Bellman & Black (22 page)

It was a day to inspire gloom, but not in Bellman. Another man, more poetic or fanciful, might have seen a violent gash in the surface of the earth, a giant’s grave, a burial pit for a thousand dead, but Bellman’s eyes were attuned differently. It was the future that he was gazing at: he saw not a pit, but a palace. London’s new and greatest emporium of mourning goods.

He knew the building to come better than any man, for it was the child of his own mind. The wet air solidified before his eyes into a massive block, five storeys high and twice as long. The strict ranks of symmetrical windows borrowed their glimmer from the rain, and between them the mistiness coalesced obediently into pilasters topped
with Corinthian capitals. Bellman’s eye coaxed cornices and corbels and lintels and mullions out of thin air, and he studied these details with an attentiveness as great as if the building had been materially present. His glance swept the length of the full-height ground-floor windows with their mirrored black and silver fascia and paused at the grand entrance in the middle of the frontage. A few steps, the oak double door with brass footplates and ornamental knocker. When open, the doors would be high enough to permit two men to pass through, one on the shoulders of the other. Over this door was to be a projecting platform. It would provide a porch, shelter from bad weather, somewhere to stop and shake out an umbrella, or, for the nervous or hesitant, simply gather oneself before entering.

Bellman’s eyes rose to the platform and squinted. On top of it was to be mounted a large insignia, elaborately carved and expensively gilded. It would represent the name of the shop. He peered and puzzled, but this spot, twenty feet above the ground and in the dead center of his project, refused to be anything but mistily blurred and wet air.

What was the shop to be called?

Bellman did not know.

He had not neglected the matter, far from it. In fact, he had consulted Critchlow and the other haberdashers on this very question in the early days, but none had wished to lend the shop his name. Having launched their daughters into marriage with respectable, impoverished gentlemen, they now waited to marry their granddaughters to greater status. For the success of such an endeavor, the wealth they had accumulated from retail needed to hide its origins, for it is well known that the purity of gold increases the further removed it is from labor. The impression must be given that a man’s riches spring from his noble nature as naturally and spontaneously as water springs from the earth.

“No,” they had said. “Let the shop be called Bellman’s.”

Why did he hesitate? Bellman had no qualms about giving his shop his name. The notion of a grand marriage for Dora did not enter his
head. Nor was it modesty that held him back. There was something unfinished in his thinking about the name, and today, when the rain had dissolved all busyness and activity around him and left only this misty haze, was as good a day as any to complete it.

Standing alone before the mirage of his shop, Bellman’s thoughts turned to the man in black.

Was it any wonder that he had let the question of Black lapse for so long? For almost a year, Bellman had worked on the project. He had developed it from an idea to a financial reality, then nursed it into legal existence. The legal side of things had required lengthy and delicate negotiations that had consumed him for months; the land purchase had not gone smoothly; the architects had stubbornly refused to understand what he wanted—good lord, he had ended up practically drawing the plans himself; there had been contractors to engage, more negotiations, more contracts . . . Night after night he had sat by candlelight, working out solutions to problems that others deemed insoluble. In all that time he had not thought too closely or too often of Black, and frankly, what could be more natural? Bellman’s diary was very full. Every hour from morning till night was accounted for, days and weeks ahead. He moved from meeting to meeting, from decision to decision with scarcely a pause to draw breath. He never ate a meal without either company or his papers and notebook beside him at the table. He reserved little difficulties to be thought about while he brushed his teeth and dressed in the morning. Bath time was the occasion to lock himself away with knotty problems that could be unraveled while the steam rose off the water.

When problems arose that did not lend themselves to being broken down into components, tabulated, and calculated in order to afford a neat solution, Bellman’s habit was to put them aside in a category marked “waste of time.” One of the first keys to success, he considered, was to recognize the difference between problems you could do something about and problems you could do nothing about. A great many people, he had noticed, spent large parts of their time worrying
about things they were powerless to alter. Had they concentrated all this energy on things they could influence, think how different their lives would be. He advocated concentrating on those things where you had some guarantee of an outcome. Every minute of Bellman’s day was spent actively pursuing some benefit or other, and for months now it had not been clear that there was any benefit to be had from thinking about Black, so in he went to the category of “unprofitable” and there he stayed.

Now Black’s idea was about to become material. As soon as this weather cleared up, construction would start. Naturally the problem of Black was starting to appear to Bellman in a more pressing light. It bothered him that his recollection of his meeting with Black was so unclear. Clarity was everything in a business relationship. What did Black expect of him? And what could he expect of Black? He felt anew the sense of indebtedness that haunted him. Black had been the one to recognize the magnitude of the opportunity, he had wanted to share it with Bellman; it was essential that the man should be adequately recompensed. What had they agreed?

He closed his eyes and thought.

“Percentages . . .” he muttered. “Division of responsibilities . . . Dividends . . .”

He strained to hear an echo from the past, an indication of the conversation they might have had, the deal they might have struck. Nothing came to his ear.

Well, there was only one thing for it. He would do something that would make plain to Black that he had not been overlooked. It would be an invitation to him—wherever he was—to come forward and claim his due. It would be evidence—not that it would come before a court of law, of course not, there would be nothing so extreme—that he, Bellman, had no intention of claiming as his own that portion of the business that was rightly Black’s.

He would call the shop Bellman & Black.

Opening his eyes onto the misty mirage of his emporium, he found the point where the platform projected over the front entrance and his imagination placed a grand double
B
on it.

That would do it!

“Hoy!”

A loud cry broke into Bellman’s reverie. He discovered himself somewhat adrift in his own mind, and it took him a long moment to recover himself. He was a long way from reality, the four floors of stone and glass before him had to dissolve into rain, and it was with mild astonishment that he found himself in front of a great gash in the ground. When a creature crawled out of it, slick with rain and mud, Bellman took a step back and almost let out a cry of alarm.

“Look at this!” the creature exclaimed, demonstrating itself thus to be a living thing and human. He stood up and held out to Bellman what looked like a stone. His voice was cultivated, expensively schooled, but his appearance and behavior was more than strange. Bellman wondered whether it was a madman. Then, seeing that the man stood straight and held himself still, and that the light in the man’s eyes was enthusiastic, not wild, Bellman felt a little reassured. He glanced at what the man was holding.

“It’s a stone.”

“Ah! That’s where you’re wrong!”

The man rubbed some of the mud away. “See the tool marks? They are man-made.”

There were indeed abrasion marks that William had taken for striations in the stone.

“And?”

“It’s not carved as such. The stone already had a form that called the shape to mind, and these marks are just to emphasize it. See the knot in the stone that gives the idea of the eye?”

The man began to talk. He had been in Egypt lately, was what he called an archaeologist—“I dig up the past,” he explained—and was
now home in London for a few months. He would go back to Egypt. “But when I saw this site I thought it looked just like an excavation and I couldn’t resist coming to have a look. There have been men crawling all over it, but today, thanks to the rain, I have my chance.”

“I am glad that somebody profits from the rain. Every day that the construction is not finished costs me. Is it worth something, your stone?”

“Worth?”

“Money. What would a museum give you for it? A collector?”

“A museum! Why nothing! This is London, not Egypt! I don’t know why the past of Egypt is worth something when the past of London is worth nothing, but there it is.”

“I can tell you the reason for that easily enough. In London it is the future that matters.”

“And what is it to be, in the future, this site of yours?”

“It will be Bellman & Black’s. An emporium of mourning goods.”

“You are Mr. Black?”

Bellman felt a lurch in his chest. “I am Mr. Bellman.”

“Well, Mr. Bellman, you should do nicely with your mourning goods. Death comes to us all. The future, eh? Mine. Yours. Everyone’s.”

The young man’s eyes followed the curving flight of the rook that turned and swooped, brilliant with rain, through the air that was to be Bellman’s emporium.

“They used to put the dead out on stone platforms for their bones to be picked clean by the rooks. Did you know that? Long time ago. Before our crosses and spires and prayer books. Before”—he swept his hand in a broad, vague gesture, taking in the pit, Regent Street, London, who knows what else—“before all this. Perhaps the ancient ancestor of that rook there”—it swooped and flapped and dropped with exactitude onto a piece of rock waiting to be tipped into the foundations—“feasted on an ancient ancestor of mine. Or yours, come to that.” Through the downpour he caught a glimpse of Bellman’s disgust. “Every era has its
own ways, eh? Who knows what will come next, eh? They burn the dead in Italy, I hear.” He shook his head and smiled at Bellman. “Must be going. The old man will be wondering where I’ve got to.”

He went.

Had Bellman just had an encounter with a half-wit? Had he really spoken the words Bellman thought he had heard? It seemed scarcely credible. Man crawls out of the mud, talking a lot of nonsense about rooks . . . An eccentric, at the very least.

The cloth of Bellman’s coat was sodden over his shoulders. The rain had crept fiber by fiber through his overcoat, jacket, shirt, and underclothes. His skin was clammy.

Bellman turned the stone over in his hand. Was that the eye the fellow meant? A round indentation in the stone, revealing in the center a dot of the shining core. It looked for all the world like a little eye gleaming at him. Curious, he rubbed the last of the mud off. These must be the tool marks . . . Feathers? Yes, here was a wing and, turning it over, another. The still-falling rain brought out the iridescence in the stone. Flashes of purple, kingfisher blue, and green came to life in the black as he held it.

Horrible thing!

With a shudder, William tossed it away from him and into the pit. It traced a curve in the air, a graceful parabola that recalled a feeling of something from long ago.

It disturbed a bird where it fell. Like a black rag the creature rose up into the wetness; the first powerful flap of its wings lifted it through deliveries and as far as first-floor umbrellas, with the second it ascended to coats and hats on the second floor. Up it rose through the offices, into the seamstresses’ atelier and out of the building though the atrium’s glass ceiling.

Bellman turned away, sick at heart, longing for a fire and his work.

·  ·  ·

“Bellman & Black,” he announced that night at Russells, his club in Mayfair where he met at regular intervals with his haberdashers.

“Excellent!” said Critchlow. “It never hurts to indicate two owners in a company name. Gives a sense of solidity. Security. Two heads are better than one, that kind of thing.”

The second haberdasher nodded. “And a clever choice of name too. What is the first thing people think of when they need mourning goods? They think of black. And having thought it, they will already be halfway to thinking of our company!”

The third haberdasher smiled. “It sounds right, don’t you think? Musical. As if the two names were meant to go together. I’m all for it. Gentlemen”—he raised a glass—“to the success of Bellman & Black!”

Bellman raised his glass and sipped, but he didn’t stay long enough to finish the glass. His feet were damp and he had work to do.

I
t would take fifteen months to complete the shop, twelve for the construction work and three for the fitting out. Bellman had seen Fox at work long enough to know that he could be left to oversee the construction of the building for weeks at a time. That was good. It meant Bellman could get on with the rest.