The Silent Boy (45 page)

As he was tucking the note into the pocket of Malbourne’s waistcoat, he heard a sharp intake of breath. Savill turned.

Jarsdel was three paces away and looking straight at him.

Soaking wet, and without his wig and hat, he was almost unrecognizable with blood and mud. What could be seen of his face was purple with exertion and perhaps excitement, the broad veins standing out on his forehead. In one hand was his bludgeon. In the other was Savill’s clasp-knife, the blade opened.

‘Now, sir,’ he said. ‘Now, sir, we’ll see how you like a bit of mud. A man can drown in mud. Or in his own blood. Did you know that?’

Savill pushed his hand in his pocket and took out Malbourne’s pistol. It was a tiny thing, little better than a popgun. He cocked it, fumbling with the unfamiliar mechanism.

Jarsdel lunged forward. He swung his stick. Savill ducked.

The blade in his other hand flicked out. The speed of the movement caught Savill off guard. The tip of the blade snagged on the cuff of his coat. He took a step back and stumbled over Malbourne’s body, falling backwards on to the ground.

Jarsdel came a step closer. Savill raised the pistol and, without taking aim, pulled the trigger.

The flint scraped down the frizzen. The pan opened to receive a shower of sparks. The priming powder ignited, giving off a puff of smoke.

And nothing happened. Damp?

Then the flame passed through the vent and set off the main charge. There was a dull crack. The pistol jerked in Savill’s hand. Jarsdel stopped in his stride.

In the long, frozen moment as the smoke cleared, the two men looked at each other. Jarsdel’s face looked puzzled.

Had the shot missed? Was the charge a blank?

Time began to move again. The bludgeon fell to the ground.

Savill rolled sideways and scrambled up.

Blood oozed from a spot below Jarsdel’s jaw somewhere among the folds of flesh that masked the division between head and neck. First it was a trickle that ran down to his collar, and then a positive stream that spurted before him and fell in a glistening shower of red spots on the wet, dead leaves on the ground.

He frowned. He released his grip on the knife. His head snapped forward. His knees gave way. He crumpled to the ground. For a moment, he stared up at Savill. He spat out a mouthful of blood. He rolled on to his side and drew up his knees.

A monstrous, hairless baby lying down to rest.

Savill knelt beside him, avoiding the pooling blood, and took one of Jarsdel’s hands in both of his. ‘Jarsdel?’ he said. ‘Jarsdel? Can you hear me?’

There was no response. The eyes were open but if they saw anything there was no sign of it.

Savill stayed on his knees beside Jarsdel as the life ebbed away. He said nothing, for there was nothing to say. But, when all was said and done, a man should not die alone.

Dew lingered on the grass and patches of mist clung to the hollows in the field in front of the cottage.

Savill waited with Malbourne only long enough to make sure he was breathing and no more uncomfortable than he had been before. His own head still hurt but the pain had retreated.

Jarsdel now lay in a pool of blood, for Savill’s bullet had nicked a carotid artery. In death he was at best an inconvenience and at worst a threat to Savill, who had killed him and might, if all went badly, face a murder charge. Malbourne needed help as urgently as ever. Charles was still missing. The dark heart of this affair was still to be exposed. The consequences to all of them, when the truth was at last uncovered, were incalculable.

First things first, Savill told himself. He must find help. He did not even know where they were. But Malbourne and Jarsdel could not have dropped out of the sky, and nor could he. There must be horses, somewhere, and a conveyance of some sort.

He put his knife in his pocket and slipped Jarsdel’s bludgeon under his arm. He walked round the far corner of the cottage to the side he had not yet seen. There was a paddock, empty of livestock, that sloped down to a belt of woodland beyond. He continued past the gable end of the cottage and along the rear wall of the woodshed where he had been held captive.

There was a gate at the end of the paddock. He climbed over it and found himself at the back of the yard behind the cottage. There were more fields on this side. Then came a swathe of grass, dotted with young trees among which several cows were grazing.

Beyond the grass were two lines of lime trees, outlined with inky precision against the grey sky. They bordered an avenue. Savill knew this for certain because at one end of the avenue he saw the chimneys of Vardells.

A chandelier in a bag hangs like a giant wasps’ nest over the centre of the salon. Behind him come the old man’s footsteps, moving with surprising rapidity over the stone slabs of the hall.

Charles bolts through a door at the far end, which opens into a dining room, the table swathed in covers. He hears a sound in the room behind him and glances over his shoulder towards it. His momentum continues to carry him blindly forward. He cannons into the edge of a sideboard. He clutches at it for support. He misses. Instead, his hand collides with a tall blue vase. The vase topples and rolls off the sideboard. It shatters into a thousand pieces on the bare boards of the floor.

‘Charles, dear boy.’ The old man is in the doorway of the salon. He switches from English to flawless French. ‘Calm yourself. No one wishes to harm you. You are home at last, just as your dear mother would have wished.’

The voice is so gentle that Charles wants to believe what it says. For a moment. He looks at the old man, who smiles uncertainly and tugs at his fingers.

Tip-tap.

The cracking of the knuckles. His mother’s blood.

He dances round the table and leaves the room by a second door, which leads to a passage that brings him back to the flagged hall by the front door.

The old man knows the house better than he does. He is already waiting there. As Charles appears, the old man takes up a walking stick from a tall jar that stands by the front door.

‘Charles,’ he says and, despite the slushing sound he makes when he speaks, his voice has grown sterner. ‘Charles, I do not wish to chastise you, especially on our first day together. But I can’t brook disobedience. Spare the rod and spoil the child, eh? That’s what I used to tell your mother when she was your age.’

Charles swerves and runs upstairs. He pauses at the half-landing, where the stairs turn to the left, and looks back. The old man is following him.

‘There is nowhere for you to go to,’ he says. ‘There is nowhere for you but here.’

Charles bounds up the rest of the stairs. The landing runs around three sides of the stairwell. All the doors are closed. He tries the nearest one. It is locked. So is the next.

That leaves the stairs to the attic, which lead out of an alcove at one end of the landing.

He turns towards the attic stairs in time to see a servant, a squat woman who looks even older than her master, coming from the alcove. At first she does not see him. She carries a tray with the remains of his breakfast on it.

She looks up and sees Charles at the head of the stairs.

‘Stop him, Tabitha!’ The old man is very close now, hauling himself up the stairs by the bannister rail. ‘The boy’s not himself.’

Still staring at Charles, she holds a hand to her ear. ‘What, sir? Is that you there?’

‘His wits are disordered. Stop him. The boy’s mazed, I tell you.’

The woman seems to understand now. She advances along the landing.

‘You must take your beating like a man,’ cries the old man, his voice high and excited.

He lunges forward, swinging the stick. It catches Charles on his thigh. But the blow is feeble, almost petulant. Charles snatches at the stick and finds to his amazement that he has a grip on it. He tugs it towards him.

The old man is still holding on to the other end. ‘Let go,’ he cries. ‘I will not brook insolence.’ He pulls harder himself, dragging Charles down the upper flight of stairs almost as far as the half-landing.

A voice in the hall below shouts: ‘Drop that stick, damn you.’

Three things happen at once.

The old man turns sharply in the direction of the interruption.

The old woman drops the tray she is carrying.

And Charles stops pulling the stick. He pushes instead.

The old man staggers back on to the half-landing and cannons into the newel post that marks the right-angle turn of the bannister rail. He cannot stop: either the stick or his own impetus pushes him further than he expected. His body twists. He takes a step backwards. For an instant, one slippered foot hangs in the air – not on the landing, but above the stair immediately below.

A cup from the old woman’s tray slips through the bannisters of the landing and falls to the hall below, where it shatters.

Charles cannot remember what happens next. Does he reverse the motion of the stick and pull it again? Or does he continue to push? Or does the sound of the breaking cup surprise the old man so much that he releases his grip?

But this is a fact, if nothing else is: that the old man falls. He topples over on to the lower flight of stairs.

Charles lets go of the stick, which clatters on to the half-landing. He watches the old man rolling rapidly downwards, like a child on a grassy slope. His cap falls off. His skull is shaven. As his body rolls over, he gasps and squeaks. He sounds like a tiny animal, not like a man.

Mr Savill is running from a doorway below towards the foot of the stairs. But he is too late.

The old man reaches the level of the hall. The back of his head hits the stone-flagged floor. He lies face upwards among the shards of broken china from the cup.

His eyes are still open.

So is his silent mouth. It looks more than ever like a pink wound.

Hush now
, Charles thinks.
Say nothing.

At a little before two o’clock on the afternoon of Sunday, 13 January 1793, Mr Malbourne called by arrangement at Nightingale Lane. It was a moot point whether he came on pleasure or business.

Lizzie had spent much of the morning deciding on her clothes and watching the weather. Savill had found her on three separate occasions consulting the thermometer which he kept in the passage at the foot of the stairs. The winter so far had been abnormally mild, and the temperature had risen to 45 degrees by midday. The wind had dropped too – a brisk westerly had moderated during the morning to a gentle southerly breeze. True, it was cloudy, and there had been the occasional shower of rain. But nothing that signified, Lizzie decided, nothing that would force them to postpone the outing.

There were five of them in the party that left the house, for Miss Horton was spending the day with the Savills. She had come up to stay with Mrs West in Green Street again.

‘He has grown prodigiously,’ she murmured to Savill as they walked arm in arm down the lane. They had had little chance for conversation until now.

‘My sister has seen to that,’ he said. ‘She feeds him at every opportunity.’

‘His face has filled out, too. He doesn’t look fearful any more.’

‘Not in the day, ma’am. Sometimes at night he does. He has bad dreams. And I have not seen him laugh or even smile yet.’

Ahead of them, Lizzie was leaning more heavily than was perhaps necessary on the arm of Mr Malbourne. There was a hint of rain in the air, enough to justify his raising his umbrella over them.

Charles walked between the two couples, occasionally glancing over his shoulder at Savill and Miss Horton as if to make sure they were still there.

‘Will you send him to school?’ she said.

‘I hope so. Eventually. He is able enough – he reads whatever he can lay his hands on.’

‘He and I had a game of chess just now. He beat me with ease.’

‘But he does not speak yet,’ Savill said. ‘I would not wish to expose him to the ridicule of his schoolfellows. I think I shall engage a tutor, and we shall see how we go.’

She glanced up at him from beneath the brim of her bonnet. ‘But what if he never speaks?’

‘He will, ma’am. He will.’ He smiled at her. ‘Lizzie has quite made up her mind about that.’

She smiled back and looked ahead at Lizzie and Malbourne. ‘Lizzie usually knows her own mind, I think.’

He followed both the direction of her glance and the current of her thoughts. But he said nothing.

They strolled along Gower Street to Bedford Square. By a fortunate chance, Mr Malbourne had been able to obtain a key to the gate in the railings in the centre of the square. His great aunt lived in one of the smaller houses on the north side.

The garden was not crowded at this hour. Half a dozen nursemaids were exchanging gossip as they took the air with their charges. Three or four small boys were kicking a ball between them on the south side.

‘Do you make a long stay in London, ma’am?’

‘Three or four weeks, perhaps, unless my father desires me to return earlier. I hope he does not – Norbury will soon offer even less in the way of society than it did before. Did you know that the household at Charnwood is to be broken up?’

‘No. When?’

‘It is happening already. The Count has left for Switzerland. Monsieur Fournier and Dr Gohlis came up to London with us but they return to Norbury on Wednesday to settle things there. They talk of joining him in a week or so.’

‘The news from France is so bad that we must be at war at any moment.’

‘That is why they must go – they can do nothing here, Monsieur Fournier says. Besides, they are not welcome in England, as you know. But Mr Malbourne has been most helpful in arranging their papers. He says the Count is quite resigned to leaving Charles in the care of his English family, on the grounds that when war comes he will be safer here.’

They talked a little more and then separated, for it would not do to leave Lizzie too long beneath Mr Malbourne’s conveniently large umbrella. Lizzie and Miss Horton walked on, while Charles played a complicated game with himself which involved jumping and skipping in a zigzag pattern across the path.