The Silent Boy Page 6

  Later he encounters the gardener’s boy again. It is in the stableyard. Charles has gone there because Dr Gohlis is paying an afternoon call on Mrs West, so he will not be in the laboratory. Charles plans to search for the key to the door. Even if he doesn’t find it, he will be able to peer through the window at Louis and greet him.

  To his horror, though, he finds the red-headed boy is in the yard. He is shortening the donkey’s reins.

  There is no time to retreat. The boy abandons the donkey. He comes up to Charles, herding him like a dog with a sheep into the corner where the mounting block stands by the door to the house.

  He prods Charles with his forefinger. ‘Cat got your tongue, then?’

  He is a head taller and his accent is as dense as mud. Charles stares at the ground. There’s a hole in the sole and the upper of the boy’s right shoe. His big toe pokes through.

  ‘You’re an idiot.’

  The boy comes closer and blows a raspberry. His spittle sprays over Charles’s face.

  ‘Little baby. Look at you – dribbling all over your baby face.’ The boy smiles. ‘You can’t even speak. So I can do whatever I like to you. Can’t tell no one, can you?’

  He sucks in air, ready for another raspberry. But suddenly the door bangs against the wall and the Count himself is there. He grabs the boy by the scruff of his neck and flings him down on the cobbles.

  The Count is dressed for riding. He is carrying a crop. He beats the boy to the ground. The whip slashes this way and that. Charles watches.

  The boy squirms like a worm. He cries for mercy. He cries for his mother.

  Charles puts his hands over his ears in an attempt to block out the screams. There is blood on the boy’s shirt, so bright that for a moment Charles has to close his eyes.

  Chapter Nine

  At first, Charles cannot make out much of what the English say. Their words collide and mingle with one another in a babble of sound, like water running over pebbles.

  He thought he would be able to understand everything because Maman taught English to him at home, as far back as he can remember. But perhaps Maman spoke a different sort of English.

  Gradually, however, as the long days pass, Charles learns to understand more and more of what he hears. Sometimes he even dreams in English.

  He wishes there were only one language in the world. He speaks – or rather used to speak, French, Maman’s special sort of English and – left over from when he was very small – some Italian and even a little German. Oh, and there is yet another language – the Latin the priests use, the language of church and lessons.

  Often he does not know where one language ends and another begins. In his head they bleed into one another like watercolour paints when you splash water on them.

  Why are there so many words? And why can he say none of them?

  Early in the afternoon on the first day of October, the sun comes out for a short while and Charles goes to the Garden of Neptune. This is higher up the valley than the house, where the pleasure grounds give way to meadow and woodland.

  It is a garden within the garden, enclosed by walls and tall hedges. In the middle is a pond with a stone statue, discoloured by age and lichen. The god has lost his trident. He looks stunted because he has disproportionally short legs and arms, like a dwarf that Charles and Maman used to see begging on the Rue Saint-Honoré, near the Palais Royale.

  The other night, Charles had a nightmare about Neptune. The sea god found his trident in the water. He waded across to the wall surrounding the pool and began stabbing Charles with his weapon. In the dream, Neptune’s body was dripping and hung with weeds. His legs had scales like a fish. But as the god stabbed and stabbed, the blood poured from Charles’s body in great gouts. Soon it was raining bright blood and Neptune himself turned red.

  Blood spurts from people like water from a pump. Charles knows that. (It is a fact.)

  He has made himself return to the garden. For, if Neptune has not found his trident, then everything Charles remembers from the dream has never happened.

  It never rained blood. Not really. Never, never, never. It is important to be sure of these things.

  Neptune has not found his trident.

  Afterwards Charles decides to measure the garden. A network of paths connects the gates and runs between the beds where small bushes grow. He walks up and down, counting.

  The path parallel to the wall is fifty-two paces on its two long sides. It is thirty-four paces on one of the shorter ones, and thirty-two paces on the other – which worries Charles because it means that the garden cannot be a perfect rectangle and he will find it hard to calculate its area. He knows how to calculate areas, but only if they form exact squares and rectangles. A further complication is that he does not know exactly how long his paces are.

  He has all these numbers in his head, and he scratches them on the gravel to help him remember. But they are just that – numbers. They don’t tell him other things. They float like clouds, unattached to anything solid.

  In his frustration, Charles kicks the low wall around the pool and hurts his foot. The water is green and covered with weeds and insects that play on the surface as if it were a sheet of glass. Neptune is reflected in the water, sneering up at him.

  Charles picks up a handful of gravel and throws it into the pond. The smooth glass shatters. The reflection of Neptune disintegrates.

  There, he thinks, that will teach you to hurt me.

  That is when he hears the footsteps.

  Charles turns. The gardener’s boy has come into the garden. He walks slowly along the wide alley that runs down the middle of the garden towards Neptune and his pond.

  The gardener’s boy stares at Charles. His face is very serious. His lips are moving slightly. Charles wonders if he is trying to multiply big numbers in his head, perhaps calculating the number of stockings and shirts in his baskets. There are still red weals on his cheek from the beating.

  The boy stops just before he would bump into Charles. He scuffs at the numbers in the gravel, obliterating the facts they record. His face is dirty. He has freckles that make it look dirtier. Words pour out of his mouth in his thick, soft, shapeless voice.

  ‘Goddamned foreigner, you can’t even speak, you’re a baby, you piss in your bed, you’re a windy great looby, you skinny ballocks, you stinking Frog noodle …’

  He says the words over and again, like a prayer. The more he says, the angrier he becomes.

  He takes Charles’s left ear by the lobe. He pinches it. Charles opens his mouth and a scream comes out, a high, wordless sound like a small animal in pain. The boy does not let go. Charles tries to hit and kick him but the boy holds him at arm’s length.

  There is a spark in the boy’s green eyes. He drags Charles’s head backwards. With his other hand he turns Charles around. He forces him to his knees. He bends him over the parapet of the pool.

  The stone coping digs into Charles’s ribs. The gardener’s boy pushes Charles’s head slowly towards the water.

  The sun is reflected in its surface. He closes his eyes. The pain in his ear fills his head with white noise.

  With his free hand the gardener’s boy pins Charles’s body to the parapet.

  The water is cool and as soft as a silk dress. Charles opens his eyes. A fish slips away into the murky depths. He opens his mouth to scream. He swallows water.

  The grip on his ear drags him down and down. His legs flail. The pain in his chest is now worse than the pain in his ear. Then pain has no borders. It goes everywhere.

  In an instant Charles remembers how he saw a man drown a litter of kittens in the yard when he was very small. The man put them one by one into the bucket of water and held them under the surface. The kittens’ legs kicked. The bodies writhed. When there was no more movement, the man took each scrap of dripping fur from the water and laid it on the ground where it lay perfectly still. Then he reached for another kitten, and soon they were all dead. Sodden scraps of flesh and fur.


  While Charles is drowning, in the middle of all the pain, he sees this bucket quite clearly. He sees the man’s hand and remembers how the back of it was covered with black hairs. He sees the head of a drowning kitten between his fingers.

  Then, as suddenly as it began, it is over. Charles is dragged out of the water and thrown to the ground, where he lies, panting and dribbling.

  Slowly the white noise and the pain diminish. Charles coughs. He hears the boy’s running footsteps.

  Charles retches – at first weakly and then with increasing violence. Dirty water spews out of his mouth and splashes on his face and hands.

  That night Charles wets the bed again.

  He doesn’t know why this shameful and babyish thing should happen: it just does. This is the first time that he has been caught wetting the bed since they came to England.

  When the maid discovers that he has wet the bed, she calls the housekeeper, who is very stern, very English. Her name is Mrs Cox and she has a voice that sounds like chalk scratching on a slate.

  Mrs Cox shakes her head and says to the maid that the boy is a dirty, devilish imp, and what can you expect of these foreigners? This one can’t even speak his own language.

  The maid says maybe he’s a simpleton, like the girl in the village who looks like a monkey and cannot keep herself clean.

  Mrs Cox replies that in any case the boy should be whipped to beat the nonsense out of him.

  For some reason Charles thinks of the way Marie used to beat the dust from the carpets in the backyard of their lodgings in Paris. In the middle of his fear, he has a picture in his head of himself draped over a fence, with Mrs Cox and the maid on either side of him, beating him with carpet beaters so that the wickedness flies out of him in puffs of evil. He thinks Mrs Cox would enjoy that, and probably the maid too.

  But the housekeeper is not quite sure of her powers. She says she will speak to Monsieur de Quillon’s valet, who has some English, and ask him to speak to his master.

  Charles waits all day for the blow to fall. But nothing happens. Not that day, nor the next, nor the one after.

  Every night he prays on his knees to God that he will not wet the bed again.

  Sometimes God listens. Sometimes he doesn’t.

  Chapter Ten

  Savill’s daughter, Lizzie, had lived with her aunt and uncle in Shepperton, on the Thames, from the time that she was little more than a baby until the death of her uncle.

  That melancholy event had been two years ago. Afterwards, Savill had brought his sister and his daughter to Nightingale Lane. The freeholds belonged to a widow in New York, who stubbornly refused to sell them, though he had forwarded several offers to her. There were four houses in the lane, and he had the largest, which had a garden with a small orchard.

  The builders were at work all around, raising new houses in new, neatly proportioned streets. Most of the land around was owned by the Duke of Bedford, apart from a rectangular enclave north of Great Store Street where the City of London held the freeholds.

  Nightingale Lane was squeezed between the Duke’s estate and the City’s land, a tiny kink in the pattern, an outrage against the principles of rational design and commercial good sense. But sometimes, early in the morning, before the builders started work and the streets filled with traffic, Savill heard the birds singing their laments in his garden, singing for lost fields and ruined hedgerows.

  It was the first time that he and Lizzie had lived under the same roof for more than a few months. It healed a wound he hardly knew he had until it began to scab over.

  In the past, he had missed his daughter more than he cared to admit, even to himself. When she was seven, he had commissioned an artist to paint a miniature of her, which he had had framed and enclosed in a square case, bound in green leather, now faded and much worn. He had kept it on his table or by his bed, standing open. It had been a poor substitute for a flesh-and-blood child, but it had been better than nothing.

  On the last Saturday in September, more than a week after Savill’s second visit to Mr Rampton’s house in Stanmore, he came home from the City to find Lizzie in the parlour, waiting to preside over the tea table.

  ‘You look fatigued,’ she said in a severe voice.

  He kissed her. ‘Where is your aunt?’

  ‘Drinking tea with Mrs Foster and admiring her grandchildren, especially the new one. But why are you looking so stern, sir?’

  ‘I shall tell you directly.’

  ‘You shall tell me nothing until you have sat down in your armchair and we have rung for hot water.’

  She would not let him say what he wished to say until the water had been brought, the tea measured out, and the infusion was brewing.

  ‘Well, sir, you may speak,’ she said, folding her hands in her lap and looking at him with a sort of mock gravity that usually made him laugh.

  ‘I was obliged to go out of town the other day and see your Uncle Rampton,’ he said.

  She made a face. ‘Nothing disagreeable?’

  ‘Not for you, I hope.’

  ‘I think he must be an odious man. He does nothing for you.’

  ‘My dear,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid there’s news of your mother.’

  At once the cheerfulness left Lizzie’s face. She raised her hand to her mouth as if holding back the words that were trying to get out. Savill knew that she barely remembered her mother, who had absconded when she was very young; and, even before that, she had seen little of her, for in those days Augusta had not been much troubled by maternal feelings.

  ‘She’s not here?’ Lizzie blurted out, the colour rushing to her cheeks. ‘Not in London?’

  ‘No. My dear, you must prepare yourself for a shock. I am sorry to say that your mother is dead.’

  Lizzie’s face puckered, as if age had prematurely withered it. ‘Oh. I – I see.’

  ‘She died in Paris.’ Savill leaned forward and took his daughter’s hand, which lay limp and warm in his. ‘Mr Rampton said it was very sudden. I do not know the details yet, but I shall in a week or two.’

  ‘I don’t know what to say, Papa.’

  ‘You don’t have to say anything. Nothing is changed – not for you – not for me.’

  She raised her head suddenly. ‘But it has. For you, at least. You can marry again.’ Her colour deepened. ‘That is to say, should you wish to.’ She sat up very straight and turned away to busy herself with the tea.

  Savill was seized by a desire to laugh. He said gravely, ‘I have no intention of marrying at present. Besides, you must not worry about me. Or about your mother.’

  ‘But I don’t know what to feel,’ she said in a voice that was almost a child’s wail.

  ‘You don’t have to feel anything, my love.’

  ‘Will we go into mourning?’

  ‘Perhaps not, in the circumstances.’ He rubbed his scar, which had begun to itch. ‘I will consult your aunt – she will know what is proper. But first there is one other thing you must know.’

  She looked down at her lap and did not speak.

  ‘After she went away, your mother had a child. A son. He is still alive.’

  Her head jerked up. ‘I have a brother?’

  ‘Yes. A half-brother.’

  ‘Why did you not tell me before?’

  ‘Because I did not know myself until I saw your uncle Rampton.’

  ‘How old is he?’

  ‘Ten or eleven, I believe,’ Savill said.

  ‘A half-brother,’ she repeated. He watched her calculating the arithmetic. ‘So – who was his father? I – I’m sorry, perhaps it is indelicate of me to—’

  ‘It is natural that you should ask. But I’m afraid I cannot tell you that either, because I do not know. Perhaps I will find out when I see him.’

  ‘Is he here? In England?’

  ‘Yes. Not in London, though.’

  ‘When shall we see him? Where will he live? Will he live with us here?’

  ‘I expect you will see him at some point,
but I do not know quite when. As for where he will live, Mr Rampton has a fancy to adopt him. If he does that, I dare say the boy would live with him, except when he is at school, and so on.’

  ‘But he should live with us, Papa.’ Colour flooded over her face. ‘If he’s my brother, I’m nearer kin to him than Mr Rampton.’

  ‘True. But Mr Rampton can give him things that we cannot give him.’

  She forced him to stop again. ‘It is not that you don’t want him, is it? Because he – he’s not your son?’

  ‘No …’ Savill hesitated. ‘Or rather, I do not think so.’

  ‘What is his name?’

  ‘Charles.’

  ‘Charles,’ she repeated, as if turning the name over in her mind and examining it from every angle. ‘Charles. Where is he living now? Who is looking after him?’

  ‘In England, at the house of a French gentleman, the Count de Quillon, who was obliged to leave his country because of the Revolution. Which is another complication. The Count had a kindness for your mother and, for her sake, he wishes to keep Charles with him and remain his guardian.’

  ‘But surely you would not let them take him from us? Either this Count or my uncle Rampton?’

  ‘The poor boy is alone in the world, and orphaned. He does not know us at all. I wish to do what is best for him, not for us.’

  There was a silence.

  ‘Will you pour the tea?’ he said.

  She obeyed mechanically. But as she passed him his cup she looked directly at him.

  ‘Will you ask him about my mother?’ she said. ‘Will he tell you who his father is? Do you think he knows?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Savill said. ‘I don’t know anything except that he’s your mother’s son and his name is Charles. And I shall go down to Somersetshire next week to fetch him.’

  Chapter Eleven

  The house in Crown Street was one of a gently curving terrace. The building had been newly refaced and refurbished. It must once have been a private residence but, like so many of its neighbours in the vicinity of the Palace of Westminster, it had gradually become a government office.