The Silent Boy (15 page)

Later, when the candles are lit and the other men are lingering in the dining room, Charles returns. He climbs the back stairs, passes along the dimly lit landing and hesitates by the partly open door of Mr Savill’s chamber.

A single candle burns on the night table by the bed, whose curtains are still open on that side. Mr Savill lies in the bed. His mouth is open. He is snoring.

So he isn’t dead. Despite all the blood. And his face is no longer a gaping, bloody mouth.

No one else is in the room, even a servant. Charles tiptoes inside and slowly approaches the bed. A fire is dwindling in the grate. Mr Savill swallows noisily. He snorts and snuffles like a hog. His breathing resumes its slow, regular, rasping rhythm, and Charles comes closer and closer.

The light of the candle turns the man’s face into a place of sharp rocks and pitch-black hollows. The interior of his mouth is as dark as the bottom of the well in the stableyard. He does not look human at all.

Charles pushes his hand in his pocket and touches the two dice. Two sixes make twelve. That is a fact.

In the first few days at Charnwood, nobody told him to go to bed and he lingered within sight of a candle or a lamp for as long as possible. But the housekeeper, Mrs Cox, finding him kicking his heels on the landing at nearly midnight, informed him that if he wasn’t in bed by eight o’clock each night like a good Christian boy, and with his candle extinguished, he must face the consequences.

Charles does not know what these consequences might be, but he is sure that he does not want to face them. So, every night, he is in his room by eight o’clock and usually in bed.

His bedroom is at the back of the house on the second floor. It is a small room with a casement window that doesn’t close properly because the catch is broken. He has tried to wedge it with a scrap of newspaper but sometimes the paper falls out and the window blows open.

Outside the window is an ash tree, which Joseph says should be cut down because it is far too close to the house: its roots threaten the foundations and, besides, it makes the servants’ hall dark and gloomy.

Charles does not care about this but he does care that, when the wind is in the wrong direction, the branches of the tree tap like fingers on the window. The ash tree is trying to get in. When it does, he knows that something horrible will happen, something perhaps worse than what has gone before.

So the window is where the evening ritual starts. First, Charles makes sure that it is still wedged shut. Unfortunately there are no shutters, but he closes the curtains instead to stop the tree looking in. Next he does the counting, to make sure nothing has changed since the morning. The room is six and a third paces long and four and a half wide, not counting the alcoves on either side of the fireplace, one of which has been boxed in to form a cupboard. These measurements make a fortress of facts that protects him as he sleeps.

The cupboard itself comes next: Charles must check that it is as it was this morning. There are five shelves from floor to ceiling, and also three hooks on the back of the door. His spare shirt is on one shelf, with his hat beside it. He takes off his coat and hangs it on one of the hooks. Next comes the wooden box at the end of the bed. There is nothing to count inside it. It is still as empty as it was when he last looked inside it. Nor is there anything under the bed except the chamber pot with a chip in its rim and a rat-trap that still contains the dusty bones of a small rat.

Only after he has made sure that everything is as it was does he permit himself to undress down to his shirt and scramble into the cold bed.

The bed is in one corner of the room. Its curtains are thin and worn, designed for hot summers long ago. He lies on his side, shivering, curled into a ball.

The tree scratches on the window, so faintly that the sound seems both there and not there. He pushes the heels of his hands against his ears to block the tree that is or isn’t there: and instead he hears the roar of a distant ocean.

He makes himself think of a blue, endless sea beside a broiling sun. He has never seen a warm blue sea, only the grey English Channel that made him seasick for what seemed like weeks.

One day, he and Louis will voyage to the Indies and find a remote island. On an island, silence will not matter because they will speak to each other as they always do, without words. They will be there for ever and ever.

By degrees, Charles glides into sleep, his mind wandering this way and that, seemingly under the direction of someone other than himself. His sleep is light and fitful at first; then, as he warms up, he plunges down and down into the darkness.

Charles does not know how long this continues. Suddenly, though, he is no longer asleep. He wakes abruptly, without passing through the usual transition that is neither one thing nor the other.

The bed-curtains are so thin that the material does not keep out light. The room should be completely dark, filled with a soft blackness without boundaries. But it is not. There is murky yellow radiance beyond the curtains.

He does not move. His own breathing is deafening so he holds his breath. It is then that he hears, or thinks he hears, that someone else is breathing: so faintly and slowly that it lies on the very edge of sound.

Minutes pass, perhaps hours. He cannot pace out the length and breadth of time. In a few places, the radiance shifts. It grows less dense, its power no longer absolute. Charles listens and listens, imagining his ears are on slender, supple stalks that probe like green suckers into the loamy darkness.

The house is not quiet, nor is the night. He hears, far away, a sort of creaking sigh deep in the bowels of the building, like a dog settling to sleep.

The tree scratches on the window, still trying to get in. He wishes it would give up and go away.

Then, much nearer, in the room with him: a footstep. Another. A third. A breath of air touches Charles’s cheek as the curtains sway.

Then: a click. The metallic click of the latch. The sigh of a hinge. A floorboard groans. Another click. Another current of air touches his cheek, this one a cold caress.

Then it is gone, whatever it was. Charles is left with the creaking house, the scratching tree and the thudding of his own blood. There is a sour tang of sweat and brandy in the air.

This has happened before, more than once.

Charles trembles. His teeth chatter. He is so very cold.

Worse than cold.

He discovers that he has wet the bed again.

When Savill woke, slowly and painfully, he forced himself out of bed to use the chamber pot. Movement made him dizzy and slightly nauseous; but that was scarcely to be wondered at.

He rang the bell and slumped into the chair by the dead fire. He pulled a blanket over his knees. The chair still had the straps attached to the arms. There was a spot of dried blood on the floor. He probed the crater in his mouth with the tip of his tongue. The hole was the size of a small country.

There was a knock and Joseph entered the room with a jug of hot water.

‘Tea,’ Savill croaked.

Joseph hesitated. ‘Doctor said you should stay in bed.’

‘Tea.’

‘He wants to bleed you before—’

‘Tea, damn you,’ Savill said. ‘But stay – has the postboy collected the letters?’

‘Yes, sir.’

He scowled at Joseph, who took this as a signal to leave the room.

The time had come, Savill thought while he waited, to put an end to this catalogue of disasters, irritations and difficulties that had afflicted him since leaving Bath. He would insist on an interview with the Count this very day and retrieve the necessary papers from him. If the livery stable failed to send another chaise by Monday, he would use to the full the powers that Mr Rampton had given him. He would require the Vicar, as the nearest Justice of the Peace to assist him, and he would commandeer whatever horses and conveyance the village had to offer. If necessary, he would settle even for Mr Roach’s cart.

Savill took up his waistcoat, neatly folded with the rest of his clothes, and found the key to the portmanteau. He fetched the case, stumbling across the room like a drunkard to the cupboard where he had told Joseph to put it.

As he turned the key in the lock, something niggled in the back of his mind, demanding attention. He opened the bag and took out the folder. It was then he remembered that he was in the habit of leaving the key in the right-hand pocket of his waistcoat; but he had found it in the pocket on the left.

The niggle pushed its way to the front of his mind: from the depths of his clouded memories of yesterday evening came the light that had slopped to and fro like water in a bucket and the rustle of leaves.

But there was no tree in his chamber and the only water was in the carafe on the dressing table.

Someone in this house had been looking through his private papers.

His mind groped towards the implications, one by one. If Fournier and the Count knew about the warrant, they knew that Savill had the legal power to force them to give up Charles.

More than that, they must know that he was suspiciously well prepared. The question was, would they also realize the significance of a warrant signed by one of Westminster’s stipendiary police magistrates?

‘In case of emergency,’ Rampton had said, ‘he appoints you under the Police Act as his agent or deputy, which gives you temporary powers of inquiry, arrest and detention.’

If they had seen that, they would know that Savill could be no ordinary private citizen. They must infer that behind him was someone infinitely more powerful.

Alarm spread through him. What a fool he had been to trust his hosts. Had the Count ordered Gohlis to drug him? Had the tooth even needed extraction?

Joseph returned with the tea. By this time, Savill was back in the chair, with the portmanteau on the floor beside him and the portfolio of papers on his lap.

‘Is His Lordship downstairs yet?’ he demanded. ‘And Monsieur Fournier?’

‘His Lordship doesn’t come down before twelve, sir.’ Joseph sounded scandalized by the possibility that Savill might have thought otherwise. ‘And Mr Fournier’s walking over to Norbury Park. He said he might dine there.’

‘Send Master Charles to me then.’

‘He’s not here either, sir. Vicar’s praying over him this morning.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake, you blockhead,’ Savill said. ‘Give me the tea.’

‘What are you doing in there?’ Mrs Cox cries, her voice shrill with anger and perhaps fear. There is a terrible knocking. ‘Open the door at once.’

Charles wakes in a damp bed. The door is banging against a box that stands in its way.

The housekeeper continues to rattle the door handle as he pads across the floor and pulls aside the box. He dragged it from the end of the bed to the door last night. It was Louis’s idea, not his, to keep him safe from whoever might come in the night.

Whoever or whatever might come back.

Mrs Cox pushes open the door and slaps him.

‘Don’t do that again, you wicked boy. Do you hear?’

She gives him a clean shirt and stockings, and a freshly pressed stock. ‘Put these on,’ she tells him. ‘But not until you’ve had your breakfast. And I need to sponge your coat and breeches.’ She catches sight of his shoes. ‘You can’t go out in those.’

He realizes that she is not, for once, angry with him. If she’s angry with anyone, it is with her masters, the Count and Monsieur Fournier, for failing to tell her that Charles would be appearing in public today. It is one thing for him to look no better than a beggar’s boy in the privacy of Charnwood but quite another for him to venture into the village like that. It would reflect badly, in some obscure but powerful way, on Mrs Cox herself.

She gives him an old coat and a pair of slippers to wear while he has his breakfast. The coat hangs from his shoulders like a cloak, and the cuffs reach his knuckles. While he eats bread and milk in the housekeeper’s room, Martha, one of the maids, does what she can to improve the appearance of his coat and shoes. After he has eaten, Mrs Cox herself brushes his hair so hard it brings tears to his eyes. She trims it with a pair of scissors and ties it with a black ribbon.

She sends him away to dress himself in the clean clothes. On his return, she makes him stand before her. She examines him front and back. She clicks her teeth as she straightens his stock. Finally she gives him his newly brushed hat.

‘You’ll do,’ she says. ‘You look almost fit for decent company.’

There is a note of pride in her voice, the pride of a creator. For a moment she looks at him with a slight smile, as if she does not really hate him after all.

Mrs Cox takes him through to the gentlemen, who are still at breakfast in the dining room. Fournier and Dr Gohlis are there. Fournier stares and the crooked eyebrows rise.

‘Well, well. I congratulate you, Mrs Cox.’

‘I could have done better with more warning, sir, and really he needs another suit of clothes. He’s grown out of these, you can see for yourself, sir, and there’s a hole in—’

‘You have done admirably,’ Fournier interrupts. ‘You may leave him here now. We will send him to the Vicarage, by and by.’

‘Will his lordship be down today, sir?’

‘I believe so. But it seems that Mr Savill is unwell, and he may not be able to leave his room. He is having trouble with his teeth. You may leave us now.’

When the housekeeper has withdrawn, Fournier tells Charles to sit. He gives him a roll to eat and pours him a cup of coffee mixed with cream and sugar.

‘This is quite like old times,’ Fournier says. ‘We must enjoy it while we can.’

Old times: Charles knows that he means the apartment in the Rue de Grenelle. Fournier would often drop in, sometimes alone and sometimes with another gentleman, and he would sit at table with Charles and Maman. They would fuss over Charles, play with him and drop morsels of food in his mouth as if he was a pet bird. And Maman would laugh and look so pretty and happy.