The Silent Boy. Andrew Taylor

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       Chapter Eight

      Charnwood is an old house where nothing is correct. All the lines are crooked – the walls, the roofs, the chimneystacks. It stands in a muddy place where it is always cold and raining. At night it is so dark and quiet that if a person screamed only the stars would hear him.

      We are quite safe here, Fournier tells Charles. No one can harm us.

      But nobody is happy here, Charles thinks, even Fournier and the Count, who talk endlessly about King Louis and the poor royal family, captives in the Temple, and about their own unhappy plight.

      ‘We are in exile,’ the Count says one morning when Charles is in the room. ‘No one will visit us here. I declare I shall die of boredom.’

      It is settled that Dr Gohlis will join the party, though Charles understands that he is not so much a visitor as a superior sort of servant who is permitted to dine with his masters. Fournier gives him permission to use a room over the stables for his experiments.

      ‘Monsieur de Quillon and I do not want you pursuing your studies in the house,’ Fournier says to the doctor by way of pleasantry. ‘It would not be agreeable to hear the screams of your victims.’

      Charles listens to the servants’ conversation. The servants talk quite freely when he is among them. He learns that, in their eyes, his inability to speak makes him an idiot or a dumb animal. He also eavesdrops on the Count, which is not difficult because he rarely moderates the volume of his voice.

      So Charles soon learns the reason why nobody comes to call on them. It is a fact to be recorded in his memory and relied on. The Vicar of Norbury, Mr Horton, does not approve of the Count and Monsieur Fournier. Their politics, their lack of religion and their amoral conduct put them beyond the pale.

      The local gentry, such as they are – ‘Jumped-up farmers,’ says the Count, ‘clodhopping peasants with turnips under their fingernails’ – take their lead from Mr Horton. The King of England does not like them either, so no one is allowed to come down from London.

      Mrs West, who lives at Norbury Park, is their friend, but she cannot call at Charnwood because there is no lady in the house to receive her. Sometimes the gentlemen call on her and she asks them to dine. But Charles always stays at Charnwood.

      The Count summons Charles. The grown-ups are dining so they are all there around the table. The room with its peeling wallpaper smells of gravy and wine and perfume as well as of damp.

      ‘You went outside today,’ the Count says. ‘Saul saw you in the stableyard.’

      Saul is Monsieur de Quillon’s valet, who has come with him from France.

      The Count leans his elbow on the table and brings his great head almost to the level of Charles’s. ‘That’s all right. When you are at liberty, you may go there. And you may go into the gardens. But that is all. You must not go into the woods, or the fields, or into the village. Is that understood?’

      Charles stares at him.

      ‘Well?’ the Count says. ‘You understand? Why the devil will you not speak?’

      ‘We must see what we can contrive,’ Gohlis says, putting his head on one side and studying Charles. ‘He can do better than this.’

      Fournier says, ‘Yes, he does understand. You can see it in his eyes.’

      ‘It is most interesting,’ the doctor says to the Count. ‘Considered philosophically and scientifically. You must permit me to try an experiment, sir.’

      ‘You can do as you like, as long as you make him speak.’

      In the last week of September, the doctor’s luggage arrives – two trunks and three wooden boxes.

      One of the boxes contains the figure of Louis, wrapped in a cotton shroud and floating in a cloud of wood shavings. Dr Gohlis himself unpacks him. Charles watches the disinterment from the second-floor landing, where his room is. He peers through the balustrade, down the well through the middle of the house to the floor of the hall where the doctor is at work.

      He is like a gravedigger, Charles thinks, bringing out the dead.

      The contents of the boxes, including Louis, are transferred to the room in the stables. Gohlis calls the room his laboratory.

      Next morning Charles rises very early. Only the servants are downstairs. He goes out to the stableyard. The doctor’s room is at one end of the loft over the looseboxes, where there is now only a solitary horse.

      The door is locked. Charles cannot find the key.

      Beside the stable is the coach house. It is possible, Charles finds, to scramble on to a water butt in the yard and climb into the lead-lined gully at the foot of the sloping roof of the coach house. If he walks along the gully, and climbs up the slope of the tiled roof, he can look through the dusty window of the laboratory.

      Charles feels a surge of relief when he sees Louis standing at the end of the table on the other side of the window. He is looking across the table and keeping his own counsel.

      If, as is possible, there is still someone there, a living boy locked in the prison made from the mould of his own mutilated body, then he must be able to see the window from the corner of his eye.

      Charles thinks of the saints in Notre-Dame on the Île de la Cité. You may pray to the statue of a saint and the saint hears your prayer and will answer you, if he or she pleases. What is prayer but conversation in church? Why should Louis be any different from an image of the Virgin?

      Charles taps the glass. Louis, he thinks as hard as he can, it’s me.

      At first he thinks it in French. СКАЧАТЬ