The Silent Boy. Andrew Taylor

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СКАЧАТЬ footman makes a patriotic point of anglicizing the names of all the foreigners. It is always Mr Fournier or Mr Saul, never some mangled form of Monsieur.

      ‘Maybe he’ll take you away. After all, you’re not much use to man or beast here. Or maybe he’ll just tan your hide hard enough to make you speak. That’s what I’d do, given half a chance.’

      Charles wonders why the visitor should want to see him, why there is even a possibility that he might take Charles away.

      A dark tide of panic rises, filling his throat, making it hard to breathe. Here there is at least something that belongs to his old life, that belongs to the old days when everything was all right, when his mother was alive and they lived in the apartment in the Rue de Grenelle.

      Monsieur Fournier and the Englishman are still sitting at the dining-room table, though all trace of their breakfast has been cleared away. Mr Savill looks cross. Something has irritated him. Perhaps it is Charles.

      Mr Savill is solidly built and has strongly marked features. But what you really notice is the long scar from the corner of his eye to the corner of his mouth.

      ‘Ah, my boy,’ says Fournier in French. ‘Good morning. Come here.’ He dismisses Joseph with a nod and turns to the Englishman. ‘And now, sir, allow me to present Charles.’ He turns back and smiles, for Fournier smiles a great deal, even at Charles. ‘This is Mr Savill.’

      Charles takes a step backwards. Mr Savill stares at him. Charles shrivels under the gaze.

      ‘Come, Charles,’ Fournier says, in English this time. ‘Make your bow.’

      Charles bows as his mother taught him, low and sweeping as she said the gentlemen did at Versailles as the King passed by. When he was little and he bowed to her like that, his mother would clap her hands. Once she gave him a grape coated with sugar.

      Mr Savill inclines his head in acknowledgement. Charles thinks his manner lacks entirely the distinction of a French gentleman. He is rough and clumsy. He is dressed like a tradesman or a lawyer.

      ‘Oh!’ his mother would say when talking of men like this, ‘but he is such an oaf!’

      ‘I am part of your English family,’ Mr Savill says slowly, also in English. He pauses. ‘Do you understand what I say?’

      Charles stares at the wall behind Mr Savill’s head at a particular stripe in the wallpaper that runs through a small brown stain where the damp comes through the wall.

      ‘Do you understand?’ Mr Savill repeats. ‘Nod your head if you do.’

      Mr Savill waits a moment and then repeats the question in French, which is perfectly comprehensible though his accent is quite barbarous, worse than Dr Gohlis’s.

      ‘Nod if you understand me,’ Mr Savill says once more.

      Charles sees the trap before him: he knows that it is possible to coax answers without words, and that these may do just as much harm as answers with words. He lets his eyes drift up to the cornice of the room. He senses the attention of the two men on him, feels the weight of it, feels the pressure of their impatience.

      Time passes. The weight lifts, the pressure relaxes.

      ‘So,’ Fournier says in his normal voice. ‘There you have it, sir. A neat philosophical conundrum, as the doctor puts it. But undeniably inconvenient for the rest of us.’

      ‘And indeed for Charles himself,’ says Mr Savill, his face twisting, as if with pain.

      ‘Let us have fresh coffee,’ Fournier says. ‘Ring for the servant, Charles. Then you may leave us, but do not go far away.’

      The boy does as he is told. As he is leaving the room, he looks back. They are watching him, Monsieur Fournier and Mr Savill, and he wonders what they see.

      ‘You see?’ Fournier says. ‘He understands simple instructions and sometimes will execute them.’

      Mr Savill nods. For a moment, he stops frowning. He turns his head and looks straight at Charles. The scar crinkles. He is smiling.

       Chapter Sixteen

      As Charles closed the door, Savill stood up and walked to the window, as if by doing so he could walk away from the pain. He rubbed the condensation on the glass with the heel of his hand to make a peephole. The world outside sharpened and came into partial focus, streaked and distorted by trails of moisture.

      The rain had stopped. The sky was a pale, duck-egg blue. The dining room overlooked a lawn silvered with a coating of dew. Beyond the grass was the darker green of shrubberies and trees that marched up the slope of the valley towards wooded hills. Further still, another line of hills smudged the horizon.

      Usually the pain was deep, chronic and continuous. But sometimes there were acute and penetrating additions, like flashes of lightning, of something far worse.

      Today, Savill thought, seizing on another subject that might distract him from the pain, I have seen Augusta’s son.

      He wished Lizzie had been here. He had not known that his daughter wanted a brother. Why had he never thought to ask?

      He had brought the miniature of Lizzie. Perhaps he would show Charles what his sister had looked like when she was a child. Not at once, of course. He must wait until they had grown accustomed to one another’s company.

      What would Charles say if he could speak? Had he been there when his mother was murdered? Had he seen her killed?

      The lightning returned.

      ‘Ah!’ Savill said.

      ‘You must see Gohlis immediately,’ Fournier said behind him.

      ‘Later.’

      ‘No, no. Now. One cannot trifle with pain, sir.’

      ‘Indeed.’ Savill drew a deep breath. The lightning had receded for the moment. ‘Tell me, can Charles read and write?’

      Fournier raised his face. In the clear light of morning, the eyes beneath the crooked eyebrows were a shade of brown that merged imperceptibly with green, like pond water. ‘Oh yes.’

      ‘So one may converse with him on paper?’

      ‘I’m afraid not. He used to be an apt scholar, but if you ask him to write anything now – anything at all – he will give the appearance of applying himself to the task with great industry. But the result of his labours is merely scratchings and scribblings. From a distance they mimic the look of handwriting. But when you try to read them all you see is a tangle of impenetrable marks.’ Fournier paused and his murky eyes seemed larger than ever. ‘The servants think he is either an idiot or possessed by the devil. If not both.’

      ‘And what do you think, sir?’

      ‘I am aware merely of my own ignorance.’ Fournier smiled, inviting complicity in a shared superior understanding. ‘Poor Charles almost certainly witnessed the murder of his mother. How can one СКАЧАТЬ