Bellman

by Diane Setterfield

  “Do you want a penny too? I don’t know how long I can afford to keep running the mill at this rate.” He feigned reaching into his pocket for a coin.

  “A kiss will do for me.” She laughed, showing the gap in her teeth.

  “You can have a thousand. And cheap at the price!”

  He leaned over her rounded belly and kissed her.

  Then he kissed her again.

  ***

  “I don’t know how I would manage without you,” he murmured, late that night, his fingers patiently untangling a knot in her hair on the pillow.

  “Mm,” she agreed sleepily. “Did you wash your hands? I can still smell vinegar.”

  They fell asleep but not for long.

  Rose woke with a sharp cry in the night, and some hours after that the new baby arrived. A little girl, Lucy.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  It was a good painting. Perhaps it was better than good. The subject was well executed. The bird looked out at the viewer with a dark eye glinting with intelligence and character, and behind it was a landscape that was sure to be Italian, though to Charles’s mind it recalled the Windrush. Should he buy it?

  He was off his usual track. He had come to Turin because the house he called home was unendurable to him. The young painter who had shared it with him for the last year and a half had gone. “I have to get married,” he had explained. “I have my parents to think of. My life is not like yours.” Charles had wept. What had he expected? It wasn’t the first time. It wouldn’t be the last. Everyone got married in the end. But this pain was worse than the last. He had entertained unrealistic hopes. He couldn’t bear the loss of them.

  So he had come traveling, and here he was in Turin, in a gallery, looking at a painting that reminded him of another home he couldn’t bear to be in.

  The painting reminded him of a day in his childhood. There had been a rook then. A catapult. His eyes glazed momentarily with tears as he thought of William, his easy happiness, his facility, the way his life fell into place as naturally and as simply as could be. He thought of Dora, his cousin’s little girl. Of blackness and color.

  He would buy the rook painting for Dora.

  He pinched his tears away and turned to the owner of the gallery. Would he deliver the painting to him at his hotel? Later today? Grazie.

  ***

  A few hours later the receptionist at the hotel took delivery of the painting and beckoned a boy to take it up to the English signor. When his knock went unanswered, the boy assumed Signor Bellman was out and unlocked the door. In this way Charles’s body was found.

  Word came from Italy. A strange letter in a strange language. William had to fetch a man from Oxford to tell them what it said.

  “But we had no word he was ill . . . “ Rose protested. “Was it an accident? What did he die of?”

  The translator coughed gently. “The letter does not state the cause.”

  William showed the Italian out.

  “Did my cousin die by his own hand?” he asked at the door in a low voice.

  The stranger moistened his lips. “The letter leaves room for the reader to draw such a conclusion.”

  Charles had written a few times since his brief visit after his father’s death. Rose took the letters from her desk, and read parts of them aloud. Charles had had some verses published in a magazine, though it wasn’t a very significant magazine. He had visited a particularly lovely part of Italy, and he described the mountains in some detail. He had bought a small French table on a trip to Paris. The workmanship was second to none, but it didn’t fit in the space he had envisaged for it.

  William did not like the pages in his wife’s hand. Black ink on white. A dead man speaking through his wife’s lips. He could not find the words to tell her so.

  She put the letter down with a sharp little cry. “Oh, William! To think! He was no older than you!”

  He was three weeks older than me, William thought.

  William left Rose to her reading and went to his abacus.

  ***

  A fortnight later a second letter arrived. This time the words were in English. They were strung together in a strange order: legalistic sentences with baroque flourishes you had to read twice. The gist was clear enough.

  For a man of wealth, Charles had not lived particularly extravagantly. He had liked wine and cigars moderately; he had liked paintings and furniture a great deal, but the house he had leased was a small one and he had furnished and decorated it accordingly. Otherwise his expenditure had been modest.

  Charles’s furniture had been left to a named individual who was described as a “painting friend.” It was a generous bequest, though not scandalously so.

  The money, the mill, and the Mill House went to William.

  Dora was to have the paintings.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  There was a part of William’s mind that counted. It counted, whether he wanted it to or not. He could not stop it. He was three weeks younger than Charles. Twenty-one days exactly. They had news of Charles’s death six days after it occurred. That left fifteen days. William tried to keep busy, he tried to use work to distract himself from the eternal abacus in his mind, but to no avail.

  He counted down the days and the day arrived. I am the age my cousin was on the day of his death. It being Sunday, there was no immersion in noise and activity at the mill to soothe him. In his chest something hopped and cavorted irregularly, adding to his anxiety.

  ***

  “Rose!”

  The children stopped the ball game. Paul turned to Dora. She would know whether they were right to be alarmed: she was ten.

  It came again, this time in a great roar. “ROSE!”

  Dora dropped the ball. “Look after Lucy,” she told the boys.

  Paul and Phil took up sentry positions, next to their sleeping baby sister, and Dora ran over the lawn to the house.

  Dora found her father by following the sound: he was whimpering as if in pain and gasping helplessly. He was on the floor of the study. His face white as a candle, he twitched and trembled all over.

  “Mother isn’t back yet,” she said tentatively. “And Mrs. Lane is out.”

  “The chimney!” His voice was shaky.

  She looked at the chimney. The remains of last night’s fire was dead in the grate.

  “Listen!”

  Dora listened. Her hearing was acute. She heard the ticking of the clock in the hallway. The far-off rush of the river. The creak of the floorboard as she leaned forward. The movement and resettling of her hair around her ears as she turned her head. The rapid in and out of her father’s breath.

  “There’s nothing,” she said, and in the same moment he burst out: “There!”

  And actually she had heard something. In the instant she had spoken, all but drowned out by her own voice, something soft and indistinct, as close to silence as it is possible for a sound to be.

  She approached the chimneypiece and rested her ear to it, intent.

  Her father was gasping in panic; she put a finger to her lips to quiet him, and he watched her, wide eyed and trembling.

  It came again. A muffled sound of movement accompanied, this time, by a hushed fall of powdery soot that sent a jolt through her father’s body.

  “There is a bird trapped in the chimney.”

  He stared at her.

  “That is all it is.”

  He could barely stand, but she made him get up, led him to the drawing room, and settled him in the big armchair with his feet up. She fetched a blanket and tucked it gently round him. She put a hand on his forehead and smoothed his hair back.

  “There,” she said. “All right now.”

  Back in the study she shut herself in and stood on a chair to open the sash windows as wide as they would go. While she waited she entertain
ed herself with the abacus and added “Give Dora a penny’ to the list of jobs in her father’s notebook.

  With a gritty rush of soot something black burst into the air. A panic of wings, flapping collision—thud!—against ceiling, window, wall. Then a wing-stir of air brushed her cheek and, miraculously, the stunned bird found the open window and was gone.

  Fine gray plumes of coal dust still drifted gently in the room. The tang of soot was at the back of Dora’s throat and on her tongue.

  And look! How sad! How beautiful! The bird had left pictures behind: blurred impressions of plumage, imprinted on the wall and the ceiling. There was one, ghost gray, on the window.

  She climbed back onto the chair to close the sash. Face close to the glass, she studied the soot burst. Here were delicate and precise reproductions of feather parts: a central shaft and serried barbs. Here was the calligraphic mark of a feather tip.

  ***

  Father mustn’t see it.

  Dora rubbed the bird away with her sleeve. It left a black mark at her wrist.

  Poor creature.

  Not hoping to see anything, Dora looked for a moment at the sky. There was nothing there.

  She watched a moment longer.

  ***

  A few weeks later Dora sat with her mother, looking at pictures. They had Mary, Mrs. Lane’s daughter and Dora’s friend, with them. She was helping carry the pictures to the different rooms in the house where they had decided to put them. Some paintings the girls found pretty, others were rather dull. Together they pulled another out of the crate and unwrapped its sackcloth cover.

  “Oh!” Dora exclaimed. She was looking at a rook, gleaming black.

  “You like that one, do you?” Rose was puzzled by her daughter’s taste.

  “He’s looking at me!” Dora laughed. “Can’t you see? I think he’s laughing.”

  She held the painting so that her mother could see it clearly. Rose tipped her head on one side, unconsciously imitating the bird, and smiled. “I don’t know how you can see he is laughing. Not with that beak! Where will we put this one, then?”

  Dora’s face changed. “Father doesn’t like birds.”

  “Doesn’t he?”

  And Dora took the sacking and wrapped it round the painting and tied it with a length of cord. “I will hide it under my bed. Until I am grown and married and have a house of my own.”

  Rose, who thought the painting rather strange, did not disagree.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  The mill was doing well. The breakfasts had proven their worth. Productivity was up. The cheaper coal from the new railway meant drying was less dependent on the weather: Bellman’s new drying houses heated by coal-powered steam pipes made the cloth softer too, and therefore he could command a higher price. And with the reservoir he was planning on the field he’d bought from Turner, productivity would be less susceptible to changes in water level. When rainfall was low, they need only release some of the pent-up water into the race to maximize the waterpower for those parts of the process that used it. On every level he was reducing the impact of these unpredictable alterations in power, which allowed him to forecast output and guarantee delivery dates in a way that reassured customers and increased orders . . . Yes, it was all going just the way he liked it.

  New customers were coming to him all the time. He was able to replace some of the machinery that was growing old and outdated, bring in new and improved feeds to the carding machines. He had made a few astute loans to other mill owners. When they ran into trouble—as he thought they would—he would be the first to know about it. He had his eye on expansion beyond Bellman’s mill itself.

  ***

  There came news one day of an accident at Rose’s parents’ farm. A horse carrying her brother’s child had reared up. The child had fallen and suffered nothing but bruises, but Rose’s mother, dashing to help, was struck by the animal’s hoof. She now lay senseless in her bed.

  Could Rose go and nurse her mother?

  Mrs. Lane agreed to take care of the children and Rose went.

  After six days she sent a message to William. Her mother was dead.

  He rode in the morning to the farm and took his place with his father-in-law and brothers-in-law for the funeral while Rose and her sisters wept at home.

  It had been arranged that William and Rose would return to Whittingford together the following day; tonight they would sleep at the farm. Rose had nursed her mother for six days and nights and grieved for two. She could not cry, for her tears were all used up. Aching with sorrow and exhaustion the only comfort left to her was sleep—and the presence of the husband she loved. She blew the candle out and turned toward him. He lay by her side, still and tense as a stranger.

  “There was a man at the funeral,” William said, in the darkness, “and I don’t know who he was.”

  Rose understood that he was expecting a response. “Was he one of those that came back here afterward?”

  “No.”

  Why was he asking her, then? What was the point of asking a woman about a person she hadn’t seen? The men were at the funeral. Why not ask them? She didn’t say all this. “My brother will know, I expect,” she told him.

  There was an edge of sharpness in her voice. She forgave herself for it instantly, and because her feelings were generous, she forgave William for his inconsiderate question at the same time.

  She reached an arm for him, wanting comfort, and asked, “What was it like when you lost your mother?” If she could make him remember his own grief, perhaps then he would know to comfort her . . .

  “He was there too. At that funeral.”

  In his voice was a note she knew: it was taut, unrelenting. Her heart shrank. She could expect nothing from him tonight.

  “He was in black.”

  She frowned in the dark. “Of course he was in black, William. Like two dozen other people.”

  Rose drew back her arm. He hadn’t noticed her hand upon his chest, had not placed his own over it, nor turned to take her in his arms.

  If she could not have his hand stroking her hair, then she would sleep. She must have at least that.

  She turned her back and settled her head on the pillow.

  “He was at Paul’s funeral too.”

  She said nothing. Sleep was not far away.

  “It should be possible to work it out. Who is there who knew your mother and my mother and Uncle Paul? There can’t be so many people who knew them all.”

  Her eyelids grew heavier. The muscles in her neck and shoulders softened. Her jaw relaxed . . .

  William began to fidget. The sheets were too high or too low. He was too hot and had to open a window. Now there was a draft.

  Rose sighed. “What did he look like, this man?”

  She listened vaguely to William as he tried to give a description of the man whose countenance was so distinctive yet so unwilling to be defined by mere words.

  It seemed to Rose that he really didn’t know what the man looked like. “Was he taller than you or shorter?” she prompted him wearily. “Was he bearded? Was he fair or dark?”

  The information was scant. He was about William’s height. Whether he was clean-shaven or bearded—William knew he ought to be able to remember, but for some reason he couldn’t. But he was dark. No doubt about it.

  Sleep is possible, she thought. If he would only be quiet and let me sleep!

  She knew William well enough to understand that where there was a problem, he wouldn’t rest till he had a solution. But his description was so vague. It could almost be anyone. And her mother was dead and all she wanted was to sleep.

  “I suppose it might be my Uncle Jack.”

  “What does he look like? Describe him to me.”

  “About your height. Dark hair. He used to be bearded in the old days. I can’t say for sure no
w.”

  “How would your Uncle Jack know my Uncle Paul?”

  “I believe he lived in Whittingford as a young man.”

  “Ah! So he’d have known my mother?”

  “More than likely.”

  He sounded better now. Her husband tossed in the bed once more, a definitive, once-and-for-all shifting. At last! Now, she thought, he will sleep.

  And he did.

  Rose waited for the night to bring her the same comfort. It didn’t. Her mother was dead, and she was in a strange bed with a strange man who was her husband. She was now too exhausted to sleep—and too heartbroken to weep.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Opening her mail one morning at breakfast, Rose frowned.

  “Trouble?”

  “My uncle has died.”

  William’s spoon paused over his porridge. “Which one?”

  “Uncle Jack.”

  William did not examine the surge of satisfaction that flared in him. “When is the funeral?”

  “Thursday. But don’t feel you must go You are so busy with this reservoir. I haven’t seen my uncle since I was a child; no one will think anything of it.”

  William swallowed his porridge. “I can take half a day and go over.”

  Enjoying the superiority of the living, William found himself rather looking forward to the funeral. His dislike of the man he had never spoken to faded now that he was dead, and he rode out to Upper Wychwood Church with a lightness of spirit that he didn’t associate with funerals.

  At the church gates someone seemed to be waiting for him. It was the man in black. William felt a prickle of astonishment. The fellow’s eyes glanced over in William’s direction, and in them was an expression of amusement that William thought quite unsuitable for the occasion. He seemed simply entertained by William’s bewilderment, quite as though he knew of William’s mistake and had been waiting to be merry with him about it.

  William was horrified when the fellow made toward him, as if to greet him. At the very moment he was expecting the man to open his mouth and speak—Just the man I’ve been waiting for! the words were written all over his face—some other funeral-goers arrived at the church. The man in black had to hop back out of the way to let them pass, and as they went he got swept up with them somehow, but not before turning his head and making a jaunty gesture in William’s direction. Another time! It seemed to indicate. No hurry!