Charles Wolfe was fair-haired, and secretive. His features were crooked and unattractive. Much less is known about him, much more conjectured. Charles’s father was a government official in India; his household included several guards and a poison taster, all of whom were present at every meal. Major Wolfe’s very brief letter to Madame de Silentio, referring to Charles simply as “the boy,” indicates disgust at Charles’s habit of stealing things. Blue things — always blue things — the boy seems to reckon there isn’t enough blue in the world. See what you can do with him. Mr. Curie, one of our science teachers, recalls seeing Charles Wolfe leaning against the Academy railings during recreation, drinking Coca-Cola through a blue straw, with such a tough look in his eyes that no one dared mock the dainty way he took his refreshment. Mrs. Engels, one of our English Literature teachers, recounts her suspicion, unsupported by any documentation, that it had taken Charles Wolfe much longer than normal to learn how to speak. He seemed to have learnt to read long before he learnt to speak. Mrs. Engels says that she sometimes remarked on the unusual way Charles Wolfe formulated his sentences, and when she did he fell silent and seemed ashamed. Charles Wolfe held grudges. He wrote in his diary that he would like to kill Mrs. Engels. It seems Charles Wolfe was capable of hating with a single-mindedness that sometimes took him into trances. Subdue this, he wrote several times in his diary. Subdue this. Charles Wolfe took every prize and passed every test and exam with distinction. He was going to make a first-rate husband. The teachers weren’t sure about him, though. They kept an eye on him. There had been incidents in the first year — there had been no evidence that the incidents were connected to him. But still. We won’t blame them for their vigilance.
The grounds of the Academy are extensive. One asset we used to boast, but are now denied access to, is the lake. A thirty-year-old prospectus shows a group of prefects boating on the lake as a treat, but the lake has a dark and forbidding aspect, and the prefects don’t seem to be having much fun. The boys were allowed to boat occasionally, but they were forbidden to swim. And Charles and Charlie seem to have been magnetised by the lake. The water is very green and has a sweet taste, both boys wrote in their diaries, at different times. Exactly the same phrase at different times. Charles Wolfe goes on to conjecture that it’s a vial of the lake water that the matron carries around with her and uses when someone needs medicine in his milk. He notes that after a few mouthfuls of the lake water you “feel fine. Like a king.” He also notes that Charlie Wulf guzzled the lake water in a manner that worried him slightly. If you’re wondering about the diaries, Madame de Silentio insists that we keep them, and that we write full accounts of our thoughts and our days. Then she spends all Sunday reading them. It’s a tricky business, writing the diaries. Madame de Silentio doesn’t want to be acknowledged in our diaries, so we have to write them as if we don’t know anyone’s going to read them. It’s like prayer, somehow. She never comments or acts on what she reads in our diaries, no matter what’s in there — that makes it even more like prayer.
In his diary, Charlie, a weak swimmer, records the afternoon he leant too far into that sweet green taste and felclass="underline" Into the shock of the water. My mouth opened and the lake rushed into me, a strong, cold, never-ending arm rammed down my throat. I didn’t know you could fall like that inside a body of water, that when you fall it’s as hard and helpless a thing as falling through air. Charles Wolfe dived and retrieved his pathetic friend, and they both saw something incredible. I say incredible even though during my interview with her Madame de Silentio shrugged and spoke of it as something quite commonplace. In swimming to shore, the boys stirred the water with open eyes, and beneath them they saw a bed of silt and rock with a shape pressed into it. Each stroke was firm and clear, even the gap between the emaciated thighs. It was a man down there. A man trapped at the bottom of the lake, wrapped round and round with a great rusty padlocked chain. His face seemed very white and stiff to them at first, then they realised that a mask had been forced over it — a commedia dell’arte mask, with its thick ivory grimace. Under the weight of all that water, the man was alive, and he saw them seeing him, and he struggled, and struggled. “Yes, I had a prisoner out there,” Madame de Silentio says. “Thought it was the safest place, but no. Reynardine was his name. No use dwelling on all that, though. Won’t do a blind bit of good.”
The next seven days of each boy’s diary hold the dutifully scrawled lines: “Nothing today,” the bare minimum required to meet Madame de Silentio’s demand that we record something every day. Matron Seacole, who has since retired, very kindly responded to my written enquiry with the recollection that Charlie Wulf kept the dormitory up three nights in a row with the shouting and kicking he did in his sleep, and had to be dosed a total of ten times. Charles Wolfe was wakeful but didn’t fuss and said he was fine. The boys wrote notes to each other, in a code that I have been unsuccessful in cracking. I can draw no firm conclusions as to what was happening inside the heads of these boys during the seven days of what they described as “nothing.” Charlie’s schoolwork slipped badly. Charles’s schoolwork remained at an excellent standard.
On the eighth day, both boys meticulously recorded a “conversation with a prisoner” in their diaries. They had learnt the prisoner’s name, and they had learnt that he had been a prisoner a long time, longer than he could remember. They had learnt that Madame de Silentio had imprisoned this man, and that the man wished to be freed. And they wished to free him.
Madame de Silentio, Charles wrote in red ink, beneath that day’s diary entry. Why did you do this to Reynardine?
Madame de Silentio stuck to her policy of not responding to diary entries.
The teachers suggested keeping a close watch on the boys, but Madame de Silentio insisted that they were intelligent boys undergoing a thought experiment, that they were not seriously planning to do anything.
The teachers kept the boys under close observation anyway.
Charles and Charlie didn’t return to the lake for quite some time. If it were not for the fact that they knew the man’s name was Reynardine, I would say the “conversation with a prisoner” recorded in their diaries is a fabrication, and an artless one at that. It looks fake to me; the tone of the exchange is almost unbearably stilted. But then the entire situation is unusual. And if the conversation was indeed a fabrication, it’s difficult to establish where else they could have got the name Reynardine from.
The boys must have developed some system of passing notes that made them feel safe — perhaps they found a hiding place — either way, they stopped corresponding in code. Flurries of extant notes are filled with guesses at the relationship between Reynardine and Madame de Silentio and, oddly, a semi-serious argument about Reynardine’s face beneath his mask. He must be like a freak — a fish, Charles wrote to Charlie. He can breathe down there. He can speak. Charles writes to Charlie of having swum down with a diving light between his teeth and spoken face-to-face with the prisoner, of having held the padlock that bound him in both hands, of testing the mechanism inside with a fingernail while Reynardine breathed bubbles in his ear. This in the darkness of three a.m., while the rest of the school — including the heavily dosed Charlie Wulf — snored. . I can’t imagine.