Bellman & Black (2 page)

The sun sank low and the sky cooled. Autumn was coming, and they were hungry. It was time to go home. The boys parted.

Will lived closest, in only a few minutes he would be in his mother’s kitchen.

On the brow of a bank of earth something prompted him to turn around. He looked back to where the bird had fallen. In the few minutes since the boys had left the place, rooks had come. They circled above the oak, fifteen or twenty of them. More were arriving from all directions. They stretched across the sky, loose skeins of dark marks, converging on this place. One by one they descended to alight in the branches of the tree. Ordinarily such a congregation would be accompanied by the noise of stony chatter as the birds flung sound at each other like gravel. This gathering was different: it took place in intent and purposeful silence.

Every bird on every branch was looking in his direction.

Will leapt off the bank and raced home, faster than he had ever run before. When he had the door handle in his grasp he dared to look behind him.
The sky was empty. He stared at the branches of the tree, but at this distance and with the late sun in his eyes it was hard to know whether he was seeing rooks or foliage. Perhaps he had imagined that many-eyed stare.

For a moment he thought one of his friends had returned to the oak. A boy, standing where he had stood in the shadow of the oak. But the figure was too short to be Charles, too slim to be Fred, and had not Luke’s red hair. Besides, unless it was an effect of light and shade, the boy was clad in black.

With the next blink, the boy was gone, on his way home through the woods, probably.

Will turned the doorknob and went inside.

“What’s got into you?” his mother wanted to know.

·  ·  ·

William was quiet that evening and his mother thought him pale. Her questions elicited little in the way of answers and she understood that her boy was old enough to have secrets now.

“Just think. In a week’s time you’ll be away at school with Charles.”

He leaned surreptitiously into her side when she stood by him to pour his soup and when she put an arm around him he lingered instead of reminding her that he was ten now. Was her fearless boy nervous of leaving her for Oxford? That night, although it was not cold, she warmed his bed and left his candle burning. When she came to kiss him an hour later she stood and watched his sleeping face. How pale he looked. Was he really her son? Children changed so quickly.

Only ten and I am losing him, she thought. And then, with a pang, Unless perhaps I have lost him already.

The next day William woke with a fever. For half a week he stayed in bed being tended to by his mother. During this time, while his blood grew warmer and warmer and he sweated and cried out in pain, William applied his ten-year-old genius and power to the greatest feat he had ever attempted: forgetting.

He very largely succeeded.

A
rook is a familiar enough creature until you actually look at him.

His plumage is among the most extravagantly beautiful things nature can produce. As the boys saw that day, a rook’s feathers can shimmer with dazzling peacock colors yet factually speaking there is no blue or purple or green pigment in a rook. Satin black on his back and head, on his front and toward his legs, his blackness softens and deepens to velvet black. He is not just black, he is blacker than that. His is a luxurious superabundance of blackness never seen in any other creature. He is the essence of blackness.

So whence the glorious color?

Well, the rook is something of a magician. His black feathers are capable of producing an entrancing optical effect.

“Aha!” you say. “So it is only an illusion.”

Far from it. The rook is no theatrical conjuror with his top hat full of tricks, deluding your eye into perceiving what is not. He is quite the opposite: a magician of the real. Ask your eyes,
What color is light?
They cannot tell you. But a rook can. He captures the light, splits it, absorbs some, and radiates the rest in a delightful demonstration of optics, showing you the truth about light that your own poor eyes cannot see.

Nor is this spellbinding display of flamboyance the only trick he has concealed in his feathers. Though it is exceedingly rare, a handful of witnesses have seen this spectacle: on a bright summer’s day, turning into the sun, a rook alters from black to angelic white. Mirror-bright he dazzles and glories in his whiteness.

Given his beauty and the dramatic and magical alterations he can bring about in his appearance, you might wonder why the rook is to be found in common fields, grubbing for larvae. Why are these supreme creatures not owned by princesses, housed in gilded aviaries, fed dainty morsels from silver trays by liveried servants? Why do they spend their time with cows when they are surely the more natural companions to unicorns, griffins, and dragons?

The answer is that the rook lives as he wishes. When he wants the entertainment of human company he is more likely to seek out the drunken poet or the wild-eyed crone than a damsel with a coronet. He is partial to a bit of dragon liver or unicorn tongue when he can get it though, and he wouldn’t refuse griffin flesh if it came his way.

·  ·  ·

There are numerous collective nouns for rooks. In some parts people say a
parish
of rooks.

Verily, the rook sees far more than we give him credit for seeing,

hears more than we think he hears,

thinks more than we think that he thinks.

—T
HE
R
EVEREND
B
OSWELL
S
MITH,
FROM
B
IRD
L
IFE
AND
B
IRD
L
ORE

S
ix days out of every seven the area along the Burford Road resounded with the clattering, booming, clanging, rattling, thundering noise of Bellman’s Mill. The shuttles that hurtled back and forth were the very least of it: there was also the churning, crashing roar of the Windrush as it turned the wheel that powered all this hectic to-ing and fro-ing. Such was the racket that at the end of the day, when the shuttles were brought home to rest and the mill wheel ceased to turn, the ears of the workers still rang with the vibration of it all. This ringing stayed with them as they made their way to their small cottages, was still there as they climbed into their beds at night, and as often as not, continued to sound through their dreams.

Birds and other small creatures stayed away from Bellman’s Mill, at least on working days. Only the rooks were bold enough to fly over the mill, seeming to relish its clamor, even adding a coarse note of their own to the music.

Today though, being Sunday, the mill was peaceful. On the other side of the Windrush and down the high street, the humans were making noise of another kind.

A rook—or a crow, it is hard to tell them apart—alighted with aplomb on the roof of the church, cocked its head, and listened.

“Oh come and dwell in me,

Spirit of power within,

and bring the glorious liberty

from sorrow, fear, and sin.”

In the first verse of the hymn, the congregation was tuneless and disorganized as a herd of sheep on market day. Some treated it as a competition where the loudest wins all. Some, having better things to do with their time than sing, rushed to the end as quickly as they could, while others, afraid of getting ahead of themselves, lagged a safe semiquaver behind. Alongside and behind these singers was a mass of mill workers whose hearing was not what it had been. These created a flat background drone, rather as if one of the organ pedals had got stuck.

Thankfully there was the choir and thankfully the choir contained William Bellman. His tenor, effortless and clear, gave a compass bearing, according to which the individual voices found north and knew where they were going. It rallied, disciplined, and provided a target to aim at. Its vibrations even managed to stimulate the eardrums of the hard of hearing, for the dull drone of the deaf was lifted by it into something almost musical. Although at “sorrow, fear, and sin” the congregation was bleating haphazardly, by “Hasten the joyful day” it had agreed on a speed; it found its tune “when old things shall be done away,” and by the time it reached “eternal bliss” in the last verse it was, thanks to William, as agreeable to the ear as any congregation can expect to be.

The last notes of the hymn died away, and soon after, the church door opened and the worshippers emerged into the churchyard, where they lingered to talk and enjoy the autumnal sunshine. Among them were a pair of women, one older and one younger, both abundantly decorated with corsages, brooches, ribbons, and trims. They were aunt and niece, or so they said, though some whispered otherwise.

“Doesn’t he have a fine voice? It makes you wish every day was Sunday,” the young Miss Young said wistfully to her aunt, and Mrs.
Baxter, overhearing, replied, “If you wish to hear William Bellman sing every night of the week, you need only listen at the window of the Red Lion. Though”—and her undertone was audible to William’s mother standing a little way off—“what is pleasant to the ear might be less so to the soul.”

Dora heard this with an expression of benign neutrality, and she turned the same face to the man now approaching her, her brother-in-law.

“Tell me, Dora. What is William doing these days, when he is not displeasing souls who loiter at the window of the Red Lion?”

“He is working with John Davies.”

“Does he like farmwork?”

“You know William. He is always happy.”

“How long does he intend to stay with Davies?”

“So long as there is work. He is willing to turn his hand to anything.”

“You would not prefer something more steady for him? With prospects?”

“What would you suggest?”

There was a whole story in the look she gave him then, an old story and a long one, and the look he returned to her said,
All that is true, but.

“My father is an old man now, and I have charge of the mill.” She protested, but he overrode her. “I will not speak of others if it angers you, but have
I
done you any injury, Dora? Have
I
hurt you or William in any way? With me, at the mill, William can have prospects, security, a future. Is it right to keep him from these?”

He waited.

“You have not wronged me in any way, Paul,” she said eventually. “I suppose that if you don’t get the answer you want from me, you will go to William directly?”

“I would much sooner we could all agree on it.”

The choristers had disrobed and were leaving the church, William among them. Many eyes were on William, for he was as agreeable to
look at as he was to the ear. He had the same dark hair as his uncle, an intelligent brow, eyes capable of seeing numerous things at once, and he inhabited his vigorous body with grace and ease. More than one young woman in the churchyard that day wondered what it would be like to be in the arms of William Bellman—and more than one young woman already knew.

He spotted his mother, widened his smile, and raised an arm to hail her.

“I will put it to him,” she told Paul. “It will be for him to decide.”

They parted, Dora toward William, and Paul to go home alone.

In the matter of marriage, Paul had tried to avoid his father’s mistake and his brother’s. Not for him a foolish wife with bags of gold, nor love and beauty that came empty-handed. Ann had been wise and good-hearted—and her dowry had just stretched to the building of the dye house. By being sensible and choosing the middle path, he had ended up with a harmonious domestic life, cordial companionship, and a dye house. But for all his good sense and solid reason he chided himself. He did not grieve his wife’s passing as a loving husband ought and in painfully honest moments he admitted in his heart that he thought more of his sister-in-law than was proper.

Dora and William went home.