The Silent Boy Page 33

  ‘I knew he must be Charles – who else could he be? Besides, I think his eyes were like mine. So I talked to him.’ A note of pride entered into her voice. ‘In English and in French. I said I would write to you, and you would come and take care of him. I’m sure he understood. I could see it in his face.’ She was still holding his hand. ‘Was I right to do that? Have I made things worse?’

  ‘You were absolutely right,’ he said, wishing to God that he had allowed her to keep house for him in Nightingale Lane in which case she would have been there when Charles arrived, however he contrived it. ‘And you’re right about its being him, too. He is very like you, you know – or rather how you were when you were younger.’

  ‘He wouldn’t say anything. Is he really …?’

  ‘He is mute. He used not to be. But – but since he lost his mother – he has not spoken a word.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘No one knows.’

  ‘He can read.’

  ‘Oh yes. There’s nothing wrong with his mental faculties.’ Savill released her hand and smiled at her. ‘And a lady in Somerset was reading Robinson Crusoe to him.’

  ‘That proves it was Charles, then. We must go there now and bring him here. Mrs Pycroft will not mind my going with you, I’m sure, not if you ask her yourself.’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘You must stay here.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I must come with you.’

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  Nightingale Lane was as black as a coal pit. The gables of the old houses on either side craned towards each other. Above them the sky was stained with the faint glow from London at night.

  The surface of the lane was paved unevenly with old stones. The coach rocked violently as it moved forward. There were three of them inside the hackney, for Savill had begged yet another favour from Mrs Pycroft and brought Troughton with them. Lizzie’s hand was tucked under Savill’s arm. He felt her rapid breathing rather than heard it.

  The lane widened, and they drew up in the wider space outside his home. Savill lowered the glass and put his head out. It had started to rain. The coach lamps threw a feeble light over the front of the house. To the side was the mouth of the alley leading to the Oak Tree.

  The coachman descended and let down the steps for them. ‘Never been here before.’ He sniffed and added, just low enough for Savill to be able to ignore it, ‘Can’t say I like it much, either.’

  ‘We won’t be long,’ Savill said.

  ‘I need to go, sir. You can pick up a hackney at the stand by Goodge Street.’

  ‘Wait for us and there’s a half-crown for you on top of the fare. A quarter of an hour, no more.’

  The coachman twitched as if stung. ‘All right, sir. But some gentlemen make promises they can’t fulfil. I’d like to see the colour of your money.’

  ‘You’ll see nothing at all unless you wait,’ Savill said, helping Lizzie down the steps.

  Troughton had brought a lantern and a stick with him. They lit the lantern with the aid of the coach lamp. Savill led the way into the alley, with Lizzie behind him and Troughton bringing up the rear.

  Savill stopped at the gate to the yard and felt in his pocket for the key. Lizzie pushed past him and raised the latch. The gate swung inwards. It had not been locked.

  They entered the yard. The house door was ajar.

  They lit candles in the kitchen. In the hall, Savill picked up a walking stick weighted with lead.

  ‘Keep behind us,’ he told Lizzie. ‘Or you go back to the coach instantly.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ she said meekly.

  They went upstairs, with Savill and Lizzie calling Charles’s name and telling him not to be afraid.

  The house was cold and damp. A current of air swept down to greet them from the upper floors. They looked first in the closet where Lizzie had found Charles. Robinson Crusoe lay on the window seat and the quince jelly was behind the curtain in the alcove.

  Lizzie broke away and threw open the door of her bedchamber. Savill heard her sharp intake of breath. He shouldered her out of the way.

  The top mattress and the coverlets had been dragged from the bed. He trod on something yielding. He stooped, and the light shone on a fragment of cheese.

  His stomach lurched when he saw a severed finger beside it. But at once he realized his eyes were playing tricks with him: it was only a piece of ham hacked from the side of a joint and roughly fingerlike in shape.

  ‘Where is he?’ Lizzie wailed. ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘Be quiet,’ he said. ‘And stay behind me, do you hear?’

  They searched the rest of the house. They found only two things of interest – further signs that someone had been foraging in the larder and the pantry and, in one of the attics, a casement window thrown open.

  It was raining steadily now. When Savill held up the lantern, the feeble light shone on mossy tiles sleek with moisture. He looked out over the roofs of his house, calling Charles’s name and hoping against hope that the boy had taken refuge among the chimney stacks.

  There was no answer. He began to close the window.

  ‘Papa, no,’ Lizzie said, touching his arm. ‘Leave it open.’

  ‘The rain will get in.’

  ‘But suppose he’s still out there. Suppose he’s too scared to come inside while we’re here.’

  He left the window open, persuaded by the desperation in her voice rather than the logic of her argument.

  ‘What now?’ she said as they were leaving the house.

  ‘I take you and Troughton back to Mrs Pycroft.’

  None of them spoke until they were in the hackney and rattling slowly down the lane.

  ‘There must be something we can do,’ Lizzie said in a whisper, in deference to the presence of Troughton not two feet away from her.

  ‘Not tonight,’ Savill said.

  ‘But he must be out there. Lost. Cold. Hungry. This is a foreign country to him.’ Her voice rose to a wail. ‘And he is dumb.’

  ‘Hush,’ he said sharply. ‘I shall leave you at the school and go back to your uncle Rampton. He has it in his power to do more than we can.’

  ‘But will he use his power?’

  ‘I shall make sure he does,’ Savill said with more confidence than he felt.

  They did not speak for the rest of the journey. Once they reached Bedford Square, the coach picked up speed. They turned into Tottenham Court Road and then right into Oxford Street.

  The rain was falling more heavily now and there were fewer people about. They pulled up outside the school in Little Castle Street. It took several minutes for them to gain admittance, for the door was heavily barred, and Mrs Pycroft’s maid was not used to the bolts and locks that secured it. Mrs Pycroft herself, armed with a poker, greeted them in the hall.

  ‘Well, sir,’ she said, ‘this is a fine business, I must say. I’d have you remember that this is a respectable establishment.’

  The situation was delicate and called for all of Savill’s powers of negotiation. Mrs Pycroft was aggrieved, and with some justification. But he needed her to look after Lizzie and he could not afford to upset her. On the other hand the hackney driver was in a hurry to be gone, as was Savill himself.

  When at last he left the house, leaving behind him a shower of promises, regrets and apologies, the coach was still waiting for him, or rather for his money. The rain was falling more heavily than before. The drains had overflowed and the pavement was sheeted with water.

  ‘Crown Street in Westminster,’ he called up to the driver.

  ‘No, sir. This is as far as I go. I’ll thank you to settle up now if you please.’

  Savill failed to change the coachman’s mind. He would not even consent to drive Savill to the nearest hackney stand, for his own home lay in quite another direction.

  As they were arguing, however, another coach turned into the road and drew up some way behind them. It was not a hackney but a private carriage, so Savill ignored it and continued to work on his driver,
who was by now taking a perverse pleasure in denying him what he wanted.

  ‘No, sir. If you’ll pay what you owe, I’m sure I’ll be much obliged.’

  ‘Damn it, I’ll take down your number and report you.’

  ‘Won’t do you any good, sir. My money, if you please.’

  In the end, there was no help for it. Savill paid his fare and the coach rolled away. He turned up the collar of his coat, wishing he had brought an umbrella, and began to walk towards the hackney stand. He drew level with the coach waiting near the corner. The glass in the door slid down. He turned automatically in the direction of the sound.

  ‘Mr Savill, sir.’

  It was too dark to see the face of the man inside the carriage. But the voice was as thick as porridge and instantly familiar.

  ‘Come to fetch you, sir,’ Jarsdel said.

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  Charles wakes.

  He drops into consciousness like a stone into a pool. The ripples spread.

  He is in bed still, and in the same room as before, so far as he can tell. But he is no longer alone.

  Automatically he pushes his hand over his belly and touches his crotch. It is still dry. His bladder is full.

  There is light, too – vertical lines of it where the curtains meet. The lines fluctuate in strength. Not constant. A candle. It is still night.

  Someone is moving on the other side of the bed-curtains. Footsteps pace up and down – very slowly; the gaps between the footfalls grow longer and longer. Charles closes his eyes and wills his breath to be soft and even.

  He remembers when the Count came to look at him on his last night at Charnwood. The memory is remote, as if it happened long ago: more than that, it is as if it no longer belongs to him; it is drifting away.

  On that occasion, he pretended to be asleep, just as he’s doing now. He smelled the odour of brandy, he remembers that, and also he heard what the Count said.

  ‘Oh, my son,’ he whispered. ‘Oh, my son.’

  The footsteps stop. The sweat breaks out on Charles’s forehead. Soon the curtains will move aside. Soon someone will look down on him.

  He waits. Nothing happens. He might be alone in the room.

  In the distance, an owl hoots.

  Then he hears it, the sound he fears most in all the world.

  Tip-tap. Like cracking a walnut. Tip-tap.

  Chapter Fifty-Seven

  Savill woke with a headache that split his skull in two. He was very cold. His body ached.

  Where in God’s name am I?

  The headache had its vicious centre at the back of his head. He touched the place gingerly and found a bruise the size of an egg. The hair covering the bruise was stiff with dried blood.

  The next discovery was that he was lying on a floor of packed earth in a windowless building. It was not entirely dark, for daylight filtered through gaps between the roof and the wallplate, between the door and its frame, and between some of the tiles.

  He pulled himself slowly into a sitting position and leaned against a wall. The exertion made him feel nauseous and lent extra savagery to the pain in his head.

  He was in a small building of crumbling brick. Much of the floor was covered with pieces of bark, twigs and scraps of tinder. An old casement window frame was propped against a wall.

  So, he thought, a woodstore with hardly any wood in it.

  The headache retreated to a tolerable level. He had no memory of being brought here. He tried to recall what had happened. When that failed, he tried to remember anything at all of what lay behind the thick grey fog of the recent past.

  An image floated up from the darkness. Lizzie’s face, lit from below by a candle in her hand, her lips parted, her eyes fixed on him.

  The sound of rain. A coach rattling and swaying; iron-rimmed wheels and iron-shod hooves on a paved street; the flicker of lights from passing shops and houses.

  Troughton’s wall-eye looking at something Savill couldn’t see. A piece of ham on the floor: it had made his stomach turn over, just for a moment, because in the flickering light it had looked like a severed finger. Charles’s finger.

  What had Lizzie said? ‘Lost. Cold. Hungry. This is a foreign country to him. And he is dumb.’

  Savill struggled to his feet, using the wall as a support. His vision blurred. Once again, the nausea returned. He retched, but nothing came up. He staggered to the door, splashing through a puddle of rainwater.

  Though it hung crookedly in its frame, the door was a solid barrier made of oak, with heavy iron reinforcements at the joints. There was no sign of a lock or handle on the inside but, when Savill pushed against the door, it moved a fraction of an inch and then stopped. He ran his eye around the frame and made out the horizontal line of the iron bar that held it in place on the outside.

  If this is a woodshed, he thought, then there must surely be a house or cottage nearby.

  He leaned against the door and listened. He heard his own breathing and a faint and sporadic rustling, perhaps dead leaves shifting on the ground in the wind. The rain must have stopped.

  The memories were coming back now. The fruitless search for Charles in the house at Nightingale Lane. The journey to Mrs Pycroft’s house in Little Castle Street. And the sound of a voice in the rain.

  Then, here and now, he heard the footsteps.

  There were two sets of footsteps, one of which was markedly heavier than the other.

  ‘God damn you.’ It was Malbourne’s voice, sharp with anger. ‘Can you not grasp your own stupidity?’

  ‘Yes, sir, but I had to do something.’ That was Jarsdel’s voice, thick as ever, but now wheezy as well from the exercise of walking. ‘You don’t understand, sir.’

  The footsteps were gone. In that instant Savill remembered the voice he had heard outside Mrs Pycroft’s house. Thick as porridge and instantly familiar.

  ‘Come to fetch you, sir.’

  The voice in the rain.

  Jarsdel had brought Savill to this place. And it had been on Malbourne’s orders.

  When they had gone, Savill threw himself against the door, again and again until his shoulder ached as well as his head. He examined the walls. The brick was old and crumbling. The lime mortar had been carelessly applied, probably two or three generations earlier. But the walls resisted him for all that. They were stronger than he was.

  Malbourne, he thought, sobbing with frustration, Malbourne and Jarsdel in alliance: everything at the Black Letter Office passed by one or both of them.

  One by one, in the back of Savill’s mind, the pieces were slipping into place at extraordinary speed. Augusta had either been recruited or had offered herself as a spy for the British Government; no doubt Rampton had had a hand in that. She was perfectly placed to send information on the liberal monarchists and their allies, who so recently had dominated the government. Malbourne was equally well placed to act as a bridge between her and the British Government. Rampton trusted him …

  The ground. Savill examined the earth, looking for rat holes, or signs of subsidence, anything that might promise a way out.

  Augusta had been a woman who always played more than one game at once. She would have hoped for more than money from Malbourne. She would have been looking to the future, perhaps to a life in England; even for marriage, for Malbourne was the sort of man who could, if he wished, manage a divorce case …

  Nothing on the ground, nothing that promised even the possibility of escape. It would take Savill years to tunnel through the earth with scraps of wood and his bare hands.

  But the roof?

  Augusta would have wanted more than security, more than money. ‘I have an appetite,’ she had said all those years ago as she sat astride Savill with Lizzie in her belly and squeezed his thighs with her heels. ‘And you shall feed me.’ Malbourne was personable enough, and had fine prospects; she had always liked a gentleman, after all, which was more than Savill was or could ever be. (He suspected now that Augusta’s attachment to him had always be
en, as it were, provisional.)

  But Malbourne was betrothed to Miss Woorgreen, with her £1200 a year and an uncle who was a great favourite of Mr Pitt, the Prime Minister. Even Augusta’s charms must have had their limits, particularly for a man as shrewd as Malbourne. But if she had insisted on her claim on him …?

  The tiles.

  Savill looked up at the roof. The tie beams and the purlins were dark with age and showed the marks of the adze. The rafters sagged under the weight of the pantiles hanging from battens attached to the rafters. Several of the pantiles had either slipped or cracked; or the laths supporting them had given way to the infirmities of age.

  He stood under one of the beams and stretched his arms towards it. He could touch the sides, but he could not hook his hands over the top of it to give him a grip that could sustain his weight.

  The only chance was the window frame. When he lifted it, one of its uprights fell away. But the rest of the frame seemed sound, the wood still firm and the corners holding. He propped it against the wall beneath one of the beams but slightly to one side.

  He studied the brickwork above it. There were two rusting nails just within reach, sunk into the mortar. One was above the beam, the other several feet below.

  Savill retreated to the opposite wall. He broke into a run and used the top of the frame as a step. He glimpsed the top of the beam and flung his right arm across it. His weight dragged him down, jarring his shoulder, and sending stabs of pain into his neck and his arm. His feet flailed wildly, scraping against the bricks. His left shoe knocked against a nail.

  That was the turning point. The nail took much of his weight, easing the strain on his shoulder. He reached a hand to the upper nail, twisted his body and wriggled on to the beam. For a moment he hung there, breathing hard, head and shoulders one side, and legs and feet the other, his muscles screaming like a choir of banshees.

  Damnation, he thought, I’m too old for this folly.

  He manoeuvred himself along the beam and, with some difficulty, swung his arms and legs on to it. After that, the matter became relatively straightforward, as long as he did not look down and realize how precarious his situation on the beam really was. He stretched an arm to the purlin above him, twisted his body again, and managed to raise himself so that he was perching on the cross-beam.