Bellman & Black

  “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.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  It 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.

  Bellman had expanded his own mill, but even so large a mill as his own could not supply all the cloth needs of a shop the size of Bellman & Black. So in bumpy carriages and on horseback he covered hundreds of miles.

  In Scotland he inspected peat-black tweeds and cashmeres. On the quayside at Portsmouth and Southampton he opened crates of foreign silk, rubbed the slippery folds between his fingers, shook out a length to judge the weight, drape, opacity. He went to Spitalfields and farther, to Norwich, in search of the flattest, most light-draining crepe that could be had. He visited mills in Wales, Lancashire, and Yorkshire, crisscrossed the country, tirelessly, looking for bombazine and paramatta and mourning silk and merino and woolen barege and grenadine and barathea.

  “Show me your black,” he announced on arrival. Bellman always looked at the black first. It emptied the eye and the mind of passing impressions, cleared the visual palate as it were. His eye was expert, he could spot a touch of green in this one, a blue tendency in another, a purplish tint here. Nothing to be concerned about from a commercial point of view: there had to be a black for every complexion, one black for fair hair and another for brunettes, redheads needed blacks all their own . . . Once in a while he found what he termed a true black. These were hard to come by. Most people couldn’t tell the difference, but Bellman would lose himself for a minute in the depths before ordering as many yards as could be produced.

  If he was pleased with the blacks, he would go on to see what the clothier might do to supply him in semimourning and quarter mourning. So every visit saw him plunged into deepest mourning before moving on through shades of gray from the darkest to the palest, emerging at last into the mauves and puces of quarter mourning.

  Bellman grew to be a stranger to color. When he looked out of the carriage window en route from one mill to the next, he found himself thinking that the bold green of the grass was verging on the indecent, and the azure sky on a summer day struck him as vulgar. On the other hand, he saw endless degrees of gravity and tenderness of feeling in an overcast November landscape, and as for a midnight sky, now there was beauty no fabric could match—though he searched high and low for one that came close.

  Bellman sent home to Mrs. Lane endless parcels of fabric samples with detailed instructions. “These dozen squares to be cut in half and one half hung in a south-facing window, the other half left in a closed drawer; after one month the two halves to be reunited to test for light-fastness.” Or else, “One half to be washed, dried, and ironed fifty times, then compared with its twin for fade.” Mrs. Lane grumbled and wrote a letter of complaint. Did he not think she had enough to do, what with Dora and a house to keep? So Bellman took on a girl who thought it a great lark to be paid to scrub squares of cloth against a board with soap as hard as she could, and start all over again as soon as the pieces were dry.

  There was an old dyer in the north, whose reputation for black was unequaled. He was soon to retire and had no sons to pass his secrets to. Bellman offered him a large incentive to talk about black. The dyer agreed, but when Bellman presented himself to learn the secrets, the man’s lifelong reticence got the better of him, and he was reluctant to speak.

  Bellman showed him his purse, to jog his memory, but the man shook his head.

  “What good is money to me now, eh? Old as I am, I’ll not have the time to spend it.”
>
  So much for nothing! But a thought struck Bellman.

  “A funeral then. Six horses, two mutes, and an angel over your grave.”

  The man told him everything he wanted to know: “Haematoxylum campechianum, otherwise known as bloodwood. You can buy it anywhere, but in my experience the best comes from a man in Mexico . . .”

  From there, Bellman rode to the south coast and met with the captain of a ship heading for South America.

  “There is a man in Yucatan,” he explained. “I want to buy all the bloodwood he has. He is to supply no one else. I want you to bring it to me and on no account to let it be mixed with bloodwood from other sources.” He pointed to some figures on a paper. “This is what I will pay you. This is what I will pay him.”

  The man looked at the paper. “He will be a rich man.”

  “We will all be rich men.”

  It was not all cloth and bloodwood. In Whitby Bellman watched young men being lowered on ropes down the perilous cliffs of shale to the stripe of black. Suspended over the waves, the men hammered and tapped to extract the jet. From the shore he went into the town, where he visited a number of carvers, selected the best of them, instructed them to take on assistants and apprentices, and placed orders for rings, brooches, lockets, and necklets, earrings, hair decorations. He ordered beads by the thousand: plain and faceted, carved and polished, beads of every shape and size to be stitched to gowns and hats and cuffs and bags where they would catch the light and gleam and glitter darkly. Fathomless black for the first phase of mourning, certainly, but after that, why should black not be as brilliant as any color?

  In the course of weeks and months, Bellman discovered a great diversity of workplaces. There was the milliner’s studio, the cordwainer’s atelier, the low-ceilinged premises of the umbrella makers. At bookbinders’ across London he negotiated prices for books and diaries bound in all grades of black and gray skin and linen, in which the bereaved might record for all posterity the last days, pious words, and divine visions of their lost ones. He climbed stairs to a damp-free room where paper of various weights and qualities and sizes was laid out for his inspection, all with black borders, ranging from half an inch to one-eighth of an inch thick. He placed the largest single order the company had ever received, so that countless widows and children, as yet unbereaved, would be able to inform their circle of the deaths that were yet to happen. In a reek of oil and ink he got his fingers dirty poking into the mechanisms of a printing press. “Productivity?” he wanted to know. “Maintenance?” What it boiled down to was this: Would he be able to deliver headed notepaper within London within four hours of notification? When he got the answer he wanted, he ordered a press.

  “Seven months’ wait? Too long.”

  He bribed the manufacturer to jump the queue.

  Coffins, of course. Bellman ran his finger along smooth finished pieces of work in a dozen different joinery workshops. How much oak do you have in stock? What about elm? Mahogany? Where do you season your timber? For how long? In warehouses he followed the grain in the wood, looked for knots and warping and other flaws. When he had found the best in the hundred miles around London, he drew up contracts. “I pay the best prices, but you sell to no one else. No one, mind.”

  Bellman turned his attention to his catalogue. He advertised at the art school for artists to produce drawings for his catalogues, and a series of young men presented themselves at his office with portfolios. He looked through sketches of antique ruins, classical statues with naked breasts and missing arms, architectural fragments. He was looking for the ability to convey a lot of information in a small space, accurately and with clarity. After that it was a matter of judging who could work fast and reliably.

  Bellman employed a trio of such artists. The students spent their evenings and Sunday afternoons drawing detailed pictures of over two hundred different styles of coffin and funerary ornament. Coffins would be lead lined or unlined or metallic lined; with handles and escutcheons in brass or silvered, plain or with many degrees of ornamentation; lined in silk or velvet or satin, embroidered or plain; the lid embellished with plaques engraved with lilies or ivy or the eternal serpent.

  Two graying sisters with long fingers and mysterious smiles wrote lavish descriptions of these funerary items to accompany the drawings. In a separate section of the catalogue, certain of the designs were repeated with delicate adjustments and additions, making them suitable for children’s coffins. The gray sisters excelled themselves here; their smiles when they delivered the copy were even more enigmatic. All these drawings, all this text, Bellman had printed on the best quality paper and bound into catalogues that were a marvel of gravity and beauty in themselves.

  The prices he put on a separate sheet, slipped into a quarter pocket inside the back cover, like an afterthought.

  · · ·

  Bellman surprised himself sometimes.

  But I can sleep anywhere! he thought as he turned over yet again and rearranged the sheets that had enshrouded him yet again.

  It was true. On his long journeys he stayed at roadside inns where he could lay his bones down on a rough straw bed and slept as sweetly as a lapdog on a silk pillow. At the house he had bought in London the revels in the street never disturbed him. Even in a coach being driven along a pitted and stony country road, he could close his eyes and nod off, giving his overworked brain a rest.

  Only in Whittingford, in his own bed, was he sleepless.

  His habit was to lie on his left side. In the old days that had meant Rose was behind him. He would hear her breathing in the night. Sometimes, as she edged close to him for warmth, her hand would gently stir his sleep. Now that she was dead, the space at his back was alive with her absence.

  He had tried sleeping on his right side and on his back. He tried sleeping on the other side of the bed altogether. He moved the bed into another room and brought in a new one. He changed rooms. Nothing worked. The bed stroked his back with its fingers, the sheet embraced him, every draft was her sigh.

  It was no good. He got up and went to the window to look outside. The sky was almost dark, but a sliver of moon highlighted the church spire. On just such a night he had found himself in the churchyard, talking to Black with the dark shapes of the yews around them and freshly dug graves waiting. One of those graves should have been Dora’s, he reflected.

  Crisscrossing the country by road and rail, in London one day and a hundred miles away the next, it was easy to keep his thoughts in careful order, but in Whittingford, with that spire piercing the moon, thoughts he preferred to keep separate had a tendency to find each other.

  He had entered into a deal with Black, and Dora had survived.

  The possibility that these two events were connected troubled Bellman. At the time of Dora’s recovery he had been in a state of great distress, and the activity of his mind could not be accurately described as rational. He recognized that. Later the relief he felt left little room for thought. Then there had been Bellman & Black to think about.

  On nights like this, things he should perhaps have thought about before came back to torment him. He had made a deal with Black, and his daughter, on the very brink of death, had been returned to him. Now that his association with death was professional, he liked to think he benefitted from certain related advantages, and in the middle of the night, his mind proposed to him that his child’s survival was one. Yet he had only to see her—her frailty, her halting progress from room to room, leaning on her stick, the lace mantle she wore to cover her white scalp—to suspect that death had not retreated but was only biding his time.

  What was the deal? He had tried more than once to remember what had been agreed, but it was possible, wasn’t it, that his failure to remember was because he had agreed to nothing? What if this opportunity had been given and the boon had been conferred and nothing had been agreed upon? Presumably the boon could be removed at any moment. The opportunity could be withdrawn with no notice. Without a contract, there was no knowing
what he was to do to meet requirements . . .

  Bellman turned his face from the window and drew the curtains closed. He did not like the moon peering into this house, pointing out what he held dear and showing where his treasure was. Rather hide his love for his child, rather cloak it in darkness than advertise it. Perhaps it was better for all concerned if he just kept away. Like the bird that lures predators away from the nest by making a display of itself far off, he would protect his daughter by keeping his distance. The greater the success of Bellman & Black, the safer she would be.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Bellman did not lose sight of the construction of his shop. Between visits north, south, east, and west, he came to London to check the progress of his emporium.

  He kept an office in London, close enough to the building site so that from his window he could see the shop rise, stone by stone, from the ground. He held interviews here for the senior staff. He had found an excellent fellow to be his right-hand man, Verney by name. He had the same soft, white hands as the chief of works his architect had suggested and whom Bellman had refused. When he performed mental arithmetic, the fleshy fingers performed a kind of high-speed ballet, fingertips bouncing off each other in a spellbinding display of prestidigitation until, arriving at the solution, he rubbed both hands together and noted the answer fastidiously. No, there was nothing wrong with fastidiousness in a numbers man, and Bellman offered him the job and was paying him already, though there was only half a job there at present.

  Today it was Fox he was meeting with. He saw him frequently when he was in London to go over forthcoming work, timetables, problems. The main business at present was doors.

  A minute before their meeting was due to start, Bellman saw Fox come away from the site. He strode toward the office with an energetic gait he had copied, without realizing it, from Bellman.