Silent

by David Mellon

  “Thank you, everyone. A lovely time. On behalf of myself and Adi—”

  “George,” said his stepmother, “don’t you think you could at least—”

  He held his hand out to Adi. “Sorry, everyone, afraid we must be going. It’s been grand.”

  • • •

  Under the wisteria, they ran up the steps two at a time, giddy in their escape, detouring only to waylay one of the footman carrying a large tray. George snatched up a couple of pastries in his hands and veered toward the great hedge on their left.

  “Get the gate,” he said as they came to the gap. She pulled an ivy-covered gate open and stepped through, George right behind.

  She was surrounded by the shapes of animals: elephants and camels, foxes and bears. Adi looked around in amazement at the splendid topiary garden; the trees and shrubs were a shadow menagerie in the early twilight. A half moon was reflecting in the long pool running before them into the garden.

  They leaned against the great hedge and caught their breath. They could still hear, faintly, the sound coming up from the table. Talking about them, no doubt.

  After a moment, George said, “I’m sorry about that, my stepmother and all.” He looked up at the elephant before them.

  “I don’t know when she got so—whatever she is.” He glanced over at Adi. “She used to be pretty nice, really.” He shook his head. “I guess I used to be nicer myself.”

  Adi smiled to see him there, leaning into the foliage, holding the two pastries in his hands, slightly damaged but still beautiful confections. He reminded her, his hands before him like that, of a statue of the god Vishnu, in a temple by the river where she grew up.

  “Here,” he said, holding out a dessert. “Sorry, it’s a little squished.” Their fingers touched as he handed it over. They dropped down on the seat alongside the pool, the marble still warm from the summer sun.

  Adi couldn’t bring herself to take a bite of her pastry. So beautiful. Everything here was so beautiful.

  George wasted no time stuffing half of the dessert into his mouth. He looked over at the girl, just as tears began to spill down her cheeks.

  “Oh,” he said, trying to talk with his mouth full. “I should not have made you do that.”

  Adi looked at him through her tears; trying to wipe them away, she only managed to smear chocolate across her cheeks. Then the dam burst. She broke down and began to sob, her shoulders heaving with each breath.

  George looked off into the valley. The twinkling lights of houses were coming on one by one, just as the stars were above. He took the last couple of bites of his dessert.

  When the crying let up, George pulled out a large handkerchief from his pocket and slid over next to her.

  “Here. Give me.” He took the dessert from her hands and chucked it into the bushes. “I’ll get you another.” He dipped the corner of the cloth into the pool and began to clean her hands, first one, then the other. Then he turned her toward him, cupped her face in his hand and began to wipe away the tears and streaks of chocolate.

  “You look like a six-year-old.”

  Adi stared up into his eyes, the chirrup of a thrush and the splashing of the fountain the only sounds. George tucked a stray curl behind her ear and brushed her cheek with his fingers.

  Automobile lights flashed up the drive.

  “That could be our man,” said George. “Come on.” He stood and pulled Adi to her feet next to him. Taking her by the hand, they ran for the house.

  • • •

  Coal waited. Inconspicuous in the dusk, he lay on his back, high up on top of the manicured hedge. He watched a bat catching its supper in the evening sky and wished it were so simple.

  A rustling below and a figure emerged from behind the bank of gardenia, only a few yards away from where George and the girl had been sitting. It was Halick.

  Coal studied the young man as he peered around the foliage, watching his stepbrother and the girl running up to the house. There was a large man climbing out of his car pulled up under the porte-cochère.

  “Who, who might this be, said the owl,” Halick whispered. “Who else has George invited to our home today?”

  Coal was wondering the same thing. He saw the girl curtsy to the new arrival. He glanced back down at Halick.

  The young man was plucking blossoms from the gardenia bush, flicking them to the ground one after another, muttering gibberish to himself. “As the lion lies with the monkey, the dog does the same with the donkey. Bethinks, I think, I think, I do believe, in another moment,” he said, more seriously now, “he was going to kiss that girl.”

  Coal looked back up to the house.

  George and Adi were leading the man inside. Halick scraped flowers into the flagstones with the tip of his shoe, devising doggerel rhymes to amuse himself. Satisfied, he wandered back down in the direction of the family table.

  Coal dropped from the hedge and hit the ground with a yelp and a curse. It was as if the girl had struck him again. He looked around to make sure no one had heard, leaning on the hedge for a moment until the pain receded.

  He found it hard to believe what he was seeing here, what the girl had managed. “She should be lying in the weeds weeping, but here she is—belle of the ball.”

  He wished he had another finger to send her. He’d gotten that one from a child in the morgue, after the train collision in Strasbourg a few days earlier. He should have taken another. Or an ear!

  The girl’s fireplace poker, he’d fancied for a moment, it had been poisoned, like a Bushman’s spear or a Borgia’s ring, sending venom coursing through his bloodstream.

  But he knew it was not so. The girl was as artless as a child. There was another cause for his affliction. He rolled his shoulder to ease the ache and went off to find supper.

  Halick’s Tale

  The tiny black salamander with the yellow spots looked up at the boy with large trusting eyes.

  “Such a pretty little thing,” thought the boy, as he shut the lid on the tobacco box.

  He’d attached a bit of rubber tubing to a hole he’d pierced in the end of the box, to let in air. Didn’t want the thing to suffocate. What would be the point of that?

  The boy walked around all week with his secret hidden away where no one else could find it; in a box, under the ground in the garden, there was a little animal starving to death.

  • • •

  Since he could remember, Halick had collected secrets, the way children collected stamps or someone like, say, Thomas Hast, collected books of British fairy tales.

  Halick knew Thomas’s secrets too, of course. Knew he had kissed a boy when he was at school, up at the abbey.

  Thomas Hast wrote this down in his diary, which was a foolish thing to do. What’s the point of having a secret if other people could find out about it? And people were so careless. They left their private things lying about for anyone with half a brain to stumble across.

  He knew all about Cook having been in Clairvaux Prison for five years. Knew about Uncle Marcel and the very young woman he kept in Strasbourg. He knew everything about anyone in the household worth knowing.

  Halick would have liked to know his mother’s secrets, but she was very good at keeping them. He could learn a lot from his mother. She lied better than anyone he knew.

  Particularly, he would have liked to have known about his father.

  Halick couldn’t remember when he’d realized that his mother was making up all those stories about the man. It would have helped if she’d been foolhardy enough to have a diary or keep letters. But there was nothing like that. She just told the stories, over and over again; how handsome and kind he was; how he had died saving those children in the burning house. Saving children. A nice touch.

  Though honestly, he wasn’t sure that his mother didn’t actually believe the stories she told. It might well be he would never know how his father had died. Not that it mattered. Not that he cared.

  Halick never wrote anything down or told a
nyone his secrets. No one knew about the animals. Or the girls.

  In his fourteenth year, as Halick changed from a boy to a strapping young man, it didn’t take him long to turn his attention from small creatures to larger ones.

  I mean, who could tell if a lizard or a mouse was really suffering? Could you be sure what any dumb animal was feeling?

  A couple of years ago, on his mother’s birthday, he’d talked the daughter of one of the hired maids into going to play in the old groundskeeper’s house. He didn’t have a plan; it all just fell into place.

  Now, she was frightened. One didn’t have to imagine it. It was right there in her eyes. She would have told him anything. Not that she had anything to tell.

  The beautiful part was that they’d still not found the body. Hers or the little gypsy girl that he’d picked up on the road and given a ride. He had discovered the perfect place to put them.

  He came to know about the lake in the mountains from a teacher, a man, who filled in briefly for his history professor who had taken ill. He didn’t remember the man’s name but he still had the old picture postcard from Lake Kore that the man had taken from his pocket and given him. He didn’t give any of the other students postcards. Only Halick. Clearly, he didn’t think less of him for not having a father.

  So now, almost his mother’s birthday again, here was this girl, this Adi. No shoes and no voice. It was hard not to wonder what secrets she might be keeping behind those pretty pretty eyes of green. He didn’t believe for a second that she couldn’t talk. She just needed the proper motivation.

  Chapter 14

  They sat in the library, George and the policeman on the sofa, Adi before them in a chair, her fingers worrying a tassel on the corner of the pillow in her lap.

  The only sound was the scratching of Detective Lendt’s pencil in his little notebook as he laboriously copied the riddles from the inside of the watch. He kept leaning forward to peer down at the device balanced on his knee. He was uncomfortable sitting in George’s presence, but George had insisted on it, and on the cup of tea as well.

  Aside from the library in Benares, Adi had never seen so many books in one place, certainly not in European languages. There were rolling ladders to reach the higher shelves and spiral staircases at both ends of the room to get to a second floor.

  The space was also a museum of sorts. Along the walls, glass-top cases and beautiful cabinets were filled with all manner of treasures: sculptures, coins, and historical artifacts. The walls between the shelves were hung with strange and marvelous objects: masks and weapons and paintings.

  She looked at the detective. In his overcoat, with his head down, he seemed like a great bear. He stopped writing for a second and took a surprisingly colorful handkerchief from his coat and wiped his brow. It was the only color on the man.

  Between George talking and Adi nodding yes or no (and the strange gold watch with its picture and riddles), they had imparted as much information as they could to the detective.

  He closed his notebook with a snap of the rubber band around it, and clicked the watch shut, shaking his head in consternation at the thing. “Tempus fugit, indeed,” he said, handing it back to her. She put the chain around her neck.

  Finishing his tea, the detective leaned over and replaced the tiny cup and saucer onto the side table. He looked at Adi and George; tugging at his wilted mustache, he puffed his cheeks out.

  “Well,” he said as he pulled himself to his feet. “It wouldn’t hurt if we had more to go on. A last name for a start.” He raised a bushy eyebrow at Adi. “Not to mention, addresses, schools . . .” Adi looked contrite.

  “But the world is never a perfect place. At least we’re looking for twins. That should give us some advantage.

  “Good evening, miss,” the officer said as he bowed and took Adi’s tiny hand in his. “We’ll do our best.” She squeezed his hand tightly and gave him a hopeful smile.

  “But,” he said inclining his head to George, “if any additional information should arise—”

  George led him to the door.

  “I’ll let you know immediately, Detective. And thank you for coming all this way. You see why it would have been difficult over the telephone. Now, are you sure I can’t get you something before you head back? It’s a long drive.”

  “No, thank you, milord, the tea will carry me. There are some things I want to check on tonight.”

  “Be right back,” George said to Adi as he lead the detective out.

  Dropping her head back in her chair, she looked up at the coral clouds painted upon the ceiling, her shoulders dropping a little in relief. Honestly, she could hardly believe these men were taking her seriously; she wasn’t sure she would if she were in their place. She slid down and lifted her feet up, examining her marvelous shoes.

  Thomas charged through the library doorway, out of breath and clearly agitated. He stopped when he saw that it was only Adi in the room.

  “Oh, miss. Sorry to . . . have you seen his lordship . . . seen George?”

  “Seen George do what?” said George, coming back in. “Where the devil have you been?”

  Suddenly there were voices in the hallway; Uncle Henri and a couple of cousins were running past the library. They spotted George.

  “George! Have you heard?”

  “Heard what? What’s going on around here?”

  “Trouble,” said Thomas.

  Chapter 15

  In ten minutes, it seemed that the entire household was in the library: family, servants, staff, many straight from the dinner table, a few already in nightshirts and robes. Adi didn’t see the duchess and her son anywhere, though it was difficult to be sure. Everyone was talking at once, and it was impossible to say what they were on about. It was as if she were sitting in the middle of a train station.

  “Would everybody be quiet for—everyone, QUIET!”

  Adi looked around. There was George standing up on the sofa, yelling above the din.

  It took a moment, but the noise settled.

  “What is going on here, George?” cried several people.

  “Okay, Thomas.” George gestured for Thomas to climb up on the sofa next to him. Thomas stayed put on the floor and cleared his throat.

  “All right, this is what—”

  “Louder!” someone in the back yelled. Thomas continued a bit more forcefully.

  “What I’ve heard—from Uncle Herbert, who’s just returned from Basel, and via telephone, from George’s cousin, Augustin Canclaux, who is in Paris; around midday today, in Sarajevo, Archduke Ferdinand and his wife were shot. And killed.”

  The room went dead silent. A large woman next to Adi (Aunt Effie, perhaps), gasped and grabbed the arm of Adi’s chair to steady herself. People began murmuring all over the room.

  “There are reports,” Thomas continued, “of a hand grenade being thrown. But Augustin’s understanding is that a young Serbian man fired a handgun, killing the royal couple. Not sure when they died; there are differing reports on that.”

  “It’s 1870 all over again!” someone said.

  A pair of sisters, faces covered in lotion, their eyes huge, collapsed onto the sofa. A little man with a tiny dog in his arms reassured the animal that everything would be fine, but tears were spilling down the man’s cheeks.

  Adi looked around. What was happening? What happened in 1870?

  The woman holding on to Adi’s chair began to moan and sway. Adi rose to give the woman her seat—the aunt fainted right into her arms.

  About to topple under the weight, Adi heard, “Come on, Effie, not just here.” George grabbed the woman and danced her over to the sofa, dropping her into a gaggle of other aunts.

  The noise level was rising. Arguments were breaking out all over the room. A man in his pajamas started shouting that he had dreamed that this was going to happen. People started weeping.

  “Come on,” George said to Adi. They elbowed their way through the crowd toward the door.

  George tapped
Thomas on the shoulder and pointed to Uncle Henri. Thomas grabbed Henri by the arm. The four of them piled out into the hallway, pulling the door shut behind them.

  “Good lord!” said Uncle Henri, catching his breath, “Hardly hear myself think in there.”

  “But, Uncle Henri,” said George, “this won’t go that far, will it? They’re all first cousins, after all.”

  Who are first cousins? thought Adi. What in heaven’s name was going on here? She looked to George and Thomas, pointing to the door.

  “You might want to explain to the young lady why everyone is losing their heads in there,” said Uncle Henri, his formidable mustache and eyebrows making up for being the only hair on his head.

  Adi nodded.

  George looked over to Adi. “How much do you know about European politics?”

  Adi held her fingers apart, just a little.

  “Well—the archduke—the man who got shot—he’s the heir to the Austrian throne. Did you know he was the heir? Well, he was in the city of Sarajevo. Which is down south.”

  “Capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina,” added Thomas. “Across the water from Italy. You should start with the Franco-Prussian War,” he said to George. “Bismarck, unifying the German states and all that.”

  “She’s confused enough. And that was forty years ago. She wants to know why the archduke—”

  “The late archduke,” Thomas added.

  “—was visiting Sarajevo when he was—” George held his finger to his temple and made a bang sound.

  Uncle Henri slapped him on the head.

  “I said, explain it—not put on a farce! Some respect, please! Even if the man was a swine.”

  “You do it then,” said George. “It’s complicated.”

  “I suppose it is,” said Henri, stroking his mustache. “All right. Somebody get me a drink and I’ll try to explain. Come with me, young lady.”

  He offered Adi his arm and led the way down the hall. The two young men followed.

  “Treaties,” said Uncle Henri. “It’s all about the treaties. All these countries in Europe have agreements to support one another, in case someone declares war on them. That is what’s going to cause the trouble!”