Bellman & Black, Page 24

  “The druid doctor, burning his child’s corpse on a hillside!” Heads were shaken and lips curled disparagingly around the table.

  “It is a wicked thing. The man is a heathen.”

  “He is making trouble for himself more than for anyone else. He is to be pitied, surely.”

  “You think he is mad?”

  And the haberdashers fell into debate about the case, which was so exercising public opinion.

  “There may be one good thing to come out of it,” Critchlow suggested. “Placing the matter before a Christian judge will clarify the law once and for all, and thus put an end to Thompson’s Society.”

  The others nodded their heads sagely.

  “I hope you are right,” said Anson.

  “So we press ahead?” Bellman put the question to them, though the way he said it was more like a statement.

  The haberdashers nodded. Agreement reached, Bellman rose and a moment later was gone.

  “He’s gone back to work,” one of the haberdashers told Anson. “Devoted to it. Got to admire the man.”

  Walking home later that evening, Anson thought back over the conversation. Got to admire the man? Yes and no. He had the utmost respect for Bellman’s commercial instincts and his financial acumen, but his admiration left room to wonder whether his single-mindedness was an entirely good thing.

  Anson considered himself hardworking. Ten till four, Monday to Friday at the bank; evenings entertaining clients and doing more business at his club; paperwork on weekends when he had to. But most days, for a few hours, he was free to live his life.

  Anson was enormously fond of the company of his children, both the grown ones from his first marriage, and the little ones from his second. His Saturday morning walk around the garden was something to which he attached importance. What is more, on those days when he could not spend half an hour in the company of a good book he felt deprived. And then there were women. His wife, of course, whom he loved dearly and treated with great tolerance and kindness, and also one or two others: cheerful souls, discreet and affectionate. Yes, he had always liked women. All this, he considered, was the stuff life was made of. It was what he worked for. When he spent his earnings—on hydrangeas, a piano for his daughters, or adornments for one pretty woman or another—it seemed the justification for his time at the bank, the natural end of a cycle that began with his labor. He could not for the life of him see what it was that held a parallel position in Bellman’s life.

  There was a daughter, or so they said, but he didn’t seem to spend much time with her. She didn’t live in London, and Bellman was never away from the shop for more than twenty-four hours. There were not known to be any women. The top floor of the shop housed a harem of seamstresses adequate in number to satisfy any number of sultans, yet an instinct—more insightful than Mrs. Critchlow’s feminine one—told Anson that Bellman left them unmolested. Nor were his appetites gastronomic or alcoholic. The bottles he kept in his office were only opened for business acquaintances, so far as he could see. If Bellman ever came to him at home, as he had once or twice when a matter was urgent, he accepted a cup of tea or a glass of brandy indifferently and left it unfinished as often as not. He had no hobbies. He hadn’t even a home that merited the name. The man simply worked, seemingly without fatigue and never needing the respite, the restoration of repose, of comfort, of company. It was impressive. But was it natural?

  We are not made of the same material as him, Anson thought. And yet he is human. How long can a man go on in such a fashion?

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Bellman’s waistcoat pocket had developed a hole where his watch weighed it down, and the fabric had bagged. “You had better send a girl down to measure me up for a new one,” he told Miss Chalcraft, and she sent Lizzie.

  He took off his jacket and placed it over the back of a chair.

  “It is made of English merino, I think?” Lizzie asked. “It is soft to wear but less resistant than the Spanish.”

  “Yet it is the same yarn. It is only the weaving that is done in the one place or the other.”

  He stood in his shirtsleeves to be measured. She took her tape measure from the pocket attached to her belt, and he felt the lightness of her touch, nape to waist, collarbone to shoulder, chest dimension, waist. In between each measurement she distanced herself to write it down. She went away and came close, once, twice, thrice . . . She did not look at him all the while, not his face, and he did not look at her, except out of the corner of his eyes.

  He found that he was not singing, nor even quite humming, but merely breathing a tune. His rib cage must have jerked to do it, for he felt her fingers on his shoulders to still him, and then he heard her voice.

  “They are saying, upstairs, that Mr. Black haunts the shop.”

  He tried to distinguish her breath in the air at the back of his neck, but could not.

  “What makes them say that?”

  “They hear him singing.”

  “Ah.”

  “Apparently he does not know all the words to the song.”

  “Is that so?”

  “Are your arms aching? No? Then I will just fit this calico to you. It is the one we used last time, and your measurements have not changed.”

  She deftly pinned a few pieces of calico together on the desk, then came behind him again and pressed them flat against his back. Her light voice drifted in his ear then, in a just audible whisper.

  “Still the angel stars are shining,

  Still the rippling waters flow,

  But the angel-voice is silent

  That I heard so long ago.

  Hark! the echoes murmur low,

  Long ago!”

  What a sad song! Bellman thought. He hadn’t realized it was sad. Had he remembered he would not have sung it—yet in Lizzie’s soft voice the sadness was enticing. He was glad when she continued.

  “Still the wood is dim and lonely,

  Still the plashing fountains play,

  But the past and all its beauty

  Whither has it fled away?

  Hark! the mournful echoes say

  Fled away!”

  Listening, he felt a sensation in his chest. The readiness to release something held taut for too long, the welcome letting go of a burden too tightly clutched . . . What was happening to him?

  Lizzie came to stand in front of him. Shy or embarrassed, she did not meet his eye and fell silent. She took the calico pieces for the front of the waistcoat and laid one on his chest, pinning it at the shoulder to its corresponding back half.

  “Go on with the song. Please.” His voice was gruff to his own ears.

  The red in her cheeks deepened. She was so close he saw the moist inner part of her lips as they opened and closed.

  “Still the bird of night complaineth,

  (Now, indeed, her song is pain)

  Visions of my happy hours

  Do I call and call in vain?—

  Hark! the echoes cry again,

  All in vain!”

  She pressed the other half of the waistcoat front to him, and when her voice broke and missed a word or two, Bellman discovered that he did know the words after all. A song, taught by drunks so long ago in the Red Lion and nine-tenths forgotten, now emerged from the past. Words that had evaded him came to his lips one after another, at the exact moment he needed them. Conscious of Verney in the next room, he murmured with as much tune as he could muster under his breath:

  “Cease, oh echoes, mournful echoes!

  Once I loved your voices well;

  Now my heart is sick and weary—

  Days of old, a long farewell!

  Hark! the echoes sad and dreary

  Cry farewell, farewell!”

  Lizzie had finished her pinning. She was watching him sing, as he had watched her, and her hands were clasped at her breast. It would be the easiest thing in the world to take her hands between his own.

  I should ask her about Black, he thought. He had been meaning
to do it for—oh! a long while.

  “When I met you before,” he said, “the night before the shop opened,” and his path diverged unexpectedly from his intention, “there was a baby’s crib in your room.”

  He saw her flinch, under the skin. “I had a little girl, once. Her name was Sarah. She—”

  Lizzie halted and swallowed. Her eyes filmed with water; it was held tense, trembled. The tear dropped and glazed her cheek, then another, and her face was brilliant with sorrow, and at the same time—Bellman was utterly dazzled—she smiled. Whatever it was she might have said was quite unnecessary for her face was radiant with the memory of joy and pain, and he was spellbound. The glance she gave him then was a gift, beautiful and frightening, and he longed to accept it.

  Something was brimming in him. He felt a twitch at his lips. What sweet relief there would be in weeping now, with a song to speak for him and a woman to weep with . . . His eyes ached, the pressure behind them increased, and at the moment his vision broke into a brilliant dazzle, he saw—or thought he saw—movement at the window.

  “What was that?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “At the window. A bird, was it?”

  “I didn’t see.”

  In the moment of surprise, his hand had found hers.

  There had once been a William Bellman who knew how to kiss a woman. Who knew how to offer and receive and the comfort of an embrace. Who could draw another human being close to him and feel a heart that was not his own beat against his chest.

  But I am with Black now, he thought as he scanned the sky for whatever had interrupted them. The comfort of grief was out of bounds, and it was too late for sorrow.

  He released Lizzie’s hand. She turned away to her sheet of measurements.

  “Will you have the pockets as before, Mr. Bellman?”

  “I think so, yes.”

  “Be careful of the pins then, as I take it off you.”

  He stood without moving while she edged the pinned pieces down his arms. She folded the model loosely and rested it over her arm. “I can do it by tomorrow. Will lunchtime be soon enough?”

  “There is no rush.”

  Lizzie went back to the sewing room, and Bellman went back to work.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  “Will!”

  It was so long since anyone had called him by this diminutive—or even by his Christian name come to that—that at first he didn’t realize it was he who was being addressed. He almost walked right by, and it was the expectation in her gaze that slowed him. Then the use of his name caught up with him, and he halted.

  Her face was familiar and unfamiliar. At Bellman & Black he knew everyone, but this was Whittingford high street. He couldn’t think for the life of him how to go about attaching a name to this face that clearly knew him so well. She smiled at him, asked him how he was, and he struggled to reply till he knew who . . .

  “It’s Jeannie Armstrong. Jeannie Aldridge as I used to be . . . What a long time it’s been . . . I can’t blame you for not knowing me. I’ve changed.”

  The Jeannie he used to know was visible in this woman. She was older, fatter, grayer. It wasn’t only time that had changed her though. Some other thing had happened to darken her eyes and line her face.

  He listened to her speaking of her children. Rob, the eldest, who now delivered the bread to the mill and to Mill House. “Thank goodness we have him, that’s what I say. Though he’s still only a lad, he’s taken on the whole running of the bakery, deliveries and the lot, and I don’t know how we’d have coped without him. Your Dora has been a godsend. She has been teaching him the bookkeeping, and more than that, in truth she is doing it for him, till his brother leaves school and can help him more. I can’t be in the bakery and looking after Fred, can I? And now that he needs me more and more, I can hardly leave his side. Our daughter is with him now, while I came out to fetch—”

  From her talk he put together the facts: Fred was sick, Rob the son was moving prematurely into his father’s shoes, his own daughter was helping them out. He faintly recalled one of Ned’s reports, he had an idea he had been told the baker was unwell but that deliveries were being maintained. He seemed to remember learning that Dora had learned bookkeeping from Ned and was making herself useful in the mill office a few mornings a week. The reality of it seemed somehow unexpected.

  Jeannie’s chatter had come to an abrupt halt as she was struck by an idea.

  “Why don’t you come and say hello? I always knew he would make something of himself, that Will Bellman. That’s what Fred always says. Saw it in you, he reckons, when you were boys together. And you gave him that big chance, the bread for the mill breakfasts. It was the making of us, that was. He never forgot that.”

  The blue of her eyes was no longer the cloudless shade it had once been.

  An image came to him out of nowhere: the river, sedges grown to their tallest, Jeannie’s white legs spread on the green of the riverbank, and her black boots still on her feet.

  He saw her remember it too. She saw he had remembered.

  “Come and see him, Will,” she said. “It would mean a lot.”

  “Yes,” he said. “I will.”

  · · ·

  “So you are working with Ned in the mill office now?” he asked Dora at breakfast.

  “I have been for the last year and a half.”

  He nodded. “Do you like it?”

  “I do.”

  “And the bakery bookkeeping?”

  She nodded more slowly, frowning. “The Armstrongs were thinking of taking young Fred and Billie out of school to help out. I can see why they felt it necessary, but it seemed shortsighted to me. With another year or two of education they can be so much more useful in the future. Rob can manage the bakery side of things in the meanwhile, if he has someone to take care of the paperwork for him.”

  “So you are doing it. Are you being paid?”

  She smiled. “We don’t pay for the household bread. And we have the bakery’s delivery cart for expeditions on Sundays. And when Rob falls asleep at a picnic or in your old chair when he brings the invoices over, I have a model to draw for an hour at least and he doesn’t move an inch. That seems a fair exchange to me.”

  He nodded. “In any event, it would be a costly annoyance to have to get a new baker for the mill if Armstrong’s went under.”

  “I hear that you are going to see Mr. Armstrong before you leave for London?” Dora asked, looking up from her marmalade. “Rob mentioned it to Mary when he delivered the bread this morning.”

  Bellman suddenly frowned and stared. She was right. He had promised.

  He shook his head. “I would have. But now . . .” He gestured in the direction of the letter at his side. A letter from Verney, setting out all the numerous and varied issues that had arisen in his short absence, for him to peruse on his journey so that he would arrive fully informed and ready to act. He felt a sudden sense of urgency. It was imperative that he should get back to London at the earliest opportunity.

  “I am needed in London,” he explained

  The need to hurry gripped him now. He rose from his chair, still wiping his mouth with his napkin, all before he had even swallowed his last mouthful of toast.

  “What is the matter with Mr. Armstrong, anyway?”

  Dora’s eye and voice were neutral. “He is dying.”

  “Let them know I’ll go next time,” he said, as though she hadn’t spoken, and he dropped his napkin on the floor in his haste to reach the door.

  He opened the door and fled.

  “Next time will be too late,” Dora told the door as it swung shut.

  She took another bite of toast.

  · · ·

  Bellman made notes in his calfskin notebook and acted upon them. In his next letter to Ned he advised him of his decision to pay for a Bellman & Black funeral for the baker who had provided the mill’s breakfasts for so many years. Would Ned please notify Mrs. Jeannie Armstrong of this, at
the necessary time, and also act as intermediary between Mrs. Armstrong and Mr. Latimer, funeral director in chief at Bellman & Black, to make the arrangements according to the family’s wishes. He added a note to the same effect in a regular memo to Mr. Latimer.

  A few weeks later, Bellman was processing a pile of papers on his desk in his standard fury of activity. One particular invoice brought him up sharp.

  What was this? An invoice for a funeral provided free of charge by Bellman & Black? Name of Armstrong . . .

  Fred!

  His blood jumped in alarm. His heart made ready to beat faster. Something blocked his throat.

  With a scrawl that was even hastier and less legible than usual he signed the invoice off and moved quickly on to the next item.

  He concentrated hard, very hard on his papers. He worked fast and then faster still. Every minute and every second and every fraction of every second he worked. When the pile of papers he was working on was reduced to nothing, he took up an absorbing piece of analysis from his accountant that he had been meaning to evaluate for some time and sat up with it till the small hours, making notes and listing queries. At the end of it he wrote a full assessment of the argument. Then he found a few other bits and pieces to do. By the time it was morning and Verney came knocking, he had forgotten all about his blood and his heart and his throat, and Fred’s funeral was a detail from the distant past.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Verney placed the month’s accounts summary on his desk together with the related files. There was a touch of hesitancy, reluctance even, in his manner. “And I thought you would want to see this,” he said, placing a printed paper on top.

  Bellman glanced at it: the broadsheet was folded so as to show a letter from one of the literary names of the day, criticizing the excesses of funeral spending.

  “Another one?” Bellman cast his eye over it. “It only serves to dissuade people from going to the charlatans and brings them to our door. All to the good.”

  Verney nodded. “I’ll be off then, if you have no further need of me.”