Bellman & Black, Page 6

  At the graveside, fingers of lucid September sun pointed at the coffin and at the pit. How had Reverend Porritt and the coffin seemed so unreal a moment ago? Look at them now . . .

  The thing from his chest had grown into his throat and he couldn’t swallow. It had locked his jaw. It was pushing from behind his eyes . . .

  Clusters of mourners stood around the grave: Dora’s brother and nephews were there, and some cousins, her neighbors and friends, people who had liked and admired her, those who had gossiped, those who had listened to gossip and those who had not.

  It was the smallest of movements that caught Will’s eye. Someone at the back. Just a glimpse. There and gone again—the merest impression . . .

  The man who had been staring at him in church! He knew it!

  Will shifted his weight a little, swayed to the left, trying to get a view of him. Nothing. The fellow must have moved. He leaned fractionally the other way. Between two mourners a sturdy shoulder was visible. Was that him? Or there, that edge of a cape? But in the mass of black, among all the downcast faces, it was impossible to distinguish one man from another.

  Paul, taking the swaying for faintness, grasped his shoulder more firmly.

  The thing inside was rattling him. He could not keep his arms still, his legs vibrated dangerously under him. He was cold in his stomach, cold down his spine, his rib cage was locked, his throat was blocked, he couldn’t breathe—

  William closed his eyes in a slow blink.

  Nothing will ever be the same again, he thought.

  When he opened his eyes it was to the glare of sunshine and tears. Was that someone signaling to him on the far side of the grave? Some gesture, it seemed to be. Exhorting him? Encouraging? Will blinked and squinted. A raised arm, he thought. The wide drape of a black cloak, splayed fingers emerging from the cuff. Something glittering. Dazzled he could look no longer. His eyes sought respite in the darkness of the grave. At the edge of his vision he was aware of the great sweep of the cloak as it blacked out the sky and the sun, the mourners, everyone and everything, and last, Will himself.

  · · ·

  Later. By some tacit arrangement, it was his friends from the mill who had the care of him for the night. Will’s mind was dull and blank already so he didn’t see what help cider and whiskey could be to him, but others knew better and they took him to the Red Lion. After three days of sympathetic ironing from the Misses Young, he welcomed the rougher way in which the men from the mill administered their consolation. There was a jug of cider on the table, and no sooner was it empty than it was filled. Fred from the bakery dropped in to clasp him in his arms and nearly lifted him off the ground. “She was a good’un, your ma. Can’t stay. Must get home. Got a littl’un now, you know?” Hamlin and Gambin the shearers came in especially to shake his hand; their words were inaudible above the hubbub of the inn, but the sense was clear enough. Thank you, Will said, Kind of you. A jolting blow on his shoulder was Rudge’s leather hand dealing out robust sympathy. Mute Greg made a delicate display of compassion, fingertips and temples expressing fellow feeling in a mime that came closer to touching Will than anything else. Some left and others came, and every minute, Poll the landlady was there, refilling the cider jug, giving him a pat or a stroke as if he were a nice stray dog, taken in at the Red Lion to be the inn’s pet. In the hubbub around him, men were smiling, men were laughing. At the edge of Will’s mouth a muscle twitched. Some raucous shouting burst out, someone accusing someone of exaggerating . . . Will listened as men leaned in toward each other to recount lewd and improbable stories about respectable women. “On us, eh?” Poll ruffled his hair as she refilled the jug for the goodness knows how manyeth time.

  The current was strong, Will let himself be carried by it.

  The cider bore his mind to a silent place far from all the commotion. When he was restored to his senses, it was to discover himself bellowing the words of a vulgar song. Hoarse his voice was, a rusty croak.

  Someone leaned over his shoulder to place a whiskey in front of him. “See if that mends your voice.”

  He felt slow. He lagged a few seconds behind everyone else. He organized some words and spoke them to the blacksmith’s son he’d known once. “Luke! Thank you. Not having one yourself?”

  Luke pulled a face. “Poll’s only serving me for ready money now.” His hair was dulled with grease, his skin yellow and stringy. “Can’t blame her.” He shrugged. “All right, are you? Saw you keel over up the churchyard this morning.”

  “Oh. You were there, were you?”

  “Dug the grave. I’ve covered her up, nice and cozy.” A grimace, black sticks of teeth in his gums. “Well, you know. Best I could.”

  What to say? “Thank you. Kind of you.”

  “She was all right, your mother.” His good eye drifted, either to a place where Will’s mother was still opening her pantry for a hungry boy or to nowhere. “Well, I’ll be off. Nothing worse than watching men drink when you’ve got a thirst on, eh?”

  “Let me get you something.” Will stumbled up, swaying.

  “No need.” He opened his jacket and Will saw a bottle. Something noxious and cheap.

  “It’ll kill you, you know.”

  A farewell salute, another flash of the black stubs. “And if not that then something else!”

  Poll refilled the cider. Laughter. An arm thrown across his shoulder. Singing. Poll patted him and refilled the cider. Someone vaguely familiar said, “Ee’s all right now, an’t yer, me old mate?” Singing. Poll refilled the cider and stroked his shoulder. Singing. Someone put a hand on his two shoulders and gave him a slight shake, to see if he fell to pieces. He didn’t. Laughter. Singing. Poll refilled the cider . . .

  · · ·

  All was silent. Will opened his eyes. No one. He was lying on the settle under the window of the Red Lion; the gray blanket draped over him had slipped to the floor, and he was chilly. Outside the sky was growing pale. He put his feet to the floor and stood up with a groan.

  A door opened. Poll’s head appeared, strands of crinkled hair sticking out from her nightcap. “All right?”

  He nodded.

  “You off?”

  Another nod.

  “I’ll have that blanket back, then.”

  He crossed the room to give the blanket to her, kissed her. In her little bed she pulled her nightdress up. The next moment he was inside her and with a few thrusts it was done.

  “There,” she said. “Take a bit of bread to eat on the way. There’s some on the shelf over the big barrel, out the back.”

  Will followed the hedgerow home. He broke off a piece of bread, mashed it in his mouth, swallowed. Hungry, he ate another piece, and another, then vomited wetly into a ditch. Good, he thought. He expected something vile to emerge in the cascade of fermented apple, something rank and bloody, a clot of something decomposing, darkly foul and liverish. But there was only this golden stream of pippin juice, and a gob of sweet froth to spit out.

  Then he felt something else in his gut. Hard and painful. This will be it. He opened his mouth again, but it was only a sharp-cornered belch—CRAA!—that emerged.

  A rook in the branches of the elm looked down askance.

  · · ·

  After an hour’s sleep William went to the mill. He sweated the rest of the alcohol out with heavy work. Against the clamor and the shouting, there was no room for thought. The next day he sat for thirteen hours in the office, motionless except for his fingers tapping ceaselessly at the abacus, and caught up a backlog of number work for the ledgers.

  The mill had its own energy, its own rhythm, and a man could give himself up to it. As the wool was drawn by the shuttle, so he was drawn by the demand of the work itself. Like a piece of the machinery, a wheel turned by the force of the river, he did what was necessary. He never tired, he rarely faltered, he moved from one task to the next without a break. Sleep was easy: he never remembered putting his head on the pillow, and the moment the sun was up he was up and on his
feet.

  Between the mill and his bed he made sure there were as few hours as possible. Sometimes he played cards. He won a bit; he lost a bit. Sometimes he went to the Red Lion. Once or twice he stayed on when everyone else had gone home. “Don’t go thinking you can make a habit of this,” Poll warned him. On Sundays he sang in the choir—his voice clear and effortless—and in the afternoon he went fishing a few times with Paul.

  “Are the Misses Young still cooking and cleaning for you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Hmm.”

  He knew what Paul meant. The Misses Young had hopes. Hopes had a habit of growing into expectations.

  “I’ll get a woman to come and clean for me. Someone to leave me a dinner ready.”

  “Good idea,” Paul said.

  · · ·

  In early advent, William broke a teapot. He wasn’t even using it, had barely touched it in fact, yet it toppled and fell plumb to the flagstones, as if some vengeful spirit was trapped inside and knew only this way out. He swept up the pieces and buried them, then a gulf opened beneath his heart, and a fearful vertigo took hold of him.

  It wasn’t the first time. This one you could understand: his mother’s teapot, a burial, reminders of a loss he preferred not to think about. But the feeling—a sinking diaphragm, nausea stirring, darkness gaining on him—came upon him at other times. He couldn’t predict these crises. It might be an unexpected interruption that set it off or the gap between one task to the next; it might be waking too early and being alone in the dark.

  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.

  &

  The 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.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The 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.