The Thief of Time

by John Boyne

  ‘So after he went,’ continued his wife, ‘we came into a little money and moved here, to Cageley, where Mr Amberton started his school. My sister lives in the next town, you see, with her husband, and I liked the idea of being nearer to them. And Mr Amberton is very popular with the children too, aren’t you, Mr Amberton?’

  ‘I like to think I am, yes,’ he said with an air of self-satisfaction.

  ‘Right now he’s got forty young ‘uns in his schoolroom and they’re getting the best education they could possibly get with Mr Amberton as their master. What lives they’ll get to lead, eh?’

  And so they continued for our first evenings, filling us in on their history as if this would enable us to melt into their newly designed family life more easily. And as exhausting as their constant talking, coughing, farting and spitting became, I found myself becoming more and more comforted by them and would have gladly stayed in front of their fire night after night had not the inevitable finally happened. At the age of eighteen, I was suddenly thrust into the unwelcome world of legal employment when I finally got a job.

  Just outside the main town boundary in Cageley stood a large house wherein lived Sir Alfred Pepys and his wife, Lady Margaret. They were the local aristocracy, celebrities of a kind, and their family had lived there for more than 300 years. Their wealth was inherited but their business was banking and it generated enough money for them to run their 300-acre estate in Cageley as well as a townhouse in London and a holiday home in the Scottish Highlands not to mention who knew what other holdings around the country. A few years before we arrived there, Sir Alfred and his wife had retired to the ancestral home and left their business interests in London in the hands of their three sons, who visited them occasionally. The parents led a quiet life, with shooting and hunting their only real activities of any great extravagance, and neither lorded it over the locals nor encouraged any closer ties with them.

  It was Mr Amberton who secured jobs for both Dominique and me on the estate, I as a stable boy and my so-called sister as a kitchen hand. He told us of our salaries, which were low but none the less the first we had ever received, and we were thrilled to be starting respectable working lives at last. The only disappointment to me was that Dominique’s position required her to board in a small room in the servants’ quarters of the house, while I had to continue living with the Ambertons. This devastated me almost as much as it thrilled her, who was suddenly achieving a level of independence to which she had been aspiring for some time. Tomas, on the other hand, began to attend Mr Amberton’s school and showed a flair for reading and drama, which was of some consolation to me. His nightly accounts of what had taken place during the day, as well as his perfect mimicry of not only his schoolfriends but also his teacher and landlord, were always entertaining and perfectly drawn; he showed a gift for the dramatic which his father had sadly lacked.

  My day began at 5 a.m. when I would rise and walk the twenty minute journey from the Ambertons’ home to the stables at the back of Cageley House. Along with another stable boy of around my own age, Jack Holby, we would prepare a breakfast for the eight horses under our care before we had even eaten our own and, after they finished it, we would spend several hours cleaning and brushing the horses down until their coats shone as if they had just been polished. Sir Alfred liked to ride in the mornings and always demanded that his horses look immaculate. We never knew which particular steed he might choose, nor whether he would have guests with him that morning, so each one of them had to look their best at all times. While Jack and I worked there, they must have been the best cared for horses in England. By around eleven, we would be set free for an hour to eat something in the kitchens and we would follow this by sitting outside in the sun and smoking our pipes for twenty minutes, a new affectation that Jack had introduced me to.

  ‘One of these days,’ Jack said, sitting with his back against a bale of hay as he drew on his pipe and drank intermittently from a cup of steaming hot tea, ‘I’m going to take a hold of one of them horses and I’m going to climb on its back and ride it all the way out of this place. And that’s the last any of them will ever see of Jack Holby.’ He was aged about nineteen and had bright blond hair which hung down over his face, forcing him to keep sweeping it away from his eyes in what became almost an instinctive gesture, a twitch of self-grooming. I wondered why he didn’t just cut his fringe instead.

  ‘I like it here,’ I confessed. ‘I’ve never been anywhere quite like it. I’ve never had to actually work before and it’s a good sensation.’ I was telling the truth; the constancy of each day, the knowledge that I had certain tasks to do and for which I would get paid, pleased me enormously, as did the envelope of money I received from the coffers every Friday afternoon.

  ‘That’s because it’s a novelty to you,’ he said. ‘I’ve been doing this since I was twelve and I’ve got almost enough money saved up to get me away from here once and for all. My twentieth birthday, Mattie, that’s when I’ll be off’

  Jack Holby’s parents both worked in Cageley House, his father as an under-butler, his mother as a cook. They were pleasant enough people but I did not see them often. Jack, on the other hand, fascinated me. Although he was only about a year or eighteen months older than I was, and although he had in fact led a much more sheltered existence than my own, he seemed a lot more mature and far more aware of where he saw his life going than I was. The difference between us, I think, was that Jack had ambitions while I had none, ambitions which his unchanging existence throughout his youth had forced him to create. He had spent enough years at Cageley House to know that he did not want to be a stable boy for ever; I had spent enough time travelling around to appreciate a little stability for once. Our differences helped us to become friends quickly and I looked up to him with something approaching hero worship for he was the first male peer I had known whose life did not revolve around stealing from other people’s pockets. Where we had greed and idleness, he had dreams.

  ‘The thing about this place’, Jack told me, ‘is that there’s about thirty different people all working their arses off to make sure that the house and the estate stay in proper order. And right now there’s only two people who actually live there, Sir Alfred and his wife. Thirty people for two! I ask you! And every so often one of them swanky sons comes down here on a visit and they treat us all like horseshit and I won’t have that.’

  ‘I haven’t met any of them yet,’ I confessed.

  ‘You don’t want to, believe me. The oldest one, David, he’s a beanpole who walks round here with his head in the clouds all day long, never so much as deigning to speak to anyone who works for a living. The next one down, Alfred Junior, is twice as bad only he’s got religion which makes him even worse ‘cos I’ve never known anyone with the power to speak down to you as them who thinks they’ve got God’s ear on their side. And the youngest one, Nat, well he’s the pick of the litter. He’s got a nasty side to him has Nat. I’ve seen it on more than one occasion. Tried it on with my Elsie once and wouldn’t let it go till she caved in. Then he just threw her away and doesn’t even speak to her any more. She hates him but what can she do? She can’t quit because she has nowhere to go. I’ve come close a few times to wanting to kill him myself but I’m not sacrificing my life for his, no sir. I like her, but not that much. One of these days though – he’ll get his.’

  Elsie was Jack’s sometime girlfriend and she worked as a cleaning maid in the house. The story, as far as Jack told it, was that Nat Pepys had made advances towards her on one of his visits to Cageley and had reappeared every weekend from then on with gifts for her until she let him have his way with her. It had killed Jack at the time, he said, to see what was going on; not because he was in love with Elsie – he wasn’t -but because he hated to see the way that wealth could get Nat anything he wanted while he, Jack, was stuck shovelling horseshit from barn to bin. For all his hatred of his employer’s son, what really galled him was the fact that Nat Pepys didn’t even know that he exis
ted. For this, Jack was eaten up with bitterness and it was a strong factor influencing why he wanted to get away from Cageley and start his life afresh.

  ‘And then’, he said, ‘no one will ever order me around again.’

  For my part, I didn’t want him to go as our friendship began to be of great importance to me. In the meantime, I simply got on with my work and continued to put a little money aside each week so that if the day ever came when I wanted to leave as much as Jack did, I might have some chance of being able to do so without having to begin again from scratch.

  I missed having Dominique in the house with me; it was the first time since we had met on the boat to Dover that we had been separated. Every Sunday evening she would come to dinner at the Ambertons’ and every week, I sensed a little more distance growing between us and I didn’t know how to fill that gap. True, it was a rare day that we did not see each other at all, for Jack and I would get our own meals from the kitchen and often she would be the one who would have prepared them for us as part of her work. She always made sure to be generous with our portions and became friendly with Jack as well, although I think he found her beauty intimidating and the fact that we were ‘related’ somewhat surprising.

  ‘She’s some looker, your sister,’ he confided in me one day, ‘although I must admit she’s a little on the skinny side for my tastes. You don’t look much like each other, though, do you?’

  ‘Not much,’ I said, not really wishing to discuss it.

  The Ambertons, on the other hand, were fascinated by the lives that we led out at the house, so enthralled were they by the very existence of the aristocracy in their neighbourhood. It was a curious thing to Dominique and me that a whole village could be in such bewildering awe of one man and his wife. The whole thing seemed ridiculous to us but every Sunday both Mr and Mrs Amberton would quiz us for information about our employers, as if by sucking details from us they were bringing themselves one step closer to heaven.

  ‘I hear she has a carpet in her bedroom that’s three inches thick and lined with fur,’ said Mrs Amberton of Lady Margaret.

  ‘I’ve never been in her bedroom,’ confessed Dominique, ‘but I know she favours floorboards.’

  ‘IT hear he has a collection of guns which rival that of the British Army, let alone a London museum, and he employs a man to spend all his time cleaning and polishing them,’ said Mr Amberton.

  ‘If he has, I’ve never met him,’ I said.

  ‘I hear that when their sons come to visit they serve a small suckled pig to each one of them and they only drink wine which is more than a century old.’

  ‘David and Alfred Junior hardly eat anything at all,’ muttered Dominique. ‘And they both claim that alcohol is the devil’s work. I haven’t met the youngest one yet.’

  After these meals, I would always walk Dominique back to the house and it was about the only time in the week when we got to spend any time together alone. We walked slowly, sometimes resting for a while by the lake if it was a warm evening. It was the time of the week that I most enjoyed for we were able to catch up with each other’s lives without having to worry about anyone listening in or having to keep one eye on the clock at all times.

  ‘I can’t remember being so happy as I am right now,’ she told me one evening as we walked along the road, the Ambertons’ dog Brutus scampering along beside us as noisily as his owners. ‘It’s so peaceful here. There’s no troubles. Everything seems so nice. I could stay here for ever.’

  ‘Eventually things will change,’ I said. ‘We can’t stay here for ever as much as we may want to. After all,’ I told her, adopting some of Jack’s independent beliefs, ‘we don’t want to see ourselves as being someone else’s lackeys for the rest of our lives. We could make our own fortunes.’

  She sighed and said nothing. I found that I was often forced to continue with the idea of an ‘us’ between Dominique, Tomas and me. Our one-time solid family unit had come slightly apart with the new arrangements in Cageley. I was sure that there were new aspects to Dominique’s life of which I knew nothing. She spoke of friends she had made within the house and the village and of time they spent together from which I as a mere stable boy was naturally excluded. I would tell her about Jack and try to interest her in the idea of her and I and Jack and Elsie taking a picnic together somewhere, but she always agreed without appearing to care less. We were growing apart and it worried me for I did not want to arrive at Cageley House one morning only to find that she had left it for ever the night before.

  On a bright summer afternoon, Mr Davies, who was the stable manager in charge of Jack and me, came to see us as we were cleaning out the stables. A dreary, middle-aged man, he spent most of his time – it seemed to me – ordering supplies and sitting in the kitchen, rarely bothering to speak to either of us. He had basically allowed Jack to take charge over the way in which the stables were run and, although he kept nominal control, all questions or queries came through Jack. His disdain for all the house employees was obvious, even though he was no more than a hired hand himself. He avoided speaking to us most of the time and when he did it was usually simply to point out our flaws. On one occasion, when there was a fire in the kitchen which ruined a day’s cooking, he made a point of hovering around us until he eventually muttered the phrase ‘at least the fire wasn’t my fault’, as if either Jack or I cared even a jot. For a man who was so keen to be seen as our superior, he was very concerned that we should see him as a competent manager, a phrase which could rarely have been applied to him. It came as a surprise therefore to see him approach us that afternoon and tell us to put away our pitchforks for a moment as he had something important to tell us.

  ‘Next week’, he began, ‘Sir Alfred’s son is coming down here for a few days with some friends of his. They’re going to be organising a hunt and we’ll have several more horses for you to take care of during their stay. He’s made it clear that he wants them to look their very best each morning so you’ll have to work extra hard.’

  ‘We can’t make them look any better than they already do,’ said Jack, matter-of-factly. ‘So don’t ask for more because that’s as good as it gets. You don’t like what we do, you can give it a go yourself.’

  ‘Well, you’ll need to stay on longer then to make sure that these other horses get the same wonderful treatment then, won’t you, Jack?’ said Mr Davies sarcastically, grinning through his broken teeth at Jack. ‘Because you know what he’s like when he gives his orders, especially when he has his friends down with him. And he’s the master after all. Pays your wages.’

  And yours, I thought. Jack grunted and shook his head as if the very word ‘master’ offended him. ‘Which one is it anyway?’ he asked. ‘David or Alfred?’

  ‘Neither one,’ said Mr Davies. ‘It’s the young one, Nat. Apparently it’s his twenty-first birthday or some such thing and that’s what the hunt is organised for.’

  Jack cursed under his breath and kicked the ground in frustration. T know what I’d like to give him for his birthday,’ he muttered, but Mr Davies ignored him.

  ‘Later on, I’ll give you your hours for next week,’ he said. ‘And don’t worry, you’ll be getting paid a little extra for them at the end of it. So no late nights, all right, because we’ll need you here on your toes.’

  I shrugged when he left. It seemed all right to me. I enjoyed my work and the way that the physical exercise was improving my body. My arms and chest had swelled a little and Mr and Mrs Amberton remarked upon what a handsome young man I was turning into. No longer the boy who had arrived there a few months earlier, I had already noticed that I was attracting a few flirtatious looks from the village girls. And a few more pounds for my savings couldn’t hurt. It was the first time I began to feel like an adult and it was a sensation I enjoyed. It was also fortunate that I felt that way, for no childish behaviour could have allowed me to survive my first encounter with Nat Pepys.

  Chapter 14

  The Terror

  The year
1793 was a turning point in my life for it is about the year at which I believe I stopped the physical act of ageing. I cannot pin it down to a particular date or an event – I cannot even be sure that 1793 was the exact year – I just believe that it was around this time that my body’s natural inclination to decline became dormant. It was also during 1793 that I had one of my least pleasant personal experiences, an event of such distasteful memory to me that I feel a strange misery for the human condition descend upon my mind even as I recall the manner in which that year turned out. But, unpalatable as it was, it remains one of the most memorable times of my life.

  In 1793, I turned fifty years old and, with the exception of a few distressing fashion trends of the time such as the tendency to wear a small ponytail at the back of one’s hair and to dress in a ridiculously effete manner, there is no great difference between the man I was then and the man I am today, 206 years later. My height of six feet and one half inch had not begun to shake off an inch or two as I wizened down to the shrunken frame of an older man as it might with another; my standard body weight of between 190 and 220 pounds was fixed at a pleasing 205 and my skin resisted the temptation to sag or grow wrinkly as with so many of my contemporaries; my hair had thinned slightly and turned a shade of grey which lent a distinguished air to my comportment and this was a condition which pleased me. All in all, I settled into an attractive middle age from which I have yet to be released. In 1793, when the French Revolution was at its height, I began the process which was to make me a thief of time.

  I had been back in England for about twenty years. My third decade had been spent in Europe, where I began to work in banking and had some good fortune along the way. At the age of thirty, I returned to London and, after my initial success in business, I invested wisely and befriended credible people in the banking world there who assisted me with my initiatives. In time, I owned a house and had a decent capital from which to earn my income. I worked hard and spent wisely. Those years were passed with a clear intention on my part to make my life comfortable and I rarely gave much thought to either my personal or spiritual happiness. All I did was work and earn money, and eventually I felt that I wanted more from life.