Benighted (3 page)

We used to be the Order of St. Giles; that was where we started. Giles, Aegidius, patron saint of cripples, protector of rams, saint of woods and forests and fear of the night. Patron saint of barebacks, though Judas Thaddeus, St. Jude, Saint of Hopeless Cases, probably gets most of our prayers. St. Giles is our saint, Giles and the Dominicans.

This is what I learned in two years, in the gaps between classes in administration, animal handling, and marksmanship. Before the fourteenth century, the laws and curfews relating to moon nights were what I’ve been taught to call ad hoc: you made them up as you went along. If people lived in a village with livestock, they locked themselves up and got any nons that happened to live in the area to keep watch so they didn’t attack their own flocks. If they lived in a city, there was probably a nightly curfew anyway, so not much changed when the moon was full. If they lived somewhere remote, they did whatever seemed sensible. If they were beggars, they roamed and slaughtered and were hanged for it later.

Then the plague came. It was a bad time to be alive, back then, a hard time to stay alive. There were wars, mercenaries roaming; there were famines, starvation, ergot in the crops and people living on poisoned bread, and the Black Death swept across Europe like an Angel of the Apocalypse. The Book of Revelations was coming true: Plague, War, Famine, and Death were riding out. It was the end of the world.

A bad time for roamers. Lunes don’t understand words like “quarantine.” Surrounded by death every day, watching their neighbors rotting alive and never knowing if they’d be next, there can’t have been a man or woman who wasn’t fearful. People were killed for wiping their dirty hands on walls by fellow townsmen who thought they might be putting on curses; Jews were killed for supposedly poisoning wells. And people who got out of their houses at night were declared plague-spreaders, and wracked citizens who’d seen half the population die built pyres in the middle of towns and burned them alive.

That was early, before the Inquisition really got under way. Some of my teaching at school I had from nuns, who weren’t eager to share these details with us: it was DORLA-appointed teachers who were prepared to tell us about history. The Church identified a new enemy: witches. Satanists, people who were prepared to turn their backs on God and all things pure and sacred for the sake of a little temporal power to work harm against their neighbors. It would have been a pretty terrible crime, if it had actually existed, and witches were declaring their wicked deeds on every rack in the continent. It was a legalistic process, the witch hunt, there were degrees of torment imposed in regular sequence and forms of confession to be gone through, and it worked with an efficiency that seemed like divine justice.

Incubi, succubi. Demons that came and made love to you in your sleep, seduced you into giving your soul to Satan. The trouble is, you don’t remember too well what you were doing when you were asleep, so it’s a hard accusation to defend yourself against. The same applied to luning. No one remembers it all that well. It was hard, then, to deny you’d had commerce with the Devil while you were luning, that he hadn’t come to you in the form of a man and called you to heel, in the form of a dog and had sex with you, in the form of a rat and made you eat him in a black Communion. Certainly hard to deny it when you were hanging by your arms in the strappado.

People were losing themselves. Years ago, when I was a girl, even to read old library books about it was enough to give me bad dreams. It was as if the world had lost its soul. People carried away non children who weren’t guarded by luning parents, lunes killed other lunes every moon night. Hungry enough to eat each other, desperate enough to run wild on moon nights, that’s what apologists say about them now. At the time, all anyone thought was that they were evil. Luning, already regarded by the Church with the suspicion that sex, childbirth, and all the other carnal upheavals the human frame fell prey to, became a matter of panic. The Inquisition came down hard; they went on the hunt. The Dominicans, the founders of it all, took up their nickname like a banner:
Domini Canes,
the Hounds of God, appointed to run down Satan’s wolves. Protestants, who by then were killing Catholics with equal fervor, declared luning to be an unregenerate state, because you were incapable of faith while under its influence. Pious citizens who feared temptation to sin, or frightened citizens who didn’t want to find themselves at the stake, take your pick, but people began locking themselves away. They hammered bars across their windows, they called in priests to bless a room in their house and anointed the thresholds with holy water and nailed crosses to the doors, and went inside to wait out moon nights in the hope of Christ’s protection.

And for the most part, it was granted. The odd person slipped through the net, but by that time, the curfew had done its work, and while witches were still dying in the flames, people began to breathe again about moon nights.

We were useful, back then. People needed us.

It was a Papal Bull that settled it. We were marked out by the affliction God had laid upon us, we were to be his guards. We were created. It wasn’t a monastic order, the Order of St. Giles, Aegidius Romanus: we were lay brothers and sisters, allied to God’s law. It was voluntary, officially, no one need join who had no vocation, but of course, we joined. There were liable to be some serious questions asked, questions involving shackles and thumbscrews, if we didn’t. And we’d suffered, we’d been suffering more than most, with lunes roaming the highways starving from the famines, with accusations of witchcraft flying and liable to land on those who didn’t fit in. Aegidians did not get accused of witchery. We listened to the accusations, we bore witness in the trials, we patrolled and inspected the lock-ups people were creating for themselves. Initiates didn’t starve, we were paid out of the tithes and had enough to eat and some security in the world and were the new guardians of laws that, in those days of famine and plague, were useful enough to seem holy, divinely ordained. We began in the Catholic countries, the deaths and trials began to fall back, and soon enough even the Calvinists set aside their dislike of Papal authority and created Aegidian orders of their own, different in name but identical in role. Christendom was, miraculously, almost united on an issue. On the first of September, St. Giles’s Day, everyone gathered at church, lycos and nons alike, to pray for protection and to give thanks.

Quite a few of the churches in the city have shrines to St. Giles, even now. I used to go and pray at them, sometimes, when I was little, and I thought no one was watching me. They’re a monument to an earlier, bloodier age, that’s what some people think. Certainly it’s the older churches that have them. Nowadays, of course, we have social benefits and atheists, and St. Giles doesn’t get as many prayers as he did.

I catch a bus over to Albin’s part of town. When I sit down, I’m careless. There’s a welt on my palm, a deep slash from the last moon night. The lune ran at me and forced the pole into my hand. As I sit there, I’m studying it, prodding it with my thumb, testing the edges for pain. The inside of my hand is visible. The man I sit down next to sees it, and gets up to move to another part of the bus. Nons don’t have calluses on their palms like lycos build up after a few years of nights on all fours. Our hands are smooth, pale inside: it doesn’t show that much unless you’re sharp-eyed. When it comes to spotting nons, people are. Most of us get into the habit of curling up our fingers to hide it, so our habitual hand position is a fist. The man settles himself on another seat, watching me out of the corner of his eye. My hand moves to my pocket to get my gloves out, but I stop it. I’m damned if I’ll put them on in front of him.

I put them on for the walk to Albin’s place, and when I get there I take them off. There are bay windows and a front yard full of ever-greenish plants; it’s a detached house. Lots of garden. It’s not unlike the area I grew up in. Very unlike the area I live in now. I rap the polished door-knocker, and then see there’s an intercom: I’m about to ring it when a voice sounds from it. “Hello?” It’s a woman’s voice.

“Hello. Is Mr. Lewis Albin at home?”

“Just a moment.” The intercom clicks off. I wait just long enough to get impatient, then Albin’s voice sounds.

“This is Lewis Albin.”

“Mr. Albin, my name is Lola Galley. I’m from DORLA. May I speak to you?”

There’s a silence. “DORLA? What do you want to talk about?”

“Mr. Albin, I’d like to come in.”

The intercom clicks off. I study the ivy that’s climbing all over the façade; it’s got a grip on the house with little tentacles. Just as I’m wondering whether he’s going to make me ring again, the door opens.

Albin is in his early thirties, I’d say, about average height with broad shoulders. Smart-casual clothes: the kind that you wear for years because they’re too well made to fall apart and too expensive to go out of fashion. His face isn’t handsome. It’s quite ordinary of feature, but with good skin and an intelligent expression: he’s brighter than the dull-eyed lost souls I’m used to dealing with. What you notice about him is how little you notice the scar that runs from eye to mouth on his left cheek. An ugly thing, yet somehow, with his manner, it barely shows; on another man, it would stand out a foot.

His hand rasps against mine as he shakes it. “I’m Lewis Albin,” he says. “Won’t you come in?”

Plants in the hallway, muted colors, sanded floorboards, sub-rustic decor. Taste. I am escorted to an upstairs living room and seated on a sofa. A woman in floaty clothes sits cross-legged on the matching one.

“Would you like some coffee?” Albin says. When I accept, he nods to the woman. “Sarah, would you mind?” Sarah unfolds her legs and goes into a connecting room.

He sits himself on a chair. “Now, how can I help you, Ms. Galley?”

He’s remembered my name first time around. “Mr. Albin, I’m advising Mr. Richard Thomas Ellaway on charges of assault and murder. According—”

“Murder?” He interrupts as if I’ve hit him. The shock sounds genuine, though a bit theatrical in his modulated voice.

“The murder of John Marcos. You may or may not know that Mr. Ellaway has already confessed to assaulting John Marcos last moon night. And yesterday, he was murdered.” Albin rubs his hand across his mouth. “Now, according to Mr. Ellaway, you spoke to him on the telephone at about nine p.m. yesterday. Can you verify that?”

In the silence that follows, I can hear the ivy on the façade tapping on the window.

“Jesus.” Albin puts his head in his hands. “Jesus.” It comes out like a sigh.

I frown at him. “Are you a close friend of Mr. Ellaway, would you say?”

He looks up at me, pale. “No.”

“Can you verify that he called you?”

“Yes. Yes, he did.”

Sarah comes in with a tray. There’s a coffeepot, three cups, milk in one jug and cream in another. She serves me, and brings the tray over to Albin and pours his coffee black as I sip my own. Toasted velvet fills my mouth.

He takes her hand. “Sarah,” he says. “This lady’s got some bad news. You remember Dick Ellaway? It seems he’s been accused of murder.”

Her eyes grow big in her face. Albin looks at me to explain myself, but I want to see how he’s going to say it. She sits down and rests her head on the back of the sofa, and he gives her her hand back. “Dick Ellaway attacked a man, you remember? And it seems someone shot the man yesterday, and he’s been accused. Ms. Galley’s advising him.”

Skillful. Very skillful. Or else innocent. There’s nothing in what he’s said that tells me anything about Ellaway, their relationship, or how much he knows. Sarah’s breath hisses out through her teeth, and she wraps her arms around a cushion. “I remember Dick Ellaway,” she says.

First things first. “Mr. Ellaway says that he called you on a cell phone. Do you remember hearing any noise in the background?”

Albin rubs his face; his hand doesn’t linger on the scar. “Voices, I think, slightly tinny. It sounded like he had the television on.”

“Anything else?”

“Not that I remember offhand. I wasn’t really paying attention to the background noise.”

“But it sounded like he was inside?”

“Yes.”

“How was the line? Clear? Interrupted?”

“It was clear. No break-ups.”

“And what time was this?”

“Nine or nine thirty, I’d say.”

I don’t feel good about this. What Albin says will probably stand up in court. I doubt Albin and Ellaway are in league: there’s a sobriety about Albin that’s as different from Ellaway as I can imagine, and I can’t see them getting along well under pressure. My client is saved. So like I say, I don’t feel great.

“How do you know Mr. Ellaway?”

Albin rubs the back of his hand against his chin. “We met at a party a couple of months ago. Met for drinks a few more times since. I deal in antique furniture; he was interested in buying some pieces.”

“And did he?”

“I sold him an old coffee table—would you like to see the invoice? I can send it to you. Nothing more. He wasn’t really an antiques enthusiast.” His voice is neutral, giving away little of how he feels about this: he’s just telling me.

“I would like to see it, thank you. What did you talk about when he called you?”

Albin frowns and taps his foot for a moment. He looks over at Sarah, who’s leaning back against the sofa, then turns his head toward me. “Is that relevant to your case?”

“If your account and his tally, it would help confirm his alibi.”

“I see. But there’s no law that says I have to tell you, is there?”

“Not at this time, no, Mr. Albin. But it would be doing everyone a favor.”

He sighs; his face is apologetic. “I’d rather not tell you. Seeing that he’s a client, I’d prefer not to discuss our conversations.”

“It was a business call?”

“I’m sorry, Ms. Galley.”

I turn my attention to Sarah. “Were you there when this phone call was made?”

She shakes her head.

“May I ask how you and Mr. Albin know each other?”

“We’re friends.”