kept him on in his retinue. The youth had long disappeared, but the rest remained.

‘Aires, we have been too cautious of the name of the Royal Society, and of its Curator Robert Hooke, to do what should already have been done.’

‘The Society owns little more than its name. Gresham’s College is a dingy, threadbare place. Mr. Hooke, likewise, is unprepossessing.’

‘The powers of his mind are acute. I have here his
Micrographia
; an astonishing and ingenious book. He reveals to us another world, one invisible to the eye, living under us, around us, and on us. It gives us pause for thought, I think, when we are busy colonising the New World, but we cannot command a flea. We can suffer their company, or kill them. There is to be no parley with them.’

‘I would say that to a flea we must appear as gods, with the power of life and death over them. And as fleas suck at ours, Christ’s blood is sucked, too, by the Catholics.’

Shaftesbury smiled at this. ‘You must share your thoughts with Dr. Locke upon the religious observance of insects. I have gone too softly. I surmised that witnessing Enoch Wolfe’s death would discourage Hooke’s assistant, as it would most men. But Henry Hunt is far from discouraged. For today he climbed across the Morice waterworks, helping to retrieve a dead man. Like Mr. Hooke’s flea, this little busy creature bites and pierces the skin, leaving it inflamed.’

‘There is gossip that the dead man on the wheel is Sir Edmund, the Justice.’

‘He was seen about London, looking perturbed, and has been missing since yesterday morning.’

‘Do you give more licence with Henry Hunt than you gave before?’

‘You have every licence. Take Monsieur Lefèvre with you.’

Aires left, and Shaftesbury turned to his automaton. ‘And then we must take back our boy.’