Voices in the Dark Read Online Free PDF Page A

long.’
    ‘You two!’ she said. She hugged Jasmine to her and laughed until tears fell from her eyes. ‘It will look terrible in the light of day. You should sketch out lines and draw it properly.’
    ‘We will, one day,’ said Leo. ‘What shall I write? Help me, Anselm. You are the clever one – give me inspiration.’
    ‘Write “L. North and M. Andros, Dealers in Secondhand Goods”.’
    ‘Don’t put my name on it,’ said my mother, still laughing. ‘I want nothing to do with this. I am going out tomy own sensible job, and you two can carry on your schemes without me.’
    ‘Mama, what Papa write?’ murmured Jasmine. She was falling asleep in my mother’s arms.
    ‘I know what,’ said Leo.
    He climbed up another step on the ladder. From where I was, I could not see what he was writing. He was balanced on the top rung now, in his oldest shirt and faded soldier’s boots, his eyes fixed in concentration as the dark got darker. ‘Maybe it is too late,’ I said. ‘Maybe we should finish it tomorrow.’
    ‘No,’ he said. ‘No, I can see well enough.’
    He worked in silence, frowning as he painted in each letter. ‘Look at the stars,’ whispered my mother. ‘You can tell how cold it is.’
    I turned without letting go of the ladder. The stars looked as if they were shivering, very low down over the houses. In an inn nearby, music started rustily, a violin and an accordion. It was a song the travelling musicians used to play at the new inn on the corner of Citadel Street. It made this place already a kind of home. The song was by Diamonn and called ‘I Would Follow the One I Love’. My mother sang the last verse very quietly in Jasmine’s ear:
    ‘Love brings down many captives, and lifts up many princes also.
    Love is both the cruel cold sea and the mariner’s true star.
    And love is the poison in the blood and in the heart the arrow.
    I’d follow him, my heart’s own soul, and never ask how far.’
    ‘There,’ said Leo, jumping down from the ladder. ‘Look at it, Anselm, and tell me what you think.’
    I stepped back and narrowed my eyes against the dark.
    ‘It is not straight, is it?’ he said. ‘But what do you think of the words?’
    ‘I can’t see.’
    ‘Wait a minute,’ said Leo. He went inside and lit an oil lamp, then held it up behind the window. His face was ghostlike through the dusty glass, but the letters stood out blackly. They shimmered as the light moved: L . NORTH & SON .
    Nearly five years had passed since that night. I was eleven then and still dreamed of England. Jasmine was a two-year-old who had yet to show any sign of powers. But between then and Aldebaran’s death, our lives became what we had wanted them to be. I don’t think we realized it then. I only knew it afterwards, when nothing was right any more.
    After Aldebaran’s funeral, the street sweepers came out in the driving rain and cleared away all traces of the crowds. And I kept expecting that life would return to normality. But the days passed and it didn’t. My mother and Jasmine were both prone to fits of angry tears. Leo went about quietly with his eyes on the ground. I began to wish school would start again, to give me a reason to leave the shop. And every morning the newspaper was full of reports on the hunt for the assassin.
    One night Leo and I sat up late counting the day’s takings, and afterwards neither of us had the heart to get up and go to bed. We listened to the rain against the windows instead. Every time I glanced up, I would think I saw someone in the alley opposite. The fourth or fifth time, I got upand went to the front window. But the street was deserted. No one passed in the rain-washed dark except a couple of stray dogs chasing a newspaper. The face of the latest suspect was emblazoned on the front of it – a thin man about Leo’s age who was with the New Imperial Order.
    ‘Do you think he did it?’ I said.
    ‘Who?’ Leo asked me.
    ‘That man from the Imperial