The Thief of Time

by John Boyne

  ‘You don’t know her,’ I said.

  ‘I know she’s not your sister,’ he said, his words coming out so clearly and unexpectedly that they didn’t even register with me for a few moments. ‘I know that much, Mattie.’

  I stared at him and felt my face drain a little, unsure of what to say. ‘How do you ...?’ I began. ‘How did you know that?’

  ‘It’s obvious from the way you look at her,’ he said. ‘I’ve seen it. And the way she looks at you sometimes. It’s the look of two people who’ve been a little bit more than just brother and sister if you ask me. I may have spent my whole life holed up in this cage but I do know a thing or two about that.’

  I slumped back against the tree and wondered for a moment why I had never bothered to tell him before. Why we hadn’t explained it to everyone. Perhaps it was because we had at first been so fearful of being separated that we had concocted the lie but, once we had settled in there so well, an opportunity had never arisen where we might clear up the deception.

  ‘Does anyone else know?’ I asked him and he shook his head.

  ‘Not so far as I’ve heard. But the point is, whatever you feel for her, you can’t let your whole life be run by it. Make your own life yourself

  I nodded. ‘We will leave some day,’ I said. ‘When we’re ready.’

  ‘Do you love her then?’ he asked and, to my irritation, I blushed furiously. Although it had been the primary emotion in my mind for a couple of years now, the all-consuming desire which racked me from morning till night, whenever I saw her and whenever I didn’t, I had never come out and just told someone about it and it seemed odd to be suddenly asked the question and find that I was stuck for words.

  But: ‘Yes,’ I said eventually. ‘I do. It’s that simple.’

  ‘And do you think she loves you?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ I said, this time without hesitation, although I was less convinced. ‘What’s not to love?’ I added with a smile in order to lighten the moment.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said pensively and for a moment I wasn’t sure whether he meant that he didn’t know what was not to love or whether she loved me or not.

  ‘The thing is’, I continued, oblivious to his doubts, wanting to reassure myself of her feelings now more than anything else, ‘the thing is she sees me as her ...’ I paused, trying to figure out exactly what she saw me as. ‘As her ... her .. .’ And for the life of me I couldn’t finish the sentence. Jack simply nodded and finished his drink before jumping up and stretching out his limbs.

  ‘She believes it, you see,’ he said. ‘The lie. She’s managed to convince herself that it’s true.’ I looked at him quizzically. ‘That you’re brother and sister,’ he explained. ‘She’s come to feel that that’s the natural relationship between the two of you.’

  ‘She’s just hiding her feelings,’ I said. ‘You don’t know her like I do.’

  He laughed. ‘Not sure I want to, Mattie,’ he said.

  I jumped up and stared at him furiously. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ I asked, my fists clenching automatically by my side even as I willed him to back down.

  ‘I just mean that, whatever you feel for her, there’s no guarantee that she feels the same way, that’s all. Maybe she’s playing on that fact. You’re a safety net for her. She knows she can count on you without her having to give anything back.’

  ‘But what could she give back?’ I asked, infuriated, and he hesitated before answering.

  ‘Well, when was the last time you spent a night in her room, Mattie?’ The words were barely out of his mouth when I swung the first punch. He stepped back quickly and my arm flew past his face without connecting. Instead he grabbed me by the arm and gave a half-laugh. ‘Take it easy,’ he said, perhaps a little unnerved by my reaction.

  ‘Take it back,’ I shouted back, my face red, particularly since he had my right arm in a tight clench and seemed unwilling to release it. ‘You don’t know her so take it back.’

  He pushed me backwards and I tripped over a root of the tree, falling hard on the ground. I groaned as I felt a jabbing pain run through my back. Jack stared down at me and kicked a foot in the dirt angrily. ‘Now look what you’ve done,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean any harm, Mattie. I was only saying, that was all. There’s no need for any of this.’

  ‘You take it back,’ I repeated, probably in no position to issue orders to him but willing none the less to stand up and face off once again if necessary.

  ‘Fine, fine, I take it back,’ he said, sighing and shaking his head. ‘But you think about what I said. It might stand to you at some point. Here,’ he continued, throwing the piece of wood at me, and I looked at it now and held it up, realising what it was for the first time. He had carefully scored out the insides of the wood, leaving a frame around emptiness and a solid cube cage in my hand. It was like a puzzle or game and I stared up at him feeling a mixture of anger at how he had talked about Dominique and frustration with an argument I had never expected. I wanted to continue our talk, to convince him how much she loved me, to make him say it, but he was already heading back towards the house and within a couple of minutes he had vanished over the hill, leaving me there alone, the wooden box in my hand.

  ‘She does love me,’ I muttered before getting up and dusting off the seat of my pants roughly.

  The sand was golden brown beneath my toes and I buried my feet down into it as deeply as I could until it became too heavy for me to push any further. I lay back, my body creating an image of itself in the sand below, and allowed the sun to burn down on top of me. I had just emerged from the cold water and my skin was wet, droplets sitting casually about my chest and making my legs appear darker as the hairs stuck gently to the skin. I ran a hand down towards my centre, my fingers enjoying the feel of my warm skin, my eyes closed to block out the light as my body stretched within itself. I could lie there for ever, I thought. Then my hand came back up towards my head until it was contorted in upon itself, shaking my shoulder, dragging me back to consciousness.

  ‘Matthieu,’ said Mrs Amberton, her nightdressed form a ghoulish figure to awaken to. I licked my mouth, creating unpleasant sounds as it snapped open, and stared at her in confusion. Why was she there? I asked myself. I’d been having such a lovely dream. ‘Matthieu,’ she repeated, her voice louder now as her rough hands shook my bare shoulder beneath the sheet. ‘You’ve got to get up. It’s Tomas. He’s not right.’

  My eyes opened now and I sat up in the bed, shaking my head and combing my hair roughly away from my eyes with my fingers. ‘What’s wrong with him?’ I asked. ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘He’s in the kitchen,’ she said. ‘Come on. Come and see him.’

  She left me alone and I stumbled out of the bed, pulling on my trousers quickly before stepping inside. Tomas, just turned eight years old, was sitting in the rocking chair by the fire on Mr Amberton’s knee, groaning dramatically.

  ‘Tomas?’ I asked, leaning over him and putting a hand to his forehead to check his temperature. ‘What’s wrong with you?’

  ‘Don’t,’ he hissed, brushing my hand away. His eyes were closed and his mouth was wide open. The brief touch I had had of his forehead had been warm and I looked at Mrs Amberton in surprise.

  ‘He’s burning up,’ I said. ‘What is it, do you think?’

  ‘Summer ‘flu,’ she said. ‘I saw it coming. He just has to go through it, that’s all. Only he don’t seem to be ‘appy about it right now, does he? Should be in bed but he won’t go.’

  ‘Tomas,’ I said, shaking him now in the same way that she had awoken me, ‘come on, you need to go to bed. You’re not well.’

  ‘I want Dominique,’ he said suddenly. ‘I want her to put me to bed.’

  ‘She’s not here, you know that,’ I replied, surprised that he had asked for her.

  ‘I want her,’ he screamed, making us all jump back in fright. He was not a tempestuous child and it was rare that he behaved in this manner. ‘I want Dominique,’ he
repeated.

  ‘I think you’d better go get her,’ said Mrs Amberton.

  ‘At this time of night? It’s nearly one O’clock in the morning.’

  ‘Well, he’s not going to get any sleep until she gets here,’ she answered angrily. ‘I’ve been trying to get him off for thirty minutes since but she’s the only one he asks for. Just tell her it’s an emergency. Look at him, Matthieu! He’s got a fever. He has to get to bed.’

  I sighed and nodded before returning to my room to finish dressing. The bed looked warm and inviting and I was sorry to have to leave it. I put on two shirts and a jumper to stave off the cold. As I stepped out into the night, wrapping one of Mr Amberton’s scarves around my neck beneath my coat, I shivered and wondered how Dominique would react to this urgent summons.

  Tomas could barely remember his mother. He had only been five when Philippe had killed her and, by the time he reached the age of reason, where he could remember the things that took place, we had already fallen in with Dominique. She had taken some charge of him then, halving my responsibilities towards him during those early days, and had been his sole daytime protector while we lived in Dover and I had earned the money for our dinners through my pickpocketing experiences. They were friends, they got on well, but it had never really occurred to me – or to Dominique, I expect – how much he saw her as a maternal figure, which in turn made me realise how much he must have seen me as his true father. And, since we had arrived in Cageley, that ‘mother’ had all but vanished out of his life. True, he saw her once a week at dinner and they would often run into each other in the village but by and large he did not have the same connections with her as he once had. I didn’t think that he had ever even been to Cageley House, where both Dominique and I spent most of our time, and it occurred to me how little I knew about his own days and what he did to occupy them. Mr Amberton had accepted him into his schoolhouse and from all accounts he performed well there, but what of his friends? What of his interests, his pastimes? I knew nothing of these. I felt guilty about this as I walked down the driveway towards the rear of the house and regretted my neglect of my brother in recent times.

  Dominique and Mary-Ann had a habit of leaving the side door to the kitchen unlocked at nights; if anyone should want to go out and return, it was far easier to go through this way than to have to unbolt the locks on the house’s main door. There was little chance of burglary as Cageley was always a peaceful place and no one would have dared risk the dogs in the driveway had they not been as well acquainted with them as I already was.

  As I turned past the stables towards the kitchen, I imagined Jack asleep in one of the upstairs rooms, dreaming of his escape from this place, and envied him his ambition. I was surprised to see a candle burning in the window of the kitchen and for a moment I thought I could see movement from within; my pace slowed down and quietened as I came closer. I hesitated outside and peered through, and I could see two figures at the table sitting close by each other and recognised them immediately as Dominique and Nat Pepys, whose head was bowed down as he held her hand. He was shaking visibly.

  Shocked, I unlatched the door and stepped inside. There was a sudden rustle and they separated, Dominique standing up and smoothing down her simple dress as she looked at me, Nat barely acknowledging my presence.

  ‘Matthieu,’ she said in surprise. ‘What on earth are you doing here?’

  ‘It’s Tomas,’ I replied suspiciously, looking from one to the other. ‘He’s not well. He’s asking for you.’

  ‘Tomas?’ she asked, her eyes widening and, despite everything else, it occurred to me how much she must have cared for the lad. ‘Why? What’s wrong with him? What’s happened?’

  ‘Nothing,’ I said, shrugging my shoulders. ‘He’s just sick, that’s all. Running a fever. Refuses to go to bed until you come to him. I’m sorry that it’s late but ...’ My voice trailed off. I was unsure what to say about the scene that I had witnessed, whether I had even actually seen what I thought I had seen. By now, Nat was over by the counter lighting a candle and looking at his watch.

  ‘It’s very late, Zéla,’ he said irritably, getting my name right for once. It might have waited until the morning.’

  ‘He’s sick, Nat,’ said Dominique quickly and I noticed he didn’t flinch when she spoke to him in such a familiar fashion. ‘And he’s my brother.’ She took her coat from behind the door and followed me outside. I walked a few steps ahead of her and said nothing. All the way back to the Ambertons’ house, we barely spoke and I made no mention of what I had seen, so unsure was I by now that I had even seen anything. She got Tomas to sleep and left shortly afterwards and it was I who lay awake most of the night then, tossing and turning, wondering, thinking, considering.

  I tried to return to my warm, peaceful beach but it was lost to me now.

  It was the following afternoon before I could get Dominique on her own again to ask her about the events of the previous night. I was tired and irritable from my lack of sleep but furious with her at the same time, having convinced myself that there was something untoward going on between her and Nat Pepys.

  ‘Oh, just stay out of it, Matthieu,’ she told me, trying to get away from me, but I blocked her route back to the house. ‘This doesn’t concern you.’

  ‘Of course it concerns me,’ I shouted. ‘I want to know what’s going on between you two.’

  ‘There’s nothing going on between us,’ she said. ‘As if there would be! A man in his position would never get involved with someone like me!’

  ‘That’s hardly the -’

  ‘We were just talking, that’s all. There’s more to him than you realise. You just see black and white, that’s all. Whatever your friend Jack tells you, you believe.’

  ‘Over Nat? Any day. Any day, Dominique,’ I said firmly.

  ‘Listen to me, Matthieu.’ She leaned in close and I could see from the flaring in her eyes that she was growing more and more angry by the minute and I was wary of pushing this to so far a point that there was no room to come back. ‘You and I ... there is nothing there. Do you see that? I care for you, but -’

  ‘It’s this place,’ I said, spinning around, not wanting to hear any of this. ‘We’ve both become so involved in this bloody place that we’ve forgotten where it all started for us. Remember the boat from Calais, do you? Remember that year in Dover? We could go back there. We were happy there.’

  ‘I’m not going back there,’ she said firmly, a brittle laugh escaping her mouth. ‘Not a chance.’

  ‘And Tomas,’ I said, ‘we have a responsibility towards him.’

  ‘I don’t,’ she said. ‘I care for him, yes, but I am sorry. My responsibilities are only towards myself, no one else. And, if you don’t stop this, you’re going to push me away for ever, can’t you see that, Matthieu?’

  I had nothing else to say and she pushed past me. I felt sick inside; I hated her and loved her at the same time. Maybe Jack was right, I thought. It was time to get out of Cage ley.

  Chapter 20

  The Fictionalise

  I arrived in London in 1850 a wealthy man. Incredibly, the Roman authorities had eventually paid me most of what they owed me for my work on the unfinished opera house and I came back to England burning with ambition. My experiences in Rome had left me feeling ill at ease; Thomas’s unnecessary murder at the hands of Canzone was causing me some sleepless nights and I was angered by the fact that the machinations of one woman – Isabella, my bigamist wife – had resulted in two deaths, that of her husband and my nephew. I placed a sum of money at the disposal of Maria, Thomas’s fiancee, and quit Italy with great haste.

  I began to feel depressed and unfulfilled by my experiences there. I had worked hard on the opera house and on my plans to give Rome a centre of culture and all my efforts had come to nothing. The internal strife of that country made it seem impossible that I could ever go back and complete the tasks which I had been employed to do. I wanted to undertake something which I could feel proud
of; to create something which I could look back on in a hundred years’ time and say I did that. I had money and I had ability and so determined to keep my eyes open for any opportunities which could test me.

  In 1850, that which we subsequently came to know as the Industrial Revolution in England was in full swing. The population had risen dramatically since the end of the Napoleonic Wars thirty-six years earlier; newly created machinery meant better farming practices, which led to a better quality of food and improved standards of living. The average life expectancy then rose to forty years old, although I, of course, was heading towards my 109th birthday and proving an unexpected exception to that particular rule. There was a gradual shift in the populace from the country to the city, where more and more factories and industrial settings were emerging on an almost monthly basis. By the time I myself arrived in London, more people were living in urban dwellings than rural ones, for the first time in history. I arrived with the masses.

  I took a set of rooms near the Law Courts and happened to be living above a family named Jennings, with whom I became quite familiar over the subsequent months. Richard Jennings was working as an assistant at that time to Joseph Pax ton, the designer of the Crystal Palace, and his every working moment was devoted to the upcoming Great Exhibition of 1851. After some initial shyness on both our parts I became familiar with Richard and spent many happy evenings taking a glass of whisky with him at either his kitchen table or my own, listening to his tales of the exotic delights which were being brought to Hyde Park for what then sounded like the most ludicrous display of conspicuous consumption in the history of mankind.

  ‘What exactly is the idea behind it?’ I asked Richard on the first occasion that we spoke of the Exhibition, which was already the talk of the country despite the fact that it lay several months off in the future. Many people were mocking the building, the very structure, and questioning why so much taxpayers’ money was being poured into something which was little more than a display of national achievement. Whether it would serve any earthly purpose after that was open to conjecture.