Read the book: «The Silent Boy»

Chapter One

Say nothing. Not a word to anyone. Whatever you see. Whatever you hear. Do you understand? Say nothing. Ever.

Tip-tap. Like cracking a walnut.

Now and always Charles sees the blood. It runs down his cheek and soaks into his shirt. He licks his dry lips and tastes it, salty and metallic and forbidden.

He has fallen as he ran down the steep stairs. He’s lying on his back. He looks up. It is raining blood from a black sky striped with yellow. Blood glistens in the light of the lantern on the table.

There’s shouting and banging outside.

Inside, the blood is crying out. It’s screaming and shouting and grunting. The sound twists through his skull. It cuts into bone and splinters into a thousand daggers that draw more blood.

He scrambles to his feet. His shoes are by the door. He slips his feet into them.

There are no words for this, all he has heard and seen. There are no words for anything. There must never be any words.

Awake and asleep, here and anywhere, now and always. Never any words.

Charles lifts the latch and drags open the heavy door. No more words.

Hush now. Say nothing.

Tip-tap.

Charles darts out of the cottage and pulls the door shut. The cobbled yard is in darkness. So are the workshops and the big house beyond. Above the rooftops, though, the air flickers orange and yellow with the light of torches. The noise is deafening. He wants to cover his ears.

The tocsin is ringing. There are other bells. Their jangling fills the night and mingles with the host of unnatural sounds. The street on the far side of the house is as noisy as by day – much noisier, with shouts and screams, with barks and explosions, with the clatter of hooves and the grating of iron-rimmed wheels.

Someone begins to knock at a door – not with a hand or a knocker. These blows are slow and purposeful. They make the air itself tremble. Glass shatters. Someone is shrieking.

Wood splinters. They are breaking down the door of the main house. In a matter of minutes they will be in the yard.

Charles stumbles towards the big gates beyond the cottage. Two heavy bars hold them shut, sealing the back of the yard. In one leaf is a little low wicket.

At night the wicket is secured by two bolts. He fumbles for them in the darkness, only to find that 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, he was disappointed.

When Marie took him home again, he left a sou on the stove, because he knew that she and Luc were poor. Marie was Charles’s nurse when he was very young and later stayed as a maid. But then she was dismissed and the boy cried himself to sleep for nearly a week.

Now the brother and sister live in one room. Their bed is in a curtained alcove by the stove.

When Charles has had all the water he can drink, she brings in the chamber pot and watches him urinate. Afterwards she makes him kneel by the bed. She kneels beside him and says the prayer to the Virgin that she always says before he goes to sleep.

He knows that he is meant to join in. When he does not, she looks sharply at him and pokes him in the ribs. When she begins the prayer again, he moves his lips, mouthing shapes which have no words to them.

She watches him closely but does not seem to mind. Perhaps she does not know the difference between words that have shapes and words that do not.

Marie puts him into bed, blows out the candle and climbs in beside him. The mattress sinks beneath her weight. His body has no choice but to sink towards her and to mould its contours to hers.

It is very hot and it grows hotter. Now he is big he does not care for the way she smells or the way she looms over him like a mountain of flesh.

Soon she drifts into sleep. She snores and twitches.

The snoring stops. ‘Tell me,’ she whispers. ‘What happened? Where is Madame?’

He does not answer. He must never answer. Say nothing. Not a word.

Marie prods him again with her finger. ‘What happened?’

Tip-tap. Like cracking a walnut.

When he does not answer, she sighs noisily and turns her head away.

He listens to her breathing. He closes his eyes but then he sees what he does not wish to see. He opens them again and stares into the night.

Luc does not come back for three days. When he does, he is drunk with blood and brandy. The single eye is bloodshot.

He does not see the boy at first. He calls for wine. He calls for food. Marie tries to press her brother into the chair but he resists.

Charles is in the alcove, in the bed. He rolls a little to the left, hoping to conceal himself behind the half-drawn curtains. But Luc’s single eye catches the movement.

‘What the devil is that?’ he says in a voice so hoarse he can barely raise it above a whisper.

‘Madame von Streicher’s boy. He came the other night.’

‘Who brought him?’

‘No one.’

Luc advances towards the alcove and stares at Charles, who looks back at him because he doesn’t know what else to do.

‘Where’s your mother?’ Luc demands.

The boy says nothing.

‘I don’t know,’ Marie says. ‘He was covered with blood.’

‘Take him back. We don’t want him here.’

‘I tried,’ Marie says. ‘I sent a message to the Rue de Grenelle but Madame isn’t there any more. The concierge said she and the boy moved out a month ago.’

‘They are traitors,’ Luc says suddenly. ‘She’s been arrested. If we shelter him, they’ll arrest us too. You know where that ends.’ Luc makes a blade of his right hand and chops it down on the palm of his left.

He means the guillotine. Charles has heard his mother and Dr Gohlis talking about the machine, and Dr Gohlis said that it is a humane way to execute criminals. But, he said, the people do not like it because it is too swift and too clean a way to die. They prefer the old ways – hanging on wooden gallows, or death by sword or breaking on the wheel. They last longer, Dr Gohlis said, and they are more entertaining.

‘They’ve set up the machine at the Tuileries now. At the Place du Carrousel.’

Marie pours her brother wine. She stands, hands on hips, in front of the alcove, with the boy behind her.

Luc takes a long swallow of wine and wipes his mouth on the back of his hand. ‘Throw him out. In the gutter. Anywhere.’

‘I can’t. He’s only a child.’

‘If they find out he’s here, it’ll be enough to bring us before the Tribunal.’

‘But he couldn’t hurt a—’

Luc throws the beaker of wine at his sister, catching her on the face. She gives a cry and turns. Charles sees the blood on her cheek.

‘You will do as I say,’ Luc says. ‘Or I’ll break every bone in his body, and in yours.’