Bellman & Black (9 page)

It was a hard thing to put words to: sometimes he experienced it as a great void, a universal and eternal nullness. Watching other people—Paul, Ned, Fred and Jeannie—he came to believe that he was alone in seeing it. At other times the black mood seemed to him as a dark and menacing thing inside himself, and that was worse. Something putrid, monstrous, was poisoning his blood and his thoughts. He was ashamed of it and glad that others did not see.

It was a source of puzzlement to remember a time when the world had seemed an entirely benign sort of place. He had rarely been ill and never for long; he had never gone hungry; he had been met everywhere with smiles and friendship; his efforts had been rewarded, his failings largely forgiven. Though he was a boy who knew how to get into trouble he had the useful knack of being as good at getting out of
it. What little there had been to frighten or pain him was left behind in the forgotten days of childhood: as a man he saw no reason to be afraid. Now some great hand had peeled back the kind surface of that fairy-tale world and shown him the chasm beneath his feet.

Still he was not defenseless. He had his triad of weapons: sleep, drink, and work—the most powerful of them all.

William had never shirked at the mill. But now he filled every minute of the day with activity. He lived in fear of idleness, sought out tasks to fill every chink and every nook of his waking day, and if a job was finished five minutes earlier than he’d allowed, he grew fretful. He learned to keep a list of small jobs to fill those dangerous spaces in his day. Accompanying Paul to a meeting with a haberdasher in Oxford, he stopped off in Turl Street to purchase a calfskin notebook for the express purpose of writing these lists. He kept it close by him: in the office it was always on his desk; on-site at the mill or traveling it was to hand in his pocket. He slept with it by his bed, reached for it the moment he awoke. When the monster reached its claw for him, sometimes just the touch of the calfskin cover was enough to hold it at bay while he armored himself with work.

They came and they went, these crises, and he covered up for himself as best he could. When one passed, leaving him short of breath, heart beating like the clappers, he hoped it would be the last.

Outwardly, within three months of the funeral William was the same man he had ever been: energetic, smiling, full of life. Only Paul, his closest observer, noticed the change that had come over him: William was perhaps working a bit too hard. He encouraged him to rest, take a book upriver, ride out to visit his mother’s brother, go fishing. But William resisted solitude as he resisted leisure. On the surface he was all ebullience and activity. Inside, hidden even from himself, he proceeded through life as though he had learned the ground beneath his feet was mined and at any step his footing might give way beneath him.

T
he juvenile rook has a fine black beak. By adulthood the beak is craggy gray. Moreover, where it meets the face it is bordered with a pitted, warty excrescence that is—I don’t mince my words—ugly. Some say it is an incomplete fairy-tale vengeance: the spell destined to turn him into a stone statue of himself touched only his beak before he flew out of range. In fact it is more to do with survival. Any tool fresh from the forge will look fine. Use it for a few years to hack the soil, break bones, hammer sea creatures against rock, and see how handsome it looks then. The beak of the rook is ideally adapted for survival, and a pretty beak soon turns ugly.

The rook is a skilled survivor. He is ancient and has inhabited the planet longer than humans. This you can tell from his singing voice: his cry is harsh and grating, made for a more ancient world that existed before the innovation of the pipe, the lute, and the viol. Before music was invented he was taught to sing by the planet itself. He mimicked the great rumble of the sea, the fearsome eruption of volcanoes, the creaking of glaciers, and the geological groaning as the world split apart in its agony and remade itself. This being the case, you can hardly be surprised that his song has not the sweet loveliness of the blackbird in your spring garden. (But if you ever get the chance, open your ears to a sky full of rooks. It is not beautiful; it is
magnificent
.)

Because of his many centuries of experience the rook is tough. He will fly through a heavy downpour and in high wind. He dances with lightning, and when it thunders he is first to go out on the rampage. He soars blithely
in oxygen-starved air over the mountaintops and without a care in the world flies over the desert. Plague and famine and battlefield are all familiar to the rook. He has seen it all before, and knows how to make the best of it. For a rook is comfortable pretty much anywhere. He goes where he pleases and, when he pleases, comes back. Laughing.

Temperature, altitude, danger . . . The things that form barriers to humans are not barriers to rooks. His horizons are broader. This is why it is the rook that accompanies departing souls through a thick fog of mystery to that place where no air is needed and drought really doesn’t matter. Having deposited in that place the soul that your body has relinquished, they return—via other worlds and feasts of unicorn tongue and dragon liver, to this one.

·  ·  ·

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

T
he months passed after Dora Bellman’s funeral. Then more months. When almost a year had gone by, to fill an empty Sunday afternoon, William rode the seven miles to Nether Wychwood, where his mother’s brother farmed. On the way he rehearsed a conversation he meant to have next week with the plate supplier over carriage terms: What objections was the man going to come up with, and what would he say to head them off? By the time he clattered into the courtyard of the square, stone farmhouse, he was satisfied that he had found the way to present the matter so that the man would be sensible of the benefits to himself and not only to the mill. Good.

He had seen something of his uncle’s farm, and they were sitting down to good bread and butter and seed cake when they heard the kitchen door open and feet come running in. A boy of six or seven, out of breath and urgent: “Our best cow has fell in a ditch and we can’t get ’er out. Can Mr. Thomas come? Straight away if you please, and I’m to ask politely but be sure to bring him.”

Will rose in the same instant as his uncle, and they put their bread and butter back on the plate, with only the first bite taken.

It was a deep ditch, a foot of brown water at the bottom of it. The bank had collapsed, and no wonder, it was three-quarters stones. What little earth it contained was thin and flavorless; nothing had wanted to root in it and hold the bank together. Will cast his eye around to get the measure of the situation. A fence had been erected—after some earlier
slide, presumably—but now a recent, second collapse had taken half the fence with it. The cow, wedged on her flank by the bank on two sides and by the landslide on the other, flailed her one free foreleg, interfering considerably with the efforts to save her.

Two young men about Will’s age were digging out the collapsed soil and geology; closer to the alarmed animal they had to work with their hands. An older man, standing in the ditch, patted the animal’s shoulder soothingly. He was a strong-built man, cut short by the muddy water that hid his lower legs, and his fair hair was dark around his face where the sweat had run into it. “We can’t budge her,” he said. Man or cow, it was hard to judge which knew the greater anguish.

Will took off his jacket and clambered into the ditch. “Clear the landslide enough to work something underneath her and lift her out? Is that it?”

“Only way, I reckon.”

Will turned to the boy. “Got more shovels?” Off he ran again.

They labored. For the first hour they were hindered by the cow herself, flailing her free foreleg constantly, unable to recognize the help she had. Once they had got the leg strapped down—a harness, adapted, did the trick—the cow complained, but they made faster progress.

The boy returned with shovels. Next Will set him to work hammering at the broken fence, working the posts free, while the men first shoveled and later with their bare hands reached under the cow, into the cold muddy water, to clear debris and stones. They worked in silence, except that every once in a while the neighbor straightened his back with a grimace, rolled his shoulders, and murmured to his animal, “Don’t you fret, my lovely,” he told her. “All will be well. You’ll see.”

A cluster of boys, scenting drama, appeared on the bank and were fascinated. “Back!” they were ordered, and five minutes later, “Back!” again. But curiosity got the better of them. Nearer and nearer they edged, until the ground beneath their feet threatened to crumble and bring all the men’s efforts to naught.

Will muttered a suggestion to the owner of the cow, and the man nodded.

“Boys,” he said. “Run up to my wife at the farm. Tell her what I want, and she’ll give you the tools. I need the cellar door off its hinges and brought up here, quick as you can.”

A job! A door to be taken off its hinges! Off they went.

In the third hour they got the fence posts under the cow and a sturdy door made its way horizontally over the field on a dozen legs. Six men raised the cow, two per post. It was out of the question to bring her up into her home field: the bank would only collapse under them. So they raised her to the wrong side and laid the door across the ditch like a bridge, and the cow—“See my lovely? Didn’t I tell you so?”—when she had found her legs, needed little encouragement to cross it and return to her own field.

She looked about her with a surprised air, then put her nose to the grass and began to eat.

“She looks right as rain, to me,” Will’s uncle said.

The men blew out their cheeks and arched their backs.

“Will, this is Thom Weston. Thom, my nephew Will.”

“Pleased to meet you.”

Hands were too wet and dirty to want shaking, and after what had passed, it was superfluous anyway.

“You’ll come up home?” Thom Weston raised a closed hand and tilted it toward his mouth. An invitation.

·  ·  ·

At Thom Weston’s farm a woman ran out to meet them. Nice blue eyes with friendly creases round them, and not a bit of gray in her fair hair. A good-looking woman, only worried. “Is she up?”

Yes, yes, she was up and out, she would go on all right now. No harm done, only a lot of time lost and six thirsty men. Oh, and this is William Bellman, Geoffrey’s nephew, over from Whittingford.

She smiled in relief and then at Will and her teeth were set straight but with gaps. It made you like her all the more.

“Rose!” she called into the house. “Set the table. Bread and butter and get out the cured ham. And peel cake!”

In the kitchen the men stripped off their shirts to rub themselves dry and unlaced their sodden boots. Thom’s wife stoked the fire, and Thom was as good as his word and poured something warming generously into glasses.

“You are not riding back to Whittingford tonight, are you, Mr. Bellman?” Thom’s wife asked, looking at the wet garments that were draped all around the hearth. When she learned that he was, she called again. “Rose! There is a young man here soaked from head to foot, who has to ride to Whittingford this evening. Before all the rest, take his boots. Let’s see if we can’t get them a bit dry before he goes.”

The chinking of plates and cutlery from the next room stopped and a girl appeared and leaned against the doorframe. Fair hair, blue eyes, the spit of her mother.

“Shall we try something of grandfather’s on him, Rose? Would it fit?”

The girl’s eyes measured him up. “I think so.” She looked him in the eye. Her gaze was straight and steady. “You’ll not have to mind the smell of mothballs.”

“I don’t mind.”

She turned to fetch the clothes.

“I’ll bring them back next Sunday,” he told Mrs. Weston.

From the next room, the girl looked over her shoulder at him and smiled. She had a nice gap between her teeth too.

·  ·  ·

Paul had told him yesterday everything he needed to know about the East India and General Company order for fine cloth, and today it was plain that not a word had gone in. Paul went over it a second time.

“Right,” William said. “I understand it now,” and he settled down to the record book again.

“Anything wrong?” asked Paul.

“No.”

But William was off-kilter, Paul could tell. Something had unsettled him. Perhaps it was time to take him fishing again. In the peace of a Sunday afternoon perhaps his nephew would be coaxed into revealing what the trouble was. But when he proposed an afternoon on the river, Will looked alarmed. He couldn’t go, he had something he had to do.

Well. He’d tried. Whatever it was, it would probably blow over. Anyway, even with only half his mind on the mill, William still did a fine job.

·  ·  ·

William’s calfskin notebook went unopened for a week. There were no spare minutes in the day to be filled with tasks, because every minute was filled with Rose. Her eyes, her hair, her teeth—he could spend half an hour imagining running his tongue over those teeth. And then, the rest of her was exactly as he liked. She was well made, whether you looked at her from the front or behind or sideways on. After that first frank look, she had not lifted her eyes to his until they said good-bye. It was not coyness: She was too occupied to be coy, what with packing his boots with old rice to draw the wet out, slicing bread and ham, pouring tea and fetching cake, making wide-eyed faces at her baby sister, wagging a finger at the brothers who were out to steal each other’s cake. But he knew by the way she didn’t look at him that she was pleased he was looking at her.