Bellman

by Diane Setterfield

  They dashed to the reception room and lifted the lid of the grand piano. Mrs. Lane sat down with an air of sad futility, her daughter beside her full of relish. They raised four hands, watched the clock, and on the stroke of eleven, brought ten fingers heavily down on the keys.

  “There!” Mary exclaimed, satisfied. “If she can’t hear that, she can’t hear nothing!”

  Upstairs, watch in hand, Bellman stood over Dora, scrutinizing her face as the vibrations from the piano strings reverberated unmusically through the house.

  He made a one word note in his book. Unresponsive.

  ***

  “Patience,” Sanderson counseled when Bellman showed him the pages of his notebook, with the results of the daily tests. Dora’s breathing was shallow and slow and constant. Her pulse was faint and slow and constant. She saw nothing, heard nothing, spent most of her time in what appeared to be deep sleep, and when her eyes opened, she saw no more than a newborn kitten would. Her hair was not growing back, and every day Mrs. Lane or Mary brushed more fallen eyelashes from her white cheek. Suspended in a place of limbo, Dora had not died, nor did she live.

  “She has been to the brink,” Sanderson said. “Her condition is stable, we must be grateful for that.”

  Bellman had had his miracle; it was unrealistic to expect another. The fever had ravaged the town and Bellman’s family, it had come within a heartbeat of taking Dora, and moments from taking her life, it had receded. In the aftermath of the devastation Bellman did not ask himself why he had been granted this reprieve. He simply contemplated it, stunned.

  ***

  Bellman spent all his time at the bedside of his daughter and did not go to the mill. After seven days a small boy knocked at the door with a message. All was well, but should the chief bookkeeper call to report to Mr. Bellman?

  That evening Ned was shown into the study by Mary. Crace was with him. The room struck cold; the fire lit by Mary had not yet cast off the chill of a month’s emptiness. Crace had never been inside Mill House, Ned only rarely. They stood in silence, looking at floorboards and corners of cornices and other such insignificances, their curiosity and compassion at the ready. They were waiting so hard that when the door cracked and Bellman appeared, they jumped. Perhaps they had reason to, for he was changed, though the alteration was not external. Their eyes puzzled over him, as the gaze returns to a spot where something used to be that is now absent.

  They expressed their condolences in the usual terms. Ned knew their faces would say the rest: that sorry was only the smallest part of what they felt, that all in the town knew suffering, but few had suffered as extensively as Bellman had suffered. What had happened at Mill House was beyond measure . . . But Bellman seemed not to see him, hardly to hear him either. Ned glanced at Crace who was similarly perplexed.

  “Sit down,” Bellman said, gesturing vaguely, and they did. He turned the desk chair into the room as if he meant to sit in it, but didn’t. Had he forgotten to sit down? Were they to wait, or to start?

  After a silence, Ned cleared his throat. “Perhaps you would like us to report on the last month?”

  Bellman raised a hand to his unshaven chin and rubbed his stubble. They took it as an invitation and began. The dramatic events in the town had had their impact on mill employees. Despite the turbulent events, over half the orders had been filled as planned. As for the rest, good relations with merchants had made it possible in almost every case to negotiate new delivery dates. There had been few cancellations. All in all things were better than one might expect.

  Bellman now lowered himself wearily into his chair, but there was no sign that he was listening.

  Ned turned a raised eyebrow to Crace, and Crace picked up the narrative. “As to technical and processing matters . . . “ He described succinctly the few difficulties that had arisen, explained the action he had taken and why he had acted as he did.

  Bellman stared at his hands, clasped in his lap.

  “We’ve kept a written log that you can look over when . . . “

  Ned offered the sheaf of notes, and when Bellman made no move to take it, he rose and placed it on the desk. Anxious to conclude the awkward meeting, Crace rose with him.

  “And Dora?” Ned asked. One more attempt to reach the man he considered his friend as much as his employer. “Her health improves, I hope?”

  Then Bellman’s eyes met his. The question had stirred something dark in them, but he made no answer.

  Crace proposed that he and Ned would call twice a week to report on events. Absently Bellman nodded, and the men took their leave.

  On their way back to the mill the two men thought of the tragedy behind them and their own griefs. They passed the Red Lion where Crace had celebrated his marriage five months before, and the church where he had buried his wife. Each man followed his own thoughts, knew pretty well what the other was thinking. When the mill gate was in sight and their privacy was coming to an end, Ned said, “He did not offer you condolences.”

  Crace shrugged. “There’s not much help in condolences. He didn’t offer you any either.”

  “My mother was old. It was her time. She knew it and I knew it.” Ned could not apologize on behalf of Bellman but he could, and did, say, “He’s a broken man.”

  Crace’s stride did not alter and he did not look up. “We’re all broken, Ned,” he said grimly. And then, with a twitch of the mouth to take the sting out of his words, “Come on. There’s some can afford to be broken. We’ve got rent to pay.”

  ***

  Bellman’s days were taken up with the care of his child. Along with the balms and oils and medications at her bedside were numerous lists: pulse rate, the length of inhalation, temperature. Her father grew adept in comparing shades of pallor; he watched for the return of color to her cheeks as intently as a sailor watches the horizon for the first sign of land. Bellman fretted over temperatures: Was Dora too warm? Too chilly? Was she lying in a draft? He opened and closed windows, called for extra blankets, and then had them folded away. Bedjackets and mittens and muffs were added to the invalid, then subtracted again. All through the day Mrs. Lane and Mary were on hand, he shared some of this care. At night, he remained alone to nurse his child.

  After the last counting of heartbeats and measuring of temperature at midnight, Bellman sat in the armchair in the corner of Dora’s room and slumbered and dozed until he fell into profound unconsciousness. Later in the night, the totality of blackness receded and he found himself deposited on an unknown gray shore, a place between sleep and wakefulness. In this place, strange and fanciful ideas formed in his mind, and in the dark he reached for his notebook and pencil and turned to some future blank page to scribble fluent and prolific words. Were his notes reasonable? Would they be legible even in the light of day? Questions such as these did not enter his head, they belonged to some other realm: distant, irrelevant, foreign. Then the tide changed; already half-asleep, he put his notebook away and drifted away to oblivion. When he awoke in the morning, it was to be claimed immediately by his charts of figures, today’s tests to be carried out, and behind it all a vague and unimportant sense of having dreamed. And perhaps the faintest recollection of his night in the graveyard, so faint that it escaped his attention.

  ***

  For weeks Bellman sought patterns in his figures. He was anxious to detect an underlying upward trend, but his accountant’s exactitude could not be outwitted by his fatherly wishful thinking: the best that could be said was that the average was stable. And then, one Thursday, there came an alteration. All at once, Dora’s condition improved. Bellman fancied that her hand, when he touched it, felt less waxy and more like human skin. Mary agreed with him. Mrs. Lowe counseled caution, but she agreed that her pallor was a little diminished.

  The next day Dora opened her eyes, and for the first time, it was clear that she recognized her father.

  “Look,” Bellman
told Sanderson, holding out his notebook, “her pulse is stronger and more regular. Her breathing is deeper. She swallows more broth. Time to try her on something more sustaining, don’t you think? She turns her gaze toward me.”

  The doctor could not deny that there was a change. An improvement. The child was aware. Yet still, he could not look at the patient without feeling a profound unease. Pallor, emaciation, loss of musculature, muteness, alopecia, absence of response to sound, touch, the human voice . . . She was an encyclopedia of symptoms, you could fill a textbook with Dora alone, she ought to be exhibited in the universities. All that to worry about, and the father rejoiced over his tables, and the maid’s great lament was that there was nothing a hairbrush could do to disguise the pink circles of smoothness on the girl’s scalp. Her looks—though he dare not say it—were the least of their worries. The fever had done worse than ruin the girl’s skin and make her bald. He very much feared it had reduced her mind to ashes.

  ***

  In the town the fever had run its course and ebbed away.

  Everyone had lost someone. Some had lost everyone.

  People remembered. They wept and they grieved. In the spaces between, they were glad that the leeks and rhubarb were doing well this year, envied the bonnet of the neighbor’s cousin, relished the fragrance of pork roasting in the kitchen on Sunday. There were those that registered the beauty of a pale moon suspended behind the branches of the elms on the ridge. Others took their pleasure in gossiping.

  Being known to all in the town, Bellman and his tragedy were the focus of some of this gossip. Mary’s tongue meant no harm, and she talked to any willing listener. Neighbors, employees, tradespeople, everyone added their ha’penny’s worth to the story: Dora Bellman was a skeleton. She lolled in her bed more dead than alive. She was blind, she was deaf, she was mute. Her body lived but her soul had passed over. She had lost her mind.

  The joiner who had raised the level of the invalid’s bed so that she could see out of the window, told of Dora Bellman sitting up in bed, her dark hair turned to tufts of down and not much of it at that.

  “You wouldn’t hardly know she were a girl. A scarecrow maybe, or a puppet made to frighten the children.”

  And had she lost her mind?

  No. The joiner did not think so. That’s not what he had heard from the girl who looked after her.

  And they gossiped about Bellman. His frown and his somber gaze; the absence of his old energy; if he was seen in the high street at all, he kept his head down, no more the nods and the tilts of the hat he had once broadcast with liberal geniality.

  The Bellman family graves were not being tended, and Bellman was never in church these days.

  “He is too occupied with his daughter,” people said, and for a time Bellman’s neglect was forgiven.

  “Has he still not gone to the mill?” they wanted to know.

  He hadn’t.

  Nor did he go to the Red Lion.

  “He does nothing but fret over his poor scarecrow,” the townspeople concluded. They pitied him for his losses. They admired his paternal devotion. Yet all the same, he was Mr. Bellman of the mill. Surely the mill was where he should be? This state of affairs couldn’t go on forever. Could it?

  Chapter Two

  Dora’s hair did not grow and her eyelashes did not come back. But flesh softened the contours of her bones and a tinge of color grew every day more marked in her cheeks. Her breathing deepened. Her pulse was firmer. There came a time when it was clear that her eyes were following movement with intelligence, and then one day Mary was astounded to hear a hoarse old man’s voice asking for honey water: it was Dora. She kissed Dora and shouted at the top of her voice for Mr. Bellman.

  “You have come back!”

  Bellman wept.

  ***

  For three months Bellman had thought of nothing but his daughter. Back in March he had lain down the reins of his life to sustain Dora in hers. Now that she was out of danger and her health was stable, it was time to return to the world.

  Mary cleaned the study window and left it open to air the room that had gone so long unused. She took the carpet out to beat and rubbed wax into the furniture. She polished the brass fireguard, plumped the cushions of the armchair, and refilled the inkwell.

  At ten o’clock Bellman entered and sat at his desk. He exhaled a great sigh of old, stale breath and replaced it with fresh April air. He ran his fingers with satisfaction over his empty desk. There were days out there waiting for him to awake them. There was a future. It wanted only his touch to stir it into life.

  From his pocket he took his leather notebook. He flicked past the lists of temperatures and times and pulse rates. He’d done with that now. He tucked them under the loop of string that he used to separate yesterday’s dead pages from today’s and tomorrow’s.

  What about these other pages? A wild scrawl, written at speed, the lines sloping up or down, a second line sometimes superimposed over the earlier one. Oh, yes, he remembered. A father must do something to while away the dark hours while he keeps vigil over his child. Notions, that’s all it was. Playthings for a fretful mind at midnight . . .

  A word caught his attention, and he peered more closely.

  From the growing intentness of his reading an onlooker might have judged that he was finding more interest in his half-forgotten notes than he had expected. He turned the pages slowly, scrutinized the nighttime writing with close attention so as not to miss a thing. Once or twice he flicked back to something he had read before. Here and there he made a few brief annotations.

  The things a man does not think about can incubate in him without benefit of conscious attention. The idea, blithely indifferent to William’s human troubles, had implanted itself, sucked sustenance from him, fed on his blood without his knowing it. Now that he was ready to turn his daytime mind to it, the incubus was ready to be born.

  At the end of his reading he stared into space for a single minute, gathering his thoughts, then turned the page and wrote unhesitatingly, fluently for a full hour. Objectives, timetables, lists, costs, plans, obstacles, strategies. At the final word, he put down his pen and, waving his diary in the air for the ink to dry, smiled the smile of a man who has put his hand in his pocket for a farthing and drawn out a golden goose.

  What a gem of an idea! he exclaimed. What a glorious opportunity!

  The word made an echo in his mind. It evoked the raw earth smell of the graveyard. He knew he ought to track down the man in black and hammer out a proper contract. He wouldn’t negotiate hard. That wouldn’t be the right thing to do. The idea was such a good one, and the man had offered it with such an air of generosity that it would be churlish to argue too hard over terms. Find out what he wanted, a bit of argument for form’s sake—business was business, you had to respect that—but at heart he meant to give the man what he asked for. He could afford to be generous; there was more than enough to go round.

  There was the matter of finding him. That raised a difficulty or two. The man must have said his name was Black at some point in the conversation, even if Bellman couldn’t remember it precisely. But his appearance was distinctive, wasn’t it? One day when he had the leisure for it, he would sit down for a minute or two, that is all it would take, and the man’s face would swim up to the surface of his mind easily enough. And then it would be enough to ask around. He had tried before to find out about Black, but that was different. Admittedly he hadn’t been methodical in his approach. Clearly he had asked the wrong people. His failure then meant nothing. When he applied himself, things would come right. Things always did, when he applied himself.

  When the time was right.

  Bellman took up his pen to add an addendum to his notes, but the nib had dried. Between the page and the inkwell his pen hovered uncertainly. Was he missing something here? Was there something else he should be taking into account? He thou
ght for ten seconds, fifteen. He found his thoughts entering unfamiliar, unsignposted territory. He frowned. It was a thing he had seen too often in others: people got lost in their own doubts. With a strong objective in mind, success well within reach, they hesitated and pondered, fretted over minutiae, and in the time they lost, the whole project was sunk. Essential to keep abreast of the whole. Details always sorted themselves out in the fullness of time.

  Bellman didn’t write it in his notebook. There was no need. It wasn’t something he was likely to forget.

  Bellman rubbed his hands in anticipation at the thought of his new venture, and anticipated his lunch with an excellent appetite.

  “Did you hear all the racket we made?” Mary asked Dora, when they were alone together. “The piano and the gong and the pans?”

  Dora shook her head. “The only thing I heard was the rooks. I heard them for a long time. And then I woke up.” She thought for a moment. “Don’t tell my father.”

  Chapter Three

  On a Tuesday at the beginning of May, William Bellman returned to the mill. He heard in the rhythm of the machinery that things were all right. There was some awkwardness: he saw in people’s faces that they found him changed. Well, he found himself changed. He did the rounds with Crace, nodded and shook hands with the senior men, took in a hundred and one pieces of information and asked short, considered questions. He left early.

  He spent Wednesday in the office with Ned. Orders, invoicing, accounts. All was in order. He left early.

  On Thursday he made a methodical and rigorous assessment of mill affairs and concluded that it was running perfectly well without him. He sent Mary over with a note, and fifteen minutes later, Ned and Crace were before him in his study. He set out what he wanted of them and they agreed that it was no more than they had been doing these last weeks. He asked them what aspects of the work they needed him for. They mentioned one or two things, and when he added one or two more they nodded. Otherwise they thought they could manage.