The Silent Boy Page 11

  ‘But the tactic failed to work?’

  Gohlis shrugged. ‘The boy seemed fascinated with the figure. Obsessed, even. I have made a note of it in case I can use it. Charles is so purged of both sentiment and intellect that any exception to the rule must be interesting to his physician. I am convinced that one day he will furnish me with materials for a paper. There is such a very simple question at the heart of it, simple yet profound: why does he not speak?’

  The pain and perhaps the medicine were making Savill light-headed. He forgot for a moment where he was and who he was speaking to. He said, ‘I suppose you have considered the simplest answer, sir: that Charles is afraid of what he might say if he did?’

  Chapter Seventeen

  In his garden, Neptune is still staring down at the water. Perhaps he is looking for his trident.

  Charles and Louis walk over to the steps that cut through the wall at the far end of the enclosure. There are six of them. They count them again to make quite sure.

  At the top of the steps is a gate of wrought iron. Beyond it, the path winds up a grassy slope towards a stile leading to a wood. This marks the point where the pleasure grounds of Charnwood give way to a scattering of paddocks, meadows and copses.

  The two boys are together, side by side. Their shoulders touch. They look at the woods and the fields and the hills beyond.

  ‘One day,’ Charles says.

  ‘One day,’ Louis says.

  They walk back to the garden and measure the paths, pacing up and down. The numbers are the same as they were before. Facts are facts. Nothing has changed, though it is a different time of day and fewer birds are singing.

  The Englishman, Mr Savill, walks into the garden.

  Louis slips away to his flayed shell in Dr Gohlis’s laboratory.

  Mr Savill sits on the low wall that surrounds Neptune’s pond.

  ‘Come here,’ he says in English.

  For a moment, neither of them moves. They might be made of stone like Neptune himself. Mr Savill wears a scarf around his neck that covers the lower part of his face and makes his voice sound muffled.

  ‘Come here,’ he says again, this time in French.

  Charles comes forward. He stops ten yards away, out of reach of the Englishman’s arm or his stick.

  ‘I tried to find you earlier,’ Mr Savill says. ‘You like to hide away, don’t you?’

  His shoes are worn, Charles sees, the leather muddy and scuffed. Mr Savill cannot be a rich man.

  ‘I dare say you feel safer that way. What were you doing just then? Your lips were moving.’ There is a pause while Charles’s eyes rise slowly to Mr Savill’s face. ‘Were you talking to someone?’

  Say nothing. Not a word to anyone.

  Louis is different.

  Charles looks over the Englishman’s head at Neptune without his trident. Neptune could dash out Mr Savill’s brains with one blow of his stone fist; he wouldn’t need to use his trident because he is a god and gods have magical powers. But he, Charles, will permit Mr Savill to live. For the time being.

  ‘You look like your mother,’ Mr Savill says. ‘Not always – sometimes. You must feel her loss.’

  Charles feels the loss of everything – his mother, their old life in Paris, all the certainties of existence that no one ever questioned until suddenly they were not certain any more.

  ‘I’m sure they wish you nothing but good,’ Mr Savill says.

  Surprised, Charles stares at him.

  ‘The Count, I mean, Monsieur Fournier and the doctor.’

  Charles examines the man’s face, as far as he can see it with the scarf covering so much. The skin of the scar tissue is paler and shinier than the rest of his face. His eyes seem very blue because the pupils have shrunk to small black dots.

  ‘There is much I don’t know,’ Mr Savill says. ‘But I believe you hear me and you understand what is said.’

  The Englishman has not shaved for a day or two, Charles notes, which adds to his uncouth air. The material of his coat is coarse and stiff. Charles’s mother would have said that he lacked address, lacked distinction.

  ‘What do you do all day? This want of occupation cannot be good for you.’ A spasm passes like a wave across Mr Savill’s face. ‘Damnation,’ he says in an altered voice, ‘and the devil take this toothache. The doctor has given me a draught but it has done nothing for me yet.’

  It is very strange. Mr Savill speaks almost as if Charles were someone he knew well or as if he were talking to himself.

  ‘I’ve come to take you to London, to your mother’s family. You’ll be safe. No one will harm you. I promise.’

  Charles’s mother said that. No one will harm you. She was wrong. No one can be trusted except Louis.

  Tip-tap. Like cracking a walnut.

  Mr Savill fumbles in his waistcoat pocket and takes out two ivory dice. He shakes them in the palm of his hand and throws them on the parapet beside him.

  A two and five.

  That makes seven, Charles thinks. Mr Savill repeats the process. This time he throws a four and three: another seven.

  He throws again, and the dice make a six and a one.

  A third seven. Does it mean something, the coincidence of the three sevens? Or is it just a matter of chance, unpredictable, and therefore terrifying?

  Three sevens are twenty-one. That is a fact.

  Mr Savill points to the dice. ‘Your turn. See if you can throw a double.’

  Charles takes them up. They are warm in his hand. He shakes them. He casts them on the parapet. Double six.

  That is a fact.

  ‘Bravo,’ says Mr Savill. ‘Bravissimo.’ He stands. ‘They are yours now,’ he says. ‘If you want them. The dice, that is.’

  Chapter Eighteen

  The medicine had at last begun to do its work. Savill’s mind was clearer than usual, capable of remarkable clarity of vision and enormous leaps of understanding.

  Dr Gohlis’s mixture did not deaden the pain, however, let alone remove it. Rather, the draught served as a distraction, steering Savill’s attention towards other things while leaving the pain to pursue its vicious career unchecked – but in remote parts of his mind where it was much less noticeable than before.

  Nothing, he reminded himself, can be taken for granted. It was clear that the boy did not want to come with him. That was understandable enough. Savill was a stranger who proposed to take him away from what little remained of his mother and his old life, and to place him among strangers who spoke an unfamiliar language.

  He contemplated the difficulty from all angles. It no longer seemed to matter very much. He also considered the dice, which he had given to Charles on a whim. Now the action seemed a philosophical curiosity of enormous interest.

  Savill’s mind considered another question with the same Olympian detachment. Had he perhaps been foolish to agree to the doctor’s offer of treatment? The people of Charnwood had no reason to wish him well, and the Count had a positive motive to wish him harm. The question was fascinating rather than disturbing, however, and soon gave way to an intense consideration of the remarkable greenness of the grass of the parkland.

  Time passed, or rather floated agreeably away in the manner of the clouds that were now scudding across the sky as the afternoon moved towards evening.

  Savill walked back to the house. He went up to his chamber and wrote two letters. The words flowed fluently, the pen skimmed across the paper and the wet ink gleamed, making delightfully elegant patterns.

  His first letter was to the livery stables in Bath, requesting that another private chaise should be sent to Charnwood no later than Monday.

  The second letter was addressed to Mr Rampton, or rather to Frederick Brown, Esquire, at the White Horse Cellar in Piccadilly, to await collection. The precaution of addressing letters care of a coaching inn, which had seemed so absurd in London, now proved its value. It would not be wise for Fournier or the Count to learn of Mr Rampton’s connection with the matter. Savill did not
trust them and he had no faith that they would respect the sanctity of the mails.

  Dear Sir,

  I regret that I am delayed in the country and cannot have the pleasure of dining with you on Monday after all. But I hope to be in London later in the week and do myself the honour of calling on you as soon as possible.

  The matter of my late wife’s son is proving more difficult to resolve than I had apprehended. Charles has entirely lost the faculty of speech. He refuses even to communicate by writing. The Count’s physician believes the cause may be that he was a witness to his mother’s death, which occurred in peculiarly distressing circumstances. I am uncertain how best to proceed, both now and when Charles returns with me to London.

  I am, Sir, etc.

  E. Savill

  He sealed both letters. He floated down to the hall and dropped them into the postbag. Joseph was passing.

  ‘Doctor was asking for you, sir,’ the footman said with gloomy satisfaction. ‘He said to tell cook you won’t be down for dinner.’

  Gohlis did not waste time in social exchanges. Savill’s chamber would be the best place for the extraction, he said, because it faced west and the light was better than in his own laboratory. Besides, Savill might find it convenient to have his bed so close to him.

  The doctor ordered the fire to be lit in the chamber and a sturdy chair, high and equipped with arms, to be brought up, as well as a bottle of brandy. He set his case of instruments on the dressing table.

  ‘Remove your coat and cravat, sir. Sit down. Loosen your shirt. Put your head back and open the mouth.’

  Gohlis tilted Savill’s head towards the light from the window and examined the mouth’s interior with the aid of his forefinger and his steel rod. He took an instrument with an ivory handle from the case.

  ‘Is that a corkscrew?’ Savill said, his mind turning to the brandy.

  ‘No, sir. It is a tooth key, for the removal of teeth.’ He prised open Savill’s mouth. ‘One inserts it horizontally. So. At the end is a piece of metal padded with chamois leather for the patient’s comfort; it rests against the gum of the diseased tooth and provides a—’

  ‘Ah—’ Savill twisted in the chair and jerked his head away.

  ‘A little tender?’ said Gohlis, showing himself a master of understatement. ‘I am not surprised. The gum is remarkably swollen. Indeed, I do not recollect having seen a—’

  ‘For God’s sake, sir. Let us leave the tooth where it is.’

  ‘That is not possible. Perhaps we need assistance. It will not take a moment, sir, once we proceed.’

  The doctor gave Savill a bumper of brandy and told Joseph, who was hovering by the door, to fetch the gardener. In the end, even with Savill’s arms strapped to the chair, it took the two servants to hold down the patient while Gohlis went about his work. Joseph tried with partial success to keep the body from moving, while the gardener, breathing heavily and scenting the air with onions, cradled Savill’s head under his arm and came near to throttling him.

  ‘At the end of the key,’ Gohlis said, thrusting the instrument into Savill’s mouth again, ‘is a hook that clamps over the crown of the tooth. This is held in place by a spring clip. Then all one has to do is twist it, as if turning a key. Simplicity itself. So.’

  Savill’s body bucked and twisted. The gardener tightened his grip. The chair shifted an inch on the floorboards. Gohlis wrenched the tooth again and this time it shattered.

  There followed a nightmarish time of blood and pain. When the key could do no more, Dr Gohlis extracted fragments of tooth with a pair of curving pincers. The medicine seemed to intensify the nightmare rather than mask it. Savill heard repeated groaning, which he eventually realized came from his own wrecked mouth.

  ‘Ah. Observe the root! It is cracked! If you permit my joke, sir, I fancy that this is the root of the problem.’

  Savill lost not only his tooth but also the rest of the day; he remembered only fragments of it, confused in their sequence and entangled so closely with his dreams that the one could not be distinguished from the other.

  At one point, during a lull in the proceedings, he opened his eyes for a moment. The chamber door was ajar. It seemed to him that Charles was staring at him through the crack between door and jamb. He tried to alert the doctor to this but Gohlis did not understand his mumbles and, when he looked again, the boy had vanished. Perhaps he had not been there in the first place.

  Afterwards they put Savill into his bed and Dr Gohlis spooned more of his mixture into the wounded mouth and made him wash it down with a few more mouthfuls of brandy. The spirit stung so much he cried aloud again. Afterwards it spread a fiery anaesthetic glow through the affected parts.

  Later – it must have been later, for candles were burning on the dressing table – he woke from a doze to hear voices.

  ‘I have not extracted a tooth since I was at the university,’ Gohlis was saying. ‘And this one was not easy. But, though I say it myself, no one could have done it more neatly.’

  ‘No doubt, Doctor.’ This was Fournier’s voice. ‘Now you must be exhausted. There are sandwiches and wine in the dining room. I will sit with Mr Savill in case he needs anything.’

  Savill dozed again. Later – minutes? hours? – his eyes opened. The room was swaying, with light slopping to and fro like water in a bucket. Or perhaps it was merely that someone was carrying a candle about. He heard a rustle of dead leaves. But there were no trees in his chamber. Only papers.

  He opened his mouth to ask who was there and what they were doing with his papers. But it was too much effort to speak. His mouth closed, and then his eyes. He slept.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Later, when the candles are lit and the other men are lingering in the dining room, Charles returns. He climbs the back stairs, passes along the dimly lit landing and hesitates by the partly open door of Mr Savill’s chamber.

  A single candle burns on the night table by the bed, whose curtains are still open on that side. Mr Savill lies in the bed. His mouth is open. He is snoring.

  So he isn’t dead. Despite all the blood. And his face is no longer a gaping, bloody mouth.

  No one else is in the room, even a servant. Charles tiptoes inside and slowly approaches the bed. A fire is dwindling in the grate. Mr Savill swallows noisily. He snorts and snuffles like a hog. His breathing resumes its slow, regular, rasping rhythm, and Charles comes closer and closer.

  The light of the candle turns the man’s face into a place of sharp rocks and pitch-black hollows. The interior of his mouth is as dark as the bottom of the well in the stableyard. He does not look human at all.

  Charles pushes his hand in his pocket and touches the two dice. Two sixes make twelve. That is a fact.

  In the first few days at Charnwood, nobody told him to go to bed and he lingered within sight of a candle or a lamp for as long as possible. But the housekeeper, Mrs Cox, finding him kicking his heels on the landing at nearly midnight, informed him that if he wasn’t in bed by eight o’clock each night like a good Christian boy, and with his candle extinguished, he must face the consequences.

  Charles does not know what these consequences might be, but he is sure that he does not want to face them. So, every night, he is in his room by eight o’clock and usually in bed.

  His bedroom is at the back of the house on the second floor. It is a small room with a casement window that doesn’t close properly because the catch is broken. He has tried to wedge it with a scrap of newspaper but sometimes the paper falls out and the window blows open.

  Outside the window is an ash tree, which Joseph says should be cut down because it is far too close to the house: its roots threaten the foundations and, besides, it makes the servants’ hall dark and gloomy.

  Charles does not care about this but he does care that, when the wind is in the wrong direction, the branches of the tree tap like fingers on the window. The ash tree is trying to get in. When it does, he knows that something horrible will happen, something perhaps w
orse than what has gone before.

  So the window is where the evening ritual starts. First, Charles makes sure that it is still wedged shut. Unfortunately there are no shutters, but he closes the curtains instead to stop the tree looking in. Next he does the counting, to make sure nothing has changed since the morning. The room is six and a third paces long and four and a half wide, not counting the alcoves on either side of the fireplace, one of which has been boxed in to form a cupboard. These measurements make a fortress of facts that protects him as he sleeps.

  The cupboard itself comes next: Charles must check that it is as it was this morning. There are five shelves from floor to ceiling, and also three hooks on the back of the door. His spare shirt is on one shelf, with his hat beside it. He takes off his coat and hangs it on one of the hooks. Next comes the wooden box at the end of the bed. There is nothing to count inside it. It is still as empty as it was when he last looked inside it. Nor is there anything under the bed except the chamber pot with a chip in its rim and a rat-trap that still contains the dusty bones of a small rat.

  Only after he has made sure that everything is as it was does he permit himself to undress down to his shirt and scramble into the cold bed.

  The bed is in one corner of the room. Its curtains are thin and worn, designed for hot summers long ago. He lies on his side, shivering, curled into a ball.

  The tree scratches on the window, so faintly that the sound seems both there and not there. He pushes the heels of his hands against his ears to block the tree that is or isn’t there: and instead he hears the roar of a distant ocean.

  He makes himself think of a blue, endless sea beside a broiling sun. He has never seen a warm blue sea, only the grey English Channel that made him seasick for what seemed like weeks.

  One day, he and Louis will voyage to the Indies and find a remote island. On an island, silence will not matter because they will speak to each other as they always do, without words. They will be there for ever and ever.