Bellman & Black, Page 23

  It was a song for girls. Men liked the more robust numbers that could be accompanied by fists banging on the table and where the chorus came in as a great communal roar. A night at an inn began with the popular numbers and got bawdier as the night went on. Sometimes, though, a long night could take hard drinking men, young and old, beyond lust to sentimentality. Then, at the end of the evening, in husky and wavering voices, they sang songs like this one: tender and yearning. He had known this song once, but it was no good pretending: he did not know the words now. But he hummed as he continued his rounds, and when the girls reached the end of the song and began it again he lingered in the workroom. Their beds were a few feet above his head. He remembered—with some surprise—that he too had been something of a singer once, a long time ago.

  The singing came to an end. There was a faint murmur of conversation, then silence.

  Everything was just so in the workroom. Bellman left a note of congratulations for Miss Chalcraft and his rounds were complete.

  The song, evidently, was not to be repeated.

  He wished—

  What did he wish for?

  He did not know. Unless it was his bed.

  Washing his face and undressing, Bellman hummed the tune again. He climbed into bed, blew out the candle, and settled his back securely against the tongue-and-groove paneling. In the second between being awake and being asleep he longed intensely for soft arms around his neck and the breathing of a woman in the crook of his neck. Lizzie’s face, on the edge of his thoughts. And then he was overcome by blackness.

  · · ·

  The plashing fountains and the happy hours found Bellman’s brain a congenial place and made a permanent encampment there. At times of deep concentration or contentment or tiredness, a few bars of the song would escape his lips and he filled in the gaps with “ta dees” and “ta dums” and other fillers of his own devising. Through the months that followed, it became the pleasant, undemanding companion of his solitary hours. Once or twice he imagined another life for himself in which he was a singer. He stood on the first-floor gallery as if on a stage, and projected his song so that his voice echoed through the empty theater of his shop. The headless mannequins and half-dummies listened with the appearance of rapt attention, but as the final note died away they did not applaud.

  In the silence that followed he wondered how far his voice carried. Had he woken the seamstresses two floors up? He allowed himself to imagine a midnight choir: himself and his seamstresses, their voices raised together in song, then he told himself it was ludicrous and put the thought away.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  In a narrow back street, in a cold and dingy bedroom in Holborn, an innkeeper turned over in bed one morning to find his wife had died in the night. His neighbors heard the weeping and came running to find him ashen faced, his eight children standing dazed around him. “What must I do?” he asked his neighbor’s wife. “Go to Bellman & Black,” she told him. “They’ll know everything.”

  A mother and father in Richmond received news of a riding accident, and minutes later the body of their son was brought into the house. Later they would weep and pray together, but in this first moment their minds responded differently. The father’s mind was stilled by shock. He neither heard nor saw anything. His wife was afforded the distraction of domestic organization. Someone will have to cancel the dinner, she thought. Someone will have to find out whether the horse is found. But before she did either of those things, before the pain possessed her completely, she reached for her ink and writing paper. “I suppose that I had better send for Bellman & Black,” she said.

  A young Clapham widow opened her closet and ran her finger over the crepe dresses inside. Two years to the day since her husband had died. A good man. A handsome one. Two years . . . though some nights it felt like yesterday. She wouldn’t be sorry to see the end of this black, though. Gray was decorous. Dignified. There was a particular shade of it, she remembered, that brought out the blue of her eyes and flattered her fair curls. They would be bound to have it at Bellman & Black.

  · · ·

  The mighty and the meek, the rich and the poor, were equal when faced with death: all dabbed their eyes and thought of Bellman & Black. The safe in the little room behind Bellman’s office grew fuller, and the accounts at the Westminster & City Bank grew richer. The haberdashers married off their daughters and granddaughters, and the guests at the weddings ate and drank lavishly thanks to the spendthrift grief of the bereaved. All was well.

  Bellman was a contented man. His wages bill grew every month as he took on more and more staff to cope with the demand. His kitchen cooked more and more lunches to fuel the staff who made the sales. There was a constant flow of deliveries coming in at the back of the shop to replace the goods that were carried out the front door. You could measure the success in any number of ways, right down to the bills for string and brown paper with which to wrap the customers’ orders and the shoe repair bills for the porters who wore down their soles running up and down stairs between customers and dispatch with purchases piled high in their arms. It all came together at the end of every month, when Bellman read his monthly reports, checked the monthly figures, and entered the month’s actual sales on his graph. Over the years the curve had never ceased to rise. Those predictions he had made in his calfskin notebook at the very beginning, and that he had reined in so as not to look overconfident in front of the haberdashers . . . Well, look now! The profits were seven times greater than he had imagined! Seven times!

  Bellman chuckled. He had every reason to be pleased.

  He had not forgotten Black. There was a time, he remembered, when he had been anxious about him. No longer. Unorthodox their arrangement might be, but it worked. Black’s money was piling up in the second account, it could be withdrawn at a day’s notice whenever the man wanted it. And what a sum! Was Black aware of the success of Bellman & Black, Bellman wondered? Did he keep an eye on it from afar, biding his time, satisfied at his nice little nest egg? Perhaps sometimes he might walk past, assessing the window display? Perhaps he came in and browsed once in a while, passing himself off as an ordinary customer?

  Bellman relished the thought of one of his shopgirls serving Black, all the while in the dark as to his identity.

  And yet, somehow he thought not. More likely the man was away. Traveling, probably. Perhaps he was in Europe, or America. Who knows what life the fellow was leading? Intrepid adventure of some kind, exploration into the farthest corners of the globe . . . It wouldn’t surprise him, for Black wasn’t a man to accept limitations. And in this case, it would come as a great surprise to him, the day after he docked, to discover on a walk through London that the idea he had sown a few years ago had grown into this huge emporium. With what joy he would come bounding in, asking for Bellman.

  What a day that would be! Bellman looked forward to it with intense longing. There would be a knock at the door, Verney saying, “Someone to see you, sir,” and then in would come Black, large as life.

  Like long-lost friends they would embrace, Black’s arms would envelop him, he would feel his hands slap his back, and they would be instantly at ease—like brothers! He would put his work aside, no matter how important, and say to Verney—he could picture his astonishment!—“No interruptions! Not even for Critchlow himself!” Then the pair of them would sit, on each side of the fire, a glass of the best brandy in their hands, and Black would talk about all manner of things. What he had been doing, where he had been. A great number of things that had mystified Bellman would become clear. “I expect you’ve been wondering about all this!” Black would say, and lighting a cigar, Bellman would tell him, “I knew you would turn up sooner or later, old fellow. I never doubted it!”

  Bellman would tell his friend all about the business, everything he had done on his side to make it the success it was today, and Black would approve it all. “I could tell you were the one, Bellman, my friend.” Yes. He would point to the graph, turn through the pa
ges of the ledger, show him the statements for the bank account he had opened for him. Then what satisfaction there would be.

  Two men, their fortunes made, talking business by the fire until—yes, this is how it would be!—their talk would drift away from commerce, rise above it, and they would speak of loftier matters, philosophical questions and universal issues . . . There were aspects of life that Bellman had no names for, they were off the edges of the pages of the dictionary, but Black was bound to know a great deal about them. He was clearly a man of unusual influence. Working alongside him had already conferred protection of a kind that went well beyond the financial, on Bellman and his daughter. He had a hundred questions he would like to ask, and Black would answer patiently, in simple words—words that would say a good deal—and Bellman, listening, would learn marvelous and miraculous things, things undreamt of, things of the gravest importance.

  What a conversation! By the time they came to the end of it the moon would be high in the sky and the stars would be out. All London would be asleep while the two great men of commerce sat here in this office and fathomed the mysteries of the world . . . Camaraderie. Understanding. Companionship to cherish. How he was looking forward to meeting Black again.

  The day would come. It was all in Black’s hands; there was nothing he, Bellman, could do about it, no matter how heartfelt his longing.

  In the meantime, there was Bellman & Black. Work to be done. Sentimentality wouldn’t put money in the bank.

  Bellman turned his thoughts from his fantasy and back to his calculations. While he occupied his conscious thoughts with meticulous adding, subtracting and multiplying, he was heartened at the knowledge that there was a good deal to be said for having a fellow like Black on your side.

  &

  The rook has few predators. He is too large, too strong, too well organized, and above all too clever to be more than a rare supper for owls and eagles. Humans are occasionally a threat, though—and not only boys with catapults.

  There is an old ditty that English mothers sing to the babies they bounce on their knees. It goes like this:

  Sing a song of sixpence, a pocketful of rye,

  Four and twenty black birds baked in a pie,

  When the pie was opened, the birds began to sing,

  Now wasn’t that a dainty dish to set before a king?

  The black birds in question are rooks, and you may well be thinking that a pie containing two dozen rooks would be a very large pie indeed, but that is far from the truth. The meat of an adult rook is bitter. You would not like it. The only palatable rook (if you’re not too fussy) is a branchling. These are the young birds that cannot yet fly but spend their days on branches outside the nest, watching the world that is to be theirs. These flightless birds of June are the only ones worth eating, and each one has only two slivers of meat—a morsel on each breast the size of the pad of your fingertip—to recompense the effort of hunting and plucking and preparing. Hence the king in the rhyme, for whom the novelty pie might just be worth it, since he has a retinue of gamekeepers with guns, and white-aproned cooks to provide it for him.

  Still, hunger is a great motivator, and your ancestors had to eat. It stands to reason that in times of hardship there will have been some patient enough to aim a bow and arrow into an oak and bring down a branchling.

  You might well turn up your nose at the prospect of eating rook pie. But the rook would not turn up his nose at the prospect of eating you. If the chance came his way—at the roadside or on the battlefield or where the tide pulls back—he would happily redden his beak in your flesh. Go back before churches and crosses and coffins, and it was ritual practice to lay out the dead on a stone platform for the bones to be picked clean in this manner.

  What I am getting at is this: some time ago, a rook ate the flesh of your ancestor, and some time ago your ancestor ate rook pie. Man eats rook; rook eats man. Bodies mingle. Thanks to this mutual ingestion, protein from human flesh becomes blue-black feather, and protein from rook flesh becomes human skin.

  There is a cousinly intimacy between rooks and men. Humans, with their unmatched ability for forgetting, are surprised at learning the closeness between the species. The rook, with his better memory, knows full well that he is your flighted, feathered kin.

  · · ·

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

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Bellman & Black was the main but not the only part of Bellman’s business empire. For a start, he still owned Bellman’s Mill. Every week he received Ned’s report from Whittingford and wrote a letter in return—some twelve or fifteen pages—instructing, advising, querying. There was a second mill too: half a year ago he had bought it at a very good price after the original owner came a cropper. The owner had made the mistake of coming to rely overmuch on a single large customer; that customer then defaulted on a payment. It was a rudimentary error, and Bellman—who had had the foresight many years earlier to offer the miller a long-term loan on good terms, and thus was first to know of his financial predicament—took advantage. He moved Ned’s right-hand man in to align the mill with the practices at Bellman’s, and after an initial period of turbulence—no one likes change—things had settled down and the mill was already starting to be profitable.

  Bellman also owned a dozen London houses in the very best areas: they made a good return for him in rents as well as holding their value. They didn’t run themselves, though. There were tenants to find, rents to collect, roofs to mend . . . He had people in place to act for him, but still, being Bellman, he liked to know just what was being done on his behalf.

  Furthermore Bellman kept a very close eye on his investments. Many a young entrepreneur had sought and been given capital by Bellman for some innovation in the area of mourning goods production. With capital came scrutiny. If there was a flaw in the business thinking, Bellman would find it. He familiarized himself with areas of business far removed from his own, saw the fundamental, universal factors that influenced success and failure, evaluated the specifics of each venture, and never invested capital without the understanding that his money came with the expectation of a hand in the guidance of the business as well. He had a light touch, yet it was the touch that made all the difference. At the Westminster & City, Anson came to see him as a kind of bellwether. If Bellman invested, you could be sure the endeavor was a sound one, and where Bellman’s money was, so was Bellman’s acumen and overseeing eye. Where he could, the banker shifted his own capital, nested it in alongside Bellman’s, and benefitted from the gains.

  · · ·

  One evening at Russells, Bellman met with his banker and his haberdashers to discuss an ambition that was close to his heart. It had been planned for some time to extend Bellman & Black by opening new shops in Bath, York, and Manchester: sites for these shops had been found, and between the haberdashers and the bank, funds had been found to purchase land and engage architects. Anxious to press on with the program of national expansion, Bellman had hit upon the idea of—this was how it appeared to the other four—hiring out the name Bellman & Black to independent retailers in the mourning goods trade, and supplying them from Bellman & Black’s established supply chain, in return for creaming off a percentage of their profit. It was an idea that struck all of them as bizarre.

  “But why should a retailer who has always been his own man wish to do such a thing?” one of the haberdashers asked, perplexed.

  “How can we know when a shop in Manchester is running low on size six Italian leather gloves?” another objected.

  Bellman had answers for everything. For every obstacle, he had a solution. For every doubt, he supplied certainty. He plugged gaps in their knowledge with firm facts and figures. He had looked into every aspect so thoroughly and he explained it with such clarity of vision that the strange idea came, little by little, to seem so obviously sensible that they all found themselves wondering why no one had ever thought of it before.
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  “Where on earth do you find the time for all this?” Anson asked him in a gap in the proceedings as a waiter was delivering new drinks to their table. “What is your secret?”

  Bellman shrugged. “Time passes more quickly for the man who lies abed than for the busy man. The more I have to do, the more time I have to do it. I discovered that a long time ago.”

  They sipped from their brandy glasses and went on with their talk. The consensus was turning toward yes. Anson would not have a say in the decision—he was only the banker—but his views were nonetheless listened to and considered with respect. “What are we to make of Thompson and his crematorium campaign?” he asked. “He is right about the graveyards. They are unhygienic and something will have to be done. With change in the air, is it the moment to be expanding so radically?”

  There was a quick outburst of feeling within the group.

  “It is ungodly!”

  “Quite so. The English will never stand for it!”

  “It is only because he is the queen’s physician that people give him the time of day. The idea is nonsensical.”

  Bellman was the only one to relate the issue to the business. “In my view a funeral is a funeral whatever the method. The desire for ritual will never change. A coffin is a large piece, but most often made of wood, which is relatively inexpensive; moreover, being destined to be buried in the ground, there is a natural limit on what people are prepared to pay for it. A casket destined to contain ashes and which people may desire to keep in their home may be made of all kinds of expensive stuff, even silver and gold, and permits of a great many decorative finishes and artistic additions. Were Thompson to be successful, I see no reason to fear for the health of the business. I myself would be inclined to see it as an opportunity rather than as something to be feared.”

  “You would press ahead immediately with the expansion plans rather than wait for the outcome of this case in Wales?”