Bellman & Black (36 page)

Whose was it?

Black.

The quaking took hold of him again; he placed a hand on the desk to steady himself. He remembered with a sense of foreboding that he had never completed that contract.

In his anxiety to find the draft he opened one drawer after another. He turned out papers, which slithered between his trembling fingers and onto the floor. On hands and knees he riffled through them by candlelight, squinting, panting with frantic effort.

How much, William wondered, do I owe?

He couldn’t find it.

Well, never mind. He could write it out afresh. The essential thing was to get the sums in order.

He fretted over calculations, jotted extraordinary figures into his notebook, added things up one way and another and squinted at the results.

It was too much. Far too much.

And nowhere near enough.

·  ·  ·

The next morning Verney was astonished to find his employer asleep at his desk with papers strewn on the floor all around him. He was still in his nightshirt, his white nightcap stained with ink where his head had come to rest on a set of wild and unfathomable calculations. Without
waking Bellman, Verney gathered the papers together before tiptoeing from the room. Outside the door he orchestrated a prolonged burst of sound—heavy footsteps, much jingling of keys and jiggling of lock—before reentering the office. By that time Bellman had removed himself and his fantastical calculations into his bedroom.

M
r. Anson of the Westminster & City nodded.

“Well, it’s a bit short notice, but I dare say I could call by and see Mr. Bellman this afternoon if it’s urgent.”

The young man swallowed. “I believe that Mr. Bellman is . . . hoping—expecting, I should say—to see you sooner than that.” He coughed. “If it can be managed, sir.”

George Anson stretched his legs out under his desk and looked over his glasses at the young man.

“If I understand you correctly, Mr. Bellman would like me to walk over to his office now, is that right?”

“Yes, sir.”

Mr. Anson had a hundred things to do, but curiosity and concern conspired in him. What is the good of being the manager of the Westminster & City Bank after all if you let your diary tell you what to do?

He rose from his chair, ignoring the dismay of his secretary. “That’s my coat, if you would. Behind the door. We’ll step over there now, shall we?”

Relief broke onto the young man’s face.

·  ·  ·

On entering Bellman’s office, Mr. Anson saw immediately that the great businessman was not quite himself. His eyes were red-rimmed and there was a slow, lumbering aspect to his movements, as if he were in pain.

“It’s about the sleeping account.”

Mr. Anson understood what Bellman meant, though he had never heard him use this term for it before. It was his second personal account. Over the last ten years Bellman had transferred one-third of his personal income into it. He had never drawn a penny out. It now represented a large—a very large—fortune. From time to time Anson had suggested investments to his client, but while Bellman was happy enough to risk the funds he held in his other account, and had seen significant returns, he had always refused absolutely to touch this money.

“Glad to hear it,” Anson now said. “Where are we to put it, then?”

“Nowhere.”

“Nowhere?”

“I want to make an additional transfer of funds.”

“What sum?”

Bellman named a figure.

Mr. Anson took a breath that did not adequately disguise his surprise.

“That would amount to—some seventy-five percent of your personal liquid wealth . . . Of course it is possible, anything you wish is possible . . . Your intention would be to maintain the funds in cash?”

“It is.”

Anson brought his fingertips to his lips while he thought. The role of a bank manager was a delicate one. It was not for him to know what his clients meant for their money. How much they spent and on what was no concern of his. But sometimes he sensed something troubling in his clients’ money, and one part of his job, as he conceived it, was to act as go-between when his clients and their money had a falling-out, a failure to understand each other. He allowed silence to grow in the room while he considered the matter.

It was logical to conclude that Bellman kept it apart from his other wealth for some special purpose, but no word had ever been spoken to indicate what that purpose might be.

“To see money sitting with its feet up by the fire when it could be put to work earning a good return—it goes against the grain with me, Bellman.” Anson spoke with a grimace, shaking his head sorrowfully.

Bellman was unmoved. He did not answer but only sat, staring through the window, blind to the street but seeing, Anson thought, something fearful in the far distance of the mind’s eye.

It couldn’t be debts. He knew Bellman. Not as a friend exactly—they had never had any conversation that you might call personal—but he knew the habits of the fellow’s life. Bellman only worked. He did not gamble, nor did he frequent brothels. Not a breath of scandal, financial or moral, had ever attached itself to his name. He lived for his work only, and his work was a success. The haberdashers knew every last detail of the financial affairs of Bellman & Black, and you only had to see their smiling, contented faces in the bar at Russells to know that all was well there. He knew the accounts like the back of his hand, and it was as clear as day that Bellman did not live expensively. In fact, his personal spending was as restrained as that of the most modest country vicar.

Was it possible that the man was being blackmailed? Had some villain got a hold over Bellman and was extorting money?

“Are you expecting to be in need of the money in liquid form at some time in the near future?”

Bellman put a hand over his eyes, as though the light was hurting them. “Perhaps. I don’t know.”

“Bellman, I am your banker and one who has known you these last ten years and has your best interests at heart. Seeing you in this state, I am obliged to ask a difficult question: Tell me, are you acting as a free man in making these arrangements?”

Bellman stared at him. “Free?”

“If some person is extorting money from you, there are things that could be done . . . Lawyers . . . With perfect discretion. It could be dealt with by others, your name need never be mentioned.”

Then Anson saw a thing he had never expected to see. Bellman squeezed his eyes closed and a tear welled out of them.

“No lawyer can get me out of this. I am bound.”

When Bellman’s eyes opened, Anson saw melancholy of the blackest tint.

Bellman took a breath and went on, as if the tear had never been shed. “Furthermore, the quarterly payments into the account are to be made on a monthly basis henceforward. And from thirty-three percent they will rise to fifty percent. All clear?”

Anson walked back to the bank a troubled man.

T
ick!

What ghastly watch is this, counting down the seconds so painfully?

Tick!

What an eternity of time between ticks. Any tick might be the last.

Tick!

He must not let the watch run down.

Tick!

But how to wind it? He feels for the watch in his breast pocket . . . But what is this? The watch is not in his pocket! It is ticking inside his chest!

Tick!

And any tick might be the last . . .

Tick!

·  ·  ·

Bellman awoke leaden hearted. Something foul and chilling had enveloped him while he slept; it clung about him with the sheets. He escaped by rising immediately and plunging into activity: he shaved too quickly and cut his chin, was too nauseated for breakfast, gnawed at a piece of bread to try and settle his stomach. In his office he did two hours’ letter writing before his first meeting of the day. He could do two jobs at once—or three. He piled task upon task, crammed every hour, every minute with ceaseless challenge. He prolonged his day beyond even his own excessive habits, and when he had worked nineteen or twenty
hours, the despair he met in the bathroom mirror could not prevent him from falling into an exhausted sleep. He did not emerge rested though: his mind, ever on guard, continued its grim battle through the night against a vaguely formed, forbidding foe, and when he woke it was to the same clinging foulness.

There were nights when he sank into his usual exhausted coma, then found himself wide awake an hour later. His conscious thoughts were no better than the sick horrors that assailed him in his sleep. Awake or asleep, it made no difference: trapped birds, the panicked flapping of wings, the brush of feathers close to his ear . . . He lay awake, sweating and breathing heavily while his heart beat fit to wake the dead.

·  ·  ·

Insomnia took its toll.

Jerking into consciousness, as if from sleep, it was full daylight, and there was Miss Chalcraft opposite him.

“Yes,” she was saying, “the new girls we took on from Pope’s, when they closed, are wonderfully quick . . .”

He was in his office, seated at his desk, entirely unable to remember his senior seamstress’s arrival in the room, nor anything that they had spoken about prior to this moment. Her manner was entirely normal. Clearly she had noticed nothing out of the ordinary.

Not only did he have no memory of her arrival in his office, but he also failed to remember their last meeting—had he really agreed to take on Pope’s seamstresses when his competitor closed? Was that wise, when his own sales figures were so uncertain?

And later that same day, when Dixon reported smilingly that he had sold three reticules in an afternoon, thanks to the display suggestion that Bellman had made the day before—he had nodded approvingly, what else could he do?—but had he really made that suggestion? It was news to him.

It was undermining to realize that he must be sleepwalking through his working day, unconscious of three-quarters of his actions while, at
night, his mind was painfully alert to every horror of the dark. He wondered whether he had been replaced by a usurper, another Bellman who made surprisingly effective suggestions about pricing and displays and employed his rival’s redundant seamstresses while he, the real Bellman, remained trapped in a dark netherworld, neither awake nor asleep, neither living nor dead.

Click!

Click!

Click!

The remorseless beads of an abacus.

Thirty-eight.

Thirty-nine.

Forty.

How many does he owe? How many tens and how many hundreds and how many thousands?

Click!

Click!

Click!

But there was no abacus, and it was only his heart, adding up his debts, incurring new ones with every beat, and he could only endure helplessly as the tally mounted.

“W
hy don’t you have a look?”

Doctor Sanderson stood back and passed the magnifying glass to Bellman. The father leaned over his child. Her large eye, five inches wide, blinked at him, through the lens. Her finger, skin imprinted with a pink whirl, a shiny white sliver of nail embellishing the fingertip—held open the lid, along which was a row of tiny blisters or beads, like fish roe.