The Silent Boy (35 page)

There were no messages during the night. He slept badly. If his mind did not run on his stupidity in allowing Charles to be stolen from under his nose, it turned to the clumsy way he had handled Lizzie, the person he loved most in the world. He seemed capable only of hurting those he had a duty to care for.

The next morning Savill rose early and slipped out of the house. Only the maid and the boy who cleaned the boots and carried the coals were about. He left word that he had to go out on an errand, and that he would return later in the day.

He had taken the precaution of hiring a horse for the day the previous evening when he returned from Mrs Pycroft’s. He had supped at the Sun in Splendour in Rose Street, which had a connection with a neighbouring livery stable, and arranged the matter there.

After breakfast at the tavern, he rode westward out of town. Two uncomfortable thoughts occupied his mind, taking turns to prey on him. He had not been able to make his peace with Lizzie last night, which made him unhappy as he knew it would her. Second, Charles had now been gone for three whole days and nights. He had not been seen since he left Charnwood. The longer the absence, the more likely that, if he were found at all, he would not be found alive.

The road was busy at this hour but most of the traffic was coming towards London. He made good speed, passing through the pretty village of Chiswick before ten o’clock. The house he was seeking, Turner’s Grove, lay several miles beyond the village on a lane that ran parallel to the high road along the river.

The houses were now few and far between. Though one or two labourers’ dwellings remained, many of the residences along this stretch were villas and large cottages owned by Londoners who took occasional refuge in them from the noise and polluted air of the city.

Turner’s Grove stood in isolation, an L-shaped house consisting of a modest cottage of some antiquity with a modern wing of more substantial dimensions. The long garden stretched down to the river, and on either side of it were meadows. The windows were shuttered and the woodwork needed repainting. The ground at the front of the house was thick with weeds running to seed. Rose bushes had sprouted into monstrous shapes covered with deadheads.

Savill dismounted and tethered his horse at the wicket. Mrs Ogden had said that no one lived there now. The farmer who leased the meadows from Mr Ogden kept an eye on the house and made sure all was secure.

‘Not that Mr Ogden cares for the place,’ she had told Savill. ‘I believe he would not care a straw if it burned to the ground and vanished from the earth.’

An ash sapling had grown up just inside the gate. Savill took out his pocket knife and cut a stick from it, which he used to beat down the nettles and brambles on his progress around the house. He tried the doors and the shutters but none of them showed any evidence of having been recently opened. There was no smoke from any of the chimneys.

At the back of the house, however, he discovered signs that someone had been here. Apart from a yard and stable behind the older part, the land between the house and the river had been laid out as a pleasure ground in the formal manner popular a generation earlier. Neglect had allowed the shrubs to grow until the design was obscured and the paths almost impassable. But judging by broken branches and crushed vegetation, several of the alleys between the beds had been used in the recent past.

Savill forced his way up one of them and found it took him to an iron gate in the brick wall between the pleasure ground and the neighbouring meadow. The gate was locked but the wall itself was in a ruinous condition and in several places nearby had fallen down. From here, another path had been cleared in the direction of the river. It led Savill to a two-storey building of brick and timber standing on the bank.

A door in the side stood ajar. He kicked it open and found himself looking at the interior of a small boathouse or covered jetty, open to the river on one side. In the half-light, the dark green water was almost black. Nothing was moored there. Two ancient chairs of canvas and wood were leaning against the wall, with a wicker basket, green with mould, beside them. He raised the lid. The basket contained nothing but a broken glass and an empty bottle.

Savill went back into the open air, glad to be out of that dank place. At the rear of the boathouse, a staircase rose up to a door, with a window beside it. He climbed the steps with care, for the rain had made the wood slippery and he was not convinced they would take his weight.

The door at the top was locked or jammed. He glanced over his shoulder. No one was about. He raised the latch and put his shoulder to the door. At his third attempt it opened, throwing him forward into the room beyond.

It was empty, but there were signs of recent occupation. Savill glanced around it, taking in the blankets, the table and chairs, the remains of a meal, the bottles, the rusting stove and a further door in the far wall. There was an oblong book on the table, with a pencil and a broken crayon beside it. He opened the book at random. He found himself looking at a sketch of a stile shaded by a tree; the lines were hurried and smudged; and the paper was hard and wrinkled as if someone had spilled liquid on it and then the page had dried.

He moved across the room to the other door. It was locked. But it hung askew in the frame because the wood was warped. When he tugged the handle, the door flew open.

A cesspit stink rushed out to greet him. The odour was mingled with an acrid underlay that caught the back of Savill’s throat and brought with it a host of unwanted memories.

Beyond the door was a floor-to-ceiling cupboard, lined with dusty shelves. The shelves were empty, though there was a chamber pot under the lowest one on the left.

The body of a man in a blue coat lay on the floor beside the chamber pot. He was on his back, his arms standing stiffly away from his body. His head was near the far end of the cupboard. It rested in a pool of dried blood mingled with fragments of bone and the grey matter of the brain. The eyes were open.

Savill swallowed his nausea and looked at the shelves beside the door. One of them, about four feet above the floor, was not quite empty. A rusty two-inch nail lay there. He touched it with his finger. It moved a fraction, revealing a single word scratched in sprawling, irregular letters underneath, the freshly scarred wood still pale yellow.

Charles.

Savill knelt by the body. There was a bullet hole under the jaw, and the skin was blackened with a powder burn. The man had been shot at close range. The bullet must have ploughed its way up through the brain and punched a ragged hole in the back of the skull.

The face itself was undamaged. The features were delicate. Savill touched the disordered hair.

Fine, black hair.

Charles wanders through the house in Nightingale Lane, pausing to listen every few seconds. The only sounds are far away – the rumble of wheels on the paved roads, the blows of builders’ hammers from the new houses.

The air is cold and damp, flavoured with the smell of dead fires. The ground-floor apartments are dark because the shutters are across the windows. At the back and upstairs, many of the windows have bars rather than shutters, and some of the smaller ones have neither.

At first he feels like a burglar. In one of the rooms downstairs is a pile of opened letters addressed to Savill. That removes the niggling fear that he has found his way into someone else’s house.

In the larder a ham hangs in a sack suspended from the ceiling and several cheeses are enclosed behind fine wire grills. He brings a knife from the kitchen and hacks into one of the cheeses. In the pantry beside the larder are bins containing walnuts and covered racks with apples and pears.

Walnuts.
Say nothing
, he reminds himself
. Not a word to anyone. Whatever you see. Whatever you hear. Do you understand? Say nothing. Ever.

Tip-tap.

In his mind, Charles says to reassure himself, ‘I am safe now.’

He has food and shelter. Soon his English family will come.

He eats quickly, cramming food into his mouth with both hands and swallowing it half-chewed. He washes it down with sour-tasting water he finds in the scullery in a bucket by the pump.

Only then does he realize how stupid he has been: he has left the key in the back door. He runs into the scullery and retrieves it. He must find another way into the house, so he can lock the door and leave the key in its hiding place outside. He begins to cry. Dare he risk staying here and leaving the house unlocked?

Fighting panic, he checks the windows overlooking the yard. Either they are too small or they have bars that will not even let a skinny boy squeeze between them. All but one – set beneath a shelf in the pantry: it isn’t really a window but an ironbound hatch secured by four great bolts, with a sill at floor level much marked by the passage of barrels. The bolts have recently been greased and, for all their size, they glide out of their sockets. Five minutes later the back door is locked, the key is returned to its hiding place in the yard and Charles is safe in the house again.

He continues his stealthy survey. This is not a place that has been planned, unlike the Hotel de Quillon or even Charnwood. The floors are uneven. Walls do not follow straight lines and rarely meet other walls at right angles. Passages wind back on themselves. Flights of stairs lead unexpectedly to solitary rooms. Some doors are locked. Many of the windows are leaded and their distorted green glass gives the outside world the appearance of being at the bottom of a pond.

A difficult house to measure, Charles thinks, a difficult house to reduce to facts.

He climbs the stairs and roams through bedchambers and closets and mysterious apartments that have no obvious function. At the top of the house is a series of shadowy attics, partly boarded and lit by tiny windows set high in the gables of the building. Beams and rafters criss-cross the dusty spaces. Even a cursory glance is enough to show that this part of the house is home to bats, birds, wasps, rats and spiders, and no doubt a host of invisible creatures.

Once Charles would have recoiled at these traces of parasitic intruders or even feared them. Now they are almost welcome, as an omen, as evidence that this is a house that gives shelter to refugees.

He returns downstairs, taking his time, relishing the pleasure of possession. This, he thinks, is what it should have been like in the castle in the woods. But that reminds him at once that the castle was something he planned to share with Louis, and that Louis turned out to be nothing but a lifeless doll, not a person; and that in turn reminds him of his solitude.

Self-pity wells up inside him and he is attacked by a desire to weep. But he has learned something in the terrible weeks since the summer; he has learned that tears bring no comfort and make nothing happen. So he stamps his foot to drive them away, and the dull thud of his heel on the stair booms through the quiet house.

On the first floor, he hesitates a moment, thinking of the day ahead and then the night. Even if he can find candles and a tinderbox, he knows it will not be safe to show a light. When evening comes, he will have to try to sleep.

The next question is where. There are three bedrooms on this landing – Mr Savill’s, to judge its lack of ornament and the razor strop on the washstand; Mr Savill’s sister’s, to judge by the black dress hanging on the door and the row of devotional tracts on the mantel; and his sister Lizzie’s, which has a jug stuffed with wilting Michaelmas daisies on the windowsill.

‘My sister, Lizzie,’ Charles says in his mind, trying the words for size, to see how they feel in his mouth. ‘Madam, may I present Elizabeth Savill, my sister.’

Something forbids him from choosing a bed that belongs to someone else. He may take the Savills’ food and the shelter of their house, but a bed is different. There are also two other beds that he thinks must be for servants – one in a maid’s room on the way to the attics, the other a straw pallet in an alcove off the kitchen – but he has still less right to take one of those, and besides they both smell strangely and, even after everything that has happened, he is sensitive to certain smells and textures.

There is a closet beside Lizzie’s chamber that he decides will do for his own bedchamber because it seems to belong to no one in particular. The small window is barred, not shuttered, and it overlooks the yard and the garden. The closet has a curtained alcove containing old cloaks and coats.

He casts about for bedding, and finds a shelf of blankets at the bottom of a cupboard full of lavender-scented linen. He carries two of them into the closet and lays them neatly on the floor under the window. He fetches a third blanket and folds it so it will serve as a pillow.

Charles glances at the sky and wonders what o’clock it is and whether Mr Savill will come soon.

The time hangs heavily. There are books in the house and he goes in search of one to read, though he hasn’t tried to read more than a few words in English before. He returns to Lizzie’s room, where he notices a line of books on the table. He picks a volume at random and opens the title page.

THE

LIFE

And Strange Surprizing

ADVENTURES

of

ROBINSON CRUSOE

OF

YORK, MARINER

Charles sleeps more soundly, and for longer, than he has done for months. When he wakes, green-grey light is struggling through the leaded lozenges of the window.

It is still very early in the morning. He goes downstairs and lets himself out into the yard, where he urinates in the earth closet. After breakfasting on cheese, ham and an apple, he returns to his room, taking with him a jar labelled quince jelly to sustain him through the morning.