Bellman & Black (18 page)

Authors: Diane Setterfield

Option one: agree terms. So much for you and so much for me, and we all get what we want . . . He’d tried that, and it hadn’t worked. Option two: sell. But this is Dora. So even if this rival seemed willing
to buy—and so far he had only destroyed and stolen—Bellman could not sell. No sale then. Option three: hide. Keep a low profile, stay small, and hope the rival finds you too insignificant to worry about. Too late. He was already in the rival’s sights. What does that leave? Option four: collaborate. But how on earth could that come about? It was impossible. Back to option one. Agree terms. But he’d tried that . . .

The mind machine worked on and on. Its proposals grew more and more desperate: he would sabotage the fellow’s machinery! Slash prices to force him out of business! He would hire thugs to set fire to his premises, steal his best men, spread malicious rumors about his shoddy goods! Ludicrous notions, given the rival in question. The wilder his ideas grew, the stranger he grew to himself. He had never known he was capable of such devious and desperate measures. He was not the man he thought he was. He was too fatigued to stop the mechanism in his head, and in any case, he didn’t know how to switch it off. He’d never needed to.

How could he live, with this in his head—this ceaseless effort to solve the unsolvable?

Agree terms, sell, hide, collaborate.

It would drive him mad. It was already driving him mad.

Why would his brain not learn that nothing could be done and he had lost?

And now, suddenly, he was here. Close to the old cottage where he had grown up. The fields were dark, but the cottage was a visible rectangle of darkness and the old oak reached its branches blackly across the sky. He began to make his way toward it.

Here was a new project: how to switch off his mind?

He came to the tree and stood beneath it. This was the right place to be. He felt it. His brain was clear and working smoothly.

This branch here was strong enough and the right height. He could climb up on the other side, make his way onto it, sit there to make ready, and when all was done, let himself fall, plumb, to the end. He eyed it all
up, ran through it in his mind to see where the flaws in the plan were, made some minor alterations . . . Perfect!

All he needed was some rope—and he knew where to get it! The coffins were lowered into the graves on ropes, and because there were so many funerals at present—two or three every day—the ropes were not put away but left on a hook halfway down the steps to the vault. He’d seen them. There was no risk of theft. No thief wants a rope that has been lowering bodies into graves.

Bellman set off to the churchyard. An achievable goal! He was feeling better already.

Lit by a sliver of moon, the sky was less than black, and the yews of the churchyard were dark against it. He walked slowly, stumbling where he veered off the path onto the uneven grass. He found the rope, and on his way back to the churchyard gate, Rose’s new grave came into view.

His pace slowed and then he stopped.

He was not alone. A little way off the man in black was leaning against an old gravestone. He was doing nothing, only gazing patiently at the tree line, dark against the sky.

If there had been a breeze, it fell still now. The air did not move but hung still.

The man gave the impression that he had been waiting a long time, yet he was not in a hurry. He appeared to have all the time in the world.

Turning to William, there was a kindly curiosity in his gaze.

“I’m sorry about this afternoon,” he said and his voice was ordinary and benign. “I could have handled things better, I admit.”

“Who the hell are you?” said William.

“A friend.” And he eyed William beadily, to see how this went down with him.

“A friend? We’ve not been introduced.”

The man in black put his head on one side and considered. “True. And yet my intentions are friendly. I thought we might have a talk.”

William shifted the rope on his shoulder and made to move on.

“Might you feel better for a talk?” the man suggested.

“So that’s how it goes! I stay for a chat with you now and in the morning my body is discovered here in this graveyard? Is that it?”

The stranger’s eye lingered for a moment on the rope that William was carrying. Then his gaze, gentle and ironic, moved to William.

He knows, William thought.

But the man in black made a gesture as though to brush that idea right away.

“No, no, no. I can see you’ve got me all wrong. I’ve come to help you—or rather to ask you to help me. It amounts to the same thing. Why don’t you put that down”—he nodded at the rope—“and take a seat.”

Wearily William dropped the rope and slumped on a tombstone on the far side of Rose’s grave from the man in black.

“Look at this, Mr. Bellman.” The man raised a cloaked arm and swept it to take in the entire graveyard. “Tell me what you see.”

“What I see?”

Before them were graves. The older ones had their statues and their tombstones, their angels and their crosses and their urns. The newer ones had bare earth still. Flowers gleamed white on Rose’s grave. New graves waited empty, ready for tomorrow and the next day. One would be Dora’s.

Anger fired up in William, through the drink. “What do I see? I’ll tell you what I see! I see my wife. I see three of my children. I see them dead. I see that grave there, cold and empty, waiting for my last child, who is dying now. I see misery and suffering and despair. I see the futility of everything I have ever done and everything I may ever do! I see every reason to do away with myself right here and now, and be finished with it! Forever!”

William collapsed onto the tomb. He shrank into a ball and pulled at his hair, face contorting so powerfully it was as if his skin wanted to
come away from the bone. He waited for the pain to submerge him, to sweep him away and deposit him in some other place, but it did not happen. The agony remained, unaltering, unending, unendurable, and here. He craved escape, but the only thing that could escape was the cry from his lips, an expulsion of feeling, a howl, a bellow. It set up a welcome vibration in his head.

The ringing in his head died down. Perhaps the man was gone by now. Perhaps he had never been there in the first place? Could he go and do the thing he intended to do? Bellman raised his eyes.

Still there. Standing, hands clasped behind his back, chest out, unperturbable.

He glanced down at William. “Good! Good!” he said, encouragingly.

William scowled. Was he talking to a madman?

“Well. It’s early days.” He unclasped his hands, thought better of it and clasped them again. “I see things differently, you know.”

“I suppose you would.” William’s voice was weakened from the bellowing.

“Yes. What I see here, in front of me”—he took a deep breath, as though drawing on a particularly expensive and exotic cigar, and exhaled it with relish—“is an opportunity.”

William stared. The fellow was unhinged. Then something rang a bell in his mind.

What was it?

Agree terms, sell, hide, collaborate.

Collaborate
.

He thought of Dora.

He nodded once. “You’ve got a deal.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

C
hill morning air entered his nostrils. A pause. Warmer air, stalely scented with liquor emerged from his mouth.

Was he awake? This was like waking. He had been asleep, then.

With the slowness of Lazarus he gathered his senses to him. His head ached. His chest felt bruised, as if his lungs had been in a battle all night. He was lying in a cold, hard place and something damp and coarse was scratching his cheek. He opened an eye. Ah! He was in the churchyard. A tombstone for a bed and a pillow of rope. A new grave was nearby. Rose’s grave.

He closed the eye to think. It had been his wife’s funeral. He had gone to the Red Lion. Drunk too much. And then? The feathered end of something stroked his consciousness . . .

. . . and was gone again.

Then a very clear and urgent thought barged into his mind.

Dora!

With clumsy urgency, he swung himself up, got to his feet.

He must go home.

Without a glance at the coil of rope behind him, he set off, his mind full of his child and the things that must be done to safeguard her life. For she would live. He was persuaded of that now. She would live! And—though he did not think of this—so would he.

· · ·

When Bellman entered the sickroom, Mrs. Lane did not comment on the rope furrows impressed in his cheek, nor the smell of drink and
the grave upon him, but only opened the door and ushered him in. All could be forgiven a man in his circumstances.

It appeared to be the final movement: Dora was gripped by the great convulsions. This time Bellman did not flinch nor clutch at his hair. His eyes did not roam the room in desperate search of salvation. He stood by, face unchanged, still as a tombstone.

The quiet period of ever-shallower breathing began. Mrs. Lane folded the girl’s hands over her breast and knelt by the bed, where she began to whisper the Lord’s Prayer.

Bellman spoke it with her. His voice was steady and unwavering.

When they had finished the prayer, flickers of life danced about her lips, unextinguished. Mildly perturbed, Mrs. Lane began the prayer again. “Our Father . . .”

At Amen the girl was breathing still.

A faint embarrassment took hold of Mrs. Lane. She glanced uncertainly at Bellman, was struck by the calm of his expression.

“Does it seem to you, Mr. Bellman, that her breathing is freer?” she asked.

“It does.”

They leaned over the girl, peering into the white face. Mrs. Lane lifted an eyelid with her gentle thumb, then took the girl’s hands, uncrossed them, and began to warm them in her own. “Lord in thy mercy,” she began and, ambushed by her own astonishment, got no further.

Dora’s breathing remained shallow but grew more regular. Degree by degree her hands thawed. Her pallor diminished fractionally. Mrs. Lane shifted her ministrations away from the girl’s soul and back to the body. An hour or so after the crisis, Dora seemed to stir. She did not wake but resettled into something that appeared more like sleep than coma.

Bellman did not move. He appeared neither to see nor to hear Mrs. Lane. He stared fixedly at his daughter, yet it was not certain that he saw her either.

After Sanderson had called and shaken his head in astonishment at the miracle, Bellman at last allowed himself to rest. He tossed Rose’s dress to the floor, lay down fully dressed, and sank instantly into a deep slumber.

· · ·

Last night. A handshake—or as good as—over a grave, in the dark, with a man he could hardly see. Today. His daughter returned from the dead.

Into his sleep there crept not the faintest chink of light to illuminate the unmaking and the remaking of the mind of William Bellman.

Something had ended. Something was about to begin.

Part II