Bellman, Page 2

  The boys murmured and once again turned to look at Will. This beauty too belonged to him.

  Emboldened, Luke picked the bird up.

  “CRAA!”

  He lunged the cadaver toward Fred, toward Charles—not in Will’s direction—and the two boys stumbled back, exclaiming in alarm, laughing with relief. Then it was Fred who larked about with the dead creature, manipulating its wings, imitating flight, cawing and croaking with gusto. Will laughed weakly. There was the aftermath of turbulence inside him. His lungs were tired.

  Before long Fred found something unpleasant in the slackness of the small body. They all did. It was the limp hang of the head, the way the feathers would not go back into place. In disgust Fred tossed the body away.

  All thought of a burial was now forgotten and they turned their attention from the bird to the stone that had killed it. That stone had a value now. They spent a long time looking, picking up one round pebble after another.

  “Too big,” they agreed.

  “Wrong color.”

  “It didn’t have that mark, there.”

  The stone would not be found. Having accomplished its miracle it had divested itself of its uniqueness and was lying somewhere about indistinguishable from any number of similar stones.

  In any case, Charles suggested, and for once they all agreed, it wasn’t really the stone. It was Will who had done it.

  They told and retold the story, acted it out for each other. With imaginary catapults they killed whole parishes of imaginary rooks.

  Will stood by. Like any ten-year-old hero, he took more than his fair share of teasing and shoving. He smiled, sick at heart, proud, abashed, guilty. He grinned and shoved back without conviction.

  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.

  Part I

  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.

  —Reverend Boswell Smith, from Bird Life and Bird Lore

  Chapter One

  Six 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 n
ight, 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.

  The rook on the church roof gave an unhurried flap, lifted effortlessly from the roof and soared away.

  ***

  “I’d like to do it,” Will told his mother in the small kitchen. “You won’t mind?”

  “And if I do?”

  He grinned and put an easy arm about her shoulders. At seventeen, there was still novelty in the pleasure of being so much taller than his mother. “You know I wouldn’t hurt you if I could help it.”

  “And there’s the rub.”

  ***

  A while later, in a secluded spot screened by sedges and rushes, Will’s easy arm was around another shoulder. His other hand was invisible beneath a mass of petticoat, and the girl sometimes placed her hand over his to indicate slower, quicker, a change of pressure. Clearly he was making progress, he thought. At the start she had kept her hand over his all the time. The girl’s white legs were whiter still against the moss, and she had kept her boots on: they would have to make a run for it if they were disturbed. Her breath came in sharp gasps. It still surprised Will that pleasure should sound so like pain.

  She fell abruptly silent and a small frown of concentration appeared on her face. Her hand pressed so hard over his it was almost painful and her white legs clamped together. He watched closely, fascinated. The flush on her cheeks and chest, the quiver of her eyelids. Then she relaxed, eyes still closed, and a small pulse beat in her neck. After a minute she opened her eyes.

  “Your turn.”

  He laid back, arms behind his head. No need for his hand to teach her. Jeannie knew what she was about.

  “Don’t you ever think you’d like to come and sit on top of me and do it properly?” he asked.

  She stopped and wagged a playful finger at him. “William Bellman, I mean to be an honest married woman one day. A Bellman baby is not going to get in my way!”

  She returned to her task.

  “Who do you take me for? Do you think I wouldn’t marry you if there was a baby coming?”

  “Don’t be daft. Course you would.”

  She caressed him, gently enough, firmly enough. It was just right.

  “Well, then?”

  “You’re a good boy, Will. I’m not saying you’re not.”

  He took her hand and stopped it, propped himself up on his elbows to see her face properly.

 
“But?”

  “Will!” Seeing he would not be satisfied without an answer, she spoke, hesitant and tentative, the words born straight from her thoughts. “I know the kind of life I want. Steady. Regular.” He nodded her to go on. “What would my life be if I were to marry you? There’s no way of knowing. Anything might happen. You’re not a bad man, Will. You’re just . . . “

  He laid back down. Something occurred to him, and he looked at her again.

  “You’ve got someone in mind!”

  “No!” But her alarm and her blush gave her away.

  “Who is it? Who? Tell me!” He grabbed her, tickled her, and for a minute they were children again, shrieking, laughing, and play fighting. Just as quickly adulthood repossessed them and they set to finishing the business they were there for.

  By the time the leaves and the sky came back into focus above his head, he discovered his brain had worked it out for him. It was respectability she wanted. She was a worker, unimpressed by the easy life. And if she was killing time with him, while waiting, it meant it was someone who hadn’t noticed her yet. There were not so very many candidates the right age, most of them you could eliminate for one reason or another. Of the remainder, one stood out.

  “It’s Fred from the bakery, isn’t it?”

  She was appalled. Her hand flew to her mouth then, more aptly, but too late, covered his.

  “Don’t tell. Will, please, not a word!” And then she was crying.

  He put his arms around her. “Hush! I won’t tell. Not a soul. Promise.”

  She sobbed and hiccoughed and then was quiet and he took her hand in his. “Jeannie! Don’t fret. I bet you’ll be married before the year is out.”