The Silent Boy Read Online Free PDF

cracking, staining with candle grease, and the plaster crumbling and flaking from the ceiling: plaster snow.
    ‘Did you hear me, sir?’ Mr Rampton said.
    The grandfather clock chimed. Savill counted the quarters and then the stroke of the hour: five.
    ‘Dead,’ Mr Rampton repeated, this time more loudly. ‘Augusta is dead.’
    Savill’s eyes dropped slowly to the marble chimney piece. On one side of the fireplace was a bronze man with bulging muscles restraining a rearing horse with one arm while waving to something or someone with the other. What in heaven’s name was it all for?
    Mr Rampton coughed. ‘Augusta. My niece, sir.’
    Savill looked at him. ‘My wife, sir.’
    Silence settled like dust in the air. Savill looked across the room at Rampton, who was sitting in the big wing armchair on the left of the fireplace. The chair was angled to catch the light from the two tall windows. Beside the chair was a lectern on wheels with candles on either side of the slope and a sturdy quarto, the pages held open with clips.
    Rampton scratched the fingertips of his left hand on the arm of the chair. His face was wrinkled but still ruddy with the impression of good health. He looked smaller than he had been. Perhaps age was shrinking him as his fortune increased. The Lord giveth, as Savill’s father used to say with a certain grim satisfaction, and the Lord taketh away.
    ‘Of course,’ Rampton was saying, ‘your unhappy wife, Mr Savill, despite everything. And it is a cause for sorrow that the unfortunate woman is dead at last. We must not judge her. We may safely leave that to a higher power.’
    Rampton was not a big man but he made good use of what he had. He wore a sober grey coat and very fine linen. His hair was his own but he still wore it powdered, a political statement in these changing times: a public demonstration of his attachment to old virtues and old loyalties. The heels of his shoes were higher than was usual for gentlemen’s shoes. He looked every inch a statesman, albeit a smallish one, which was a pretty fair description of what he was.
    ‘The poor woman,’ he went on. ‘Alas, she paid the price for flouting the laws of God and man.’
    The rectangle of sky outside the nearer window was cloudless, a deep rich blue. Against this backdrop danced black specks, sweeping, diving and climbing with extraordinary rapidity. The swallows and the martins had begun their evening exercise. They would be vanishing soon as they did every year, though where they went, no man knew.
    ‘Those confounded swallows,’ Rampton said. ‘You cannot begin to comprehend the mess they make on the terrace.’ He too was staring out of the window; he too was glad of an excuse to think of something other than Augusta. ‘They nest under the eaves of the house or in the stables – I’ve tried for three years to get rid of them. But wherever they nest, they use my terrace as their privy.’
    ‘Where?’ Savill said.
    ‘What?’ Rampton turned from the window, away from the swallows, from one annoyance to another. ‘Paris. The foolish, foolish girl.’
    ‘How did you hear, sir?’
    ‘Through the Embassy. It happened just over a week ago.’
    ‘When the mob stormed the Tuileries?’
    ‘Yes. By all accounts the whole of Paris was delivered up to them. Riot, carnage, chaos. It beggars comprehension, sir, that such a civilized city should sink so low. The poor King and his family are prisoners. Tell me, when did you last hear from her?’
    ‘Five years ago,’ Savill said. ‘A little more. She wrote for money.’
    ‘And you sent it?’
    ‘Yes.’
    Rampton grunted. ‘There was no necessity for you to do that.’
    ‘Perhaps not. But I did.’
    ‘On the other hand,’ Rampton said, ‘perhaps it was for the best. If you hadn’t, she might have been obliged to return to England.’
    ‘You mean she might still be alive?’
    ‘Would that really have been better? For her or for anyone else? For Elizabeth? After all, you