The Silent Boy (36 page)

By now it is light enough to sit in a nest of blankets on the window seat and continue with
Robinson Crusoe
. Miss Horton had left the narrative at the moment when Mr Crusoe discovered the print of a naked foot in the sand. Charles spent some hours puzzling over the book yesterday but made painfully slow progress because of the English language and because, he suspects, Miss Horton must have left out many of the duller passages when she read the book to him at Charnwood.

Today, however, his efforts are rewarded by Mr Crusoe’s stumbling on the site of a cannibal dinner party on the beach, a discovery that quite understandably disgusts Mr Crusoe so much that nature obliges him to vomit. This occurs nearly eighteen years after his shipwreck and the start of his solitary life. Charles reads on and on and for a while entirely forgets that he is a fugitive concealed in a house where he has no right to be.

The interruption comes as Mr Crusoe stumbles on a cave that contains a groaning monster.

The click of the latch of the door in the wall from the alley.

Charles tumbles from the window seat. Wriggling on to his knees, he peers through the window, keeping well away from the glass. The old woman he saw yesterday is coming into the yard. Her head is turned over her shoulder. Two young ladies follow her, and then another woman dressed as a maid. He cannot see their faces because of their hats.

As they cross the yard, the sound of their voices reach him. One of the girls laughs.

My sister?

Charles does not wait to see more. He gathers up the blankets and bundles them into the alcove behind the curtain. Then he follows them. He squats on the blankets behind the cloaks.

The closet door is open. There are noises in the house below – the old woman talking about something in a voice that grates like a rusty hinge, a door banging and then running footsteps on the stairs.

‘Pray do not trouble yourself, ma’am,’ a young woman says. ‘I know just where it is.’

That is when Charles discovers that he has left
Robinson Crusoe
on the window seat. And the jar of quince jelly, now half-eaten, is on the floor. But the floorboards will betray him if he tries to retrieve them.

Light, rapid footsteps cross the landing.

A door opens. The footsteps are in the next room, Lizzie’s bedchamber. There is the scrape of a drawer being pulled out; after a pause it is closed. Then another drawer. Then a third.

More footsteps. A long pause. Footsteps again. A faint click.

The steps are on the landing.

Downstairs, the old woman’s voice drones on, cutting into the quietness of the house like a saw.

The young woman enters the closet. A pause.

She has seen the book, Charles knows, lying where he left it, face down on the window seat at the very moment when Mr Crusoe enters the cave with a flaming torch held aloft. And the jar, with the wooden spoon standing in what’s left of the jelly.

He prays to Father Viré’s God.
Make her go away
.

God does not listen. As usual.

She sucks in a breath of air. A flurry of footsteps. She snatches back the curtain and light floods into the alcove.

Even then he cherishes the hope that she has not seen him, that the cloaks and blankets hide him from her eyes.

‘Come out,’ she whispers. ‘Come out now. Come on, you silly boy.’

‘Lizzie? Where are you?’

It is the voice of another young woman, calling up the stairs.

Lizzie pulls away the screen of cloaks. She holds her forefinger to her lips.

‘Coming,’ she calls back.

She stares down at him, her eyes widening. She is so fresh and clean. She has a piece of lace in her hand, as delicate as a cobweb.

All of a sudden, he sees himself as she must see him: the ragged clothes, the unkempt hair and the dirt.

‘Are you – are you Charles? You are, aren’t you?’

Say nothing.

My sister, he thinks.

‘Are you? Why won’t you answer?’ She pauses and then rushes on: ‘Oh, of course. You have lived in France. Perhaps you don’t understand English.’ She draws breath, pauses again and whispers very slowly and carefully: ‘
Je m’appelle Elizabeth Savill. Comment vous appellez-vous
?’

‘Lizzie?’ The voice comes up the stairs again. ‘Where are you? Have you found it?’

‘Yes, Mary,’ she calls back. ‘I shall be down directly.’ She swallows. ‘You must be Charles. Who else could you be? And your eyes – oh, please say something.
Je suis vôtre sœur. Monsieur Savill – mon père – il vous cherche. Je vais – je vais le—’
She pounces on
Robinson Crusoe
. ‘But you do understand English. You must, if you read this.’

He raises his hands to his face and crosses his forefingers over his mouth.

She frowns. ‘Oh – do you mean you’re scared to speak?’ The frown deepens. ‘Or you can’t?’

There are footsteps coming up the stairs.

‘Quick,’ she says, and he knows that she has made up her mind to be his friend.

She arranges the cloaks to cover most of him and draws the curtain across the alcove. A moment later there’s a soft thud as
Robinson Crusoe
lands on the blanket by his feet. The jar of quince jelly slides under the hem of the curtain.

‘I’ve got it, Mary,’ Lizzie says. ‘What do think?’

‘Oh it’s lovely,’ says another voice, a young woman’s. ‘But is it large enough?’

‘Your mother will know.’

Mary lowers her voice to a whisper. ‘Does she ever stop talking?’

‘Mrs Forster? No. She probably talks in her sleep as well.’

The two girls giggle.

‘My father says she is to be pitied, and we should not laugh at her,’ Lizzie goes on, with the ghost of the laugh still in her voice. ‘But I fear it is very hard not to. It’s better than hitting her over the head with a rolling pin to make her hold her tongue. But Father says she works hard, and is entirely to be trusted, and she is a good mother to her poor unfortunate daughter. Which is all very true, no doubt, but I do wish she would be quiet sometimes.’ She raises her voice to its normal level. ‘Come – we must not keep Mrs Forster waiting.’ She lowers her voice again. ‘And your poor maid. She’s bearing the brunt of all this. She’ll give your mother notice when she gets home.’

Mary suppresses a snort of laughter. The two of them leave the room and begin to go downstairs. Charles lets out his breath and fights a desire to sneeze.

‘You go down,’ he hears Lizzie say. ‘I might as well get my other cloak while we’re here. It’s much colder, isn’t it?’

She runs into the closet. The curtain slides back. She snatches at a dark blue cloak. She bends down, bringing her face to within a foot of his.

‘Stay here, Charles,’ she says. ‘
Restez ici, je vous en prie
. I will write to my father and he will come and take care of you.’

The encounter with Mr Rampton did not go well.

‘You did what, sir?’ he said when Savill told him how he had spent yesterday afternoon. ‘You saw Mrs Ogden? I told you expressly that you must leave all that to me, that I did not want you—’

‘You do not have the right to forbid me to do anything. I’m not in your employment.’

‘You will find that I have the power to compel you. Do not make me use it.’

‘Young Ogden is Irwin. I have proof. And there’s worse—’

‘Hush.’ Rampton rose from his desk. ‘The damage is done, I suppose. It will be better if we talk this over elsewhere.’ His voice was very quiet. ‘Let us take a turn in the Park.’

‘But may I not—’

Rampton cut him off with a chopping motion of his hand. ‘Pray oblige me in this, sir.’

He rang the bell and ordered his greatcoat, hat and stick to be brought. ‘I shall be gone for twenty minutes or less,’ he told Malbourne. ‘I am expecting His Lordship this afternoon but I do not know when. If he should call while I am out, pray make my excuses and ask him to be good enough to wait.’

When they went downstairs, Jarsdel came out of his box to usher them down to the street. Despite his usual surliness, he could not keep his eyes from Mr Rampton’s face, as a whipped dog cannot ignore his master.

‘Brush your coat and straighten your wig,’ Rampton said to him in a soft, chilly voice. ‘His Lordship may call this afternoon, and I do not wish him to think we have a scarecrow to guard our door.’

Jarsdel lowered his head and leaned forward, which was all he could manage in the way of a bow.

Neither Rampton nor Savill spoke on their way to the Park. The rain had stopped and there were patches of sunshine, enough to lend colour to the notion that the two of them were taking the air after a morning’s work in their office. They walked west along the street, crossed the top of Duke Street and cut through the alley leading to the open space beyond. Rampton encountered two men who bowed to him, but he avoided conversation with them.

They passed beneath the trees that lined the border of the Park and walked in silence across the open ground between them and the canal. The weather was growing colder now, with occasional gusts of rain. There were few gentlemen about – it was chiefly the common sort of people at this hour, and not many of those.

When they reached the water, Rampton stopped. They were near the eastern end of the canal, as straight as a ruler could make it. It pointed at the Parade Ground, with the arch of the Horse Guards beyond.

‘Well, sir,’ Rampton said at last, poking his stick at a slug that had the temerity to be passing over the stone border of the water. ‘You had better tell me the whole.’

Savill described his encounter with Mrs Ogden at the British Library, and how he had known she would be there. ‘She and her husband have a son, Richard, who ran up debts, quarrelled with his father and was sent down from Oxford. He refused to settle to the law and in the end his father cast him out. He lived for a while on the river at their cottage beyond Chiswick and tried to make his living with his pencil, but it did not answer. His mother is desperate to effect a reconciliation – that is why she talked so frankly to me. Her description of him answers in every particular the description of Irwin, the man who took Charles away from Charnwood. You will recall that Norbury’s landlady in Somersetshire said he was “artistical”. And, to cap it all, Irwin was Ogden’s mother’s maiden name.’

Rampton grunted. ‘Very well. Let us walk on. I’m cold.’

They followed the bank of the canal. To the west, at the far end of the long vista of water choked with lilies under a grey sky was the Queen’s residence, Buckingham House, with its quadrants and pavilions and its forest of smoking chimneys. As they walked, Savill’s hand brushed the side of his coat and felt the outline of Ogden’s sketchbook in his pocket. He couldn’t hide the truth for ever.

‘There’s more,’ he said.

‘I thought there might be. When you decide to meddle, sir, you do it wholeheartedly. I must give you that. Where did you ride to?’

‘How did you know I’d ridden anywhere?’

‘When I enquired for you this morning, one of the clerks downstairs said he had seen you riding down Great George Street on one of the hacks from the Sun in Splendour.’

‘I went out to the Ogdens’ cottage.’

‘Why?’

‘Because it’s not so far from the Bath road, sir.’

‘I see. So you thought Irwin might have had himself and the boy set down nearby as they were approaching London? Young Ogden, that is.’

‘Yes, sir.’ Savill glanced at Rampton: the old man’s body might be showing its age but there was nothing amiss with his intellectual faculties. ‘And I was right.’

Rampton stopped. ‘You found him?’

Savill nodded. ‘In a boathouse on the riverbank. Someone had blown his brains out.’

‘Good God! And Charles?’

‘He wasn’t there. No one was – the place was quite deserted. But he had been there. The body was in a closet. As soon as I opened the door, I knew by the smell that a firearm had been discharged. The name Charles was scratched on one of the shelves. It was no more than two feet away from the body.’

‘But we can’t necessarily infer from that it was our Charles who wrote it.’

‘I think we can, sir. The mark had been made very recently.’

‘God damn it.’ Rampton swung his stick at a pebble and sent it skimming into the water. ‘Then you understand what this means?’

‘We’ve lost his scent again, but he can’t be far. If you were to muster a search party and set them to—’

‘No, no. You mistake my meaning.’ He looked up at Savill, his face sombre. ‘From what you’ve said, there must be a strong probability that it was Charles himself who killed young Ogden. Presumably with his own pistol.’

The two of them circled the canal for nearly half an hour, from the railings of Buckingham House to the immaculately gravelled surface of the Parade Ground.

‘I cannot trust anyone,’ Rampton said, when they reached the western end for the first time. He stopped and stared at a carriage approaching at a trot along the Mall. ‘That’s why I cannot afford to send out a search party along the river, at least not without careful consideration of how it may be done discreetly. And that’s also why you must stay away from Mrs Ogden.’

‘Is it also why we need to talk here, rather than in your room?’

‘Perhaps.’

‘I don’t understand,’ Savill said.

‘There’s much you don’t understand,’ Rampton said, with a flash of the cold arrogance Savill remembered from their days together at the American Department. ‘The point is, young Ogden was clearly acting on behalf of someone else. We don’t know who. The obvious suspect is the Count de Quillon. We must look into that – all the more so because he is now in London. I wonder – would you call on him this evening? No, stay – call at Mrs West’s, that will be better.’

‘Why me?’

‘Because it would be perfectly natural for you to call at Green Street because you made Mrs West’s acquaintance in the country and she was most obliging when she offered you the loan of her chaise. So it would be a very proper attention if you call on her. In any case, it’s likely that the Count and Monsieur Fournier will be there because they cannot easily go anywhere else in London at present. I’m sure they will dine with her and probably sup there too.’