The Silent Boy

by Taylor, Andrew

  A current of cold air brushed his cheek. He brought his eyes level with a chink in the tiles where one of them had slipped a few inches. He saw a roofless cottage and, beyond it, a scrubby meadow rising to a bedraggled hedgerow.

  Where the devil was he? Not in London.

  He pushed at the tile immediately below the hole and felt it lift away from the lath supporting it. The rattle of its sliding down the roof sounded inordinately loud. He froze, listening for running footsteps.

  No one came. The only sound was birdsong in the distance. He made himself wait another minute, counting the seconds. Then he set to work.

  First he removed the tiles around the hole he had made. The difficulty was the horizontal laths, which were nailed to the rafters at each of the points of intersection. Savill tried to push first one then the other with the heel of his hand. None of the nails would move.

  When the skin of one hand began to bleed, Savill considered using one of the tiles as a hammer but abandoned the idea on the grounds that the sound of the blows would carry too easily in the early morning quiet.

  It was only then, with a sense of his own stupidity, that he remembered the clasp-knife he usually carried in his coat pocket. He felt for it, only to discover it had gone. His purse and pocketbook had gone as well. Jarsdel must have taken them all.

  A disproportionate anger, fuelled by his own helplessness, welled up inside him. He lashed out at the nearest lath with his clenched fist.

  Two things happened at once: he cried out with pain, and the lath snapped. He had hit it midway between the rafters on either side, where it was at its weakest, and where a knot in the wood had further lessened its strength. The age of the lath had done the rest.

  He licked his grazed knuckles. Then, with the sweat pouring off him, he worked at the two halves of the lath, using the extra leverage to prise up the nails on either side.

  Once he had cleared a tier of tiles and its supporting lath between the pair of rafters, he stripped the tiles from the tier below, which allowed him to attack the lath that had supported them. He could exert more force this time, and it soon snapped in two places.

  Light now poured into the shed. Savill poked his head through the hole in the roof and looked about him. A mass of inky clouds was approaching from the east, where the sun was just visible, veiled with moisture, close to the horizon. Immediately below him was a yard with a small open store to one side and the roofless cottage directly opposite. The yard and the floor of the store were choked with tall, dying weeds that glistened with last night’s rain. Like the cottage, the store had lost its tiles – but not from neglect: by the look of it, they had been deliberately stripped off. The cottage’s back door and its window frames had also been removed.

  The birds were no longer singing. But there were other sounds in the distance: scuffling and groaning and shouts.

  Savill scrambled through the hole and let himself down to the yard below. He landed awkwardly, wrenching his right ankle.

  He wanted to run in the opposite direction from the sounds. What stopped him was the chance that they might lead him to Charles. His headache now made thinking almost impossible. But it seemed rational to suspect that Jarsdel had brought both Charles and Savill himself to the one place, and that now Malbourne had come to see what his hireling had brought him.

  He moved toward the end of the cottage, where the remains of a gate linked the house with the open store. Beyond it, a muddy track, scarred with deep wheel-ruts, wound its way between gently sloping fields. Salvaged tiles had been stacked untidily on the verge.

  The sounds had grown louder. Savill passed through the gateway and turned left, guided by the noises. He followed the blank gable wall of the cottage. At the next corner he hesitated and then slowly put his head round it.

  Not ten yards away was the huge bulk of Jarsdel, standing with his back to Savill. Seen from the rear, he was almost egg-like in his proportions. He was kicking something on the ground. He was so absorbed, and so energetic, in his exertions that his hat had fallen off, and he had trodden on it.

  Each kick was accompanied with a grunt. His legs and feet looked too small to do much harm to anything but each kick produced an answering scream from its target.

  Savill craned his head further round, trying to see the victim. At that moment, Jarsdel swivelled about. As part of the same movement, he stooped and stretched his arm towards his hat. There was something inherently comic in the manoeuvre, for his dimensions made picking up anything from the ground difficult for him.

  His eyes met Savill’s.

  Neither of them moved for a moment. Jarsdel’s face was red with exertion. His mouth opened in a pink O of surprise. His great chest heaved up and down.

  Jarsdel straightened up. His hat was still on the ground. In his hand was a short, heavy stick.

  Savill turned and bolted. At the gateway to the yard, he turned sharply to the left, away from the cottage and its yard. His instinct – it would have been inaccurate to call it a plan – was simply to put as much distance between himself and Jarsdel as possible, and the simplest way to do that was to follow the track away from the buildings.

  But he had miscalculated. The mud that spread out from the gateway was much deeper than it looked. It sucked at his feet and trapped them.

  Jarsdel lumbered towards him, blocking the access to the lane. He crowed wordlessly and plunged toward Savill, the stick upraised.

  The mud caught him too. He sank to his ankles. His momentum drove him forward. He tripped, dragged down by his own weight, and fell, bellowing, to the ground.

  Savill wrenched his feet free and jumped to the firmer surface of the verge. He staggered as he landed, colliding with the stack of tiles.

  Jarsdel was on his hands and knees now, still bellowing, trying to raise his bulk out of the mud.

  Savill seized the nearest tile in both hands and, raising his arms over his head, threw it at Jarsdel. It hit the man on his cheek. He shouted more loudly and canted over.

  Without a moment’s hesitation, Savill threw another tile. This one caught Jarsdel on the side on his head, just above the ear. He collapsed into the mud. His limbs twitched but the enormous body lay still.

  Savill waited a few seconds, watching him. Then he lobbed a third tile and the arms and legs stopped moving.

  Chapter Fifty-Eight

  Savill walked away without a backward glance. Jarsdel’s victim was more important than the question of whether Jarsdel was dead or dying.

  At the corner of the cottage, Savill paused. His headache was now so acute that it affected his vision, which was sometimes blurred. Jarsdel had hit him so hard last night that he must have been senseless for hours. Savill touched his skull, probing the swelling there, which had grown larger. He could feel nothing broken, thank God, but he did not like to press too hard.

  But he could not afford to attend to his injuries. Everything now had to be reassessed in the light of the alliance between Malbourne and Jarsdel.

  He glanced up. A buzzard circled high above his head. Every now and then its wings flapped with luxurious languor. A shiver ran through him – partly for the sake of the bird’s intended victim and partly because he was so very cold.

  He walked on. His limbs were heavy with tiredness. His clothes were damp and his fall in the lane had left the right side of his coat smeared with mud.

  The other man was still lying spread-eagled on the ground at the front of the ruined cottage, with Jarsdel’s ruined hat within a yard of him. He wore a riding coat and boots, both filthy. His upturned face was a mass of blood, streaked with mucous. His mouth was open and he had lost at least one tooth. His eyes were closed, and his chest was not moving.

  Savill knelt beside him. He picked up the victim’s left wrist and felt for a pulse. He couldn’t find it. Jarsdel would hang for this murderous assault, Savill thought, if for nothing else.

  There was a flutter of life beneath his fingertips.

  The man was alive, after all. His cra
vat had come loose in the struggle. Savill eased it away from his neck, registering the fact that it was made of fine linen. He used it to dab gently at the ruined face. The man moaned softly. His eyelids twitched but did not open.

  Both the boots and riding coat were well made. Savill felt the pockets of the coat, seeking a clue to the man’s identity. He found nothing apart from a box pistol, small enough for a waistcoat or lady’s muff, which he transferred to his own pocket.

  The man moaned again and opened his eyes. He stared up at Savill, still kneeling beside him. Whether he saw him was another matter. His eyebrows arched, creating an illusion of astonishment.

  The swollen lips moved. A wordless mumble emerged. The man broke off and swallowed. The eyelids fluttered down.

  Savill bent closer to his face. ‘What did you say?’

  There was no reply.

  ‘Let me help you, sir. I am your friend.’

  The lips twitched. The mouth opened. Broken words emerged, one by one, shorn of their proper consonants and separated by gasps of breath. They might have been meaningless, not words but random syllables dragged up from the depths of pain. Or they might have been a desperate attempt to say five or six short words.

  ‘Say it again. I can’t understand you.’

  It was too late. The eyes had closed again. The breathing settled to a regular rhythm.

  At that moment Savill knew who this was. It was something to do with the man’s slim build and the quietly expensive clothes. Or even those arched eyebrows, which hinted not only at surprise but also at disdain.

  So why the devil had Jarsdel done his best to kick Mr Malbourne to death? And what had Malbourne tried so hard to say?

  Time drifted away. It began to rain again, more gently this time, the drops of water floating gently down.

  Savill had no idea how long he spent there, crouching beside Horace Malbourne and nursing his aching head. He was aware in a remote province of his mind that he needed to think about what had happened, that there were implications that changed everything. But his rational faculty was paralysed.

  Slowly the pain in his head diminished and turned into the question of what to do next. Malbourne needed help. Charles must be found. Everything else was secondary.

  With concentration and much painful effort, Savill stood up. The movement made the blood roar in his head. He swayed like a drunken man. He stared down at Horace Malbourne.

  What if he wakes when I’m gone? Savill wondered, his mind seizing on a lesser question because it could not cope with the greater ones.

  Malbourne’s plight was bad enough without his having to wonder what had happened to him. Savill decided to leave a note. His pocket book had gone, but Dick Ogden’s sketchbook was still there, an oblong shape in his coat, together with a pencil which Savill kept in his waistcoat.

  He took out the sketchbook and, shielding it from the rain, turned towards the back, looking for a blank page he could tear out. He chanced to open the book about two-thirds of the way through, at a page containing one of Ogden’s drawings of buildings. He stopped, distracted from his search for a blank sheet.

  There was something unexpectedly familiar about the sketch. The drawing was in ink. It showed a two-storey wing of a house. On the ground floor, long windows opened on to a path or terrace that terminated with a column holding an urn. Half a dozen birds skimmed to and fro above the roofline, their rapid, apparently erratic movements captured with a few economical flicks of the pen.

  Swallows perhaps, Savill thought, pushing the distraction aside and turning the pages over, or house martins or even swifts.

  Swallows? Those confounded swallows.

  The shock was so great that Savill staggered and almost fell. He steadied himself against the wall of the cottage. This was a sketch of Mr Rampton’s new wing at Vardells, together with the defecating swallows that Rampton hated with such strange ardour. The long windows of the new library opened on to the terrace.

  But what had Dick Ogden to do with Rampton? And why had he been at Vardells?

  Savill flicked the pages until he came back to the sketch. The urn was not standing on a column, as he had first thought, but on the wall that Mr Rampton intended to mark the end of the terrace. The builders had been at work on the wall when Savill had last been to Vardells, midway in September.

  Therefore, Savill thought, fighting to dispel the mist in his mind, Dick Ogden had been at Vardells afterwards, when the work had been finished. Since the wall was complete, and since the mortar was apparently firmly enough set to sustain the weight of an urn, the sketch must have been made at least a week or so after Savill’s last visit.

  The conclusion was inescapable: Ogden had called at Vardells after Savill had gone down to Charnwood.

  Perhaps it was the distraction of another puzzle, of another line of thought. Or perhaps it was that the shock of this new discovery jolted another, quite separate train of thought into motion again, and changed its direction.

  Whatever the reason, Savill suddenly had a possible interpretation of the sounds that Malbourne had made, of the five broken words he had tried so hard to say.

  ‘He – came – to – Paris – too.’

  But who came? Ogden?

  Chapter Fifty-Nine

  Charles knows at once that dawn has come. The light is different, grey and steady. The air is colder, too. Finally – as if to put the question beyond doubt – a cock crows in the distance.

  Strange to say, he has slept deeply. His last memory is of the terrible sound – Tip-tap – and what happened next. He remembers how he shut his eyes and pretended to be asleep. He remembers the air on his face as the curtain was moved aside and the glare of the candle flame beyond his lashes.

  But then nothing.

  He listens but hears nothing except the crowing cock and a slight rustling that is probably the rain. When the pressure to relieve himself grows intolerable, he sits up in bed. He is still wearing the clothes he wore in Nightingale Lane, apart from his coat and shoes. His fingers poke the line where the curtains meet. He pulls them apart.

  The light is still uncertain. It has no more sheen to it than dulled pewter. It shows the outlines of a small room with a sloping roof. There is a dormer window, which has a bowed upper edge. His eyes, drawn to the light, go to the window, so he notices at once the three vertical bars that divide it.

  Charles wriggles away from the bedclothes and, shivering, climbs down from the bed. His shoes are waiting side by side for him. He slips them on and feels under the bed for the pot.

  Afterwards he tiptoes to the window and looks out over a valley of slates between two pitched roofs, joined by a broad gutter lined with lead. The slates are wet with rain. Everything is grey, including the sky and a wisp of smoke that ascends towards it from a chimneystack to the left.

  It is not a big window. The bars are set too close together for even a small and very skinny boy to slip between them.

  Charles puts on his coat, drawing it close to him for warmth. His wrists poke out of the sleeves and the coat feels tight around his chest and armpits.

  He makes a survey of the rest of the room. It is bare of furniture apart from the bed and a washstand. It measures ten and a half paces by seven and a quarter. There is no fireplace.

  He turns the door knob. The door rattles in its frame but it doesn’t open.

  All these are facts, and may be relied upon.

  Is he still in London? The question is almost meaningless. Where everything is strange, one place becomes much the same as another.

  Nightingale Lane, though: that is a real place. The memories are coming back now. Someone betrayed him and sent the man-mountain to find him there.

  Only Lizzie knew he was in Nightingale Lane. His sister.

  Did she betray him? Is she even really his sister? There is no way of knowing. But if she told Mr Savill, then he knew that Charles was there too, and probably it was he who sent the man-mountain, not the girl who might or might not be Lizzie.

/>   Charles squeezes his eyes closed until he sees only sparks of false light in the darkness. The man-mountain is an enemy. That is fact.

  He is very hungry. That is another fact. If one knew enough facts, then—

  A key is turning in the lock of the door.

  All the facts in the world evaporate.

  Charles back away until his shoulder bumps against the wall. He pushes himself into the corner by the bedhead.

  The door swings slowly into the room.

  On the threshold stands an old man, hunched over a stick. He is dressed in a morning gown and slippers, and on his head is a nightcap. He carries a lighted candle. His eyes slide into the room and come to rest on Charles.

  He raises the candlestick and pinches out the flame. His face is a place of hollows and shadows.

  ‘Good morning, Charles,’ he says in English. He pauses and wrinkles his nose, as if to satisfy an itch. He tugs with his right hand at the fingers of his left. ‘I see you’re awake already. I hope you slept well?’

  He tugs again. The finger joints pop.

  Tip-tap.

  The man stares at Charles. Charles stares at him.

  ‘Breakfast,’ the man says. ‘Are you hungry?’

  Say nothing. Not a word to anyone. Whatever you see. Whatever you hear. Do you understand? Say nothing. Ever.

  The man frowns. He is still pulling at his fingers.

  Tip-tap. Like cracking a walnut.

  The man stretches out his hand and wraps chilly fingers around Charles’s wrist.

  ‘You’re shivering,’ he says. ‘We must warm you, mustn’t we?’

  He draws Charles from the room and leads him along the landing to another door. They enter a room which also has a sloping ceiling. But this apartment is larger than the bedchamber and has two of the windows with bowed tops and vertical bars. A coal fire burns briskly in the fireplace.