The Silent Boy Read online

  ‘Sit at the table,’ the man says, closing the door behind them. He has no teeth and his voice lacks hard edges. His eyes glisten with moisture.

  Charles can smell the rolls but not see them. They are covered with a cloth. A jug of milk stands beside them on the table, together with a piece of cheese. His mouth waters so much he has to swallow. For the moment, his hunger is almost as great as his fear.

  ‘Sit,’ the man says again. ‘Eat. Will that do? I did not know what to tell her to bring.’

  Charles sits. The man whips the cloth away. Charles takes a roll, breaks off a piece and stuffs it into his mouth. The rolls are still warm.

  The man pours milk into a cup and pushes it across the table. ‘Perhaps coffee? Should you have liked coffee? That would have been more difficult, but I’m sure it could be managed …’

  His voice diminishes into silence. His hands clasped together and still holding the cloth, he stands in front of Charles and watches him eat and drink.

  ‘Remarkable,’ he murmurs, ‘quite remarkable.’ He pauses. When he continues, it is as if he is answering a question that Charles has asked him: ‘Yes, the coffee – you see the house is closed up at present. I’ve sent the indoor servants away, apart from Tabitha, or taken them to my other house. Tabitha’s deaf now. Even if I ring for her, she won’t hear me. One has to go down to the kitchen and talk very loudly in her ear. But perhaps later …?’

  The voice trailed away. The man pulls out another chair and sits. He does this very carefully, as old people do, holding on to the edge of the table and then lowering himself inch by inch to the seat of the chair.

  ‘This damp weather,’ he murmurs. ‘It makes my joints ache so.’

  Charles finishes the rolls. He has drunk all of the milk and eaten two-thirds of the cheese.

  The old man nods. ‘Good. You look refreshed.’ He sits back in the chair and he too looks refreshed. When he speaks his voice is firmer and less slurred. ‘Now listen carefully, Charles. For the time being you will live up here, in these two rooms. You will see me sometimes, and Tabitha as well, so you will not be lonely. We shall get to know each other. You will have a suit of new clothes: you must dress in a manner fitting to your station. Besides, you cannot wear those stinking rags a moment longer than is necessary. And then, by and by, you will meet other people and go out, and see more of the world.’

  Charles stares at him and wonders how old he is. Older than Monsieur de Quillon, probably, but younger than Father Viré.

  ‘You will put the past behind you, and all the sad things that have happened. There are bad people in this world but I shall make sure they cannot harm you. We shall live together and be very happy.’

  Probably everyone is younger than Father Viré. Charles decides with reluctance that, while this last belief is almost certainly true, it cannot be classed as a fact. It cannot be included among those things that can be relied upon.

  ‘So is it true what they say then? You don’t speak?’

  Charles does not speak. He does not move.

  The man shrugs. ‘It doesn’t matter, not now.’ He fumbles inside his gown and takes out a watch. He angles the face towards the window, to catch the light, which has been growing rapidly while Charles ate his breakfast. ‘I must leave you for a while. I have business to transact. But come – I wish to show you something first.’

  The old man stands up. Charles does too because Maman made it clear that one should never remain seated when one’s elders rise. They go on to the landing. The man grips Charles’s shoulder.

  ‘You will be my support as we go downstairs. That is your duty now, Charles. To be my support.’

  Side by side, they march slowly down a flight of stairs to a long high landing with many doors opening off it. The next flight of stairs is L-shaped; the stairs are broad and shallow; the two of them descend to a square hall where statues of ancient heroes stand in arched alcoves, one on either side of the front door. There are tables muffled with brown Holland covers. The air is very cold and Charles cannot prevent himself from shivering.

  ‘Come to the library,’ the old man says. ‘There’s a fire there.’

  He opens a door and leads Charles across an apartment where the shrouded shapes of furniture stand against the walls. Their footsteps clatter across the wooden floor, for the carpet has been rolled up.

  They pass through another door. The library is still gloomy despite the candles. A dying fire smoulders in the grate. The old man opens the shutters on the three long windows, and daylight pours into the room.

  ‘Perhaps a book would amuse you?’ he says, while he is snuffing the pale flames of the candles. ‘It would help pass the time. You might study something, perhaps, and turn this period of leisure to profit. Yes, I shall consult a bookseller on the subject of what would be suitable for a young gentleman of your age. Mark what I say: one cannot have too much useful knowledge. One day, perhaps, I shall send you to the University and you will become a perfect paragon of learning.’

  He smiles at his own wit. He puts down the snuffer and runs a forefinger along one of the shelves. He hums quietly. Charles looks out of the nearest window. There is a terrace outside, with an urn on a wall and a sweep of grass beyond.

  ‘De Bello Gallico, perhaps? No, Caesar should wait, I think, though the Latin could hardly be more straightforward. I may engage a tutor for you, by and by, when everything has settled down. Ah – I have it: A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life.’ He pulls out a volume and lays it on the table beside the snuffer. ‘We must start there. Nothing is more important than a firm grounding in religion. I fear your head has been stuffed with Papist nonsense in Paris, but we shall soon root it out, my boy, and plant something more wholesome in its place.’

  Charles edges towards the door.

  But the old man moves in front of him. He is filled with sudden vigour. ‘Before I take you back upstairs, I shall show you something.’

  The claw grips Charles’s shoulder again and draws him towards a mirror that hangs over a pier table between two of the tall windows. The pair of them stand side by side in front of their reflections, with the man’s hand still on Charles’s shoulder. Their faces are grey and weary in the light of the early morning.

  ‘Look. Is there not a likeness? I hoped there would be, and indeed there is. The set of the eyes, of course, and their colour. The nose and mouth are similar, even now, and when you are grown the similarities will be quite unmistakable. You will be the very image of myself as a young man.’

  Charles looks at their reflections, at the smiling man and the boy he no longer recognizes. He remembers the stranger he saw shimmering in the mirror on the stairs at Charnwood on the evening that Mr Savill arrived, and how he and the stranger stretched their hands towards each other. But the glass with its patina of candle grease kept them for ever apart.

  Everyone has another side to them. A side they cannot quite touch. That is a fact.

  ‘This library. This house. The gardens, the farms. Everything.’ The old man releases Charles’s shoulder and smiles down at him with his toothless mouth stretched wide. ‘One day, Charles, when I’m gone, it will be yours. As is right and fitting.’

  His fingers grapple with each other, squeezing and pulling. The toothless smile grows wider and wider, a pink wound. His face splits apart.

  ‘From father to son,’ he says, and pulls at his fingers.

  Tip-tap.

  Charles runs.

  Through the door, through the apartment with the ghostly furniture and into the cold, cold heart of the house.

  Chapter Sixty

  Malbourne was breathing heavily through his mouth. Savill tried speaking to him again but had no response. He would have liked to drag him into the partial shelter of the cottage doorway but did not dare, in case there was internal damage.

  As he was tucking the note into the pocket of Malbourne’s waistcoat, he heard a sharp intake of breath. Savill turned.

  Jarsdel was three paces away and looki
ng straight at him.

  Soaking wet, and without his wig and hat, he was almost unrecognizable with blood and mud. What could be seen of his face was purple with exertion and perhaps excitement, the broad veins standing out on his forehead. In one hand was his bludgeon. In the other was Savill’s clasp-knife, the blade opened.

  ‘Now, sir,’ he said. ‘Now, sir, we’ll see how you like a bit of mud. A man can drown in mud. Or in his own blood. Did you know that?’

  Savill pushed his hand in his pocket and took out Malbourne’s pistol. It was a tiny thing, little better than a popgun. He cocked it, fumbling with the unfamiliar mechanism.

  Jarsdel lunged forward. He swung his stick. Savill ducked.

  The blade in his other hand flicked out. The speed of the movement caught Savill off guard. The tip of the blade snagged on the cuff of his coat. He took a step back and stumbled over Malbourne’s body, falling backwards on to the ground.

  Jarsdel came a step closer. Savill raised the pistol and, without taking aim, pulled the trigger.

  The flint scraped down the frizzen. The pan opened to receive a shower of sparks. The priming powder ignited, giving off a puff of smoke.

  And nothing happened. Damp?

  Then the flame passed through the vent and set off the main charge. There was a dull crack. The pistol jerked in Savill’s hand. Jarsdel stopped in his stride.

  In the long, frozen moment as the smoke cleared, the two men looked at each other. Jarsdel’s face looked puzzled.

  Had the shot missed? Was the charge a blank?

  Time began to move again. The bludgeon fell to the ground.

  Savill rolled sideways and scrambled up.

  Blood oozed from a spot below Jarsdel’s jaw somewhere among the folds of flesh that masked the division between head and neck. First it was a trickle that ran down to his collar, and then a positive stream that spurted before him and fell in a glistening shower of red spots on the wet, dead leaves on the ground.

  He frowned. He released his grip on the knife. His head snapped forward. His knees gave way. He crumpled to the ground. For a moment, he stared up at Savill. He spat out a mouthful of blood. He rolled on to his side and drew up his knees.

  A monstrous, hairless baby lying down to rest.

  Savill knelt beside him, avoiding the pooling blood, and took one of Jarsdel’s hands in both of his. ‘Jarsdel?’ he said. ‘Jarsdel? Can you hear me?’

  There was no response. The eyes were open but if they saw anything there was no sign of it.

  Savill stayed on his knees beside Jarsdel as the life ebbed away. He said nothing, for there was nothing to say. But, when all was said and done, a man should not die alone.

  Dew lingered on the grass and patches of mist clung to the hollows in the field in front of the cottage.

  Savill waited with Malbourne only long enough to make sure he was breathing and no more uncomfortable than he had been before. His own head still hurt but the pain had retreated.

  Jarsdel now lay in a pool of blood, for Savill’s bullet had nicked a carotid artery. In death he was at best an inconvenience and at worst a threat to Savill, who had killed him and might, if all went badly, face a murder charge. Malbourne needed help as urgently as ever. Charles was still missing. The dark heart of this affair was still to be exposed. The consequences to all of them, when the truth was at last uncovered, were incalculable.

  First things first, Savill told himself. He must find help. He did not even know where they were. But Malbourne and Jarsdel could not have dropped out of the sky, and nor could he. There must be horses, somewhere, and a conveyance of some sort.

  He put his knife in his pocket and slipped Jarsdel’s bludgeon under his arm. He walked round the far corner of the cottage to the side he had not yet seen. There was a paddock, empty of livestock, that sloped down to a belt of woodland beyond. He continued past the gable end of the cottage and along the rear wall of the woodshed where he had been held captive.

  There was a gate at the end of the paddock. He climbed over it and found himself at the back of the yard behind the cottage. There were more fields on this side. Then came a swathe of grass, dotted with young trees among which several cows were grazing.

  Beyond the grass were two lines of lime trees, outlined with inky precision against the grey sky. They bordered an avenue. Savill knew this for certain because at one end of the avenue he saw the chimneys of Vardells.

  Chapter Sixty-One

  A chandelier in a bag hangs like a giant wasps’ nest over the centre of the salon. Behind him come the old man’s footsteps, moving with surprising rapidity over the stone slabs of the hall.

  Charles bolts through a door at the far end, which opens into a dining room, the table swathed in covers. He hears a sound in the room behind him and glances over his shoulder towards it. His momentum continues to carry him blindly forward. He cannons into the edge of a sideboard. He clutches at it for support. He misses. Instead, his hand collides with a tall blue vase. The vase topples and rolls off the sideboard. It shatters into a thousand pieces on the bare boards of the floor.

  ‘Charles, dear boy.’ The old man is in the doorway of the salon. He switches from English to flawless French. ‘Calm yourself. No one wishes to harm you. You are home at last, just as your dear mother would have wished.’

  The voice is so gentle that Charles wants to believe what it says. For a moment. He looks at the old man, who smiles uncertainly and tugs at his fingers.

  Tip-tap.

  The cracking of the knuckles. His mother’s blood.

  He dances round the table and leaves the room by a second door, which leads to a passage that brings him back to the flagged hall by the front door.

  The old man knows the house better than he does. He is already waiting there. As Charles appears, the old man takes up a walking stick from a tall jar that stands by the front door.

  ‘Charles,’ he says and, despite the slushing sound he makes when he speaks, his voice has grown sterner. ‘Charles, I do not wish to chastise you, especially on our first day together. But I can’t brook disobedience. Spare the rod and spoil the child, eh? That’s what I used to tell your mother when she was your age.’

  Charles swerves and runs upstairs. He pauses at the half-landing, where the stairs turn to the left, and looks back. The old man is following him.

  ‘There is nowhere for you to go to,’ he says. ‘There is nowhere for you but here.’

  Charles bounds up the rest of the stairs. The landing runs around three sides of the stairwell. All the doors are closed. He tries the nearest one. It is locked. So is the next.

  That leaves the stairs to the attic, which lead out of an alcove at one end of the landing.

  He turns towards the attic stairs in time to see a servant, a squat woman who looks even older than her master, coming from the alcove. At first she does not see him. She carries a tray with the remains of his breakfast on it.

  She looks up and sees Charles at the head of the stairs.

  ‘Stop him, Tabitha!’ The old man is very close now, hauling himself up the stairs by the bannister rail. ‘The boy’s not himself.’

  Still staring at Charles, she holds a hand to her ear. ‘What, sir? Is that you there?’

  ‘His wits are disordered. Stop him. The boy’s mazed, I tell you.’

  The woman seems to understand now. She advances along the landing.

  ‘You must take your beating like a man,’ cries the old man, his voice high and excited.

  He lunges forward, swinging the stick. It catches Charles on his thigh. But the blow is feeble, almost petulant. Charles snatches at the stick and finds to his amazement that he has a grip on it. He tugs it towards him.

  The old man is still holding on to the other end. ‘Let go,’ he cries. ‘I will not brook insolence.’ He pulls harder himself, dragging Charles down the upper flight of stairs almost as far as the half-landing.

  A voice in the hall below shouts: ‘Drop that stick, damn you.’

 
; Three things happen at once.

  The old man turns sharply in the direction of the interruption.

  The old woman drops the tray she is carrying.

  And Charles stops pulling the stick. He pushes instead.

  The old man staggers back on to the half-landing and cannons into the newel post that marks the right-angle turn of the bannister rail. He cannot stop: either the stick or his own impetus pushes him further than he expected. His body twists. He takes a step backwards. For an instant, one slippered foot hangs in the air – not on the landing, but above the stair immediately below.

  A cup from the old woman’s tray slips through the bannisters of the landing and falls to the hall below, where it shatters.

  Charles cannot remember what happens next. Does he reverse the motion of the stick and pull it again? Or does he continue to push? Or does the sound of the breaking cup surprise the old man so much that he releases his grip?

  But this is a fact, if nothing else is: that the old man falls. He topples over on to the lower flight of stairs.

  Charles lets go of the stick, which clatters on to the half-landing. He watches the old man rolling rapidly downwards, like a child on a grassy slope. His cap falls off. His skull is shaven. As his body rolls over, he gasps and squeaks. He sounds like a tiny animal, not like a man.

  Mr Savill is running from a doorway below towards the foot of the stairs. But he is too late.

  The old man reaches the level of the hall. The back of his head hits the stone-flagged floor. He lies face upwards among the shards of broken china from the cup.

  His eyes are still open.

  So is his silent mouth. It looks more than ever like a pink wound.

  Hush now, Charles thinks. Say nothing.

  Chapter Sixty-Two

  At a little before two o’clock on the afternoon of Sunday, 13 January 1793, Mr Malbourne called by arrangement at Nightingale Lane. It was a moot point whether he came on pleasure or business.