The Silent Boy (34 page)

The smell of rotting vegetation fills his nostrils, not unpleasantly. He watches the chimneys of the house. There is still no sign of smoke from any of them.

He listens. The sounds of the city rise and fall. Sometimes it is so quiet that he might almost be in the country. Clocks chime at intervals. One hour passes. Then half an hour.

Charles stands up and stretches. He urinates against the compost heap. He moves warily towards the house.

At the archway he stops a moment. The back door is closed. He glances at the door in the wall. He can see from here that the lock is engaged.

Keeping to the shelter of the wall, he moves round the yard to the pump. The area around it is paved with stones, roughly squared. All the cracks around them are lined with moss and weeds. But one stone is clear. Resting on it is a rusty nail.

Charles inserts the nail under the edge of the stone and uses it as a lever. The stone rises and there, lying in a jar beneath, is the key to the back door of Mr Savill’s house.

Savill watched the two women, the mistress and the maid, approaching the round table in the middle of Mr Bell’s Library. Here were displayed the latest arrivals to anyone who cared to pay a guinea a year and abide by Mr Bell’s regulations.

Mrs Ogden turned over the new books for a moment. Then she broke away from her maid and approached the counter where the middle-aged clerk sat behind his desk.

‘Good afternoon, Mr Fisk,’ she said, turning the sagging, left-hand side of her face away from him.

‘Good afternoon, Mrs Ogden. I declare I could set my watch by you. Every afternoon, four o’clock, shine or rain, and here you are.’

She ignored the pleasantry. ‘Do you have Mr Mackenzie’s
A Man of Feeling
on the shelves, Mr Fisk? I dreamed about it last night, and I have a desire to look over it again.’

The clerk took up his ledger and turned the pages. ‘Novels,’ he murmured, ‘
Man
, yes, here we are,
Man of Feeling
. Number four-six-three-two. An old favourite, ma’am – very popular with the ladies.’ He looked up and ducked his head in a sort of bow. ‘One moment if you please. Permit me to enquire whether it is available.’

He jotted the number on a scrap of paper and beckoned one of the youths behind the counter. Mrs Ogden turned away and looked at a wall of calf-bound spines. Everything about her was entirely respectable – her dress, her manner, her maid. There was nothing to recall the distraught, dishevelled woman that Savill had seen earlier in the day. Nothing but the ruined face.

The subjects of each shelf was announced by a card label attached to them. Mrs Ogden stared at SERMONS for a moment, and then transferred her gaze if not her attention to VOYAGES & TRAVELS. The maid sidled away and eyed a footman who had just come in, attending a lady with a dog that scurried, yapping, about her feet.

Savill drew nearer. ‘Have I the honour of addressing Mrs Ogden?’

She turned, her hand flying to her throat as if he had caught her in a shameful situation. He watched her eyes widen as she recognized him from this morning.

‘Pray don’t be agitated. It will draw attention.’

The servant had discreetly turned away and was talking in whispers to another lady’s maid.

‘I did not think you would come – it was a such a desperate stratagem this morning. I am ashamed that I should be obliged to resort to it. I must apologize.’

‘It doesn’t matter, ma’am.’ He drew her aside to a corner where magazines were displayed on a table. ‘How may I help you?’

‘I am so anxious for news of my son, sir. Dick quarrelled with his father, you see, and I have not seen him these two years or more.’

‘And the telescope was a present from your husband to your son?’

‘Yes.’ Her hands waved the question aside. ‘Mr Ogden says you called in connection with a crime that he had committed. It cannot be true, sir. Dick is impulsive, I know, and perhaps a trifle wild on occasion. But he’s good at heart, sir.’

‘I’m sure he is.’ Savill handed her to a chair. ‘And, as far as I know, he is accused of nothing. I am employed on an enquiry for the Westminster Magistrates’ Office, and it is true that a crime may have been committed, though we cannot be sure even of that. The more I know about him, the more likely it is I shall be able to set your mind at rest.’

‘I blame myself.’ Her voice fell into a monotonous rut, as though she were following a train of thought that she had followed many times before. ‘If only I’d taken his side more firmly when he said he wanted to be an architect or even a painter. But my husband, Mr Ogden, is not a man who changes his mind once he has made it up. And he determined that after Dick left school, he should go up to the University and then follow him into the law. Dick was at fault, I own it, for a son owes a duty to his father, does he not, and he should not set his will in defiance to his elders and betters. He did not apply himself to his studies, and his tutor said he had fallen into bad company. The foolish boy ran up debts he could not pay, and his friends were idle and expensive young men, who led him into vicious ways.’

‘He did not have a friend named Irwin, I suppose?’

She stared at him. ‘No, sir. Not that I know of – and I would have remembered that, you know. Irwin was my mother’s name. Mind you, when he went to Oxford, there were many of his acquaintance I did not know, and I dare say I would not care to know, either.’

It was a familiar story. The young man had indulged himself at the University, and he and his parents had paid the price at home. Sent down from Oxford, he was articled as a clerk to an attorney of his father’s acquaintance; but he was idle and was sometimes drunk even at the office; at length he was discharged, and after a final quarrel with his father he was expelled from his home.

‘I am forbidden to mention him,’ Mrs Ogden said. ‘Mr Ogden has scratched out his name in our Bible. I might have been able to mend things between them had I not been so ill at the time.’ Her hand touched her left cheek, and Savill wondered whether the final quarrel between father and son had brought on her apoplectic seizure. ‘He went to live in Turner’s Grove – our cottage near Chiswick, you know; it was my father’s once – and he tried to make his living with his pencil. But when Mr Ogden learned of it, he threw him out, and had the house shut up.’

‘So he did not know his son was there?’

‘No. It was standing empty – we haven’t been there for years. We used to go every summer when Dick was young. We’d idle away our time on the river, and Dick would draw, and at the end of the week my husband would fish and forget the cares of his employment.’

‘How old is your son now, ma’am?’ Savill said.

‘Twenty-eight last birthday.’ She smiled at him with half of her face. ‘July the fifth. He was a summer baby.’

‘Tell me what he looks like.’

‘He’s a good-looking boy.’ She looked up at him. ‘I know what you are thinking, sir. That any mother would say that about her son. I own I’m partial, but he has fine, noble features and the most lustrous black hair. And anyone will tell you he has the address of a gentleman. If only he would not drink so much and fly into a passion with his father, he might have done anything he wanted.’

Black hair, Savill thought. A taste for drawing. A cottage near Chiswick. He said, ‘Tell me where to find the house, ma’am. If he’s there, shall I give him a message from you?’

Mrs Ogden looked directly at him. ‘Give him my best love,’ she said. ‘Tell him to come home. Tell him his father misses him, whatever he says, and so do I. And tell him that, with God’s help, there is nothing that cannot be mended.’

After Savill had dined, he walked up to Oxford Street to call on his daughter at Mrs Pycroft’s. Mrs Pycroft was the proprietor and principal instructress of the Beaufort Academy for Young Ladies, an establishment that occupied the ground floor of a house in Little Castle Street, east of Oxford Market. Mrs Pycroft and several youthful Pycrofts shared the upper floors with Mrs Pycroft’s mother, who kept to her bed and was never seen.

Lizzie had spent two years at the school. According to the prospectus, she learned French and Italian from visiting masters, as well as dancing and drawing and a host of other skills deemed essential for young ladies destined to move in good society, or at least in what passed for it in the circles they adorned.

All these things cost extra, and Savill sometimes wondered what Mrs Pycroft’s fees actually covered, apart from the occasional ramble among the foothills of arithmetic and the learning by rote of the kings and queens of England, together with the dates of their reigns. But the money had been well spent nonetheless, for Lizzie had mixed with girls of her own age and Mary Pycroft had become her best friend.

When Savill reached the house, most of the ground floor was in darkness. He knocked on the door and was admitted by the solitary manservant, a wall-eyed middle-aged man who lived in the basement behind the kitchen and who had been chosen partly because his ugliness could be relied upon not to lead the young ladies astray.

‘Madam’s at home, sir,’ the servant said, pocketing the sixpence that Savill slipped into his hand. ‘Or she will be to you. Thank you kindly.’

‘Is all well, Troughton?’ They were old friends, for there had been many sixpences in the past.

‘Well enough, sir. But you wouldn’t believe the fuss there’s been, what with the mistress and Miss Mary and your young miss, buzzing about like a parcel of bees. You’d think no one had ever got wed before.’

Savill found Lizzie in the drawing room on the first floor, which the Pycrofts used as the family sitting room. Mrs Pycroft, Mary and Lizzie were there, sitting in a line on the sofa with their heads bent over a pattern book. Lizzie leapt up when she saw him and, careless of the company they were in, flung her arms around his neck.

‘I did not know you were back – you don’t look well, Papa, indeed you don’t – I must come home directly and look after you. Is my aunt returned?’

He kissed her. ‘No, not yet.’

‘And what about—’

‘Hush. All in good time.’

Savill bowed to Mrs Pycroft and her daughter. ‘Forgive me for arriving without warning, ma’am. To make matters worse, I see I have interrupted you.’

Mrs Pycroft was disposed to be gracious about this. Not only had Savill been a model parent, paying his daughter’s fees on time and not asking unreasonable questions about the extent of her formal education, but there were rumours that he was, despite his modest lifestyle, richer than he seemed; added to this, he had the knack of making himself agreeable in any company; and she considered that he could look quite presentable, too, notwithstanding that unsightly scar, should a lady take the time and trouble to make him so; finally, there was the point that Mrs Pycroft believed him to be a widower, and she was not entirely averse to the idea of a second experiment in matrimony, if the right gentleman were to offer her his heart and hand.

He was aware of all this, at least in outline, for Lizzie had given him several hints, which derived in turn from hints she herself had received from Mary.

Mrs Pycroft rang the bell for tea. After they had talked in wearisome detail about Mary’s forthcoming wedding, Savill drew Lizzie aside.

‘Is he at home now?’ she murmured, colouring as she spoke. ‘My brother Charles? What is he like? When can I meet him?’

‘I’m afraid he isn’t at home. There’s been a difficulty, my love. It will sound quite ludicrous, but at the moment he cannot be found. It is like something out of a bad farce, is it not?’

‘But what do you mean? That cannot be so.’

‘On the morning we were to leave Somersetshire he could not be found …’ Savill hesitated only a moment. Better to know than to suspect even worse. ‘There is a possibility that he has been abducted.’

Her face froze with surprise. He watched her grappling with the notion, trying to bring kidnapping out of the world of the novel and the theatre and into the everyday world of Mary Pycroft’s wedding and Aunt Ferguson’s tiresome notions of what was suitable for a young lady and what was not.

‘You must tell no one, my dear, even Mary,’ he said softly. ‘Only that Charles’s coming to London has been delayed.’

‘But who would be so wicked?’

‘I will tell you more later. You must promise me that you will tell no one. Promise me, Lizzie.’

‘But have you been to Bow Street? We must hire a Runner. Is that not the correct thing to do in these situations?’

Her assumption of worldly wisdom made him want to hug her. So did her willingness to assume that this was her business as well as his. He said, ‘Not in this case. It is not as simple as it might seem – there are other considerations. But your uncle Rampton has concerned himself in the matter. He will see to it that everything is done that can be. He will use his influence, and he has it in his power to do more than any Runner can.’

‘May I not come home with you? We should be together at a time like this.’

‘No. You must stay here and help Mrs Pycroft and Mary.’

‘But, Papa, you—’

‘No,’ he said. ‘Anyway I am not at Nightingale Lane at present. The house is empty.’

In his distress he spoke more loudly than was prudent. He heard a pause in the conversation behind him, where Mrs Pycroft and Mary were dealing with the vexed question of the lace on the veil.

‘Tell no one,’ he repeated, aware that in his despair he was going round in circles and making matters worse between them. ‘Even Mary. You must promise me that.’

Lizzie stared at him. She made a sound that was a sort of smothered cry and rushed from the room.

After a moment, Mrs Pycroft said in her warm, comfortable voice, ‘Oh dear, I dare say Lizzie is overtired, sir. And the relief of seeing you has brought it all to the surface. You must not concern yourself. It is often the way with girls, as I know to my cost. Mary will go up to her in a moment and make it all right again. Now won’t you come sit by me and take your tea with us?’

Savill had agreed to pass the night in Crown Street again, in the house opposite the Black Letter Office. Mr Rampton had been insistent, saying that it was important that Savill should be on hand in case there were intelligence of Charles; besides, he had gathered that there was no one to look after Savill at Nightingale Lane.