The Bloodless Boy

by Robert J. Lloyd

  Sir Edmund filled with dread; the feeling diffused through him like black ink dripped into water.

  Stop with these thoughts, Edmund, stop with them.

  *

  The wherry reached the turn at Westminster, where the river flowing from the south swerved lazily east. Sir Edmund forced himself to think of something else, looking at London from this point on the river, and the waterman saw the twitch on his face, the effort of will to do so.

  He saw the usual landmarks as he approached his home; the bell tower of Saint Martin’s, the four towers of Northumberland House, Saint James’s Park rising up on the hill behind, the long rows of trees following the line of the canal. He looked over the low buildings of his own coal and wood stores, as the brightly coloured wherry moved against the water’s flow to his own wharf, at the end of Hartshorne Lane.

  Did anyone wait here for him, or around a bend in one of the crescent shaped alleys, or behind a door, perhaps ready to fling it open into his face and stun him helpless, knock him to the ground?

  He paid the waterman, paying him double the fare for the information that he had heard of nothing untoward around his property, in this part of Saint Martin-in-the-Fields, and that he had heard no rumours of a threat to the Justice.

  He jumped from the vessel, and walked slowly to his house, a long narrow building of red brick. He stayed to the middle of the lane, looking to left and right.

  Hartshorne Lane, leading from the river to the Strand, was busy, full of people pushing carts. Usually he walked through them like a great flagship surrounded by its flotilla, impervious and separate from those around him, all smooth motion and purpose. This morning his face was pale, and his eyes darted everywhere. The man looked as nervous as a cat in a kennel. He gripped the hilt of his rapier in its scabbard, the weapon poking out behind him from under his coat like Satan’s tail. They scurried away from him, keeping well clear, wondering what it was that he expected.

  They, too, had heard the rumours.

  Many tiny alleys and courts led off from Hartshorne Lane; like veins diverging from an artery, Sir Edmund imagined. He looked down each of them, into every corner and hollow, behind every crate and box and cart, walking on the balls of his feet, ready to run. Whether towards or away he had not decided. The early morning sunlight flung shadows across his path, and sent bright stars into his vision. He squinted into the bright light, pulling for the shade afforded by the brim of his hat.

  He moved stealthily around his house, trying to look in all directions at once, looking intently up at the windows for the smallest sign of movement, checking that no one skulked behind the low wall surrounding it, turning to see if anyone crept behind him.

  He went to his outbuildings, still looking around him, to ensure that the locks had not been tampered with.

  The main store for his coal was long and squat. It was strongly built, for when he held the coal back, working with his allies at the Woodmongers’ Company to keep the prices high. The coal dust dispersed over the ground and across the walls of the structure, the bricks around the doorway looking as if an explosion had sent black powder blasting from it. He hefted the large door, made of rough thick planking, pegged to its braces rather than nailed. It was firmly locked, with no sign of being tried by a jemmy or blade.

  The yard in which he kept his wood, with its stacks of planking kept apart on blocks to dry with the air moving freely around them, sagging tarpaulins suspended over them to keep off the weather, afforded perfect cover for any Jesuit assassin. Here the gloom cast by the tarpaulins was almost impenetrable.

  He drew his sword, holding it in front of him, feeling his way into the shadows with its point. He circled each of the stacks, and moved aside some of the timbers to reassure himself that no one hid under them.

  He found nothing. He entered the narrow passageway along the side of the house to go in through the door.

  More shadows. Damn this strong light. Away from the lane, only silence.

  Who came after him, who taunted him with these signs, and infected his head with girlish nervousness? He would check his weapons. He could at least defend himself while in his own home. He would stay there for a day; try to rest. He was fraught. He had gunpowder, pistols and muskets. Enough to start his own insurrection, should he so choose.

  Left in the gap between the door to his house and its frame was a letter, sealed with black wax, with a design of a lit candle. He slid the sword back into its place on his belt.

  Breaking the wax and pulling open the letter, he saw that it had just one word written on it.

  He unlocked the door to his house, and went in.

  Observation XXXII

  Of Rest

  Harry first stirred when the bells of St. Ethelburga-the-Virgin sounded for the one o’clock service. He had missed the whole of the morning, sleeping on. No dreams had troubled him. He wondered if he had even moved a limb.

  He lay for a while, his mind blank, thinking of nothing.

  He sat up, but the hurt from his tailbone made him cry out. It brought back the memory of Alsatia; he had not thought of it, as if his mind worked to keep it from him. He turned onto his belly, wriggled to the edge of the bed, and gingerly placed his feet onto the floor. The weight through his shins reminded him that he had fallen over a wall, after seeing Enoch Wolfe’s throat being bitten away.

  Harry could see the monster’s teeth, each one outlined by dark blood. The monster had stared at him as he held Wolfe. And the other with him, the driver of the coach, had also stood and watched him.

  Why had they not watched Turner? Or Sir Edmund, when he arrived?

  Harry reached for his chamber pot from under his bed, and convulsively puked into it, until only a thread of thin liquid was left. His throat and nose burned from the taste, and he washed it away with some beer. His eyes streamed; he wiped them with some paper, and then put his glasses on.

  He had slept in his breeches. Carefully, he pulled them down to inspect his legs. One shin did not look too bad, a dark yellowy-green spreading down from his knee, and the skin was not broken. It did not feel too sore, either, although he would not want to bump it. The other shin, though, had gone black, the bruise from his fall following the line of sharp bone. He touched it, and immediately winced, pulling his hand away. He felt it again, checking that it was not cracked. The pain brought tears to his eyes, but he pressed his finger against the bone, running it along its length, seeking a notch or line.

  It did not seem to be broken. It looked spectacular, even worse than it felt. He had been lucky not to shatter it. His heel, too, was sore. He also had a cut in his hand from a stone, the congealed blood crusting it over.

  He took the little mirror he kept by his bedside, and used it to observe his coccyx. He pushed at it, each side. It was not too damaged, only bruised.

  He would rest today, he decided. As soon as he had settled upon this decision, he heard a voice telling him: three boys are dead.

  He jumped, startled, and looked around his room, but of course, no one was there. It had been a man’s voice. Not Hooke’s, whose nasal tones he knew so well. An older man’s voice. Not Sir Edmund’s. Not Colonel Fields’s. Not anyone’s that he could remember.

  It was a voice from his imagination, he realised. The voice of his conscience. Perhaps it was the voice of his older self. It had been so clear.

  Three boys were dead.

  The discoverer of one of them, Enoch Wolfe, was also dead, murdered by a monster, a bestial man.

  How many more would be killed?

  Why had Wolfe been killed? Had he been sent to collect the boy, as the size of his box of lampreys suggested? Was it, then, because of his failure to take the boy from the Fleet?

  Where was the boy to be taken?

  To the monster?

  Did this monster kill the boys? Did he feed on their blood?

  Was he the one who wrote on them, noting the days he took blood through the holes he had made?

  Was he the wearer of th
e snowshoes?

  Was he the one who wrote out the Red Cipher in a letter left on the Fleet boy, and in a letter delivered to Robert Hooke?

  Expensive candles had been used at the draining of the boys, presumably to provide light for the procedure. The coach carrying the murderer of Enoch Wolfe had been expensive too. If Harry’s notion – an idea that Mr. Hooke disagreed with – that the boys were preserved in the glass receivers of Air-pumps was true, this, too, required money.

  A business funded by Catholics?

  Harry wondered whether Sir Edmund had been right all along.

  Catholics were said to be conspiring against the King. Sir Edmund had spoken with the King of the threat, having had evidence from two men named Oates and Tonge.

  Did they know of the blood taken from boys? The King had sent Sir Edmund to the Lord High Treasurer Danby, to examine their evidence. Harry supposed that he would hear soon enough whether it was truthful, for the news-sheets were full of stories of Papist insurgency, and would be quick to report any new proofs against the Catholics.

  Harry went to the table by the window, where the package from Oldenburg’s chest sat.

  Who were the two in sea-green coats? They had also looked for Enoch Wolfe in Alsatia, and had taken the enciphered letter for Robert Hooke to the Solicitor, Moses Creed, in Lincoln’s Inn. Were they, as Felicity Tarripan had thought, ladies?

  What was the relationship between the boys? The connection between them? They were all young. Innocent – Sir Edmund would take this to be a Catholic requirement. They were small – perhaps so that they could all be stored in glass receivers.

  Sir Edmund had noted that this meant they had to be observed, for otherwise glass would not have been used for the material of the chamber.

  The boy at the College of Physicians, found at Barking Creed on Christmas Day, had not been studied closely enough. Harry would need to look at him again. When he had visited there, with the King, Mr. Hooke, and Sir Jonas, they had left him in the jar, and spoken generally of the search into the killings. Indeed, they had spent more time dwelling on why Sir Jonas Moore had required their preservation.

  He would also need to see Sir Jonas. But what if Sir Jonas did not wish to be asked? Not even the King had known of his decision to keep the boys preserved.

  Harry sat cautiously down at his desk, and ran his hands over the package, feeling the texture of the rough sailcloth.

  He knew that he had to do something, even if he could not leave his lodgings. He could try the cipher again, while he felt sore. He could guess at keywords.

  The old soldier, Colonel Fields, had told Harry of the cipher from the Civil Wars, and of the King’s escape to France. The Colonel did not say, and Harry had not thought to ask, who else knew of the cipher, and who might use it, all these years after.

  The cipher was used again, left with the bodies of boys drained of their blood.

  Fields might know of the monstrous man, if he too used the Red Cipher.

  To try to guess at the word which unlocked the meaning of these numbered grids would be fruitless. Even if the word was English, that was still all English words to choose from. And there were many other languages that it could be. It could be more than one word. It did not even have to be a word, just a collection of letters put together randomly. His chance of success was infinitesimal.

  His mind still full of questions, Harry decided he would leave the package. Instead, he took some smoothing paper, and used it to smooth some wood that he had, the repetitive action calming him as he considered the events of the last few days, and how he should continue.

  What best to do?

  Observation XXXIII

  Of the Morice Waterwheels

  The following morning found the old Constable, Gabriel Knapp, clinging to a narrow buttress under an arch of London Bridge, the nearest to the north bank. He was drenched with spray. Water poured from his montero.

  The Morice waterwheels, nearly three times his height, powering the great pumps that delivered water to the City, dripped with slime, their blades trawling filth from the water. Their smell made the bile rise in his throat.

  Looking down at the water made him feel as if he was transported upriver, up against its rush. Curling like the backs of maddened porpoises, the waves owned a compelling attraction, enticing him to join them in a last, fatal leap. This attraction made him grip more tightly the slippery stone on which he found himself.

  The noise of the Thames, crashing through the gap between the wooden starlings that supported the bridge, deafened him. Shaped like the prows of ships, the points of the starlings knifed through the flow. The water, forced between them, rocked the whole structure.

  Knapp’s foot slipped as he inched along the stone, and he pulled himself further in towards the fantasy of protection offered by the curving wall.

  Two watchmen stood on the bank, refusing to follow him along the beams that led to this narrow shelf.

  The wheel nearest to the north bank was still, deliberately stopped, and the reason for its halting hung above him. As he moved towards it he wondered how he would ever pull it away. He beckoned again, half-heartedly, to the watchmen, knowing that they would not follow him. They had watched him on his hair-raising scramble across the timbers supporting the wheel to get to this spot.

  Gresham’s College was no distance away.

  ‘Gresham’s!’ he mouthed exaggeratedly, and pointed north along the line of Fish Street. They stared at him, confused. Although only yards separated them his words were whipped away by the thrash of the waves. He crooked a finger, and with his other hand pointed to it. ‘Hooke! Hooke!’

  Enlightenment spread across their faces. ‘Gresham’s!’ they called back. ‘Hooke!’

  ‘Yes!’ And then quietly, directed at himself: ‘Old fool!’

  The watchmen moved off, glad to be away from the bridge, away from the water.

  The wet stone was too treacherous to move forwards along, but Knapp could not muster the courage to take himself back. Hooke would bring the younger man Hunt with him, he hoped, and they would assist him. It would have been better to bring a boat for the purpose of removal – but no waterman would relish tying a wherry to the starling.

  He tried not to watch the water.

  Instead, he looked up at the body of a man, whose back was arched over the topmost blades of the waterwheel. He had been jammed into the mechanism, fixing him as firmly as a prisoner in the stocks. Knapp gazed into the upside-down face.

  The wait seemed interminable, and Knapp’s eardrums rang from their constant battering. He tried to think of ways to take the dead man down from his perch; most he rejected as too whimsical, especially as he doubted whether he could propel himself, either forwards or backwards, from his own place of transfixion.

  The inverted figure above him, with his black coat hanging down, arms spread beseechingly, looked as if he flew to take him from this dangerous spot.

  ‘I should have served you better,’ the Constable said sadly.

  *

  From Saint Magnus the Martyr, Harry had to push his way through the crowd gathering at the Morice waterworks. He limped, his falls in Alsatia making him wince, shins and tailbone still sore, heel tender, pain now stiffening a shoulder. Robert Hooke scuttled along behind, wondering what had happened to make Harry so unwieldy in his movements.

  Harry had been about to tell Hooke of his nightmarish visit to Alsatia, and of witnessing the bestial murder of Enoch Wolfe, but the watchmen coming to Gresham’s College and demanding their assistance at London Bridge had interrupted him.

  Through the network of beams the Constable was only partly visible. More easily observable was the man hanging from the wheel. The crowd swayed up and down the bank, fluctuating between a better view of the Constable and a better view of the dead body. Some people positioned themselves higher up on the hill, to see more over the crush. One waterman took a brave group of onlookers out on the river, rowing against its flow to keep the same position.
Animated gesticulating from them conveyed their excitement at what they saw.

  ‘He is crucified! Held there by nails!’

  The story took a hold of the crowd. ‘The Jesuits are among us!’

  Harry and Hooke pushed through, past the vendors and their baskets of goods, leaving their fetchers, the two timid watchmen, behind. By a telepathic understanding the crowd let them through, aware that they had something to do with the unfolding drama.

  Hooke tugged at Harry. ‘I will go to Saint Magnus!’ he told him urgently. ‘The men there work to finish the inside. I shall seek their help.’

  ‘They need tools to release him from the wheel, Mr. Hooke.’

  Reaching the Bridge, Harry saw Knapp; the part of his face that showed was an ashy colour. As Harry looked at him, the old man’s foot slipped; he recovered his balance, and hugged even tighter the wall of the arch.

  Harry, resignedly, recognised that he must help him; the dead body looked more firmly situated, in no danger of being swept away by the Thames.

  Harry searched out a route across the jumble of beams. He had to get to the Constable before he fell; he could not wait for Hooke to return with the workmen. He took a first careful step, testing how slippery the wet timber was. It offered no friction for his boot. The distance to the far side of the arch, and to the stone ledge holding the Constable, seemed impossible to traverse. Harry’s woollen glove held the beam more effectively, and so he bent to take off his boots. He put them carefully down, not expecting to see them again, for they would disappear into the crowd.

  Stepping out once more, the rough material of his woollen stockings provided more grip on the wood. This seemed safer, but in the cold his toes immediately became numb, feeling as if they retracted into little stubs. Shards of pain stabbed under his toenails.