Bell Weather

by Dennis Mahoney

  Catherine Bell had stopped crying. Finally it was done. She was white, as if her color might be draining with the afterbirth. Lord Bell adjusted her position on the bed—gently, very gently—when her head began to tip.

  He shouted at the hall, where the household servants huddled out of sight.

  “Bring the doctor!”

  “On his way, m’lord,” the butler said without coming in, mumbling something vague about a carriage in the storm.

  Rain beat the roof. Bell knelt beside the bed.

  “Cat,” he said gently, leaning in close.

  She seemed not to recognize his face in her fatigue. He held her hand upon her bosom—there was scarcely any breath—and used his other hand to smooth the ragged hair off her forehead. He still clutched the penknife he’d used to cut the cord, and the blade lay cold just above her eye. He kissed her lips and tasted her and knew that she was dying, and he cried for the first time in years, very plainly, dripping tears on her cheeks where they blended with her sweat.

  “Catherine,” Bell said, incapable of more, just the clarity and cleanliness of “Catherine, oh, Catherine.”

  Quieter and quieter, he whispered it and stared, fearing that she truly might vanish if he blinked.

  “She isn’t breathing,” Frances said, muffled by the rain.

  “Catherine,” Bell said.

  “M’lord, she isn’t breathing.”

  “She is!” he yelled. “She is!”

  He could feel it on his face, every tiny exhalation that was passing from her lips.

  “Please!” Frances said, much closer, right beside him.

  Bell squeezed the knife until the handle seemed to bend. He turned to her and shouted for the doctor once again; Frances didn’t move but held the infant up to show him.

  “Please, she isn’t breathing, oh I’ve tried—she’s going cold!”

  Bell registered the deep, leaden blueness of its skin. He threw the knife against the wall and took the child by the ankles.

  “Softly!” Frances moaned, as if she hadn’t begged for help.

  He dangled it aloft and slapped the baby on the bottom, half a dozen times until his palm began to sting.

  “It isn’t helping,” Frances said. “Please, it isn’t help—”

  Bell slapped her, hard across the jaw. Frances backed away and finally held her tongue. He turned his hand upon the babe again, slapping at its back, at its thighs, at its chest, at its weakness and its breathlessness. He stopped and let it hang, wearied by his failure.

  With a gurgle and a cough, the girl began to cry.

  She cried as he had never heard a baby cry before, so fiery and red he almost dropped her in alarm.

  “You’ve done it!” Frances said, laughing through her tears. She took the baby back again, admiring the sound. “Bless her, little thing, listen to her now! Breathe, let it out. There you are, m’love, go on!”

  Bell returned to the bed and saw the umbilical blood smudged above his wife’s left eye. He licked his thumb to clean it off, tasting it and wondering whether it was Catherine’s or the child’s, unsure if there was really any difference. Now her eyes were on his face, midday blue. He touched her hair along her collarbone and held her feeble hand. Rain pounded overhead, bearing down as if to crush them, and the sconces on the walls weakened in the gloom. On and on the infant cried, fabulously loud, neither slowing nor diminishing but growing every moment. He didn’t dare turn and take his eyes off his wife—her watery expression and the flicker of her consciousness dissolving as if the rain were rinsing her away.

  Yet the wails were all he heard, all he felt, all he knew. He looked and there was Frances with the child in her arms, crying out and reddening and breathing as she cried.

  “Quiet!” Bell said. “Soothe her! Make her stop!”

  He clawed his head until his wig fell sullied to the floor, and then he turned to see his wife had closed her weary eyes. Her body had the same bleached pallor as her gown, and both the blood and Catherine’s hair looked darker through his tears. Bell slumped until his forehead pressed against her own.

  For an instant all the world vanished in her stillness. A silence fell around them and he might have spent the night there, stupefied and calm, just the two of them alone. But the baby called him back, and with the cries he heard the rain again, and Frances crying, too, and all the servants’ hissing whispers in the darkness of the hall.

  He studied Catherine’s face as if it might have been a portrait, worth his admiration but inanimate and flat. Not the woman he had married. Not a woman he could hold. He wiped his palms and tucked his handkerchief neatly in his pocket. His knife was on the floor, he suddenly recalled. He picked it up, snapped it shut, and walked toward Frances.

  “Did Catherine choose a name?” he asked above the cries.

  Frances stared across the room with a dawning look of fear, only starting to acknowledge that her mistress wasn’t moving.

  Bell repeated the question.

  “Molly,” Frances said, holding up his daughter.

  “Quiet her,” he said. “I need to speak with Nicholas.”

  He exited the room. Servants met him in the hall. Their expressions were composed, almost chiseled on their heads, and none of them was fool enough to offer a condolence. Bell strode past them to the stairs and started down. The doctor had arrived and was coming up to meet him, puny in a greatcoat and trembling from the wet. He craned to look at Bell, neck flaccid as a turkey’s as he paused upon the landing with an educated smile.

  “Please excuse my delay, Lord Bell!” the doctor said. “I had thought to come sooner … fought to come at all! I was far across the city, halfway to Woodchapel Gate, when I received your summons, and the rain overwhelmed me. The carriages were slow, my horse was nearly drowned,” he said, wringing out his wig upon the clean white floor. “But judging by the sound, my worries were unfounded. Healthy lungs. A sonorous child! Best congratulations. Does the child have a name?”

  “Molly,” Bell said.

  “Ah, a daughter! And the lady—”

  “Dead,” Bell said. “God damn your drowning horse.”

  He left the doctor thunderstruck, fumbling with his bag, and continued downstairs to the darkened study of the mansion’s first floor, where he poured himself a tumblerful of rum and gulped it down. Catherine’s shawl was on the lounge, near a book that she’d been reading. Bell dropped the tumbler. It didn’t break but bounced along the rug, and when he bent to pick it up he stumbled to the floor, fighting nausea and a wild swirl of dizziness and heat.

  He heard a servant in the hallway outside the door and struggled to a chair. They shouldn’t see him on his knees; they were terrified already. They would look to him as Frances had, desperate for instruction. They had loved Catherine. She had coddled them and oh, how he’d chastised her and criticized her kindness. Catherine’s ordinary kindness!

  He placed the tumbler on the highboy and straightened out his waistcoat. Even downstairs with a hundred feet between them, he could hear the baby’s cries as if the child were inside him. He imagined they could hear it from the stables, from the street. His son would hear it, too, and wonder what had happened. He would need an explanation. He would need to be consoled. That was his responsibility, Bell quietly remembered, having foolishly considered that his wife would offer solace.

  Nicholas was drawing at a table in the library. He sat alone, a boy of six with black hair, black eyes, and skin the color of his dead mother’s body. Frail from birth and perpetually ill, he had worried Catherine and disappointed Lord Bell until his fortitude, his will, and most of all his intellect had overshadowed any of his physical deficiencies. Nicholas had walked late but talked early. He struggled to eat but voraciously read, and wrote, and worked at mathematics far beyond his peers. He played with difficult books the way ordinary boys played war, showed a keen fascination with anatomy and guns, and practiced harpsichord simply but precisely as a clock.

  Affectionate with Catherine and conv
ivial with servants, Nicholas was stoic and at times even icy with his father, who often sensed rebellion in the boy’s unwavering expression.

  The library was bright with a pair of brass lamps and heavy with the smell of ink and moldy books. Catherine’s shadowplants, carefully selected for a room without windows, had grown beyond their pots and sent their creepers, vines, and leaves crawling up the shelves. Even here the baby’s cries were easily discerned, penetrating cherry and mahogany and oak, shearing through the million-page buffer of the cases.

  Bell stood before his son, bloody and composed.

  Nicholas sat and watched him with his quill above a sketch. Kidneys, it appeared, and their connecting apparatus.

  “You have a sister,” Bell intoned. “Her name is Molly.”

  “Mother—”

  “Your mother is dead.”

  Bell could not recall the last time he had seen his son cry. Had he ever? Nicholas stared without a glimmer of surprise. He supposed the boy had sensed it—he had always been remarkably perceptive—or deduced it from the blood upon Bell’s own clothes. Shock or fear might have tamped down obvious emotion, yet his young son’s eyes had the clarity of scholarship, of someone who was carefully observing and recording.

  “Come,” Bell said, pulling Nicholas toward him in a violent embrace.

  The boy did not resist but pricked his father with the quill, quickly on the shoulder, accidentally it seemed. Bell pushed him off and grimaced at the stain. “Sit,” Bell said, loosening his collar. He was woozy from the strain again, and Nicholas had blurred. He wiped his eyes and said, “Your mother died of blood loss. It happens now and then, a complication of the birth. You mustn’t think it all a frightful mystery. She bled and didn’t stop and there is nothing further to explain.”

  “Her uterus tore,” Nicholas said, so quietly that Bell leaned forward, trying to reconstruct the word—surely not “uterus”!—by picturing the movement of the boy’s thin lips.

  The sketch upon the table wasn’t kidneys after all. They were ovaries, clinically precise and deftly drawn. Bell read the words “cervix” and “vagina,” copied from the volume Nicholas had opened.

  “You oughtn’t … You’re a child. I forbid—”

  “I’m sorry,” Nicholas said.

  “Damn the doctor and his horse!” Bell shouted at the ceiling, pounding on the table and at last, with the outburst, startling his son. “Catherine, o my Catherine. What am I to do?” he said, feeling like the room was moving in a spiral. He clenched his eyes and calmed himself. “You mustn’t be afraid. We have suffered a terrible loss, a terrible loss. But people are depending on us now. Frances and the others. They will look to us—yes, even to you. Only six and yet a Bell. You must be brave and show them strength. You were crying for a moment. Were you crying? It is natural, of course, as natural as bleeding. But what are we to do with injuries that bleed? Stem the flow. Clamp the wound. So we will. So we must! But no: your eyes are dry. Look at me,” he said, holding Nicholas’s chin. “Have you heard me? Have you listened? Have you not a single tear for your own lost mother? She is looking at you now, looking down. Aye, she knows! The rain could be her tears, falling out of grief because she knows you do not care, not a whit, that she has died!”

  Nicholas’s brows tightened in perplexity, not about the rain—that was obvious to Bell—but from his father having posited a notion so absurd.

  “Get up!” Bell said.

  He crumpled the drawings and seized the boy firmly by the arm. The baby’s wails steadily worsened as he dragged Nicholas out of the library, down the hall, and up the three flights of the rear staircase, and it was there, at the heavy dark door of Nicholas’s room, that the boy began to sob.

  “No,” Bell said. “You are crying for yourself,” and locked him in alone to think about his mother.

  Bell retreated downstairs to the study once more. He downed another rum, hugged himself tight, and trembled in a deep velvet chair, unable to think because of the baby’s noise, and Nicholas’s silence, and the rain that fell and fell and did, after all, seem a judgment that was falling from above. Once the drink had taken hold and he was confident he wouldn’t vomit, Bell returned upstairs, groaning as he climbed, to govern as he must before the home came to ruin.

  Most of the servants hadn’t left the third-floor hall. He directed them in turn and off they hurried, comforted as children with clear-cut tasks, to resecure the house against the storm, carry his wife’s body to an adjoining room, prepare a late meal, burn the mattress and the linens, and go about their business as they would have done on any other evening. He spoke with the doctor, who had spent the last twenty minutes confirming Catherine’s death but hadn’t done a thing to ease the baby’s cries, which had grown, like Nicholas’s cool black stare, to seem a challenge—an affront—to Lord Bell’s authority.

  Frances sat apart and rocked the child gently, whispering and making little noises to console her. The girl was black of hair, wrinkled and misshapen, and the earlier blue of her skin had turned incendiary red.

  “Has she suffered—”

  “She is perfect head to foot,” Frances said, speaking with a tone as soothing as her coos.

  “A wet nurse—”

  “Newton,” Frances said, referring to the footman, “is bringing back two in case the first doesn’t satisfy.”

  “Good. Very good,” Bell said. “The child’s cries—”

  “Aren’t they wonderful,” she said. “And see the way her mouth is like m’lady’s—”

  “Why is she crying?”

  Frances gawked at him, amazed. “Her mother gone and strangers all about,” she began. “The strangling and the slaps … she is only now alive!”

  “Give her to me,” Bell said.

  Frances leaned away and held the baby closer. Bell forced his hands under the bundle and she was forced to let go, much to her distress. He held the baby awkwardly and Frances stood to follow, but he ordered her to stay and meet the nurses when they came. She looked as if he’d kidnapped her own precious daughter.

  He carried the baby through the house, away from everyone until they seemed the only two people in the home, her cries and his rigidity the only two forces in the world. He came to Nicholas’s room, balanced the baby in the crook of his elbow, and opened the door without knocking.

  The boy stood in the dark, silhouetted at the window, and didn’t move until his father beckoned him to come.

  “Hold out your arms,” Bell said.

  He placed the girl firmly into Nicholas’s hands. Right away the boy’s hold seemed entirely assured and Bell stepped back, confident his daughter wouldn’t fall but anxious—he could not have said why—to see them there together, son and daughter, as a pair.

  “Your sister,” he declared.

  “Molly,” Nicholas said, and suddenly the baby fell silent and relaxed, her color flowing out and into her brother’s cheeks, until they both looked healthy—she less inflamed, he less anemic—and Lord Bell observed them from the door, disregarded, thinking of his wife and powerfully alone.

  Chapter Five

  “Molly,” Frances said, pausing in the garden with her tusk-handled pruning knife. “If you cannot leave that spider alone, I will serve it up for supper.”

  For six years, Frances had attempted all manner of correction with Molly, who thought of her governess’s reprimands, exasperations, and emotional entreaties not only as variations on a game, but as constant reassurances of Frances’s devotion. They were together in the courtyard behind the house, a thickly gardened refuge with high stone walls that almost made the bustle of the world disappear.

  Umber was a compact, overpeopled city. Most of its central buildings were constructed of ghostly pale lunarite, a native stone of Bruntland, which gave the capital both the beauty and echoing hardness of an open-air cathedral. From the garden, Molly could see the neighboring mansions of Worthington Square and the tower of Elmcross Church, the latter’s white belfry glaring in the sun, but wit
h the burstwoods and roses clustering around her, it was easy to imagine they were deep within the countryside.

  Molly put the ripe purple spider in her mouth.

  Frances shrieked and rushed forward, only to snag her skirts upon the rosebush thorns. The spider struggled in Molly’s mouth, dancing on her tongue and almost scrambling down her throat. She puffed her cheeks to give it room, surprised a thing so colorful had no distinguishing flavor. But neither did a grape, Molly thought, until you chewed it …

  “Spit it out, spit it out!” Frances said, tearing free of the bush and opening Molly’s mouth. Out the spider came, tumbling off her lip and landing in the moss—a vibrant combination to behold: violet-green. The lingering tickle on her tongue left her giggling uncontrollably.

  “Oh, you wicked thing.” Frances glowered but her eyes grew teary with affection. “Don’t you know how poisonous they are? It might have bit you!”

  “Those are safe,” Molly said, relishing the pinkness of her governess’s cheeks. “That’s a sugarplum weaver. Nicholas told me. It would take a hundred of them biting all at once to make me sick.”

  “You mustn’t do such things,” Frances said, unconvinced. She saw the spider at her toe and leapt away. Molly laughed. The governess continued: “Is it any wonder that your cousins and the children in the park prefer each other’s company?”

  “Some of the children like me,” Molly said. “I make them laugh.”

  “Their parents don’t laugh, nor their governesses neither. You would have more friends if you would play with better manners.”

  Molly sulked and watched the spider crawl across the moss until it hid beneath a rock and left her feeling lonely. It was true: other children didn’t actively avoid her, but they didn’t seek her out as often as she hoped, and she received dirty glances from their guardians and mothers when she dug in public flower beds, and yelled, and swallowed bugs. Molly’s father rarely socialized—“He gave it up after your mother died,” Frances had once told her—and her truest young companion was her own friendless brother. Nicholas was generally too ill, or too bored by children his age, to set aside his studies for more than a hasty walk in the park. Their governess was all Molly had, most days.