The Silent Boy. Andrew Taylor

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СКАЧАТЬ they are already open.

      Of course they are.

      He pushes the gate outward. Nothing happens. Locked, not bolted? In desperation he tugs it towards him. The gate slams into him with such force that he falls on the slippery cobbles.

      The cottage door is opening.

      Panic surges through him. He is on his feet again. The lane outside the gate is in darkness. He leaps through the wicket. The lane beyond runs parallel to the street. The warm air stinks of decay. The city is so hot it has gone mad.

      In the confusion, he is dimly aware that the hammering from the house has stopped. There are lights on the other side of the yard. Shutters are flung open. The windows fill with the light of hell.

      Chains rattle, bolts slide back. A dog is barking with deep, excited bellows.

      Through the open wicket he sees the house door opening. He glimpses the black shape of a huge dog in the doorway.

      Charles covers his mouth with his hand to keep the words inside from spilling out. He turns and runs.

      There is so much confusion in the world that no one gives Charles a second glance. They push past him. They cuff him out of their way as if swatting a fly.

      He is of no interest to them. He is nothing. He is glad to be nothing. He wants to be less than nothing.

      He shrinks back into a doorway. He sees blood everywhere, in the gutters, on the faces and clothes of the men and women hurrying past him, daubed on the wall opposite.

      At the corner of the street, the crowd has surrounded a coach. They are pulling out the man and the woman inside and throwing out their possessions. A hatbox falls open and the hat rolls out. A man stamps on it.

      The woman is crying, great ragged sobs. The gentleman is quite silent. His eyes are closed.

      The baker’s assistant, who is a burly fellow half a head taller than everyone else, tugs at the woman’s dress. He paws at the neck. The thin fabric rips.

      Charles slips from the doorway. He does not know where he is going but his feet know the way. He has nothing with him except the shirt he was sleeping in, his breeches and the shoes on his feet.

      The sign of the Golden Pheasant hangs above the shop that sells poultry. Someone has draped a petticoat over it.

      Old Barbon, the porter of the house five doors down, is lying on the ground. He is pouring wine into his mouth and the liquid runs over his cheeks. Barbon once gave him a plum so sweet and juicy that Marie said it came from the angels.

      Madame Pial, who keeps the wine shop in the next street, is dragging a sack along the road. She has lost her hat and her cap. Her grey hair flows in a greasy tide over her shoulders.

      The Rue de Richelieu is seething with people. Their faces are twisted out of shape. They are no longer human. They are ghouls in a nightmare. Charles pushes through them in the direction of the river. The street ends at the Rue Saint-Honoré. He means to turn left and cross the river at the Pont Royal. But the crowd is even denser here, clustering around the Tuileries like wasps round a saucer of jam. He will not be able to force his way through.

      Besides, lying on the road not three yards away from him is one of the King’s Swiss Guards. The man has no head and he has lost his boots and breeches. His entrails coil out of his belly, gleaming in the torchlight, still twitching.

      Charles slows. He weaves eastwards towards the Île du Palais. He crosses the river at the Pont Neuf. National Guards are on both sides of the river and also on the Île du Palais itself. But they are taking no notice of the people who stream north over the river towards the Tuileries. He slips among them, against the flow of the tide. He smells sweat and excitement and anger.

      There are fewer people on the Rive Gauche. But the noise is almost as bad. The sound of artillery and musket fire near the Tuileries. The screams and shouts. The clatter of wheels and hooves.

      On the Quai d’Orsay and the Quai Theatines people are watching the battle on the other side of the river as if it is a firework display.

      In the Rue Dauphine, his mind clears, not much but enough to realize where he is going. He has been here only once before, and then it was daylight and everything was normal. It takes him nearly an hour to find his way, casting to and fro in the near darkness, avoiding the crowds, avoiding the people who try to sweep him into their lives.

      At last, not far from the Café Corazza, he stumbles on the narrow mouth of the alley. It leads to a paved court. The only light comes from an oil lamp on a second-floor windowsill. The lamp casts a faint dirty-yellow fragrance. The court has trapped the sun’s warmth during the day. It is even hotter than the street.

      For a moment he listens. He hears nothing nearby except the scramble of rats, a sound grown so familiar he barely notices it.

      He finds the door with the help of his fingertips not his eyes.

      The wood is old and scarred and as dry as a desert. Charles hammers on it until his knuckles bleed. He hammers on it until it opens.

      Marie is not much taller than he is. She is almost as wide as she is tall. She looks like a bull in a faded blue dress and carries with her a smell of sweat, garlic and woodsmoke, mingled with a sour, milky quality that is hers alone. Her smell is as familiar to Charles as anything in the world.

      She draws him over the threshold and squeezes him in her arms so tightly that he finds it hard to breathe.

      ‘What happened?’ she says. ‘Where is Madame?’

      She asks him questions over and over again and he cannot answer any of them. In the end she gives up. She brings water and a cloth and rinses the blood from his face and hands.

      The only light in the room comes from the stump of a tallow candle and a rushlight on the unlit stove. That is why she does not see the clotted patches of blood in his hair. But her fingers find them. She makes the smacking noise with her lips that signifies her disapproval of something. With sudden violence, she strips off his breeches and his stained shirt. She drags him, white and naked, into the court.

      There is a pump in one corner. She holds him under it with one hand and sluices water over him with the other. She runs her fingers through his wet hair, over every surface and into every crack and cranny of his slippery body. She rinses him again. With a hand on his neck, she pushes him in front of her into the room and bars the door behind them.

      Despite the heat, Charles is shivering. She wraps him in a blanket, makes him sit on a stool and lean against the wall. She brings him water in a beaker made of wood.

      He drinks greedily. She is humming quietly. She often does this, the same three notes, la-la-la, low and soft, over and over again.

      He is glad that Luc is not there. Luc is Marie’s brother. He is a kitchen porter. He has only one eye, owing to a frightful accident in the slaughterhouse where he used to work. Though she did not witness it herself, Marie has described the accident to him many many times in graphic detail.

      Charles’s one visit to this house, nearly a year ago, was so that he might see in person the angry red crater that was the site of Luc’s lost left eye. It was not as impressive in reality as in imagination. For the sake of his hosts, he acted out a polite pantomime of shock and horror. In truth, however, СКАЧАТЬ