The Silent Boy. Andrew Taylor

Not a word.

      Nightmares have this to be said for them: they wake you up.

      He’s screaming but nobody comes. But at least he is awake. The nightmare is reluctant to leave him. Gradually its hold on him loosens. He cries for a while, almost for the sake of something to do, something to fill the silent darkness.

      At last the pressure on his bladder forces him to leave the warmth of the bed and pull out the chamber pot from under the bed where, when he was a baby, he had believed that nightmares lived.

      So this nightmare has a silver lining of sorts. The bed stays dry.

      This is the best time. Shortly after dawn, before anyone else is up except the servants.

      The air is very clear, the colours of the distant hills are crisp and clean. The shadows are long and cold.

      His footprints make ragged marks in the scythed grass, darker patches on the shining patina of moisture. In the pleasure grounds, he has to be wary, but it is easy to slip about unnoticed now he knows his way. He stays within the paling that encircles them – it would not do to risk the unknown terrors of the village and the fields around. He has never lived much in the country and he is afraid of cows, pigs, donkeys, dogs and much else he might reasonably expect to find there.

      The gardener and his boy are cutting down a dead tree at the other end of the drive. So it is safe to go to the Garden of Neptune. The dew is heavier here because the garden is below the level of the surrounding land. The walls around it retain the cold and damp rather than the warmth.

      Charles walks the paths, counting his steps. Counting fills his mind and quietens it. Moreover, in this world where so much has changed, and is changing, it is important to make sure that at least something remains unaltered: and the length and breadth of this garden is as good a place to start as any.

      When he has finished his counting, he says to Louis, who has been pacing beside him, ‘See, it is just the same as it was before.’ And Louis agrees with him, for he was counting too.

      They sit on the wall that surrounds the pool at the centre of the garden. Neptune stands above them. If only he had had his trident when the gardener’s boy tried to drown him. The sea god could have dropped it on the boy’s head and the prongs would have dug into his brain.

      Charles imagines how the gardener’s boy would look if his face were covered with blood. His mouth would be open and gushing more blood like a fountain. His hair would then be the colour of blood rather than the colour of rust.

      The creak of the gate.

      Joseph is coming into the garden from the side nearest the house. ‘Why the devil are you hiding away here?’ the footman says.

      Louis has gone.

      ‘You are wanted in the dining room. Look sharp.’

      Charles follows Joseph, avoiding his footsteps in the dew but counting them as he walks.

      ‘It’s that Mr Savill,’ Joseph says over his shoulder, talking to himself as much as to Charles. ‘They want to show you to him. Give him a laugh, eh? Looks like he needs it. Mr Fournier’s been telling him all about you.’

      The 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