The Bloodless Boy

by Robert J. Lloyd

  Mr. Hooke was the only man to ask, even if Harry had lied to the Curator again.

  Observation LIX

  Of Simulacra

  At the Aldgate arch the decision had been taken, and the barrier removed. It was impossible to search everyone in the crowd. They all pressed through to the City, aiming for vantage points along Aldgate High Street, or Bishopsgate Street, or Leadenhall Street. Word was that there was no use going down to the Thames for a wherry to Temple Bar, where the Mock Pope was to be burned, as the queues at the quayside were worse. Fights had broken out, and wherries tipped. Passengers had been cast into the River.

  Harry kept his hands, their lacerations stinging when exposed to the air, deep in his pockets. In the late afternoon, the sunshine had grown weaker, the temperature dropping sharply, and the waiting chilled him; his bruised legs shivered as well as ached.

  ‘Imagine the City aflame!’ a man shouted, agitated, his thin voice half carried away by the breeze. ‘Imagine all of the great buildings of London blazing by the same Popish cruelty that before set it afire! Imagine your father and your mother tied to a stake, as they are cooked by Jesuits; imagine their heart-wrenching screams in their torment . . .’

  Harry tried to block the noise from his mind. Nearly everyone he saw had their mouths open, talking excitedly of the Procession. They held bags of vegetables, or baskets of eggs, or pockets bulging with pebbles, ammunition to hurl at the Mock Pope. He thought of the contents of his own pocket, and how much pain it had brought, and how much trouble it could still bring him. He felt for Whitcombe’s Observations, in case the guard wanted to search him.

  ‘Protestant flails!’ a man yelled, too close to his ear. ‘Have a care against the damnable Papists!’

  Harry brushed him off.

  The man looked affronted. ‘Are you a one to be wary of?’

  Harry turned, and grabbed him by his elbow. The trader howled, surprised by the force of the young man’s grip. Seeing dark intent on Harry’s face, he picked up a flail from his tray with his free arm and held it in front of him.

  ‘Have a care yourself, Sir,’ Harry hissed at him. ‘You speak out of turn. Your question is malicious.’

  The man gripped his flail as if trying to ward Harry’s words away with it. ‘I meant nothing by it.’

  ‘Then you merely prattle. Talk such as yours is dangerous, and should not be let loose.’

  Made nervous by the zeal on his face, the man could not hold Harry’s gaze, and he dropped his eyes. ‘I am sorry,’ he mumbled contritely.

  Harry released him. A trooper looked hard at them, but settled down as the confrontation seemed to have ended. Those around gave Harry a little more room, wary of the spots of anger on his cheeks.

  He stood, waiting, every so often shuffling forward with all the others, hoping that nothing more would draw attention to himself. Word had started that Houndsditch was to be the way, and those who believed it took a gamble, turning to go north by St. Butolph’s.

  The smells from the people pressing against him, and jostling him, were almost overpowering; of sweat, something like old bread, wine, smoke, and fat. He only wanted to be at Gresham, by the fire, talking to Mr. Hooke, talking with Grace, away from this gathering crowd.

  His shoulders slumped. The flail seller was speaking with one of the soldiers, and pointing straight at him.

  He could hear the sound, like a heartbeat, of drums approaching, low and booming, beating a slow and solemn rhythm. The pageant approached. Everyone pushed forwards or backwards, trying to work out which side of the Gate they should be. The guards went up and down, breaking up the worst of the crush with the lengths of their pikes.

  At last, as the gloom of dusk descended, Harry reached Aldgate.

  The trooper moved in front of him, his voice gruff. ‘What was that? With the man and his flails?’ The flail-seller stood there, still looking aggrieved.

  ‘I did not want one, and so he took against me.’

  The soldier, large and doughty-looking, inspected him. The crowd pushed past their conversation, oozing slowly around them like tar. ‘Empty your pockets. Take off your hat. There is fear of regicide.’

  ‘I have only papers.’ Harry bridled at the man’s close scrutiny, extending to a prodding of the bump on his head that made him flinch. He produced the package of Thomas Whitcombe’s Observations. ‘I am no assassin – I am known to the King, and he considers me a friend.’

  The trooper considered. He was surrounded by Enthusiasts, and this one looked no less earnest; wide-eyed, sweaty, taken up by the same fervour that gripped all at Aldgate. He had papers, which could not be dangerous.

  ‘Please let me through,’ Harry said. ‘I have news of the killing of Sir Edmund Bury Godfrey.’

  The soldier narrowed his eyes doubtingly, and then looked around to the others with him. ‘Where’s the sergeant?’

  *

  Along Houndsditch, over the heads of the crowd, the Pope’s crown was spotted, to shouts of ‘the Whore of Rome!’ The crowd seemed to swell, as if a great lung taking a breath. The way along Shoemaker Row had been too constricted, and the pageant instead had gone outside the Roman Wall, along the broader way. As realisation spread, some turned to come back through Aldgate, as others resisted. Those still on the Whitechapel side saw their chance, and rushed up Houndsditch to see.

  A harsh voice came across them, aimed at the trooper with Harry. ‘Push them back! Keep them back!’ The sergeant, his voice ruined from shouting, waved angrily. The trooper saluted, muttered to himself, and took a strip of leather from his pouch. ‘Put out your hands, like this,’ he said, with the insides of his wrists together in front of him. Harry looked beyond him, wondering whether to run, but the size of the man and the push of the crowd gave him nowhere to go. Slowly, he extended his hands, as Sir Edmund must have done for Colonel Fields, and the soldier tied him firmly to a bar set in the wall.

  A man dressed as the Devil whirled by, knocking those around him, blowing unmusically into a flute. The trooper pushed him away, and left Harry restrained against the wall, trying to avoid the suspicious looks from those who pressed through.

  Now, winding its sluggish progress from Moorgate, came the Mock Papal Procession, with drums beating steadily and a slow and doleful ringing of a bell. At its head were six whifflers, bulky men wearing bright red waistcoats. Harry, pulling against his strap, having to twist to look over his shoulder, could see the red seeping through the crowd, inexorably forwards, the men moving from side to side, swinging sticks to discourage those before them.

  To the sides of the pageant walked men wearing green ribbons on their sleeves, carrying flambeaux and lamps, which in the fading light flickered orange over the scene.

  They were the Earl of Shaftesbury’s men.

  Behind the whifflers walked the bell-ringer, whose shout could now be heard: ‘Remember Justice Godfrey!’

  Sir Edmund Bury Godfrey, dressed completely in black, rode on a white horse. The effigy was skilfully made, a good likeness of him, even down to the thinness of the lips and the saturnine expression. Only the way that he rode, stiff in the saddle, showed that he was of wood, straw, and wax. He was kept on the horse by a black-robed Jesuit behind him, holding up a bloody dagger theatrically to the crowd. They gasped as they saw the murder of the Justice represented, they all knew of the journey he must have taken to the wheel under London Bridge, and they gasped again as they saw the blood-stained clothes and the deep red weal across the neck.

  They started to chant along with the bell-ringer, ‘Remember the Justice! Remember Sir Edmund!’

  A whiffler, as the procession reached Aldgate, tried to move Harry out of his way, but realised that he was tied. He looked at the young man, confused, and guided the Procession around him. At the constriction of Aldgate, the pageant slowed to a crawl, and Harry could see clearly by all the flambeaux and lamps every detail of those who went by.

  Behind Sir Edmund and his assassin went a tall fat man, dressed in the gown
of a Protestant curate, with a large black wig on his head. A strange cricket of a man, tiny by comparison, walked with him. His hips swayed and jerked, and his silver hair stood on end as if tipped with Saint Elmo’s fire.

  ‘To fall for the demonic tricks of Papistry is to become a half-man!’ the cricket screamed as he came through the Gate. ‘A stunted homunculus, duped by the cruel lies of the anti-Christ! They would yoke us under the tyrannical absolutism of Rome, in diabolical partnership with the French King! Jesuitical spies infiltrate healthy Protestantism, infecting its body with doubts and misgivings, turning its head with diseased evasions and maintenances of grim fictions that fly in the face of reason! Their blasphemous rites, profane, sacrilegious, irreverent, immoral, corrupt, depraved, disrespectful . . .’

  It was Titus Oates, Harry realised, the Saviour of the Nation, and that must be Israel Tonge with him. Around them they had their own bodyguard, a small group of militia, watching around them constantly for imminent attack.

  They went through the arch, Tonge still ranting, his hands held aloft, fingers splayed out as if to grasp the sky itself, eyes wide and hair shaking, and Oates’s great bulk beside him.

  Behind them came more of the targets of Tonge’s vitriol, to jeers and hisses from the crowd.

  They pointed at the Catholic priests, robes decorated with skulls and bones, holding huge silver crosses, giving out pardons to those who would murder Protestants. They punched the air at the Carmelites and Grey Friars. The Bishops, clad in purple, the breeze flapping their lawn sleeves, ducked as the crowd forgot this was spectacle, and hurled eggs and vegetables at them. They sang songs for Queen Bess, and songs calling for the King’s wife to bear children, as scarlet Cardinals, and the Pope’s physician holding Jesuit’s powder, and two boys, red crosses on their white silks, swinging incense-pots, walked past. The boys were just in front of the Pope himself, whose robes and the chair he sat on were a glory of red and gold and ermine.

  Larger than life, he would have been at least ten feet tall if he were to miraculously stand from his chair. He lurched on his platform, which was skirted by a curtain decorated with Saint Peter’s keys. Lit torches ringed him with fire. Men carried him, handles projecting from each side of the platform.

  His giant hand was raised to bless them all.

  At each stop and start, the Pope rolled forward or back, the ropes holding his chair becoming taut or slack as he moved. His face, garishly-painted plaster and wood, looked angry; he was made furious by such Protestant zeal surrounding him, such Enthusiasm, such hatred for him and his way of worship.

  A clamour of shouts and roars filled the street, as people were pushed one way and another, against one another, eddying and swirling against the buildings around them. For Harry, strapped to his bar, the noise became deafening, the Pope stopped by the arch of Aldgate, the sound echoing from its stones. The crowd pressed up to the Pope, and his bearers nearly collapsed under the weight. The men with green ribbons came to his rescue, as the shoving threatened to topple him.

  The Pope towered above them all, his golden crown shining against the night sky. His wild swinging settled, as more people came to assist, taking the platform he was on.

  Harry caught a glimpse of one of the faces among the crowd, belonging to a man moving smoothly out to the Pope’s platform, taking one of the handles at the back. Something about the shape of the forehead had caught his eye, but when Harry looked again, he had gone.

  He pulled hard at the leather holding him, trying to spot the face again.

  The man had been dressed in the black of a Jesuit, with a black, wide-rimmed hat.

  Harry was sure he had just seen the murderer of Enoch Wolfe.

  *

  He pulled once more, the leather digging into his wrists, looking for anything sharp to cut it through. The stone was too smooth, and no edge presented itself.

  There, again, under the Pope. Now towards the front of his stage.

  The man was unmistakeable, even under his hat. The shape of the forehead, the same one long eyebrow across it. The quietness and stillness of him, when all around were shouting, animated, writhing in their displeasure at wicked Papistry, at the iniquities that the Procession showed them.

  Harry was gripped by a certainty that this man, who before had worn a soldier’s coat and bucket boots, and who now assumed the appearance of a Jesuit, was a threat, but to whom? That he was a killer, Harry knew, but who in amongst this crowd was in danger?

  The man only looked in one direction, down Aldgate High Street; he was not scanning the crowd for a particular face.

  Harry screamed out, but his noise only joined the noise of everyone there, barely adding to the whole. No one gave him any attention; all focus was on the Pope and his entourage.

  He quietened, bowing his head in his frustration. All he could do was wait to be released by the soldiers.

  *

  The crowd was so dense that further movement forward, to bring the Pope under Aldgate’s archway, was impossible. The music and the shouting continued, but everything else stopped still. People still tried to gain access from Whitechapel, to get ahead of the Procession, and Harry found himself pressed up against the wall, until his ribs felt as if they could surely no longer hold. Tied to the bar he had nowhere to go, and his wrists bled from the bite of the strap.

  ‘Is this the one?’

  The sergeant had arrived back at the Gate, forcing his way through, and the big trooper, carrying a lantern, nodded. Both men looked frayed, breathing heavily, and Harry was the opportunity for them to leave the crush.

  ‘Says he has news of the death of the Justice.’

  ‘I have seen another in the crowd, a killer!’ Harry gasped.

  The sergeant raised an eyebrow. ‘Get him in, we may talk in peace,’ he said to his man, producing a large key. ‘His Holiness goes nowhere for a while.’

  The trooper took out a knife, and cut the leather strap.

  The soldiers opened up a thick door, leading to the interior of Aldgate, and pushed Harry up the dark staircase and into a murky room, the light from the street hardly able to enter through its narrow, barred windows. The Pope’s great face, glowing orange from all the fire around him, stared in at them from the Whitechapel side. Stains and patches mottled the walls, spreading across the ceiling from a corner, and the redolent plaster smelled like rotten seaweed. The trooper’s lantern showed that the room had once been lived in, but now just a few pieces of furniture remained; a dull table with a couple of broken chairs stacked on it was pushed up against the wall. Otherwise there was only a long-disused fireplace, a broken fire-guard lying in it.

  The squalid reek of the room signalled that its main use was for the soldiers to relieve themselves, and one corner showed their usual place to do so.

  Although the room was small, the sudden space around him, and with the tang in his nose, made Harry dizzy, as he had felt on the Monument after the man’s fall. His hands were sweaty, and although the soldiers had not yet started their questioning he feared it would go badly. All he wanted was for them to believe him, but he expected the sergeant’s response to echo that of the trooper’s.

  The sergeant took one of the upside-down chairs, and flipped it easily over to place it down. Wiry, steady-eyed, he sat and leaned interrogatively to Harry.

  ‘I remember you, from this afternoon,’ he said. ‘I cannot recall your name.’

  ‘I am Henry Hunt, of – .’

  ‘– the Royal Society. So you said, when I let you out of the City.’

  ‘I wish only to return to Gresham’s College, to see Mr. Hooke there.’

  The sergeant cocked his head. ‘I shall tell you what I know: you went to Colonel Fields in Whitechapel. A philosophical business. Coming back, you made trouble, and claimed to know of Justice Godfrey’s murder.’

  ‘It was the Colonel who killed the Justice. Going to his burnt chapel proved it to me, for Sir Edmund was killed by fire.’

  The sergeant stood, and the cha
ir scraped loudly on the wooden floor. ‘Yet the Justice was found upon the wheel, under London Bridge.’

  ‘But he died by fire,’ Harry insisted. ‘I helped Mr. Robert Hooke with the autopsy. His other wounds did not kill him.’

  ‘This news has not come out.’

  ‘The King swore us to secrecy.’

  The sergeant took off his cap, and wiped the sweat from his hair. What the boy claimed could not be true; and opinion was against him – for everyone spoke only of the Papist murder of Sir Edmund. ‘And now you’ve seen another killer, in the mob.’ He flicked the sweat off his fingers. ‘I start to think you a rabble-rouser. Or else, your reason slips in these fearful times, like a poor creature of the Bethlehem hospital.’

  ‘I report what I observe, nothing more. I saw a murder! The killer stands under the Pope, holding him up. He is dressed as a Jesuit.’

  ‘Dressed as what he is? A Jesuit assassin?’ The sergeant looked at his trooper, rolled his eyes, and stood up. ‘Enough of this, boy…I shall tell you what will happen. You will stay here. Mr. Robert Hooke shall be fetched, after the Procession. If he vouches for you, then he may take you away. Of your story of Colonel Fields, I believe you to be wrong, but it will be looked into. Of your story of the Jesuit, I fear you are overcome by the passions of the day, for an assassin would not work so openly. He would make himself invisible, in amongst the mob. You may watch the Procession from here.’

  He motioned to the trooper, who moved to retie Harry with the strap.

  ‘No need,’ the sergeant told him, picking up the lantern. ‘This boy’s no danger, unless to himself. We must go, for His Majesty is due to meet with the Procession.’

  They did not look back at him, and Harry, after the door was firmly locked, heard their heavy descent of the stairs.

  *

  Harry let out an anguished howl, and crossed the room to the barred window, to look down upon the crowd, and those dressed as Catholics in the Procession, and the Mock Pope, whose eyes stared blindly at him.