The Silent Boy Read online

  With Gohlis leaning on Savill’s arm, the four of them set off for the kitchen. They were joined by the maid on the way.

  ‘One other thing, sir,’ Gohlis said. ‘When Monsieur Fournier brought the intelligence, I was examining the ground near the place where we found my écorché figure this morning.’

  ‘This way, sir,’ cried Mrs Fenner. ‘Out of the way, you silly girl. Stay, you’d better fetch the brandy. Here is the key. Mind you touch nothing else, and I shall uncork it myself.’

  The kitchen door opened as they approached it. Savill had a confused picture of a crowd of servants, their faces turned towards the doorway. Gohlis fumbled in his pocket and stopped.

  ‘I found this,’ he said.

  The servants stared blankly at him. The doctor held up a small, brass cylinder, four or five inches long.

  ‘A spyglass,’ he said.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  All he does is stand there in the stream with his mouth hanging open.

  And the man in the blue coat steps into the water, which comes halfway up his boots, and takes Charles by the arm. He doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t even laugh. He merely tows Charles after him, out of the stream.

  Charles stumbles as he climbs out and falls on the bank. The man turns. For the first time, they look at each other properly. The man has very black hair and a sunburned skin. His eyes are large, brown and moist – not unlike Bessie’s, now Charles comes to think of it. His face is covered with dark bristles.

  The man frowns. He lunges forward, seizes Charles under the arms and swings him up as if Charles is no more than a baby.

  ‘Don’t move and don’t speak,’ he says in English, which is the first thing Charles hears him say. His voice is high-pitched and sometimes it wavers as if someone is shaking him up and down. ‘Or – or it’ll be the worse for you.’

  So, with Charles in his arms, he walks on, forcing himself to hurry. His breathing grows laboured.

  ‘Good God, you’re heavier than you look. You’ll have to walk now.’

  He drops Charles to the ground and seizes his wrist. He is not a tall man but he is broad and muscular. His fingers grip so tightly that needles of pain shoot up Charles’s arm. Together they fight their way through the wood. Something scratches Charles’s face and the blood trickles into his mouth. He licks it greedily, feeding on himself.

  The blood drips on his left forearm. And he sees it.

  When Charles sees the blood, he remembers everything. All he wants to do is scream and scream.

  Hush now.

  Charles struggles, trying to escape the man’s grasp, trying to run from the slippery blood, just as he ran long ago on that hot night in Paris. But he cannot run from this blood any more than he can run from himself and what is trapped inside his head.

  ‘Stop it, you little fool, or I’ll have to hit you.’

  The trees are thinning. On the edge of the wood, hard by the lane, they come to a roofless barn with walls of crumbling stone. The piebald pony waits, tethered to the branch of an elder tree, for the woods have begun to colonize the barn in its decay. The pony raises its head and looks at them with a complete absence of interest.

  Still holding Charles’s wrist, the man fumbles in the saddlebag and takes out a length of cord. He ties Charles’s wrists together in front of him and, for good measure, circles his body twice with what remains of the cord, binding his arms just above the elbows to his body.

  ‘There,’ he says, smiling. ‘Trussed like a chicken.’ He screeches like a chicken. ‘Time for a celebration.’ He is speaking very quickly, the words tumbling on top of each other. ‘Elevate our spirits before the journey? Just by the merest trifle. Yes, an admirable idea.’

  Out comes the bottle for the first time. Afterwards, he places Charles on the pony and mounts behind him. They ride on to the lane and climb, up and up.

  The pony sways. The poor beast is labouring beneath the double burden. They are ascending a steep, rocky path with sides so high that it’s almost a tunnel.

  It is still early. The lane twists and rises, and there is a rare glimpse of the narrow valley below. A mist clings to the invisible village. The pale stone of Norbury Park gleams on the far slope. Charles wonders whether the Charnwood servants are about yet, whether the water has been sent to boil on the kitchen fire and whether George White, the gardener’s boy, has come into the garden.

  A cock crows in the distance.

  Charles is sitting directly in front of the man with the blue coat, and he feels every movement his captor makes. His arms are bound to his side so the man is obliged to support him to keep him upright on the pony. His feet and lower legs are very cold.

  On and on they go, jolting and swaying up the lane. Charles is stiff and sore and cold. In a while, the misery converts itself to a waking doze.

  When he returns to full consciousness, it is much brighter and there is a breeze on his face. They have stopped moving.

  The man is speaking: ‘… can’t take any risks. Must seem a trifle absurd, if you really are dumb. But perhaps you can grunt or squawk, or something of that nature, which might give the game away, eh? Just for a little. An hour or two at most.’

  A finger and thumb squeeze Charles’s face, finding a spot between the upper and lower teeth and then tightening like pincers, which forces his mouth open. A strap is passed round his face, forcing his mouth to stay open. The man fastens the buckle at the back of his neck at the base of the skull. Charles squirms.

  ‘Is it uncomfortable? Tell me if it is.’ There’s a laugh, thin and high like a hen’s screech. ‘But you can’t, of course. You’ll have to nod, I suppose.’

  Charles hears the soft explosion of the cork leaving the neck of the bottle just behind his left ear. He smells the fruity acridity of spirits.

  ‘Ah,’ the man says, drawing out the syllable until it ends in a cough. ‘Ah.’ He returns the bottle to his pocket. ‘And now this,’ he says. ‘Don’t be afraid. You’ll be able to breathe perfectly well, and it won’t be for long.’

  He pulls a bag of some coarsely woven material over Charles’s head. It smells of earth and damp and decay. At first everything is black but then he sees there are specks of lights like stars.

  ‘Less you see, the less you know, eh?’

  They ride on. There’s another laugh, another screeching hen.

  ‘It’s for your own good, you know,’ the man says. ‘I dare say you’ll thank me for this one day.’

  Is this my punishment for what I did to Louis, Charles wonders?

  There’s another screech in his ear, and another acrid breath that catches the back of his throat.

  ‘Ah,’ says the man. ‘At last.’

  The sound of hooves in the distance. The rattle of wheels on a road.

  ‘You know what old Mother Fenner said about him, sir.’

  Another man is there, invisible to Charles because of the bag over his head. But his voice is quite different from the voice of the man in the blue coat. It’s sharper and harder, pregnant with mockery.

  ‘The mad mute. He runs wild at night and bites the heads off cats and chickens.’

  ‘Oh for God’s sake, that’s enough.’ This is the man in the blue coat. ‘Help me get him in the chaise.’

  This is how it begins.

  After this point, when they bundle Charles into the carriage, his knowledge of events becomes increasingly fragmentary and increasingly unreliable. He is still gagged and hooded. He knows he is in a carriage of some sort and that it is in motion. He knows the man in the blue coat is with him, sitting opposite but with his feet up on the seat beside Charles.

  The chaise stops briefly. Charles hears the sound of voices outside. Then, with a jerk, they move off again, more rapidly this time, and gathering speed. He hears the man muttering to himself. Once or twice he takes out his bottle.

  Charles dozes again. A terrible thirst possesses him. He dreams of water, endless water. He has a pain at the bottom of his stomach.

&n
bsp; What wakes him is the change in the sound of the wheels and in the quality of the vibration: they are now travelling on a smoother surface and moving even faster than before.

  ‘Well,’ says the man in the blue coat. ‘You awake in there? Time to have a look at you.’ He lifts the bag from Charles’s head. ‘Pale, aren’t you?’

  Charles blinks in the light. The inside of his mouth is like cracked leather. The pain bores into his stomach. His arms are still bound at the wrists and his hands feel strangely clumsy, as if they are no longer entirely his.

  One of the blinds is down, but the other is at the halfway mark. The man is a shadow, facing him and leaning towards him.

  ‘Hold still. I’ll take off the gag. Don’t cry, eh? Won’t help.’ The familiar chicken screech. ‘I should know, damn it. I’ve wept enough tears to float a frigate in my time. And where’s it got me? Precisely nowhere.’

  He fumbles on the floor. Once again, a cork pops out. But it’s a different cork from before. It makes a deeper, more melodious sound. The man holds up an earthenware bottle.

  ‘Water. I’ll hold it for you.’

  The water is the most beautiful thing Charles has ever known. He gulps and gulps from the bottle until the water flows from his mouth and pours over his chin and soaks his shirt.

  The man sits back and studies him. ‘Hungry? No, perhaps we’d better wait. But you’ll need to piss soon, I’ll be bound – we can’t have you stinking out the chaise, can we?’

  He glances out of the window and then raps on the roof. There is an answering knock. A moment later, the carriage rolls to a halt. Charles sees a belt of trees at the side of the road. Then he sees nothing but stars because the man drops the bag over his head again.

  The door opens. There’s a rattle as the steps are let down. The man descends first and then draws Charles out of the chaise. There’s a breeze and a hint of rain in the air. The man leads him forward.

  ‘I’ll unbutton your breeches. Then you can manage by yourself, eh?’

  As soon as the urine gushes out, Charles knows that this is the source of the pain low in his stomach. Afterwards the man buttons Charles’s breeches and leads him back to the chaise.

  Inside the chaise, the man pushes him on to the front seat and closes the door. He removes Charles’s hood and grins at him. He digs his hand into the pocket of his blue coat and pulls out a silver teaspoon and a small brown bottle. This cork makes another sound as it comes out – much higher than the others. He measures half a dozen drops on to the spoon.

  ‘Time to dose you,’ he says.

  The drops taste bitter. The man gives him a drink of water to wash the taste away. Afterwards he has a drink from his own bottle and then raps the roof to tell the man to drive on.

  Off they go, the chaise rumbling and swaying down the road.

  Three corks, Charles thinks, and each makes its own sound. That is a fact. He wonders whether the sound of a withdrawn cork varies with the size of the bottle.

  Here is another fact. Since he has become mute, Charles has discovered that there are two sorts of people in the world: those who are unkind because they are obliged to be so, and those who are unkind because it gives them pleasure.

  The man in the blue coat is one of the former. That is a fact.

  Inside his head, Charles begins to count up all the facts he knows. Somewhere between a hundred and two hundred he falls asleep.

  The journey continues. Charles sleeps for most of the time or inhabits a twilight place on the borders of sleep. The man in the blue coat gives him more water and, once, after one of the stops when they change the horses, some soup.

  He hears the servant talking to someone outside. ‘Closed carriage – doctor’s orders. Could be the Bengal plague, they reckon. Weeping pustules the size of saucers. Doctor in there with her – he has a sanatorium over Maidenhead way. It’s the only hope for the poor young lady.’

  Many hours pass. Perhaps days or nights. Charles wishes he could measure the time but there is no way to do so.

  He wakes with a start to find himself alone in the carriage, which is no longer moving. But there are voices outside.

  ‘But we’re in the middle of nowhere,’ the servant is saying. ‘You’ll get soaked.’

  ‘Why should you care about that?’ says the man in the blue coat. ‘Just do as you’re told.’

  ‘I thought I was coming with you, sir.’

  ‘You’re wrong. Here. That’s for the stables – and that’s for you. There’ll be the same again for you if you do as I say.’

  ‘But when will I see you, sir? In the Blue Posts?’

  ‘Perhaps. In a while. Now listen: go away for a month or two. Right away. Go down to the country and see your family.’

  ‘I thought you said—’

  ‘“Thought?”’ The chicken screech of laughter. ‘Don’t think. Just do as I say.’

  When the carriage is gone, the man removes the bag from Charles’s head. It is very cold and almost dark, though one side of the sky is beginning to lighten. They are standing in the shelter of a hedge.

  ‘You won’t try to bolt if I untie you? There’s nowhere for you to run to.’

  He fumbles with the knots. Then, cursing, he takes out his pocket knife and cuts the cord. Charles’s hands are so painful that he moans. The man massages each hand, slowly restoring them to life.

  ‘Now,’ he says. ‘We shall contrive to warm ourselves with some exercise. And then, by and by, we shall come to our lodging.’

  Instead of taking the high road, the man leads Charles into the field on the other side of the hedge. Hand in hand, they cross the roughly mown grass, stumbling because the ground is uneven and marshy.

  The light is growing steadily, spreading from one side of the sky. A line of widely spaced willows marks the further field boundary. Beyond the trees lies a broad, oily river, gliding sluggishly towards the rising sun.

  The man is looking for something. Whistling under his breath, he peers up and down, taking a few steps one way and then retreating. All the while he tows Charles after him.

  Charles is cold and wet and tired. He whimpers quietly.

  ‘There we are,’ the man says, his voice suddenly cheerful.

  A boat is pulled up on the bank, almost entirely concealed by the trailing branches of the willow. The man puts down his portmanteau.

  ‘This deserves a toast.’ He releases Charles’s hand and takes out his bottle. ‘Un bon voyage, hey?’

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Vereker.

  The word was engraved in the brass, the small, discreet lettering following the curve of the brass cylinder.

  Leaning back in his chair, Savill pulled out the spyglass and held it to his eye. He twisted it and a tree sprang into sharp relief on the opposite side of the road to the inn.

  ‘Not a powerful instrument, as these things go,’ Dr Gohlis said. ‘A naval officer would find it inadequate for longer range observations. And an astronomer would simply laugh at it. But it’s something better than a toy. As one would expect. Vereker, you know.’

  ‘What’s that?’ the Vicar said. ‘Who?’

  ‘The maker, sir. The name is on the barrel.’

  Savill closed the spyglass. ‘He is well known?’

  ‘In his field, yes. Mr Vereker may not enjoy the reputation of Dollond or Martin, but his instruments are not to be despised. When I lived in London I heard him lecture on his improved aquatic microscope. There is an admirable attention to detail, particularly in the grinding of the lenses.’

  Mrs Fenner had ordered the fire to be lit in the private parlour. Dr Gohlis was now dry, warm and perhaps slightly tipsy, which made him more expansive than he was inclined to be in company.

  ‘His instruments are certainly not cheap,’ he went on. ‘Though that is not a consideration for many of his customers – I believe he has a considerable connection among gentlemen who dabble in natural philosophy, and even the nobility. When I was last in his shop, His Grace of Devonshire�
��s carriage stopped outside, and a footman came in to collect a parcel. Of course Mr Vereker went out to attend His Grace in person, though it transpired that the carriage was empty.’

  Meanwhile, Savill was turning the telescope over in his hands. ‘Where precisely did you find this, sir?’

  ‘Eh? Within a stone’s throw of that mound where we found my poor figure. On the bank of a stream.’

  ‘It’s plain enough,’ Mr Horton said. ‘The kidnapper must have dropped it. Perhaps he was using it to observe the grounds from the wood.’

  Savill laid the spyglass on the table and pointed. ‘There’s a number here, Doctor. On the barrel, just above the eyepiece. Eight, nine, one, four.’

  ‘Mr Vereker’s mark, no doubt,’ Gohlis said, taking up his glass.

  ‘Where’s his shop?’

  ‘Between Temple Bar and the river, sir. Arundel Street, I believe.’

  The Vicar glanced out of the window at the sky. ‘We should go back, sir. I should much prefer to reach Norbury before the light goes.’

  ‘Indeed, sir,’ Gohlis said. ‘But must I ride that wretched animal again? Is there not a horse I might borrow?’

  Horton glanced at Savill with a smile glimmering on his face. ‘Mrs Fenner has a piebald pony for hire, I believe. It knows the way to Charnwood.’

  Savill ignored them both. For a moment he wished he had kept the dice he had given Charles. A decision must be made, and how else could a man choose in a case like this where so little was known?

  The man in the blue coat clearly existed – independent witnesses from Miss Horton to Mrs Fenner – confirmed that. But had he been acting for himself when he kidnapped Charles? Or for a third party?

  The Count had been determined to keep Charles, and Fournier was his friend and ally. Was it they who had arranged for the boy to be taken? If so, Charles might be still in Norbury or even concealed at Charnwood itself, though it seemed unlikely that he could be kept hidden for long.