The Bloodless Boy (32 page)

They each took a last breath, holding it in their lungs even though they knew that it was now too late for them all. Their end was to be there; in the darkness of the cellar, invisible to one another, Hooke’s Air-pump destroyed about them.

It was Hooke who first let go of the air inside him, and his intake of breath filled his chest with the smoke.

To Harry, the noise of the iron plates of the door buckling was subdued, distant, stifled by his broken eardrums. His head felt fantastically heavy, as if transmuted into gold, impossible to keep it from falling onto his chest, the muscles at the back of his neck losing all of their strength. Sleep sought to take him off, into infinity. Everything seemed distant, far away . . .

*

A dim understanding appeared to him, becoming stronger, firmer, a slow and leisurely comprehension. It was not the sound of the iron door buckling that he could still hear, clattering, jangling, and sibilant. It was the sound of boots, clambering over its iron plates and the remains of the machine strewn over the floor. This understanding came at the same time as his recognition of the sound of voices, bellowing excitedly, calling out for survivors, and then the sounds of water being splashed at them from metal buckets.

The light from several lanterns spilled into the room, their beams jerking about, seeking into the shadows, reflecting from the smashed glass.

From behind the lights, Mary Robinson’s face appeared, black with soot, a handkerchief over her mouth, her wide eyes fearful of what she might find. She saw the huddle of Hooke and Harry together, with another man she knew to be the King, although he appeared far removed from his usual dignity. When she was confronted only by their silence, she burst into wails of despair.

More faces appeared, just, almost wholly obscured through the haze of smoke, as equally grimed from the fight against the fire. Grace was with them, too, clutching a bucket.

When Grace saw Harry she ran forward to him, and pulled at his hands, separating him from Hooke. ‘You must go quickly, Harry!’ she shouted into his face, slapping him when he closed his eyes, his head slumping forwards again.

‘Grace,’ he said to her, slurring her name, hardly able to expel his words through the effects of the smoke. ‘I do not want to die.’

‘These fumes will kill you yet.’ She hoisted him up, and pulled his arm across her shoulders. Mary bent to lift Hooke clean off the floor, and draped him over her back.

Grace, with the help of the King, who was less affected by the smoke, got Harry up the steps, and half pushed and half carried him from the cellar room, Mary following close behind with her load of the lifeless Curator.

They staggered back through the passage, Harry suspended between Grace and the King, the objects that once had lined the walls now black and skeletal remains. Some of them still glowed in the ash, threatening to re-ignite. The people parted in front of them, bravely continuing to douse the remaining flames, buckets swinging their way from hand to hand.

Outside, in Gresham’s College quadrangle, the line of fire-fighters formed a buzzing swarm of celebration around them. Those lower, now starved of the supply of buckets, began to climb back to the daylight to join them.

Grace and the King carefully lowered Harry to the ground, and he crouched on his knees, coughing up black liquid, his face streaked with a pattern of lines like the roots of a plant, where his tears had run through the soot.

Mary placed Hooke on the ground, where he stayed motionless. The King sat down next to him, his head between his knees, great coughs shaking his frame.

The King and Harry dragged in great gasps of fresh, cold, London air, drawing it far down into their lungs. Even London air, they found, could taste sweet. They had thought they would never smell or breathe it again.

Cheering and hollering contagiously spread through their rescuers, but this died down as the realisation took hold that Hooke was still, and unconscious.

Harry crawled to him, still coughing, and crouched beside his inert form. His anxiety, as he pushed weakly at Hooke’s chest, and tried to breathe life back into him, conveyed itself through the crowd, and they moved backwards, becoming sombre. Harry felt for the pulse of life in Hooke’s neck, and found just a remote throb in his carotid artery, the blood still, feebly, slowly, flowing; the weak heart still pushed it on its journey around the body.

The King kept back, his face hidden behind his torn band of shirt, still sitting to hide his height from them. He, too, was anxious for the Curator, but he did not want the crowd to fuss around him, or for word to escape that he visited Gresham’s College. Without his wig and covered with soot he was unfamiliar to them all. And, in times like these, no one would have expected the King to be in such a place.

Harry’s pressing of Hooke’s chest brought a weak flicker of purple eyelids and a faltering movement of his hand, as if Hooke tried to ward something off. Harry, and then Grace as she joined with his endeavours to save the Curator, kept at him, both desperate for him to breathe more strongly. After a seemingly endless series of pumps and thumps to the older man’s chest, trying to massage the life back into it, they eventually slowed, and then stopped.

The Curator still hardly moved, his signs of life so faded. Mary, with a scream at them that they must not give in, took over, and pounded Hooke’s ribs, but still he did not respond. Harry looked searchingly at Grace, who fixed her eyes on him, both of their stares wide with despondency over Hooke’s fate. His eyes were startlingly white against his smoke-blackened face. His look implored her to trust him.

Harry motioned to Mary to stop, and placed his hands firmly over Hooke’s mouth and nose.

All of the onlookers unthinkingly stopped breathing too, waiting for the result of Harry’s action. After a long moment deprived of air Hooke’s body reacted, and with a great coughing up of smoke and a spume of grey saliva ejecting from his mouth, he stirred, struggling against the pressure of Harry’s grip. Harry let go of him, and stood, the relief that his efforts had revived his one-time master, and his closest friend, making him want to stretch towards the sky.

Eventually, after yet more coughs and even more liquid from his lungs, Hooke’s eyes snapped open, and he stared at them in confusion. As recollection of what had happened to him filled his mind, he managed at last to sit up. Grace wrapped her arms around her uncle, sobbing her tears on his shoulder.

The crowd, still clutching their buckets, were exultant. They had thought that all their efforts had been in vain, but the illustrious Curator would live.

The King moved over to Harry. ‘Well done, Harry. Well done!’ he exclaimed. ‘Robert is dear to us both – I too would have wept if he had been taken from us.’ He leaned forwards, and to Harry’s astonishment he kissed him on both cheeks. He kept his mouth by Harry’s ear. ‘You will not divulge my identity, will you?’ he muttered into it. ‘I do not wish it known that there has been this try at assassination. I begin to believe Titus Oates; there
is
a damnable and hellish plot against me.’

‘Yet, you were not nearly killed.’

‘I was not?’ the King said, mystified.

‘It was William Jackson who nearly died in the fire. The King is safely in Whitehall.’

‘I see what you are about.’ The King tried a cackle, which became a series of splutters. ‘Do you think rather, then, that Robert Hooke, my Curator of Experiments, was their quarry?’

‘I too have had my life threatened. I have sought after the killer of these boys, and a boy was killed in my place. Mr. Hooke’s apprentice was poisoned by injection of smallpox. Furthermore, at the top of the Fish Street pillar, I had to fight off a man who chased me there.’

‘So you are being pursued, hmm? You must watch yourself, for it would be a shame to lose a man with your talents. I shall arrange protection.’

‘I think this another matter, Your Majesty, one stemming from Oliver Cromwell’s use of a man named Thomas Whitcombe. Thomas Whitcombe is a natural philosopher and experimentalist, a
virtuosi
, whose interests coincide with Mr. Hooke’s.’ Harry coughed some more, and then continued. ‘Whitcombe made experiments upon boys, and wrote of his work in a series of papers, called by him his
Observations
. The cipher he used to make secret his trials was the same used to assist your escape to France. Sir Edmund found the cipher’s keyword, and at the last made sure to communicate it to us.’

Harry’s speech ended in more coughing, and he had to put his head towards the ground to let more of the soot-filled liquid leave his stomach.

‘
Corpus
,’ the King recalled. ‘Tell of this to me later, Harry, when you are well. I remember Whitcombe; he was to be my physician should I have need of him.’

The King shook Harry’s hand, and then moved to take Hooke by the arm, showing that he was ready to leave. ‘With the pasting of us in, you saved my life, Robert.’

Thanking everyone graciously for his rescue, assuming an elaborate accent which some took to be Welsh, and planting further royal kisses onto an ecstatic Mary’s cheeks, he saw his chance to slip away, as the crowd’s embellishments of the story of the rescue became ever more ornate, and more loudly expressed.

The tale was told, many times over; of Mary’s watching Harry through the kitchen window as he returned to the cellars, of her hearing footsteps out in the courtyard a few minutes later, expecting to see Hooke and Harry and instead spying two figures running. A flash of sea-green coats, and the idea that they carried something, but she could not be sure what it was. Before she had time to decide she didn’t much like the look of them, a great bang rattled the cups hanging from their hooks on the dresser, and shook the sash windows. The very ground seemed to shiver – she never felt a sensation like it, nor did she want to again – and when she crossed to the door of the cellar a tongue of flame nearly caught her apron as she unlocked it. It would have set her ablaze like a martyr in Queen Mary’s time.

At this point of her story, other voices broke in, their own accounts interweaving with the housekeeper’s, as they told of hearing the great bang, and coming into the College from Broad Street and Bishopsgate, the panicking horses kicking at the walls of the stables, and Mary demanding assistance. The population was an effective fire-fighting force, through necessity. Their familiarity with fire also made them expert in deciding cause; the conviction shared amongst them all was that it had been undoubtedly the work of Papists.

Returning to the Curator, now washing himself down at the water-pump, still coughing from the inhalation of smoke, Harry observed a flush of colour on Hooke’s normally pale skin.

‘Mr. Hooke, I perceive on you the same redness that affected the Justice. We must get you inside, in the warmth, and you must take your rest. When you are revived I will tell you of the notes of a man called Thomas Whitcombe, detailing his various trials requiring the blood of boys; of the murder of Enoch Wolfe in Alsatia; and of those who tried to stop my search.’

Hooke, his chest still heaving, gave one of his silent nods. With Grace and Mary supporting him, they returned to the safety of Hooke’s rooms.

Observation LIII
Of Conflux and Diflux Bloods

At last less red, becoming a more customary grey, Robert Hooke sat by the fire-place, a blanket over him at Mary’s instruction.

She poured tea for him. ‘You need liquid, Mr. Hooke,’ she said. ‘The fire is still inside you, and wants putting out!’

Harry sat at the table, finding pieces of glass in the back of his hands, his hair and in the leather of his coat, and as he talked he placed them into a pile in front of him. Grace sat next to him. From time to time she looked at him as if he had turned into somebody else; somebody far removed from the mild boy she grew up with.

She was repulsed when Harry described the death of Enoch Wolfe, whose throat had been ripped away by a creature more demon than man; and shocked when hearing of Harry’s fight at the top of the Fish Street pillar.

Hooke, as he listened, winced. ‘You have become very secretive, Harry.’

‘I have hardly had the chance to tell you, as Tom was ill, and today we went to see to the boy in the Air-pump and found the cellars open. And then we were busy with explosions and fire.’

‘Tom was poisoned, Harry;
murdered
.’ Hooke coughed violently, and more matter came up from his lungs. ‘A sickness was injected into him, which was surely meant for you. You have not been mindful of my wishes, nor of the safety of those around you!’ When he had calmed, he pointed a grey finger at Harry accusingly. ‘I counselled against your involvement in this, when you first told me of the old soldier’s story of the King’s escape.’ The Curator wiped at his blood-shot, smoke-filled eyes, and his voice quivered with emotion. ‘A young life has been lost.’

‘How could I have known that Tom would be killed? I wish that I had been injected in his place.’

Hooke bit his tongue, so that he did not say something that he would regret. He tried some of the tea from Mary, who fussed around him, also anxious to hear what Harry had to tell. The drink was too hot, his mouth raw and sensitive after the fire.

‘You know that Tom was like a brother to me,’ Harry said. ‘I miss him most of all things. Please, Mr. Hooke, you say that I am secretive. Let me speak, then, of what I know.’

Harry stood, angry and tearful, and took out the pile of papers from the drawer and passed Hooke his deciphered versions of the letters. Harry sat back down, and Grace shot him a sympathetic look.

She listened intently, her hand to her mouth, as he repeated Colonel Fields’s story of his blood-brothers, Reuben Creed and Thomas Whitcombe, assisting the King’s escape to France, and of Reuben being hanged from a tree outside Worcester, and of Thomas being taken as a slave to the Barbadoes. He told them of Whitcombe’s skills as an army chirurgeon.

‘Using the keyword
CORPUS
, it was an easy thing to read his letters. He prepares for his death, and leaves instruction to pass his work to you. The letter to Sir Edmund speaks of two lights. I did not at first understand it. I think that Whitcombe finished with his trials, and saw that he had turned away from the Light of God, immersed as he was only in the Light of Nature. He sought absolution. I also translated his work on blood and its infusion, from within a package left with Henry Oldenburg. It was in the chest, found there as I began the task of cataloguing the Secretary’s correspondences.’