Voices in the Dark Read Free

consolation. We went inside; then my mother shut the door, and the noise of the crowded city vanished. Leo sat down at the table in the back room. My mother put the kettle on the stove. We all stood around and could think of nothing to say.
    ‘It’s so unfair,’ my mother said eventually.
    ‘I know,’ said Leo.
    ‘He would never have wanted to go like that.’
    ‘I know.’
    There was another silence. A few raindrops crackled on the window. I added more coals to the stove and tried to turn them over without interrupting the silence that had settled over us.
    ‘I must say,’ my grandmother ventured,‘I thought it was a lovely ceremony. And he was old, Maria. He was eighty-six. I’m sure I’d be glad to die at such an age.’
    ‘He was shot,’ said Leo. ‘No one would be glad—’
    ‘Why haven’t they caught the man—’ began Jasmine.
    ‘Shh,’ said my mother. ‘I don’t know. They will.’
    She went to the stove and took the kettle off it and put it back on again. Still it would not boil.
    In a box on the table was all that Aldebaran had bequeathed to us. I took out the things carefully and replaced them again; it was something to do. He had not left much. The chief advisers took a vow of poverty when they were sworn into office, and after they died, all their papers were burned. There was a wooden box for Jasmine, his christening medallion for me, and a ring for my mother. For Leo there was a book in a paper wrapping that still layunopened. There was also a parcel with
To the baby
written across it in red ink. My mother’s baby was not due for several months, but it seemed Aldebaran had thought of everything.
    Jasmine lay down under the table and began to cry in earnest. Aldebaran had been her teacher, and his death left her the last in the family with powers. Although they had argued bitterly in all their lessons, she had really been the one he loved the most.
    ‘Hush,’ said my mother. She knelt down beside the table and stroked Jasmine’s hair. ‘Come on, Jas. He wouldn’t want you to make yourself so unhappy. And it is not for ever. You know that.’
    ‘Dead is for ever,’ said Jasmine. ‘Dead means dead, and you can never be not dead again.’
    ‘He will still watch over you.’
    ‘He won’t.’
    Someone tapped at the door. The neighbours were out in the street waiting to pay their respects. ‘Anselm, go and let them in,’ said my mother.
    The neighbours’ chatter drowned out the silence of our house, and by the time they began to leave, darkness was falling. The Barones stayed a while longer than the rest. My grandmother was still here, and Mr Pascal, who could never be made to leave any funeral. We stood around the table in the back room and listened to the guns fire yet another salute from the Royal Gardens. Leo and Mr Pascal lit cigarettes, and the smoke rose and made strange patterns under the ceiling.
    ‘Tell me,’ said Mr Pascal when the silence had drawn out for several minutes, ‘who succeeds Aldebaran as chief adviser?’
    ‘I believe it is Joseph Marcus Sawyer,’ said my grandmother.
    ‘Sawyer?’ said Mr Pascal.
    Mr Barone shook his head and ran his hands over his thinning hair as though he wanted to fix it in place. ‘I don’t know why the king has chosen a man like that,’ he said.
    ‘He is not so bad,’ said Mr Pascal. ‘He may be the best we can hope for, under the circumstances. At least they say he has powers, and it has to be someone with powers. In these days, it is a miracle they found anyone at all.’
    ‘As far as I heard, those powers left him when he was a child,’ said Mr Barone. ‘And all the world knows he was a collaborator.’
    ‘There are worse things.’
    ‘Are there?’ said Mr Barone with a sharpness I had never heard in his voice before. ‘Are there really worse things?’
    Mr Pascal breathed out and held his cheeks there. He was a large man, and it made his face look round and shapeless like a baby’s.
    ‘What’s a