Free The Silent Boy by Andrew Taylor

increasing violence. Dirty water spews out of his mouth and splashes on his face and hands.
     
    That night Charles wets the bed again.
    He doesn’t know why this shameful and babyish thing should happen: it just does. This is the first time that he has been caught wetting the bed since they came to England.
    When the maid discovers that he has wet the bed, she calls the housekeeper, who is very stern, very English. Her name is Mrs Cox and she has a voice that sounds like chalk scratching on a slate.
    Mrs Cox shakes her head and says to the maid that the boy is a dirty, devilish imp, and what can you expect of these foreigners? This one can’t even speak his own language.
    The maid says maybe he’s a simpleton, like the girl in the village who looks like a monkey and cannot keep herself clean.
    Mrs Cox replies that in any case the boy should be whipped to beat the nonsense out of him.
    For some reason Charles thinks of the way Marie used to beat the dust from the carpets in the backyard of their lodgings in Paris. In the middle of his fear, he has a picture in his head of himself draped over a fence, with Mrs Cox and the maid on either side of him, beating him with carpet beaters so that the wickedness flies out of him in puffs of evil. He thinks Mrs Cox would enjoy that, and probably the maid too.
    But the housekeeper is not quite sure of her powers. She says she will speak to Monsieur de Quillon’s valet, who has some English, and ask him to speak to his master.
    Charles waits all day for the blow to fall. But nothing happens. Not that day, nor the next, nor the one after.
    Every night he prays on his knees to God that he will not wet the bed again.
    Sometimes God listens. Sometimes he doesn’t.

Chapter Ten
     
    Savill’s daughter, Lizzie, had lived with her aunt and uncle in Shepperton, on the Thames, from the time that she was little more than a baby until the death of her uncle.
    That melancholy event had been two years ago. Afterwards, Savill had brought his sister and his daughter to Nightingale Lane. The freeholds belonged to a widow in New York, who stubbornly refused to sell them, though he had forwarded several offers to her. There were four houses in the lane, and he had the largest, which had a garden with a small orchard.
    The builders were at work all around, raising new houses in new, neatly proportioned streets. Most of the land around was owned by the Duke of Bedford, apart from a rectangular enclave north of Great Store Street where the City of London held the freeholds.
    Nightingale Lane was squeezed between the Duke’s estate and the City’s land, a tiny kink in the pattern, an outrage against the principles of rational design and commercial good sense. But sometimes, early in the morning, before the builders started work and the streets filled with traffic, Savill heard the birds singing their laments in his garden, singing for lost fields and ruined hedgerows.
    It was the first time that he and Lizzie had lived under the same roof for more than a few months. It healed a wound he hardly knew he had until it began to scab over.
    In the past, he had missed his daughter more than he cared to admit, even to himself. When she was seven, he had commissioned an artist to paint a miniature of her, which he had had framed and enclosed in a square case, bound in green leather, now faded and much worn. He had kept it on his table or by his bed, standing open. It had been a poor substitute for a flesh-and-blood child, but it had been better than nothing.
     
    On the last Saturday in September, more than a week after Savill’s second visit to Mr Rampton’s house in Stanmore, he came home from the City to find Lizzie in the parlour, waiting to preside over the tea table.
    ‘You look fatigued,’ she said in a severe voice.
    He kissed her. ‘Where is your aunt?’
    ‘Drinking tea with Mrs Foster and admiring her grandchildren, especially the new one. But why are you looking so stern, sir?’
    ‘I shall