I reckon he looks like you or me, Charlie responded. The question is, which?
What do you mean by that? Charles wrote back to him, in very precise, very black lettering, the handwriting of hostility.
Thinking that the boys had been reduced to mere squabbling over aesthetics, the teachers relaxed. That was their mistake, because when the staff relaxed, the boys struck, bribing three first-years to report a sighting of rats in a first-floor broom cupboard and locking Madame de Silentio and Miss Fortescue, the deputy head teacher, into the broom cupboard when those two worthy ladies went marching in to investigate. After that Charlie stood guard outside Madame de Silentio’s office. Within, it was the work of a few minutes for Charles, the experienced thief of small items, to unobtrusively comb Madame de Silentio’s belongings and pocket two keys. He knew his padlocks but was too pressed for time to exercise proper Decisive Thinking — all he could be sure of was that one or the other of these keys would free Reynardine.
When imagining such relationships — prisoner and gaoler — you’d imagine that the gaoler is always aware of the whereabouts of the key that gives her her power. You — or I; let’s say I — imagine her stroking the key and gloating over it, taking it out nightly and admiring it. Not so. Madame de Silentio says she’d just tossed the key into a drawer somewhere and hadn’t looked for it for years. She didn’t miss it. Her office was in the order she’d left it in, and the baffling time spent in the broom cupboard was brief enough to be passed off as minor mischief on the part of the first-years, all of whom she punished with a severity disproportionate to the crime. “Can’t be slapdash with these things. Got to let them know it’s not on.”
And so Reynardine was freed. That simply, that easily, because Madame de Silentio was unable to believe that she could be disobeyed, Reynardine was freed by a boy who conspicuously asked for a dose and let the milk run out of his mouth and soak his pillow once the matron had walked down to the other end of the dormitory.
Reynardine rose up amongst the loose chains, his legs twitching, as he had forgotten how to walk. Neither of the boys record this; that’s just how I think those first few seconds of freedom were. He told Charles he would be gone by morning. He flexed his hands in a way that worried Charles but gave a gurgling laugh and said, “You have nothing to fear from me, boy.”
He told me he won’t forget what we did for him, Wolfe wrote to Wulf.
By the middle of the next day, Madame de Silentio knew that Reynardine had been released. This wasn’t due to any psychic connection; it was due to the local news. “The thing about Reynardine,” Madame de Silentio explains, “is that he is a woman-killer. He doesn’t do it joyously — oh, no, he does it with dolour and scowling. Women upset him. He said to me once that he hates their Ways, that from the moment he encounters one of them he’s forced to play a Role, and he won’t stand for it. Paranoid nonsense.” The night he was released he passed through Greenwich, killing and killing. Forty women gone between two-thirty and four a.m., and he went quickly on throughout the country, doing more. Worse, in the days that followed, other killers, killers of children and aged parents and love rivals and husbands, they, too, swelled the murder rate, as if inspired. A bad week in time, an awful week of red shivers, the streets empty of civilians and full of police.
Madame de Silentio called the boys into her office and took the key back from Charles. Useless now, but still, it was hers. The boys didn’t know what they’d done, they didn’t connect this red week with Reynardine, until Madame de Silentio explained it to them.
For the rest of their time at the Academy they were in hell, without her even laying a finger on them or saying another reproving word to them. The two boys went around together, always together, without speaking to each other, their hair limp, their eyes bulging, their faces the faces of drowned men. Each day brought news of Reynardine’s work in the world. He didn’t look like what he was, Charlie Wulf wrote in his diary. That was his last entry before all the leavers’ diaries were handed in. Charles Wolfe didn’t mention the lake incident again.
Upon their graduation Madame de Silentio sold Charles to a beautiful woman named Helene. She had blue eyes, which it thrilled him to look into. He believed that the petty thievery of his childhood had simply been impatience for the day when he would have two blue eyes like these to adore. But Helene was haunted by her past self. She’d been a fat child; even her ankles had been fat. In a letter to Madame de Silentio, Charles wrote that Helene had a serious fit of the hysterics when she saw him making supper for her — he was frying fish fingers in oil. She was unable to accept a hot meal as a gesture of love; she was convinced Charles was trying to make her fat again. He was able to soothe her — our training covers all emergencies, but he wished he hadn’t had to draw upon it. Helene didn’t like introducing Charles to her friends, either, because she found him ugly. She left him at home, or if she entertained at home she left him skulking around in the kitchen. As a test, Charles went missing for two weeks, roaming London, sleeping under newspapers on park benches. When he came home, Helene spoke of a party she’d recently been to, running rapidly through a list of anecdotes connected to names he didn’t know, and she looked irritated when he asked her to slow down and explain who was who. “I already told you,” she said. She hadn’t noticed that he’d been gone. She’d probably come home from her parties and chattered away to thin air, believing that he was hidden in it somewhere, listening attentively. She hadn’t been worried at all during his fourteen-day absence, hadn’t looked for him.
“How can I be a better husband?” he asked her humbly.
Helene gave Charles Wolfe a mask to wear. A white mask. Not flat white; rather, a colour suggestive of earth, brilliant but faintly fibrous, as it is beneath the skin of a pear. The mask’s expression was neither happy nor sad. Its lips ran in a straight geometric line, a humanly impossible one. It was a heavy mask; it changed the way Charles held his head, and, by extension, it changed the way he moved. As long as Charles wore the mask, Helene allowed him to escort her to dinners out, friends’ weddings, etc. Helene’s friends tried to behave as if her masked husband didn’t bother them, but he bothered them tremendously. I suppose it’s difficult to find a face friendly if you see it every day and it never smiles at you.
Charlie Wulf. . Charlie Wulf was sold to a plainlooking woman. Plain but wholesome and good-hearted. Laurel. She turned her back on the frivolous pursuits of her class and trained as a nursery school teacher. She wore long skirts and always found a kind word and a hug for even the most tiresome of the children who played at her feet. Charlie had absorbed more training than anyone had credited him with, and he had no trouble speaking Words of Love to his wife. Laurel didn’t like to hear them. It was all too insincere. She worried about how they looked as a couple — on the street, in their home. She turned all the household mirrors to the wall. She heard people making fun of her, even though Charlie assured her that she was imagining things. She became jealous if he appeared to take too much of an interest in conversation with her female friends. Laurel wrote Charlie tearstained letters, turned him out of the house again and again, arrived unannounced at his hotel room in the early hours of the morning, just to check that he was alone. She couldn’t believe in him.