The Silent Boy (7 page)

Savill shrugged. In truth, he kept the dice in his pocket because they reminded him that nothing should be taken for granted, that the Wheel of Fortune might spin at any moment, that everything was precarious. He had learned that long ago in another country.

‘Permit me to tell you why I want the boy,’ the old man said.

‘Charles, sir,’ Savill said. ‘His name is Charles.’

‘Indeed, sir. But pray hear me out. You have had a month to grow accustomed to my proposal. You see this?’ He waved his hand about the room. ‘This house of mine, the gardens, the farms, the house in Westminster. All this, and indeed there’s more. But I have no children of my own – no one to leave this to. Nor do I have any close relations left alive, no one to carry my name into the future. That is why I want Charles. He is Augusta’s son, therefore he is my own kin, my own great-nephew. I wish him to bear the name of Rampton. And is this not the happiest outcome for all concerned? After all, I am his nearest relation, in blood if not in law.’

‘No, sir, you are not.’ Savill took up his glass. ‘My daughter Lizzie is his nearest relation. She’s his half-sister.’

‘A quibble, my dear sir. She does not even know of the boy’s existence. She cannot miss what she has never had. Nor is she in a position to do anything for him.’

Rampton placed his hand on Savill’s arm. ‘So perhaps we can come to an arrangement?’

‘You cannot buy him, sir, if that’s what you mean.’

‘I would make him my heir. My adopted son.’

‘Then I am surprised you have not brought him here already,’ Savill said. ‘Rather than leave him in such evil company.’

Rampton took a deep breath and tried the effect of a smile. ‘You must understand that my position makes it quite impossible for me to be seen as a principal in this affair. As one of His Majesty’s civil servants, it would not be fitting for me to have private business with the Count de Quillon and his friends, whose reputations are irrevocably stained by their political and moral degeneracy. For the same reason, I cannot send Malbourne. Besides, the press of business is such that I do not believe I could spare him.’

‘I see that no such scruples need restrain me,’ Savill said, resisting a sudden urge to laugh.

‘Indeed – as a private citizen and Augusta’s husband, you have every right to claim the boy. My name need not appear in the matter at all. There is another consideration which may sway you – Monsieur de Quillon and Monsieur Fournier hold the papers attesting to Augusta’s death and burial. You must have these. You will need them, not least if you should ever wish to marry again … after all, my dear sir, you are still in the prime of life. And then – what if the Count should refuse to surrender Charles? Only you are in a position to force his hand. Indeed, it is your duty.’

‘But why the devil should Monsieur de Quillon wish to retain him?’ Savill said.

Rampton cracked his knuckles. ‘Oh, as to that – that is part of the difficulty; the Count has a foolish fancy that Charles is his son.’

Charnwood is an old house where nothing is correct. All the lines are crooked – the walls, the roofs, the chimneystacks. It stands in a muddy place where it is always cold and raining. At night it is so dark and quiet that if a person screamed only the stars would hear him.

We are quite safe here, Fournier tells Charles. No one can harm us.

But nobody is happy here, Charles thinks, even Fournier and the Count, who talk endlessly about King Louis and the poor royal family, captives in the Temple, and about their own unhappy plight.

‘We are in exile,’ the Count says one morning when Charles is in the room. ‘No one will visit us here. I declare I shall die of boredom.’

It is settled that Dr Gohlis will join the party, though Charles understands that he is not so much a visitor as a superior sort of servant who is permitted to dine with his masters. Fournier gives him permission to use a room over the stables for his experiments.

‘Monsieur de Quillon and I do not want you pursuing your studies in the house,’ Fournier says to the doctor by way of pleasantry. ‘It would not be agreeable to hear the screams of your victims.’

Charles listens to the servants’ conversation. The servants talk quite freely when he is among them. He learns that, in their eyes, his inability to speak makes him an idiot or a dumb animal. He also eavesdrops on the Count, which is not difficult because he rarely moderates the volume of his voice.

So Charles soon learns the reason why nobody comes to call on them. It is a fact to be recorded in his memory and relied on. The Vicar of Norbury, Mr Horton, does not approve of the Count and Monsieur Fournier. Their politics, their lack of religion and their amoral conduct put them beyond the pale.

The local gentry, such as they are – ‘Jumped-up farmers,’ says the Count, ‘clodhopping peasants with turnips under their fingernails’ – take their lead from Mr Horton. The King of England does not like them either, so no one is allowed to come down from London.

Mrs West, who lives at Norbury Park, is their friend, but she cannot call at Charnwood because there is no lady in the house to receive her. Sometimes the gentlemen call on her and she asks them to dine. But Charles always stays at Charnwood.

The Count summons Charles. The grown-ups are dining so they are all there around the table. The room with its peeling wallpaper smells of gravy and wine and perfume as well as of damp.

‘You went outside today,’ the Count says. ‘Saul saw you in the stableyard.’

Saul is Monsieur de Quillon’s valet, who has come with him from France.

The Count leans his elbow on the table and brings his great head almost to the level of Charles’s. ‘That’s all right. When you are at liberty, you may go there. And you may go into the gardens. But that is all. You must not go into the woods, or the fields, or into the village. Is that understood?’

Charles stares at him.

‘Well?’ the Count says. ‘You understand? Why the devil will you not speak?’

‘We must see what we can contrive,’ Gohlis says, putting his head on one side and studying Charles. ‘He can do better than this.’

Fournier says, ‘Yes, he does understand. You can see it in his eyes.’

‘It is most interesting,’ the doctor says to the Count. ‘Considered philosophically and scientifically. You must permit me to try an experiment, sir.’

‘You can do as you like, as long as you make him speak.’

In the last week of September, the doctor’s luggage arrives – two trunks and three wooden boxes.

One of the boxes contains the figure of Louis, wrapped in a cotton shroud and floating in a cloud of wood shavings. Dr Gohlis himself unpacks him. Charles watches the disinterment from the second-floor landing, where his room is. He peers through the balustrade, down the well through the middle of the house to the floor of the hall where the doctor is at work.

He is like a gravedigger, Charles thinks, bringing out the dead.

The contents of the boxes, including Louis, are transferred to the room in the stables. Gohlis calls the room his laboratory.

Next morning Charles rises very early. Only the servants are downstairs. He goes out to the stableyard. The doctor’s room is at one end of the loft over the looseboxes, where there is now only a solitary horse.

The door is locked. Charles cannot find the key.

Beside the stable is the coach house. It is possible, Charles finds, to scramble on to a water butt in the yard and climb into the lead-lined gully at the foot of the sloping roof of the coach house. If he walks along the gully, and climbs up the slope of the tiled roof, he can look through the dusty window of the laboratory.

Charles feels a surge of relief when he sees Louis standing at the end of the table on the other side of the window. He is looking across the table and keeping his own counsel.

If, as is possible, there is still someone there, a living boy locked in the prison made from the mould of his own mutilated body, then he must be able to see the window from the corner of his eye.

Charles thinks of the saints in Notre-Dame on the Île de la Cité. You may pray to the statue of a saint and the saint hears your prayer and will answer you, if he or she pleases. What is prayer but conversation in church? Why should Louis be any different from an image of the Virgin?

Charles taps the glass. Louis, he thinks as hard as he can, it’s me.

At first he thinks it in French. Then, to be on the safe side, he thinks it in English.

Next day, Thursday, the Charnwood laundry comes back. The washerwoman has a dark, wrinkled face. Her name is Mrs White, and she lives in the cottage at the end of the drive and opens the gate to visitors. (These are all facts, and may be relied upon.)

Mrs White is fat, deaf and very small. She is like a hedgehog in a dirty brown dress. She comes up the back drive in a cart drawn by a donkey with the scars of old sores and old beatings on its flanks.

The clean linen is in three wicker baskets, on one of which she sits. Charles wonders how many shirts and sheets and pairs of stockings have been squeezed into them.

The gardener’s boy leads the donkey. He holds the bridle in one hand and a stick in the other. The stick is for beating the donkey. The boy is a year or two older than Charles and has red hair. According to one of the maids, he is Mrs White’s grandson.

Charnwood is surrounded by a small park. Charles shelters in a clump of trees and watches them coming up the drive. He likes to know who comes and goes. In this strange place among strange and half-strange people, he does not know very much yet. But gradually he accumulates information. It is not much but it is something. Facts are solid things. You may trust them, unlike people.

The old woman in the cart stares straight ahead. She does not move at all. Perhaps she is asleep. The boy trudges up the drive, occasionally glancing at the donkey and prodding or hitting it with his stick.

The cart passes within twenty or thirty yards of the trees where Charles is standing. He is not exactly hiding, but he does not wish to be seen so he stands well back, partly concealed by the trunk of a cedar tree.

At the nearest point between them, the red-headed boy looks at the trees, looks directly at Charles.

The donkey plods on. The cart rattles. The boy glances at the donkey and hits it very hard with the stick.

That’s all it takes. Charles knows from that moment that the gardener’s boy hates him. If you can have love at first sight, then why not hate? You do not need a reason to love and you do not need a reason to hate.

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.

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.