The Bloodless Boy (11 page)

*

As he stood on the bank, where he had been with Hooke, Sir Edmund, and the body of the boy, the only sounds were the cries from a couple of gulls, the chatter of some people crossing the bridge above him, and the flow of the tributary. There were no skiffs or wherries, yet, on the water, although downstream he could see lighters and packet boats below the Fleet bridge.

The Fleet flowed thickly, as if filled with a fluid more resembling oil than water. The melting of the snow had revealed patches of wet mud, dark, almost black. Without Hooke to meet him here, or meeting the Justice, and with no box of lampreys, or the boy, the landscape appeared empty and featureless. The sun cast stronger shadows than on that dull, snowy morning, just two days ago, subtly readjusting his memory.

Harry traced where they had staggered about around the body of the boy, although the marks closest to the water had gone after the intervening tides. Their feet had left deep sloughs in the softness of the ground. Snow still lodged in some of their footprints, those closer to the quay and away from the strongest sunlight, but most were now empty. He could see the trails of their arduous journeys back up to the quay, to question the angler Enoch Wolfe, and also later trails, presumably of Sir Edmund’s man Welkin helping the Justice load the boy onto the sequestered tumbrel, and of Wolfe reclaiming his big box of bait.

Along the bank, following the line where the edge of the receding snow exposed the mud, another trail could be seen. It reached where the body had been left and continued upstream, away from the Thames.

It was broken, faint, but easy to identify.

*

The New Philosophy championed a controlled method – as Francis Bacon had decreed,
Nature should be put to the torture, and made to yield its reluctant secrets
. Its approach set it apart from the Greeks, the Rationalists, the Idealists, the Schoolmen. In seeking to discredit these old ways of thinking, it had to offer an alternative, from observation and experiment.

And yet . . . did not all the New Philosophers rely also upon their instincts, upon inspiration, flashes of brilliance that seemed revealed to them, allowed them?

Harry, in his own small way, felt just such a moment of epiphany. What he saw, the trail there along the riverbank, confirmed his suspicions about Sir Edmund; it proved his anxiety, although bubbling up from the darkest, unknown parts of his mind, to have been well founded.

As Harry had walked to Gresham’s College on the morning of New Year’s Day, the weather had turned from rain to snow. He remembered the way that the rain stuck to the glass of his spectacles just before. Hooke had left his rooms near this time to make his own journey to Holborn; Tom had said that Harry had only just missed him.

Sir Edmund had called for Hooke: therefore the Justice had stood here before the snow fell.

The distance between Gresham’s College and the Fleet Bridge was a mile. It had taken Harry barely twenty minutes, even through the snow, to walk it.

No time, surely, for Sir Edmund to send his message, even by a courier on horseback.

The eel-fisher had told them that when he arrived with his bait and line there were no marks to be seen and no one there to be seen.

Yet Harry now observed in front of him, disappearing away northwards towards the gardens and ruins of Hatton House, a series of cross-shapes, left by compressed, icy snow within their depressions, slower to melt than the snow around them. Sometimes a plane of compacted snow, shaped according to the angle of landing and forming part of a square, remained precariously on the mud. These marks were so shallow that the falling snow had quickly hidden them.

At Hooke’s New Philosophical Club, the regular meeting of like-minded Fellows away from the Royal Society, William Wynde had once demonstrated the shoes of the Eskimo, describing the spreading out of pressure across the large sole of the shoe, so as to traverse across the softest snow.

Harry deciphered the tracks.

A man wearing snowshoes had walked across here after the snow began, and the marks he made had disappeared under the snow that followed. Only now, as the snow retreated, the snow compressed under the snowshoes being slower to melt, had his trail become visible.

Why had Sir Edmund and the eel-fisher lied to them?

There was another alternative: that Sir Edmund had known that the body would be here, and so sent his message to the Curator, and had then come to the Fleet. Either way, he had been untruthful to them.

Sir Edmund may well have good reason to keep secrets from them, as he went about his judicial business. He must have recognised the cipher, if the Colonel was to be believed. Perhaps Sir Edmund quite rightly suspected who had killed the boy, and Mr. Hooke was wrong to dismiss his suspicions against the Catholics.

What best to do?

He could not tell Hooke in his current fearfulness, and he had promised the Curator that he would withdraw from the matter. He could not confront the Justice with his new knowledge until he knew more of Sir Edmund’s activities, and what his search involved.

Should he continue to investigate the death of the boy? Or should he honour his promise to Robert Hooke?

He would continue his walk, Harry decided. Over the bridge, over the Fleet ditch, and into Alsatia, to find the eel-fisher Enoch Wolfe. Sir Edmund’s questioning of him at the Fleet had been brief. Only then would he act as postman, to deliver Hooke’s letter and his own workings upon the Red Cipher to Sir Edmund.

Observation XVI
Of Enthusiasm

This fellow, Titus Oates, repulsed him, with his fat face, and his fat flesh hanging over each side of his seat as if liquefying like a burning candle. This other one, Israel Tonge, perched on his chair, his hands doing a feral dance in front of him as he spoke, seemed possessed by a malignant spirit.

‘. . . and the devilish stinks of the Papists, with their unholy waters and their cloudy smokes, their blasphemous masses led by snuffling genuflecting monkeys garbed in the clothes of harlotry, their Satanic artifices, their Baalish methods, these bladder-puffed-up wily men! Their canting effusions, a landskip of horror so contrary to Christ, their reliance upon the scratching of beads to bring them closer to God, their slavish devotion to the whore of Rome, their exorcisms and tricks and conjurations, their untrusty deviance and constant bloodthirsty plotting . . .’

‘I have not heard one rant so madly since the days of Solomon Eagle!’ the Earl of Shaftesbury muttered.

John Locke clasped and unclasped his hands impatiently. He had never heard Eagle’s famously apocalyptic speeches during the Plague, and then the Conflagration, but he agreed entirely with his master’s sentiment.

The ranter stood up alarmingly, and began to move around the Earl’s library, fingers clawed as if looking for handholds into the air.

Tonge was fifty years of age, and small and thin – a head shorter than Locke and barely reaching Shaftesbury’s chest. Long dry hair, his own, protruded from his flaky scalp like silver wires. When he moved a snow-shower of skin-flakes fell from it, and when he passed his hand through it he created a blizzard. His eyes were the wide eyes of an Enthusiast; he was a dreamer of dreams and a seer of visions, of Jesuits gliding through the air, of their sanctifying of daggers for the killing of Protestants, and their seeking to put London to fire again.

‘. . . their Romish lies and dastardly machinations against the Protestant sons of martyrs, their extravagances, intolerances, and persecutions of patriots, their cruelties, and malice, and enmity to Truth; their antipathy to purity and sobriety, their contemptible sneaking away from right-thinkers as if afraid of God’s bright Sun. Strawberry-preachers! Text-splitters! Their faulty benedictional and schismatic aposticals, agends and mannals . . .’

‘My father was a chaplain of the New Model Army,’ Titus Oates told Shaftesbury, in a sleepy, and curiously high-pitched, sing-song voice, ‘and he did not carry on so.’

‘It would have exhausted the troops before any encounter,’ the Earl replied.

‘Tonge is all red-rag, wiggle-waggle, a brainsick Tom a’Bedlam!’

Oates’s mouth, a small round hole, had lips that creased together like the strung neck of a bag. His features all gathered to the middle of his face, getting away from his enormous chin. His eyes remained half-closed as Tonge’s tirade went on.

Oates had endured three hapless days deprived of sleep, leaving Saint Omers on horseback, riding with Dr. Locke to Cap Gris Nez. They had then crossed to Hythe – further discomfort in an old smack, whose every surface speared splinters into his behind. Around the coast, north to Foulness Island, then to Gravesend, then the great dockyards at Woolwich, where they had met with the brute, Aires, and transferred to a tiny, pinching, rowing boat. Now, after another restless night at Thanet House, lying on an overstuffed mattress in an underlength bed, he was being subjected to Israel Tonge.

‘Dr. Tonge,’ Shaftesbury called, and then louder. ‘Dr. Tonge!’

‘. . . their foul deeds, affronts and afflictions . . . eh?’ Tonge’s train of vituperation was finally halted. ‘What’s that?’

‘Your great zeal brings credit to you, Dr. Tonge, but we progress not in our enterprise. Mr. Oates is to perfect his lines. We have our own plotting to continue. Please, Dr. Tonge, you must concentrate upon the task at hand.’

Tonge’s eyes swept the room, an invisible congregation populating it. ‘By the Powers of the Air!’ he cried. ‘I concentrate upon it fully!’

‘You must perfect the Articles, Dr. Tonge, to memorise them, so that you may take them to the Justice, Sir Edmund Bury Godfrey. Are you ready to continue, Oates?’

Oates shrugged wearily, and poured himself some brandy from the pitcher on Shaftesbury’s table. ‘I am ready now,’ he answered. ‘You know, I too am
Doctor
…’

‘Let us continue with our practise, Oates,’ Shaftesbury said. ‘We must see off these perfidious Catholics, hiding in London like maggots in meat. Article eighteen . . .’

Observation XVII
Of Angels

The new churches, replacing those swept away by fire – Sir Christopher Wren’s Saint Benet in Thames Street, and his Saint Bride in Fleet Street, yet to be spired, but its bells in place – were the nearest and loudest. Temple Church, of the Crusaders, on the very edge of the fire and spared its destruction, and likewise Saint Dunstan-in-the-West, were further off, but the notes of their bells rang clear.

It was as if Harry’s arrival set them all off, an alarm to those who lived here.

He peered up at the chipped walls and blankly menacing windows, thinking of his lack of courage as he had gone through the crowds of Whitechapel to find Colonel Michael Fields.

Alsatia’s reputation was crueller. A sanctuary from the law, by Royal decree, it was a low place, a refuge for villains. He looked back at Hooke’s quayside, newly-built and neatly finished. These places were the Janus-faces of London, kept apart only by a narrow tributary and a low ditch.

He saw few people here, though, although nine o’clock had come, and he found the relative peace unsettling. The people of Alsatia seemed to use a different timetable, preferring the night to the day.

Who watched him through these windows as he entered their domain? Which of these façades hid Enoch Wolfe? ‘
Go down to Alsatia. Anyone there will know me
.’ Wolfe’s words now sounded like a challenge, their apparent helpfulness mocking Harry’s ignorance of the place.

He descended through Salisbury Court, and the burnt ruins of Sackville’s House, down towards the Thames. The river’s tangle of masts, spars, and rigging etched the sky. Barques, brigantines, and sloops, pressed stern to prow, appeared blue in the distance, lighters moving between them and the quays like drones attending their queens.

Harry met a woman’s stare; she did not break it. Ensnared by her unblinking gaze, his mind only slowly pulled her husband into focus with her. Their bent bodies and the old fruit texture of their faces instructed him on the negative possibilities of Alsatia. They shuffled, making cautious way over the rough ground and the dirty melting slush lying between the stones. The old man suffered disobedient tremors, and held his wife’s arm to steady himself.

Before Harry had summoned the courage to ask them whether they knew anything of Enoch Wolfe, the woman turned indifferently away, taking the old man by the elbow to steer his shaky progress.

A man, bare arms mapped with veins and sheathed with muscle, walked easily by, with a child bouncing high on a shoulder-ride, its tiny grasp in his splayed fingers. Harry approached him, and the man swerved his body, unwilling to pass the time of day. After his failure with the old woman, Harry was determined, and he too changed direction. The man, unwillingly, stopped. The child on his shoulders watched Harry curiously, resting its chin on the top of the man’s head.

‘I search for a man calling himself Enoch Wolfe,’ Harry told him. The man affected to look as if this information was of absolutely no interest to him. ‘Do you know the name?’ He added this as much to test Wolfe’s assertion of his own fame as to satisfy his own curiosity.

Harry now saw the child to be a young girl, no older than four years of age, her eyes enormous in her round face. She had the same proportions as the boy found at the Fleet, head large on plump-bellied body, and Harry, watching her quick bird-like movements, thought of the boy’s contrasting stillness.

The man’s strong hands moved as if passing an unseen rope through them. Harry stepped back, thinking himself about to be struck.

Instead, the man spoke.

‘Enoch Wolfe!’ he said. ‘I know the name
Enoch
Fucking
Wolfe
well enough! But who asks the question?’ He put his face close into Harry’s, so that the child swayed, her little feet swinging as counterbalance.

‘He told me to find him here in Alsatia,’ Harry placated him nervously, stepping backwards. ‘I am no friend to him, but neither do I mean him harm. I seek only intelligence.’

‘
Intelligence
?’ The word was clearly unsavoury. ‘Then you must pay. He will not give out ’less he sees silver first.’

‘Will you direct me?’ Harry asked, readying himself for flight.

‘The Angel,’ the man told him abruptly, and set off. A thumb stabbed towards the river indicated the way.

Only the girl glanced back, twisting in her seat as they went.

*

The place was streaked with salt and soot, its bricks scarred by the passage of cartwheels. Its windows were filled with cards veiled by dirt on the panes, advertising miraculous cures, sure-fire investments, and rooms available at reasonable cost.

Harry took a deep breath, and made the stooping walk through the low door of the Angel coffee-house.