The Silent Boy Read Online Free PDF Page A

not send him to a comfortable oblivion: instead, they pinned his body to the bed while leaving his mind free and restless, skimming above the surface of sleep.
    London was never quiet, even on the darkest night. He heard the watch calling the hours, the cries of drunken passers-by, the hammer-blows of hooves and the rumble of distant wagons bringing their loads through the night to Smithfield and Covent Garden.
    The heat warmed the fancies of his brain to an unhealthy temperature and stirred into life the half-buried memory of another hot night. He had supped with fellow clerks at the American Department and returned late to the lodgings on the wrong side of Hill Street. It was their first married home. The apartments were too expensive for them but the address was genteel and Augusta had argued that a man did not rise in the world without seeming worthy to rise; and nor did his wife.
    He found her sitting on the ottoman at the foot of the bed. There were two tall candles on the mantel. The edges of the room were dark, the corners populated with shifting shadows. But Augusta herself was coated with a soft golden glow.
    She wore a simple white nightgown, so loose at the neck that it revealed most of her smooth shoulders. Her hair was down. She smiled up at him and held up her hand. The movement dislodged her gown and he glimpsed the swell of her breasts and the darkness between them.
    This was how it had been in the beginning of their marriage: Savill had revelled in the contrast between Augusta by day and Augusta by night – the one icily elegant, ambitious to the point of ruthlessness, calculating yet so strangely foolish; and the other, everything a man could desire to find in his bed, and more. Even when he grew to dislike her, which did not take long, she retained her ability to excite him.
    ‘I have an appetite,’ she said that night as she sat astride him, her belly already swollen with Lizzie. ‘And you shall feed me.’
    The excitement drained away from him, leaving a residue of bitterness, of regret, that mingled with the dreary ache of his tooth. The drops were making his head swim and they had given him a pain in his stomach. His eyes were full of sand. He felt nauseous but lacked the strength to roll out of bed and find the chamber pot.
    At times like this, in these long, sleepless nights, Savill wondered whether he, too, had been to blame for what had happened. But that was folly. Memories are not real, he told himself, they are little more than waking dreams; and there is no guilt in dreams, neither hers nor mine, and no betrayals, either.
    For are we not innocent when we dream?
     
    The next morning, the servant brought up the letter when Savill was at breakfast with his sister and Lizzie. He noticed it had been franked by an obliging Member of Parliament in lieu of postage. He broke the heavy seal. As soon as he unfolded the letter he recognized the handwriting as that of a man who no doubt included many Members of Parliament among his intimate acquaintance.
    The women were watching him. He read the letter twice. The questions crowded into his mind but he had long ago schooled his face not to betray his feelings.
    Savill looked up. ‘I shall not dine with you today after all. I am obliged to go out of town on business.’ He registered the disappointment spreading over Lizzie’s face, then watched her instantly suppressing it. ‘Tomorrow,’ he said. ‘There’s always tomorrow.’
    Why now? he wondered. Why a summons to Vardells, not Westminster? And again, and above all, why should Rampton want to see me now?
     
    ‘She is dead.’
    Twelve feet above Savill’s head, plaster putti writhed, a pair of them in each corner of the salon. Each set of twins were shackled together with garlands. The infant boys had short, stubby limbs and plump, inflated bodies. Their eyes were sightless blanks, their lips slightly parted.
    Give it time, Savill thought. He imagined the gilt and the whitewash fading and