The Silent Boy (39 page)

‘The question is, sir, did Malbourne know that you were contemplating this?’ Savill knew the answer already, for he knew Rampton, and he knew from his own bitter experience that the old man had a history of managing other people by dangling the hope of future benefits in front of them. ‘Of course he did. Perhaps he has borrowed against his expectations.’

The coals shifted in the grate and a shower of ash fell to the hearth. There was no need to say the rest aloud. Horace Malbourne had a motive for disposing of Charles as well as the means, through Dick Ogden, of carrying it out.

Savill smacked the desk with the palm of his hand. ‘So where is Mr Malbourne now, sir, and what has he done with Charles?’

Rampton was still reluctant but Savill forced his hand. A clerk was sent to order a hackney to attend them at Crown Street. When it arrived they drove directly to Cavendish Square, where Mr Woorgreen, the father of Mr Malbourne’s intended wife, lived in a house on the north side. But their journey was in vain, for Mr Woorgreen had gone into the City and was not expected home until much later, while the ladies had driven out to Hampstead to dine with Mrs Woorgreen’s sister.

‘A wild-goose chase,’ Rampton said when they were in the hackney again. He had to raise his voice to be heard over the din of the wheels and hooves. ‘But I tell you, Malbourne’s absence is not suspicious in itself. No doubt the business he is transacting has something to do with his marriage – a conference with his attorney about the settlement, perhaps, or a visit to his broker.’

‘Yes, but how do we find him now?’

‘Our best plan is to wait at the office. He will have to return after dinner – he will need to go through the afternoon’s letters – but not for an hour or two.’ Rampton pulled out his watch and peered at it in the swaying gloom. ‘There’s no point in our hurrying back. You will have ample time to eat your dinner and then call at Green Street.’

Savill turned his head sharply. ‘But to what purpose? Besides, suppose Malbourne returns early?’

‘Why should he do that?’ A sour note entered Rampton’s voice. ‘He is not a man who attends the office unless he is obliged to. He cultivates a wide acquaintance.’

They dined – if such a word could be used to describe the snatched meal – at Flavell’s, a chophouse in Kingly Street where Mr Rampton was known. They occupied a private booth and could talk without fear of eavesdroppers.

Rampton grew confidential. ‘I own this has shaken me, this news of Malbourne. If there was one man in the world whose loyalty I trusted, it was he. But we must not rush to judgement. That is always a cardinal error. Perhaps there is a perfectly innocent explanation. Perhaps you were misinformed. After all, from what you say, Mrs Ogden does not strike one as a particularly reliable witness. Her sorrows may have unseated her reason.’

Afterwards they went their separate ways. Rampton took another hackney coach and returned to Westminster, while Savill walked westwards into Mayfair. He made his way to 14 Green Street, where Mrs West had taken apartments. The tall windows on the first floor were blazing with light.

The porter admitted him and Savill sent up his card. On the back he wrote that, if Mrs West was at home, he begged the honour of paying his respects to her. While he waited for the footman, he listened to the raised voices and laughter above his head.

The footman returned and led him upstairs, past candles flickering in sconces. He threw open the door of the drawing room and announced the visitor. For an instant the occupants of the room were framed in the doorway, turning towards the visitor, their conversation dying.

Miss Horton had been laughing at something a slender gentleman had been telling her. Her eyes widened as they met Savill’s over the shoulder of the gentleman’s dark green coat. Beside them, on a sofa, was the Count, while Monsieur Fournier and Mrs West were seated together, as close to one another as decorum permitted, on another sofa opposite him. Behind the Count hovered Dr Gohlis, a book in his hand. His glasses reflected a candle flame, giving his eyes a golden gleam.

Savill entered the room. Mrs West held out her hand to him. The slender gentleman turned away from Miss Horton and bowed to Savill.

‘Good evening, sir,’ said Mr Malbourne.

Someone is in the yard below. A shadow moves from the garden towards the back door. It advances inch by inch – so slowly that unless you were watching for it you would hardly know it was moving at all.

It is too dark to make out anything but the outlines of things. The window is ajar. In the background is the singing from the Royal Oak and, further away still, the rumble of traffic in Bedford Square and Tottenham Court Road. Every now and then there comes a nearer sound, sharper and harder than the rest.

The shadow draws closer and vanishes beneath the lee of the scullery roof. Charles hears the scrape and click of a bolt sliding in a lock. The back door.

The man-mountain? How has he found his way into the yard?

Charles slips across the dark landing. Despite his care, a board creaks beneath him. The door of Lizzie’s bedchamber is ajar. He passes into the room. He would like to shut the door behind him – for any barrier between him and the man-mountain is better than none – but he does not dare, in case the sound of the latch is audible downstairs.

Head cocked, he pauses by the bed. He hears no sounds of movement below. A wild hope leaps within him: perhaps he imagined the shadow in the yard, imagined the scrape of the bolt.

Charles burrows between the wall and bed. He slithers into the crushing embrace of the mattresses. He pushes his hand between the wall and the upper mattress, trying to make a gap that will allow the passage of air.

His heart twitches and thumps inside his chest. An image of it, astonishingly vivid, grows in his mind: his heart is a small pink animal with short legs; it scurries to and fro, trying to escape from the prison of Charles’s ribcage.

He strains to hear the slightest sound apart from his own laboured breathing. But there is nothing. The mattresses cut off sound as well as air.

Time passes. In a similar predicament, Mr Crusoe would shoot the man with one of his guns or run him through with a sword. Or, if he were obliged to hide, he would do so in order to contrive an ambush and use the advantage of surprise to overpower the intruder. Or, if he judged it wiser to retreat, he would do so by a route he had prepared in advance, for Mr Crusoe was both far-sighted and industrious; he always thought ahead to what the future might hold.

But Charles is not Robinson Crusoe. He is a small boy with neither family nor friends. He is without resources and without the power of speech in a city that is completely strange to him. But he has food, he reminds himself, and he has a knife. He investigates his hiding place until he finds the bundle of cheese and ham, which he contrives to push into his pocket. His fingers close around the handle of the knife.

The mattresses press him into a musty sandwich of horsehair, squeezing him harder and harder. The temperature is rising. The sweat streams off him, soaking his shirt. The handle of the knife is slippery. The air is growing worse. He pants for breath. He moves slightly in the hope of encouraging a current of fresh air.

Worst of all, there is a tickle in the back of his throat.

The tickle grows. Charles rubs his upper lip with his forefinger, a trick his mother taught him when he began to sneeze while she was talking with a gentleman in the Palais Royal. ‘Rub it harder, my love, rub it faster – it will make the naughty tickle go away.’

But this time the rubbing has the opposite effect. Or perhaps it is the thought of Maman, a distraction that unlocks a great hollowness within him. The tickle swells to a sensation of elephantine proportions.

Charles rubs his lip even harder.

The tickle dies.

It is a miracle. Charles relaxes. Air glides from his lungs in a long, soft sigh.

But the tickle returns. Charles sucks in a breath. A spasm runs through his body and a mighty sneeze erupts from him so quickly that he does not even know it is coming.

The ringing in his ears subsides. He wants to be sick.

Nothing happens. Charles waits. He allows himself the luxury of hope.

At that moment, and without any warning, the mattress shifts above him. Next, in one swift movement it is dragged from the bed. Fresh, cold air rushes over his sweating skin. The room is dark apart from a covered lantern held high, its feeble light playing over the lower mattress until it finds Charles’s face.

The side of the lower mattress still pins Charles to the wall. He wriggles from its embrace. The bedchamber is filled with an immense shadow. In the lantern’s light he glimpses the brim of a hat and hears stertorous breathing. A hand grips his leg.

‘Ha!’ a man says in a whisper as he drags Charles across the mattress towards him. ‘Ha!’

Charles twists his body and curls his spine towards the shadow. He stabs the knife down on the hand.

The man screams. The hand relaxes its grip. Charles pulls his leg free and rolls off the bottom of the bed. The lantern clatters against the post at the end of the bed and the flame inside it sways and flickers.

Charles crawls through the doorway. On the landing he scrambles to his feet and takes the flight of stairs leading to the floor above.

He knows at once he has made a mistake. He should have run downstairs, to the back door or to the hatch from the cellar into the yard.

Too late. The light from the lantern has steadied and grown stronger. The man’s heavy footsteps are already on the landing.

Charles has the advantage of knowing where he is going. The man behind him has the advantage of the lantern. Charles is nimbler. The man is stronger.

In the dark, the house in Nightingale Lane is a maze of doorways, passages and stairs, arranged without rhyme or reason. Landings lead nowhere – more than once, Charles is forced to double back and almost rushes into the intruder’s arms.

It is as much by chance as intention that he rises higher and higher in the old house and at last bursts through a low, slanting door into the loft.

The man is following him up the last flight of stairs. He is breathing heavily like a wheezing pump.

They are in the attics, a series of tentlike spaces beneath the many gables of the house. Their arrival has set off the rats – Charles hears a scurrying of tiny paws, diminishing rapidly in volume.

Despite the panic, despite the haste, everything moves very slowly. There is time for him to register the presence of the rats, and time for him to feel that the air is cooler up here and to notice the windows in the gables, rectangles of faint radiance in the gloom. There is even time to consider the courses of action before him: to turn and attack the man with the knife; to hide, if he can find a hiding place; or—

Even as the idea is forming in his head, he has made his choice: he is running again, knife in hand, making for the far end of the attics where a projecting gable forms an alcove at right angles to the main pitch of the roof. He cannot see where he is going. He stumbles and falls. Behind him, the lantern sways and its light lurches among the rafters. The breathing is louder than ever and drawing closer.

Charles reaches the window and fumbles for the latch. The opening is about eighteen inches high and less than a foot in width. The casement swings out in a rush and the night air rushes into the attic. He pushes his head and shoulders through the opening and drags his body on to the sill.

The night is cloudy, but the faint radiance of the city fills the sky to the south. On the far side of the window, a leaded valley stretches away between two lower roofs, which belong to the kitchen wing and the outhouses at the back of the house. Charles’s hands scrabble for purchase on the leads. He feels water, a slimy puddle. He touches spongy moss and dead leaves.

His hips are through. The sill digs into his thighs. No man could crawl through this space, let alone a man-monster.

A hand grasps his left ankle. Charles kicks out with his right foot, though he cannot do much because his legs are so tightly confined by the window frame.

He twists his body, trying to stab the man’s hand again. But the blade catches on the side of the window frame, and the force of his own thrust wrenches it from his hand. The knife clatters down the tiles and comes to rest in a gully.

Another hand shackles his right ankle. An immense force drags him back into the house. There is nothing to hold on to. The fronts of his thighs are compressed against the sill. He fears the bones will snap.

Charles opens his mouth. He wants to scream. But he cannot.

The drawing room stretched the width of the house. Despite the candles, it was a place of vast and ill-defined shadows. It held five people, six now Savill was here, but it was large enough for forty or fifty.

‘Do you know Mr Malbourne?’ Mrs West said in a low voice, releasing his hand.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘But not well. Have you known him long?’

‘No – a few hours. He is an acquaintance of Monsieur de Quillon, and they encountered each other quite by chance in the street. He seems very agreeable and
très bien élevé
, as Monsieur Fournier says. But enough of that – sit beside me, sir. Tell me, have you news of the boy?’

He joined her on the sofa. ‘No, ma’am, or rather nothing to the point.’ He answered almost at random, for his mind was elsewhere, struggling to comprehend this new information about Malbourne. ‘I believe he was brought to London. But where he is now, I have no idea.’

Mrs West patted his sleeve with her fan. ‘You poor man. Forgive me if I speak plainly, but you do not look at all well. I see that this business has distressed you greatly.’

Monsieur Fournier, Savill noticed, had joined Malbourne and Miss Horton. But the Count approached the sofa.

‘Mr Savill,’ he said, ‘have you found my son?’ He waved imperiously. ‘No, don’t get up. No need to stand on ceremony, sir. All I want is Charles.’