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.
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 tell you directly.’
‘You shall tell me nothing until you have sat down in your armchair and we have rung for hot water.’
She would not let him say what he wished to say until the water had been brought, the tea measured out, and the infusion was brewing.
‘Well, sir, you may speak,’ she said, folding her hands in her lap and looking at him with a sort of mock gravity that usually made him laugh.
‘I was obliged to go out of town the other day and see your Uncle Rampton,’ he said.
She made a face. ‘Nothing disagreeable?’
‘Not for you, I hope.’
‘I think he must be an odious man. He does nothing for you.’
‘My dear,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid there’s news of your mother.’
At once the cheerfulness left Lizzie’s face. She raised her hand to her mouth as if holding back the words that were trying to get out. Savill knew that she barely remembered her mother, who had absconded when she was very young; and, even before that, she had seen little of her, for in those days Augusta had not been much troubled by maternal feelings.
‘She’s not here?’ Lizzie blurted out, the colour rushing to her cheeks. ‘Not in London?’
‘No. My dear, you must prepare yourself for a shock. I am sorry to say that your mother is dead.’
Lizzie’s face puckered, as if age had prematurely withered it. ‘Oh. I – I see.’
‘She died in Paris.’ Savill leaned forward and took his daughter’s hand, which lay limp and warm in his. ‘Mr Rampton said it was very sudden. I do not know the details yet, but I shall in a week or two.’
‘I don’t know what to say, Papa.’
‘You don’t have to say anything. Nothing is changed – not for you – not for me.’
She raised her head suddenly. ‘But it has. For you, at least. You can marry again.’ Her colour deepened. ‘That is to say, should you wish to.’ She sat up very straight and turned away to busy herself with the tea.
Savill was seized by a desire to laugh. He said gravely, ‘I have no intention of marrying at present. Besides, you must not worry about me. Or about your mother.’
‘But I don’t know what to feel,’ she said in a voice that was almost a child’s wail.
‘You don’t have to feel anything, my love.’
‘Will we go into mourning?’
‘Perhaps not, in the circumstances.’ He rubbed his scar, which had begun to itch. ‘I will consult your aunt – she will know what is proper. But first there is one other thing you must know.’
She looked down at her lap and did not speak.
‘After she went away, your mother had a child. A son. He is still alive.’
Her head jerked up. ‘I have a brother?’
‘Yes. A half-brother.’
‘Why did you not tell me before?’
‘Because I did not know myself until I saw your uncle Rampton.’
‘How old is he?’
‘Ten or eleven, I believe,’ Savill said.
‘A half-brother,’ she repeated. He watched her calculating the arithmetic. ‘So – who was his father? I – I’m sorry, perhaps it is indelicate of me to—’
‘It is natural that you should ask. But I’m afraid I cannot tell you that either, because I do not know. Perhaps I will find out when I see him.’
‘Is he here? In England?’
‘Yes. Not in London, though.’
‘When shall we see him? Where will he live? Will he live with us here?’
‘I expect you will see him at some point, but I do not know quite when. As for where he will live, Mr Rampton has a fancy to adopt him. If he does that, I dare say the boy would live with him, except when he is at school, and so on.’
‘But he should live with us, Papa.’ Colour flooded over her face. ‘If he’s my brother, I’m nearer kin to him than Mr Rampton.’
‘True.