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safest with Robert Hooke?’
    Locke, judging that Wolfe would need his nose resetting if it was to regain its previous shape, nodded his affirmation. ‘Hooke is the engine of the Royal Society.’
    ‘If he helps the Justice, would there be a way of quietly sounding out his progress?’
    ‘I am not close to him, although our medical paths once ran parallel. He is more gainfully employed in the building of the new London.’ He paused, knowing that Shaftesbury needed reassurance. ‘Hooke can have no notion of the boy’s use.’
    ‘Our man is still at large. We must not have Sir Edmund near him.’
    All through the conversation between Shaftesbury and Locke, Lefèvre waited silently, his gaze moving from one face to the other, maintaining the stillness of his head. For the first time he spoke.
    ‘What do you know of Sir Edmund?’ His voice had an accent difficult to place. It could have been French, yet with an overlay of Dutch, or perhaps Italian, somewhere to the north, or emanating from some part of the German states. He had lived and worked in all these places, and his fluency in their languages always retained this mixture of accents, this unplaceability.
    Shaftesbury unleashed a snarl of contempt.
    Locke, reflecting on the possibility of complete transmission of meaning between one man and another, perfectly exemplified by Shaftesbury’s response, answered him.
    ‘In the Wars he was for Parliament. During the plague, most left London, yet he remained, organising burials and prosecuting grave robbers. An intelligent man. A man of austerity, and of a melancholy disposition. He is known for his distrust of Catholicism. In his work as Justice of Peace there is no hint of abuse of his position.’
    ‘He keeps his counsel upon the boy’s death,’ Shaftesbury observed. ‘It has not hit the London gossip-yards yet.’
    ‘Sir Edmund must have reason for keeping quiet. We must have a care, especially if he has found allies.’
    ‘We have a way of keeping him from us. Titus Oates and Israel Tonge can be sent to him, to present their evidence against the Catholics. Sir Edmund is known for his dislike of Papistry – let him look, then, in entirely the wrong direction, as Lefèvre makes his preparations.’
    Shaftesbury at last took off his wig, and threw it down onto the table in front of him. ‘Does that close our business?’
    Lefèvre raised half of his long eyebrow at Locke. They had been dismissed, and they made their exit. Locke led out the bleeding Enoch Wolfe.
    Left alone, Shaftesbury stood, and the pain of the hole in his side made him grimace.
    He crossed to his automaton, and considered his own body, merging with the mechanical, his human identity extended and altered by the bag and the silver pipe. It was pain that separated them. The automaton, he thought, will never suffer.
    Constant irritability is a property inherent in all tissue.
    Observation X
Of Concealment
    Tom held the lantern, his low height sending a shadow play of their movements over the ceiling.
    Dr. Diodati studied the head of Henry Oldenburg, who sat in the study of his house in Pall Mall. The hole entered above the hairline over the temple, and exited through the opening of the occipital bone, where the spinal chord passed into the skull. The force of the ball had brought chips of bone and shreds of flesh out with it, and these resided in the fabric and stuffing of the chair – as did the ball itself, flattened against its thick wooden back. Blood misted the wall behind the chair, despite the distance between them.
    ‘This will be easy to conceal,’ Hooke remarked quietly.
    Dora-Katherina arrived with cloths and a fresh nightgown, and Hooke observed her shudder as she saw again the pistol that killed her husband. It lay on the floor beside Oldenburg with its scouring stick and powder. Its box was left open, untouched since the old man had taken the weapon from it.
    ‘Do you wish us to take it?’
    ‘Yes, take it out of here, Mr.