Voices in the Dark

by Catherine Banner

  ‘You’re lying,’ I said again.

  ‘Ask your mother. Ask anyone who was in our circle at the time. They all knew – the Marlazzi family and the Wrights and the St John daughters, who were so close with Maria. No one said anything, but they all knew. I could tell by their glances and the gossip that went round. Is there any shame worse? I always said you should have been told, Anselm. Well, there!’ She was still breathing fast. ‘There! Now you have been. What do you think of that?’

  I turned and started down the stairs. My hands were shaking, and I could not unlock the side door. ‘No,’ Jasmine said, starting to cry. ‘Anselm, don’t go away too.’

  ‘I’m not going away,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t leave! Please!’

  I wrenched the door open and started across the frozen yard. Halfway across, I collided with the remains of Jasmine’s snow statue.

  ‘Fine,’ said my grandmother, a black figure in the doorway. ‘Go running off as you always do. Anselm Andros, I sometimes think you know nothing about real life!’

  ‘Don’t go away, Anselm!’ cried Jasmine.

  I had not even taken my jacket. I ran anyway, out into the snow.

  Jasmine tried to follow me at first, sniffing and stumbling after me across the yard. ‘Go back!’ I told her then, so fiercely that she obeyed. Ahira’s face was everywhere, on the side of every shop, with his fist raised in defiance. How had I not realized it? A red-haired man with determined features. A man who looked like me.

  Jared Wright’s shop was in darkness, but he appeared at the door the third time I rang the bell, his shirt collar undone and his hair tousled. ‘Anselm,’ he said. ‘It is past eleven.’

  I said something that I can’t remember now. He raised one eyebrow and stepped back to let me in. A woman was standing halfway down the stairs, drawing a shawl around her. ‘Tomorrow, Estelle,’ he said, and their hands closed on a few crown notes. She nodded and left. ‘Well,’ said Jared. He lit a cigarette and frowned at the smoke rising. ‘What can I do for you?’

  I stood there and could not say it.

  ‘Well?’ said Jared then.

  I found my voice again, what was left of it. ‘Was my real father Ahira?’ I said. ‘You know.’

  Jared dropped his cigarette. It burned a black hole in the varnish of the table. ‘My God,’ he said. ‘I thought you had been told.’ He looked up when I did not answer. ‘Everyone suspected it,’ he said. ‘At least, when your mother and I were young. It was the gossip of the whole city. How did she keep that from you? How the hell did she manage not to tell you …’

  I walked to the table and back again. Then I opened my mouth to speak, but I could not do it.

  ‘Sit down,’ he said. ‘Don’t get so agitated.’

  I sat, then stood up again. Jared’s cigarette was burning deeper into the table; he rubbed at it distractedly.

  ‘There aren’t many people who know for sure,’ he went on. ‘Maria. Your stepfather, I would assume. Maria’s parents. And me. I was Maria’s closest friend at the time, or had been. I was working with Ahira in the government. I was his apprentice, I suppose – or would have been, if he had lived long enough. But we used to talk. My father was a great friend of his. Ahira confided in me.’

  ‘Ahira,’ I whispered, as if saying his name would make sense out of it.

  ‘Yes,’ said Jared. ‘He was no prince; it is true.’

  ‘I want to see his grave,’ I said.

  Jared breathed in carefully. ‘He doesn’t have a grave,’ he said. ‘Not a real one. They set up a memorial stone with the other war criminals.’

  ‘But he must be somewhere,’ I said. I felt suddenly that if I could find where he was, it might still be all right. There might be some kind of mistake.

  ‘Some of his supporters fled north,’ said Jared, ‘and took Ahira’s ashes with them. I think they were fleeing to the town where he was born. It’s a few hundred miles; they were probably caught on the road.’ He spread his hands helplessly. ‘I’ll take you to his memorial stone.’

  I waited at the door while he fetched his overcoat and boots. In the darkness, everything in the shop looked altered. The dark pictures towered oppressively from the ceiling.

  ‘Haven’t you even brought a coat?’ he demanded, as if we were out on a day’s excursion. He threw me a jacket of his own. ‘We have a long way to go. The war criminals’ graves were exhumed and taken beyond the graveyard.’

  ‘Why?’ I said.

  ‘Why what? God, it’s cold.’ As he opened the door, a current of ice drove in at our faces. He lit another cigarette and led me out into the dark. ‘Why were they taken away from the graveyard? Because it was a mistake to bury them alongside the dead resistance members. Everyone saw that as soon as they did it. There were incidents. Vandalisms and … robberies. Bones were taken.’ He caught my glance. ‘Ahira’s stone is still intact. To a certain point. To tell the truth, I think no one dared.’

  Jared went on talking as we set out through the dark city. I walked in silence beside him. Once, we glimpsed two police officers on the road ahead, and he pulled me into an alleyway. A few Imperial Order men ran past, but they ignored us. Eventually he fell into silence too, lighting and relighting his cigarette.

  ‘He was misunderstood,’ said Jared abruptly as we crossed the new bridge. ‘You have to know that. He was uncompromising, and the government used him as a symbol. A symbol of fear – that’s what he was. But, towards the end, he was very unhappy with the way things were going. Very unhappy. He was an idealist, you know. At least at the start.’

  ‘My family lost everything,’ I said. ‘Because of him. Because of me. Is that the truth?’

  ‘He wanted to make amends for it. He was shot before he could make things right.’

  ‘But it was because of that, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Anselm, in his will, he left everything he owned to you – his house, his estate, the money he had, everything. A small fortune. He regretted what he did. Under a proper government, he would never have had the power to do it.’

  A cat leaped from behind a grave and shot between us, its mangy fur on end against the cold. ‘A small fortune he left to you,’ said Jared, ‘but the king came back, and the last wishes of a notorious war criminal were not respected. Those things were seized and redistributed. You know all this from your history books, don’t you?’

  I had read about it, but that was a story that had nothing to do with my own life. I had thought the redistribution highly justified.

  ‘He wrote you a letter,’ said Jared. ‘He asked me to give it to your mother.’

  I could not ask the question, but my mouth formed the words. ‘Did you?’

  Jared ran his hands over his oiled hair. ‘I feel guilty about this, to tell you the truth,’ he said. ‘I had to get out of the country. He wrote to you the day he was shot, the afternoon before he died. Naturally, that night was the start of the revolution, and things fell out hard for the rest of us directly after that.’

  ‘But the letter—’

  ‘I still have it,’ he said. ‘I will give it to you as soon as we get back. Anselm, it’s been weighing on my mind these sixteen years. I should have passed it on years ago.’

  We had left the graveyard now and were crossing the waste ground that edged the eastern hills. The king had begun some building project here and had given it up when it was still half finished. The lights of the Alcyrian army burned along the horizon. ‘We have a way to go yet,’ said Jared. ‘Can you see?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Your teeth are chattering.’

  ‘I’m all right.’

  Jared stopped to light another cigarette. ‘This is not too much?’ he said.

  I shook my head. He gave a strange kind of humourless laugh. ‘Anselm, I have wanted to speak about this for so long,’ he said. ‘I can’t tell you how long. So many years I have kept silent. I wanted to find you again – it’s half the reason I came back. He haunts me, you know. I promised him that I w
ould give you the letter. And then for you to come walking into the shop like that …’ He shook his head. ‘I knew I had seen you before. It’s your father. That’s who I’ve seen. It was like a sign. I’m not a superstitious man, but that’s how it was. I know Maria has probably not told you the half of this. I want you to know the truth about him.’

  The wind blew cold over the eastern hills, driving the snow at us like grit. ‘What is the truth?’ I said dully.

  ‘He was misunderstood,’ said Jared. ‘He was part of the de Fiore family, but there was some disagreement, and he fell out with them when he was still a boy. He came here with nothing, completely homeless. The king’s government failed him. The Kalitz family took him in. That was why his allegiance fell where it did. And he was a brilliant man, Anselm. Absolutely brilliant. He taught himself completely; he was never at school. I think he genuinely believed in change, you know. I was in it for the money – I won’t deny it. My father was a rich man and set me up in Lucien’s government, because it was a way of staying rich. But Ahira had ideals. His family disowned him completely when he joined Lucien’s government; he lost an absolute fortune in inheritance. I am not denying he grew unbalanced towards the end, but he had ideals.’

  We had stopped walking now and stood there at the end of everything with the wind driving around us. I could tell by the tones of the darkness that we were between two hills. Jared lit a match, and a fence rose in front of us; then the dark snatched the light away. He stumbled through the snow along the side of it, cursing, and after a long search found the gate. ‘Come on,’ he said.

  I followed him. We were surrounded by graves. Stones dug into the soles of my boots under the snow. ‘Where are we?’ I said.

  ‘Devil’s Cross,’ said Jared. ‘It’s just a crossroads in the middle of nowhere. Go that way and you’ll drown in marshes; over that way, the soil is so bad it poisons every plant that tries to grow. Even the cattle sicken and die.’ With the snow and the dark, I could not see where he was pointing. ‘It’s where the notorious were always buried,’ he said. ‘In true archaic fashion. Come here.’ He was kneeling in front of a grave, brushing the snow from the weathered stone. ‘There,’ he said. ‘You can just make it out.’ I saw him trace something, pronouncing the name as he did it. ‘Jean-Cristophe Ahira de Fiore. It’s just a marker – there is no one buried here.’

  The wind wailed like a lost child, the way Jasmine cried when she dreamed of terrors in her sleep.

  ‘He had his full name on his grave,’ said Jared. ‘He asked me to tell them to put that. Perhaps he had a change of heart towards his family, at the end. Perhaps he had a change of heart towards Ahira and all that name stood for. Because he did change, Anselm. No one knows what was in his mind that last night of his life, but he did change. He was the one—’

  ‘The one who shot Lucien,’ I said.

  Jared looked up at me sharply. ‘How do you know that?’ he demanded.

  I could not recall at first. Then I remembered it. Years ago, when I was still a young boy and my history books were full of bitterness directed against that man, Aldebaran had told me.

  I fell to my knees in the snow. I could not read the letters, so I reached out and touched the stone instead. It was a plain cross, smashed in several places so that the letters were disconnected. Someone had scrawled words on it in black. ‘What does that say?’ I whispered. My voice came out hoarse.

  ‘Here,’ said Jared, lighting a match and shielding it in his cupped hands. It burned just long enough to let me read: I HOPE ALL YOUR DESCENDANTS FOLLOW YOU TO HELL was on one side and MARTYRED FOR HIS BELIEF IN FREEDOM was on the other. And between them were the carved words JEAN-CRISTOPHE AHIRA DE FIORE and the dates.

  ‘He was a very clever man,’ said Jared. ‘The clever are often misunderstood. The clever are often very unhappy. I was never an intelligent man, and I thank God for it. They destroy themselves from the inside, those people, and no one ever really knows what they are thinking; no one can ever really make them out. I don’t think he believed in Lucien’s government any more. When he wrote to you, I don’t think he believed in it.’

  ‘But he was the worst of them all.’

  ‘Was he? He was cleverer than the others. Does that make him worse?’

  I brushed the falling snow from the grave but more fell. ‘Ahira believed that you had to compromise to get anywhere,’ said Jared. ‘I am not denying that some of his measures seemed extreme. But I think he was constrained by a system that had lost all its ideals. Does that make sense to you?’

  I got to my feet. I did not know the way out, but I turned anyway and began struggling through the snow. I collided with the fence, and then I was throwing myself against it, like I was in prison and trying to break free. Every time I did it, the whole world lost its bearings.

  ‘Hey, hey,’ said Jared then, catching hold of my arms. I broke away from him and set out into the darkness. ‘Anselm!’ he said. ‘Stop. Careful, for God’s sake. The city is that way.’

  I turned and saw the lights.

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘It is bound to be a shock. All right.’

  He steered me out of the gate, then made me sit down in the snow at the side of the road and took out a flask of spirits. ‘Here,’ he said, tipping some into my mouth. He thumped my shoulder and made me cough. ‘Come on, Anselm,’ he said. ‘At least he was not no one at all. He was an important man. He came from a noble family. He has been misunderstood, it’s true, but …’

  He went on, but I did not hear him. I felt the burning cold of the snow around me without caring. It was as if my life had stopped being real any more, as if its connection to the world was shaken and might drift free altogether. The dark was more than infinity around us. I had not understood until then what it was like to feel nothing. Here it was, the truth that I had wanted ever since I realized my grandmother half hated me. And now I didn’t know what to do with it.

  * * *

  Jared must have taken me back to his shop, but I remember nothing of the journey. The next thing I knew, we were in the back room, and he was pushing a cup of hot tea towards me, because I was still shivering with cold. I glanced into the gilded mirror that was propped against the wall. My face looked back, so altered in this knowledge that I would hardly have recognized it. I had Ahira’s red hair and his definite eyebrows; even the bones under my skin were set out the same as his, on some invisible pattern that ran in my blood. Whatever I had expected to find out about my real father, it was not this.

  ‘Listen,’ said Jared. ‘I was the one he confided in, and I know he was not a bad man. Not at heart. He had been discontented with Lucien’s government for a long time. He was looking for a way to get out. He visited the Alcyrian border and saw the terrible conditions there, and he began trying to find a way of getting out of that war. But you can’t break free of a prison like that without leaving damage behind you. The fact is, he acted one way and thought another for a long time before he found his chance.’

  I tried to remember the dates on his grave. ‘How old was he?’ I said eventually.

  ‘Thirty-five when he died. About.’

  It was older than my mother was now. Jared got up and began polishing the mirror, avoiding my glance.

  ‘That letter …’ I said.

  He disappeared up the stairs. I wandered about the shop in the darkness. My thoughts could not settle, and walking about was better, because I did not have to listen to the silence.

  ‘Here,’ said Jared then, putting an envelope into my hand. It was fastened with a blue seal, and the paper was brittle and lifeless with age. ‘I have not read it,’ he said. ‘I have been carrying it about the continent with me for sixteen years. I wanted to give it to you when I first realized who you were. It was why I came to your house. I wanted to ask Maria first, but I kept losing my courage. I know you think I am a man without scruples. But there, I have kept my word, and I hope it helps you.’

  I took it from him.

  ‘You know
,’ he said quietly as I turned to leave. ‘I wish I could tell you better. I wish I could explain those days, just after the Liberation, when families like mine were the kings of the world. We thought everything was going to change for the better. We thought we could make it change. You know?’ He broke off and ground his cigarette on the side of the door frame.

  I turned and walked away into the snow.

  They were all awake when I got back, even my mother. ‘Where have you been?’ demanded my grandmother, marching over. ‘You have kept us all awake with worrying. Have you been drinking, Anselm? I can smell the spirits on you. For heaven’s sake, you are as bad as Leo.’

  ‘Anselm?’ said Jasmine, reaching up to take my hand. ‘Anselm, what’s the matter?’

  My mother watched me in silence. I could not meet her eyes, and it seemed the longest journey to my bedroom door. I shut it behind me, bolted it, and lit the lamp. My hands looked strange in that light, like someone else’s. They were arguing, my grandmother and my mother. I made out phrases through the door: ‘completely out of control’ and ‘just stop lecturing’ and ‘needs a firm talking-to.’

  I took out the envelope. The words were written in a scrawling hand: ‘Anselm Raphael Andros’.

  He had known my middle name. Hardly anyone knew it, but my father had taken the trouble to find it out. I broke the seal carefully and opened it. There was a single sheet inside, the writing so scrawled and shaking that I could hardly read it. I stood in the lamplight and held the letter out in front of me. It was my last hope of redemption, this letter. I didn’t know how, but I prayed it would somehow make everything all right.

  My son.

  I see such visions. In the dark outside the window, I can hear them accusing me, & I do not have much time. I want you to know that I am sorry. For the actions I have done in the name of this government & for the wrongs I did your mother. I will be dead by the time you read these words. Anselm, I would have loved you, if I had seen you. I would have tried to make amends. For all it is worth, I loved her. She was so beautiful & so kind and young, Anselm, & I was sick with everything & had no one I could trust. I had just come back from the Alcyrian border that night. My God, if you had seen it. I was supposed to be holding a party. I came in covered in mud and sweat, & the guests were already arriving. My heart was so sick with everything. I cannot explain it. Anselm, my life was burned out far too young. I had done so many bad things that I was already damned. I drank very heavily in those days, & perhaps my judgement was not what it could have been. In my defence, I thought she loved me or that perhaps she would come to. I see such visions. I am afraid for your safety. I am most heartily sorry for what I did. I want you to grow up in peace. I want you to be a better man than me. I ask one thing of you. It is my only request. Anselm, never forgive me. I want to die condemned, and stand condemned for ever.