Voices in the Dark (47 page)

‘The will to act,’ said Aldebaran, ‘is the talent. Lose one and the other vanishes.’

Richard hardly understood this, so he fell silent and stared into the black ocean pitching under them. He had not understood it at the time, and he didn’t now. But when he woke, it was with a strange thought. That account Aldebaran had written, the record of his life’s work, must be out there somewhere.

On the day agreed, at six in the morning, Juliette began
packing. She did not have a suitcase – she had never travelled with Richard on his journeys – but she filled up several plastic bags and her leather school satchel with all the belongings she had taken with her to the hotel. Sleet was driving down the window. Juliette put on several jumpers and her school coat, a drab grey duffel coat that clashed with the rest of the uniform. As she shut the rickety wardrobe, her green hat fell from the top of it and landed on the floor. She set it back with care. It already looked like the relic of some former existence. She saw her life in this country like another person’s, the life of some younger sister who she would always look on tenderly. ‘Farewell,’ she said to the room.

She was at the hotel’s front door when Richard called out to her from above. He was at his window upstairs, still half asleep. ‘Where are you going?’ he said.

‘Just for a walk.’

‘With all those bags?’

‘I’m visiting a friend.’

‘Come back inside,’ he said.

‘I won’t be long.’

Richard hesitated. In that second, Juliette ran down the steps, put her hand out for a taxi, and in a wash of grey sleet, was gone. She cried bitterly all the way to the station. But she did not go back.

On the first train, she and Ashley could think of nothing to say. He had a battered holdall and no overcoat. She could tell they were both wishing they could turn back. But if there was any chance of it, they would have decided to already. ‘I wonder,’ began Juliette, and stopped. She had been thinking that perhaps her father would come after them.

When they changed trains, the hills were so strange to
them that talking came more easily. The sun shone very cold and clear, and there was snow on the mountains. ‘I remember that place!’ Ashley kept saying, until she laughed at him. The wind cut bitterly when they got off the train.

‘It’s getting dark,’ said Juliette. ‘Let’s find somewhere to stay.’

They ended up at a bed-and-breakfast on the outskirts of the town. At the end of the garden, chilled sheep huddled against the fence. Their bleating made Juliette’s heart cold, but at the same time, something in her chest was loosening its grip. She realized she had grown too used to the greyness and the smoke of the city. The sheep knew and cared nothing about Belgravia.

Juliette went to Ashley’s room and sat on the bed and said, ‘Talk to me.’ Ashley was studying maps and did not want to be distracted, but eventually he closed them and came and sat beside her.

‘My aunt used to run a hotel like this,’ he said. ‘But bigger. It was the best place in the whole valley. My mam worked there, and I went to the school in Lowcastle. I think I was happy then. I think that was the time when my life made the most sense. And one time I saw my father.’

‘How?’ she said.

‘I don’t know. He was just there one night, on the hill with the stone circle. You can see it from here.’ He guided her to the window and drew the curtain aside. Through the darkness, she could make out the outline of the stones against the sky. ‘I’d forgotten,’ he said. ‘Afterwards, I couldn’t remember it properly. But it happened. Like the story you told me, about the boat and the river when you were five years old.’

‘Do you think it’s because it’s too unbelievable?’ said Juliette. ‘So you just forget?’

‘Maybe.’ He sat back down and turned over the maps. ‘Tell me about your own life.’

‘Mine?’ said Juliette. ‘I can’t remember much before I came here. I remember the castle on the rock. It was red – the stone was red. And our house had railings and red and green windows.’

‘Red and green windows?’ said Ashley. ‘Why?’

‘I don’t know. I think it was an idea of my mother’s.’

They talked for a long time, until Juliette’s head began to nod with exhaustion and she fell asleep. He covered her with the quilt and slept in the armchair. His last thought as he drifted away was that this girl’s father would probably come after them and kill him. Then he thought of nothing else except the lake and the mountains. And the sheep bleating, the one sound he had forgotten, ran like a familiar song through all his dreams.

When Richard came running down the stairs, there was some kind of commotion going on at the reception desk. He registered it only dimly. He pulled up his coat collar and went out into the sleet. Juliette had already gone; the taxi was rounding the corner. He shouted her name anyway, then ran back up the steps. In the shelter of the doorway, he tried to think. But he could not concentrate with all the noise behind him.

‘I’m sorry,’ one of the hotel employees was saying, brushing sleet out of her hair. ‘I would have been here on time, but my son—’

‘It’s not good enough,’ the manager was saying. ‘You’ve been unreliable from the beginning.’

Richard turned to go back up the stairs. He didn’t want to be here when this woman was fired. He would ask James
to fetch the car and he would go out and look for Juliette.

The woman was close to tears as he edged past. ‘It’s my son,’ she said. ‘He said he was going to meet a friend and left without telling me where he was going, and he had half his belongings with him. I have to go after him.’

‘You can do that later.’

‘No,’ said the woman. ‘No, I have to go now. I promise I’ll be back by the afternoon.’

The hotel manager shook his head. He went on shaking it, and the woman said, ‘All right,’ and took off her badge and laid it down on the counter. ‘Then I’ll have to resign,’ she said, and left.

Richard turned and ran back down the steps. At the bottom he almost collided with the woman. She was sitting there in the sleet, swiping angrily at the tears on her face. ‘Excuse me,’ said Richard. ‘I could not help overhearing.’

The woman looked up at him. ‘Yes?’ she said.

‘Your son,’ he said. ‘Is he Ashley Devere? Are you Anna?’

Richard knew it was too late even as he and the boy’s mother were driving north, not speaking to each other. They stopped in cold white service stations, like the one where he had bought chips that first night, and five-year-old Juliette had fallen asleep in his arms. Sometimes in the silences, he felt that weight still, like a terrible burden. He could still feel the way his arms closed around his only child. Anna Devere drank tea with several sugars; Richard, the black English coffee that he had never acquired a taste for. They drove all day and half the night, because the minor roads were treacherous with black ice, and they had to go slowly. It was one o’clock when they came to Lakebank
and parked the old Rolls-Royce close up to the gates.

They crossed the grounds in silence. The inhabitants of the house, whoever they were, were all asleep. Richard and Anna went carefully across the gravel and up into the woods behind the house. The path was already trampled, but the chapel was empty.

Anna said, ‘He’s gone,’ and sat down on the broken wall, resting her head on her hand. Snow was falling now, and it seemed like a sign, this rare English snow obscuring the night and covering her shoulders.

Richard’s mind was clearer the colder it grew. ‘Take the car,’ he said eventually. ‘Here are the keys. Drive home and wait, and I will send you word. I promise. I’ll go after them. I am Aldebaran’s disciple; I’m a relative of his. I won’t let either of them come to any harm.’

‘No,’ said Anna. ‘No, I’m staying here. I’m a relative of his too.’

‘Trust me. I promise I will send you word. I promise.’

It took a good deal more arguing before she would be persuaded. Then she turned and shrugged her jacket over her shoulders and went away from him. He saw the car’s lights come on below the trees. She sat there for a long time without moving. Then she pulled out slowly and drove off along the lake road, and the snow obscured her tracks. Richard was shivering now. He wrapped his overcoat around him and sat down in the shelter of the wall of the old chapel. He thought that this was how he would find his way home. As he grew steadily colder, he wondered if this had been Aldebaran’s plan all along. His daughter was the last in one branch of the family, and Anna’s son was the last in another, and he, Richard, was willing to die to protect them. It was like one of those English plays. To keep himself
warm, Richard repeated lines to himself in the darkness. ‘When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions!’ ‘Oh, now be gone! More light and light it grows. More light and light – more dark and dark our woes.’

He knew there were cheerful lines, but they never spoke to him. His was a bleak and melancholy land, and his heart wished to be back there now.

Out of the dark, Aldebaran’s voice came to him, telling him that old story of the magician and his daughter, just as he had when Richard was his pupil. He had read the play since, and he knew it. The part that struck him was the ending, where the magician stood at the front of the stage and lifted up his hands and asked the audience to forgive his mistakes. And asked them to let him go.

Richard decided that he was dying of cold, but he did not have the will to get up and move. And then, out of the dark, a gas lamp emerged. It shone very brightly, and others came out, the silent lights of a city already prepared for war. The last lines of the play came to him, very clear and certain. ‘As you from crimes would pardoned be, let your indulgence set me free.’

In a minute, he would get up and start out into his old city. In a minute, but not yet. Into the darkness, with a faint surprise, Richard felt his powers drifting away from him. He thought, Is this the effect of my own country? Or is it something else? Then he made himself get up slowly and go into the church. He was no longer the great one, the lord Rigel. He would go on foot and unaided by magic, and he would find them both and find Aldebaran’s last descendant. He would go as the boy who dreamed of magic once, as Richard Delmar.

* * *

Anna threw her keys on the table without turning on the lights. She stood and looked out at the sleet-washed darkness. It was almost Christmas. A few lights flashed gaudily at the window of the house opposite, a plastic silhouette of Father Christmas and his sleigh taking off into the stars.

Anna had stopped on the way back and gone into a public phone box and thought about calling the police. Her fingers moved from key to key for what felt like several hours. Ashley was missing, and this man, this friend of her great-uncle’s, seemed no hope at all. But what could she say? How could she start to say it? Because if people don’t believe you, you can’t tell them, she thought. That is the loneliest thing in the world. Not to be understood.

Bradley came in and put his arm about her shoulders and said, ‘Anna, any news?’

‘There will be,’ she said.

She found a book and wrote in it, trying to concentrate her mind. It was something R yan had told her about, in passing, years ago. ‘Any news?’ she wrote, over and over again. Eventually she heard on the still night air, ‘It will be all right.’ Then it vanished, and she thought perhaps it was a mistake. But its stillness stayed with her. That night, things became clear. If there were other people like her, her heart would not be at rest until she found them. She had left it too long.

When Anna slept, she dreamed about her grandmother and thought she was a child again. And then she saw Ashley, in an empty house with a blonde-haired girl, sitting close to the fire. She woke up and thought about the man called Richard, and R yan, and her son. Maybe there was a silence constraining everyone, but those with powers understood each other. Their hearts were connected, and their
minds reached out across the miles, across the years. And if you listened and had the willpower, you could hear them speak to you.

After I finished that story, the bells of the last ships were already clanging. ‘You had better go,’ I told Mr Hardy. ‘If you miss it, you will be waiting until tomorrow evening.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, I suppose I had.’

I walked with him to the harbour. He gripped my hands and went, with his few belongings in his hand. I watched him go slowly along the gangplank. People who passed him did not glance up; no one knew that he once had been a famous man. I thought that perhaps no one would ever know, except our family. He did not have many years left. At the lighted door of the ship, he turned and waved. He looked like a saint already, on the path to some better place. I raised my hand to him. Then he disappeared from view, and the ship was moving out across the harbour. I watched its lights until they began to fade. Then I turned and walked away. I slept in the front room of a charitable innkeeper, and when it grew light, I went out and boarded the ship to Arkavitz. On the way, to pass the silent hours, I finished the story for my brother.

Arkavitz, Northern Passes, is a drab, grey place. It is just a few streets in the shelter of a church, the final outpost before the first pass north. The Alcyrian army took hold of it long before I arrived. And I did not find my real father’s grave. There is a graveyard, but no Jean-Cristophe Ahira de Fiore lies buried there.

The factory makes tin plates and saucepans. I work all the hours of daylight, and then I sit awake and think. Sometimes in my sleep, my arms move by themselves and try to carry on working, rearranging something on a production line or checking the rivets on a saucepan over and over, until I wake up confused and uncertain of where I am. It is the kind of work that dulls your mind. Already things are changing. Two months ago, the gleaming machines of the factory made me wonder, and its noise was deafening. Now I am used to it all.