The Silent Boy Read online

  Tip-tap.

  In his mind, Charles says to reassure himself, ‘I am safe now.’

  He has food and shelter. Soon his English family will come.

  He eats quickly, cramming food into his mouth with both hands and swallowing it half-chewed. He washes it down with sour-tasting water he finds in the scullery in a bucket by the pump.

  Only then does he realize how stupid he has been: he has left the key in the back door. He runs into the scullery and retrieves it. He must find another way into the house, so he can lock the door and leave the key in its hiding place outside. He begins to cry. Dare he risk staying here and leaving the house unlocked?

  Fighting panic, he checks the windows overlooking the yard. Either they are too small or they have bars that will not even let a skinny boy squeeze between them. All but one – set beneath a shelf in the pantry: it isn’t really a window but an ironbound hatch secured by four great bolts, with a sill at floor level much marked by the passage of barrels. The bolts have recently been greased and, for all their size, they glide out of their sockets. Five minutes later the back door is locked, the key is returned to its hiding place in the yard and Charles is safe in the house again.

  He continues his stealthy survey. This is not a place that has been planned, unlike the Hotel de Quillon or even Charnwood. The floors are uneven. Walls do not follow straight lines and rarely meet other walls at right angles. Passages wind back on themselves. Flights of stairs lead unexpectedly to solitary rooms. Some doors are locked. Many of the windows are leaded and their distorted green glass gives the outside world the appearance of being at the bottom of a pond.

  A difficult house to measure, Charles thinks, a difficult house to reduce to facts.

  He climbs the stairs and roams through bedchambers and closets and mysterious apartments that have no obvious function. At the top of the house is a series of shadowy attics, partly boarded and lit by tiny windows set high in the gables of the building. Beams and rafters criss-cross the dusty spaces. Even a cursory glance is enough to show that this part of the house is home to bats, birds, wasps, rats and spiders, and no doubt a host of invisible creatures.

  Once Charles would have recoiled at these traces of parasitic intruders or even feared them. Now they are almost welcome, as an omen, as evidence that this is a house that gives shelter to refugees.

  He returns downstairs, taking his time, relishing the pleasure of possession. This, he thinks, is what it should have been like in the castle in the woods. But that reminds him at once that the castle was something he planned to share with Louis, and that Louis turned out to be nothing but a lifeless doll, not a person; and that in turn reminds him of his solitude.

  Self-pity wells up inside him and he is attacked by a desire to weep. But he has learned something in the terrible weeks since the summer; he has learned that tears bring no comfort and make nothing happen. So he stamps his foot to drive them away, and the dull thud of his heel on the stair booms through the quiet house.

  On the first floor, he hesitates a moment, thinking of the day ahead and then the night. Even if he can find candles and a tinderbox, he knows it will not be safe to show a light. When evening comes, he will have to try to sleep.

  The next question is where. There are three bedrooms on this landing – Mr Savill’s, to judge its lack of ornament and the razor strop on the washstand; Mr Savill’s sister’s, to judge by the black dress hanging on the door and the row of devotional tracts on the mantel; and his sister Lizzie’s, which has a jug stuffed with wilting Michaelmas daisies on the windowsill.

  ‘My sister, Lizzie,’ Charles says in his mind, trying the words for size, to see how they feel in his mouth. ‘Madam, may I present Elizabeth Savill, my sister.’

  Something forbids him from choosing a bed that belongs to someone else. He may take the Savills’ food and the shelter of their house, but a bed is different. There are also two other beds that he thinks must be for servants – one in a maid’s room on the way to the attics, the other a straw pallet in an alcove off the kitchen – but he has still less right to take one of those, and besides they both smell strangely and, even after everything that has happened, he is sensitive to certain smells and textures.

  There is a closet beside Lizzie’s chamber that he decides will do for his own bedchamber because it seems to belong to no one in particular. The small window is barred, not shuttered, and it overlooks the yard and the garden. The closet has a curtained alcove containing old cloaks and coats.

  He casts about for bedding, and finds a shelf of blankets at the bottom of a cupboard full of lavender-scented linen. He carries two of them into the closet and lays them neatly on the floor under the window. He fetches a third blanket and folds it so it will serve as a pillow.

  Charles glances at the sky and wonders what o’clock it is and whether Mr Savill will come soon.

  The time hangs heavily. There are books in the house and he goes in search of one to read, though he hasn’t tried to read more than a few words in English before. He returns to Lizzie’s room, where he notices a line of books on the table. He picks a volume at random and opens the title page.

  THE

  LIFE

  And Strange Surprizing

  ADVENTURES

  of

  ROBINSON CRUSOE

  OF

  YORK, MARINER

  Charles sleeps more soundly, and for longer, than he has done for months. When he wakes, green-grey light is struggling through the leaded lozenges of the window.

  It is still very early in the morning. He goes downstairs and lets himself out into the yard, where he urinates in the earth closet. After breakfasting on cheese, ham and an apple, he returns to his room, taking with him a jar labelled quince jelly to sustain him through the morning.

  By now it is light enough to sit in a nest of blankets on the window seat and continue with Robinson Crusoe. Miss Horton had left the narrative at the moment when Mr Crusoe discovered the print of a naked foot in the sand. Charles spent some hours puzzling over the book yesterday but made painfully slow progress because of the English language and because, he suspects, Miss Horton must have left out many of the duller passages when she read the book to him at Charnwood.

  Today, however, his efforts are rewarded by Mr Crusoe’s stumbling on the site of a cannibal dinner party on the beach, a discovery that quite understandably disgusts Mr Crusoe so much that nature obliges him to vomit. This occurs nearly eighteen years after his shipwreck and the start of his solitary life. Charles reads on and on and for a while entirely forgets that he is a fugitive concealed in a house where he has no right to be.

  The interruption comes as Mr Crusoe stumbles on a cave that contains a groaning monster.

  The click of the latch of the door in the wall from the alley.

  Charles tumbles from the window seat. Wriggling on to his knees, he peers through the window, keeping well away from the glass. The old woman he saw yesterday is coming into the yard. Her head is turned over her shoulder. Two young ladies follow her, and then another woman dressed as a maid. He cannot see their faces because of their hats.

  As they cross the yard, the sound of their voices reach him. One of the girls laughs.

  My sister?

  Charles does not wait to see more. He gathers up the blankets and bundles them into the alcove behind the curtain. Then he follows them. He squats on the blankets behind the cloaks.

  The closet door is open. There are noises in the house below – the old woman talking about something in a voice that grates like a rusty hinge, a door banging and then running footsteps on the stairs.

  ‘Pray do not trouble yourself, ma’am,’ a young woman says. ‘I know just where it is.’

  That is when Charles discovers that he has left Robinson Crusoe on the window seat. And the jar of quince jelly, now half-eaten, is on the floor. But the floorboards will betray him if he tries to retrieve them.

  Light, rapid footsteps cross the landing.

  A doo
r opens. The footsteps are in the next room, Lizzie’s bedchamber. There is the scrape of a drawer being pulled out; after a pause it is closed. Then another drawer. Then a third.

  More footsteps. A long pause. Footsteps again. A faint click.

  The steps are on the landing.

  Downstairs, the old woman’s voice drones on, cutting into the quietness of the house like a saw.

  The young woman enters the closet. A pause.

  She has seen the book, Charles knows, lying where he left it, face down on the window seat at the very moment when Mr Crusoe enters the cave with a flaming torch held aloft. And the jar, with the wooden spoon standing in what’s left of the jelly.

  He prays to Father Viré’s God. Make her go away.

  God does not listen. As usual.

  She sucks in a breath of air. A flurry of footsteps. She snatches back the curtain and light floods into the alcove.

  Even then he cherishes the hope that she has not seen him, that the cloaks and blankets hide him from her eyes.

  ‘Come out,’ she whispers. ‘Come out now. Come on, you silly boy.’

  ‘Lizzie? Where are you?’

  It is the voice of another young woman, calling up the stairs.

  Lizzie pulls away the screen of cloaks. She holds her forefinger to her lips.

  ‘Coming,’ she calls back.

  She stares down at him, her eyes widening. She is so fresh and clean. She has a piece of lace in her hand, as delicate as a cobweb.

  All of a sudden, he sees himself as she must see him: the ragged clothes, the unkempt hair and the dirt.

  ‘Are you – are you Charles? You are, aren’t you?’

  Say nothing.

  My sister, he thinks.

  ‘Are you? Why won’t you answer?’ She pauses and then rushes on: ‘Oh, of course. You have lived in France. Perhaps you don’t understand English.’ She draws breath, pauses again and whispers very slowly and carefully: ‘Je m’appelle Elizabeth Savill. Comment vous appellez-vous?’

  ‘Lizzie?’ The voice comes up the stairs again. ‘Where are you? Have you found it?’

  ‘Yes, Mary,’ she calls back. ‘I shall be down directly.’ She swallows. ‘You must be Charles. Who else could you be? And your eyes – oh, please say something. Je suis vôtre sœur. Monsieur Savill – mon père – il vous cherche. Je vais – je vais le—’ She pounces on Robinson Crusoe. ‘But you do understand English. You must, if you read this.’

  He raises his hands to his face and crosses his forefingers over his mouth.

  She frowns. ‘Oh – do you mean you’re scared to speak?’ The frown deepens. ‘Or you can’t?’

  There are footsteps coming up the stairs.

  ‘Quick,’ she says, and he knows that she has made up her mind to be his friend.

  She arranges the cloaks to cover most of him and draws the curtain across the alcove. A moment later there’s a soft thud as Robinson Crusoe lands on the blanket by his feet. The jar of quince jelly slides under the hem of the curtain.

  ‘I’ve got it, Mary,’ Lizzie says. ‘What do think?’

  ‘Oh it’s lovely,’ says another voice, a young woman’s. ‘But is it large enough?’

  ‘Your mother will know.’

  Mary lowers her voice to a whisper. ‘Does she ever stop talking?’

  ‘Mrs Forster? No. She probably talks in her sleep as well.’

  The two girls giggle.

  ‘My father says she is to be pitied, and we should not laugh at her,’ Lizzie goes on, with the ghost of the laugh still in her voice. ‘But I fear it is very hard not to. It’s better than hitting her over the head with a rolling pin to make her hold her tongue. But Father says she works hard, and is entirely to be trusted, and she is a good mother to her poor unfortunate daughter. Which is all very true, no doubt, but I do wish she would be quiet sometimes.’ She raises her voice to its normal level. ‘Come – we must not keep Mrs Forster waiting.’ She lowers her voice again. ‘And your poor maid. She’s bearing the brunt of all this. She’ll give your mother notice when she gets home.’

  Mary suppresses a snort of laughter. The two of them leave the room and begin to go downstairs. Charles lets out his breath and fights a desire to sneeze.

  ‘You go down,’ he hears Lizzie say. ‘I might as well get my other cloak while we’re here. It’s much colder, isn’t it?’

  She runs into the closet. The curtain slides back. She snatches at a dark blue cloak. She bends down, bringing her face to within a foot of his.

  ‘Stay here, Charles,’ she says. ‘Restez ici, je vous en prie. I will write to my father and he will come and take care of you.’

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  The encounter with Mr Rampton did not go well.

  ‘You did what, sir?’ he said when Savill told him how he had spent yesterday afternoon. ‘You saw Mrs Ogden? I told you expressly that you must leave all that to me, that I did not want you—’

  ‘You do not have the right to forbid me to do anything. I’m not in your employment.’

  ‘You will find that I have the power to compel you. Do not make me use it.’

  ‘Young Ogden is Irwin. I have proof. And there’s worse—’

  ‘Hush.’ Rampton rose from his desk. ‘The damage is done, I suppose. It will be better if we talk this over elsewhere.’ His voice was very quiet. ‘Let us take a turn in the Park.’

  ‘But may I not—’

  Rampton cut him off with a chopping motion of his hand. ‘Pray oblige me in this, sir.’

  He rang the bell and ordered his greatcoat, hat and stick to be brought. ‘I shall be gone for twenty minutes or less,’ he told Malbourne. ‘I am expecting His Lordship this afternoon but I do not know when. If he should call while I am out, pray make my excuses and ask him to be good enough to wait.’

  When they went downstairs, Jarsdel came out of his box to usher them down to the street. Despite his usual surliness, he could not keep his eyes from Mr Rampton’s face, as a whipped dog cannot ignore his master.

  ‘Brush your coat and straighten your wig,’ Rampton said to him in a soft, chilly voice. ‘His Lordship may call this afternoon, and I do not wish him to think we have a scarecrow to guard our door.’

  Jarsdel lowered his head and leaned forward, which was all he could manage in the way of a bow.

  Neither Rampton nor Savill spoke on their way to the Park. The rain had stopped and there were patches of sunshine, enough to lend colour to the notion that the two of them were taking the air after a morning’s work in their office. They walked west along the street, crossed the top of Duke Street and cut through the alley leading to the open space beyond. Rampton encountered two men who bowed to him, but he avoided conversation with them.

  They passed beneath the trees that lined the border of the Park and walked in silence across the open ground between them and the canal. The weather was growing colder now, with occasional gusts of rain. There were few gentlemen about – it was chiefly the common sort of people at this hour, and not many of those.

  When they reached the water, Rampton stopped. They were near the eastern end of the canal, as straight as a ruler could make it. It pointed at the Parade Ground, with the arch of the Horse Guards beyond.

  ‘Well, sir,’ Rampton said at last, poking his stick at a slug that had the temerity to be passing over the stone border of the water. ‘You had better tell me the whole.’

  Savill described his encounter with Mrs Ogden at the British Library, and how he had known she would be there. ‘She and her husband have a son, Richard, who ran up debts, quarrelled with his father and was sent down from Oxford. He refused to settle to the law and in the end his father cast him out. He lived for a while on the river at their cottage beyond Chiswick and tried to make his living with his pencil, but it did not answer. His mother is desperate to effect a reconciliation – that is why she talked so frankly to me. Her description of him answers in every particular the description of Irwin, the man who took Charles away from Charnwood.
You will recall that Norbury’s landlady in Somersetshire said he was “artistical”. And, to cap it all, Irwin was Ogden’s mother’s maiden name.’

  Rampton grunted. ‘Very well. Let us walk on. I’m cold.’

  They followed the bank of the canal. To the west, at the far end of the long vista of water choked with lilies under a grey sky was the Queen’s residence, Buckingham House, with its quadrants and pavilions and its forest of smoking chimneys. As they walked, Savill’s hand brushed the side of his coat and felt the outline of Ogden’s sketchbook in his pocket. He couldn’t hide the truth for ever.

  ‘There’s more,’ he said.

  ‘I thought there might be. When you decide to meddle, sir, you do it wholeheartedly. I must give you that. Where did you ride to?’

  ‘How did you know I’d ridden anywhere?’

  ‘When I enquired for you this morning, one of the clerks downstairs said he had seen you riding down Great George Street on one of the hacks from the Sun in Splendour.’

  ‘I went out to the Ogdens’ cottage.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because it’s not so far from the Bath road, sir.’

  ‘I see. So you thought Irwin might have had himself and the boy set down nearby as they were approaching London? Young Ogden, that is.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ Savill glanced at Rampton: the old man’s body might be showing its age but there was nothing amiss with his intellectual faculties. ‘And I was right.’

  Rampton stopped. ‘You found him?’

  Savill nodded. ‘In a boathouse on the riverbank. Someone had blown his brains out.’

  ‘Good God! And Charles?’

  ‘He wasn’t there. No one was – the place was quite deserted. But he had been there. The body was in a closet. As soon as I opened the door, I knew by the smell that a firearm had been discharged. The name Charles was scratched on one of the shelves. It was no more than two feet away from the body.’