Anson accompanied Bellman back to the hall. They shook hands again, and the banker watched his new customer cross the marble floor toward the exit with the same assured and purposeful gait he had used when entering, undaunted by the great vault above his head, undiminished by the expanses of marble around him. How unusual, he reflected. This is a man to whom a bank is just a place to put money. If money were raindrops then the Westminster & City is no more than a water butt. Large, expensive, and made of marble, but a water butt nonetheless.
Turning into the corridor leading to his colleague’s office in search of the paper he had left there this morning, he congratulated himself. If Bellman’s venture did as well as he thought it might, then he, Anson, had just done the best day’s business in his life—and in less than three-quarters of an hour.
Chapter Six
One wet February day, Bellman stood under a cloud-thick sky surveying his site. The ramshackle buildings of yesterday were gone, razed to the ground, and London’s earth had been broken by a hundred shovels to expose this vast crater. There were no shovels today: impossible to work in weather like this. Inches of rain lay in the bottom of the pit, and the new raindrops fell so heavily and insistently into it that there was a continual splashing and flying of water. Rain slicked Bellman’s hair to his scalp and darkened his coat to an indistinct color. Puddles were seeping through the stitchwork of his shoes. Every man and beast that had shelter had withdrawn to it, so Bellman was alone in his contemplation—except for a solitary rook on a rooftop, indifferent to the rain, who eyed both man and site with an air of faint interest.
It was a day to inspire gloom, but not in Bellman. Another man, more poetic or fanciful, might have seen a violent gash in the surface of the earth, a giant’s grave, a burial pit for a thousand dead, but Bellman’s eyes were attuned differently. It was the future that he was gazing at: he saw not a pit, but a palace. London’s new and greatest emporium of mourning goods.
He knew the building to come better than any man, for it was the child of his own mind. The wet air solidified before his eyes into a massive block, five storeys high and twice as long. The strict ranks of symmetrical windows borrowed their glimmer from the rain, and between them the mistiness coalesced obediently into pilasters topped with Corinthian capitals. Bellman’s eye coaxed cornices and corbels and lintels and mullions out of thin air, and he studied these details with an attentiveness as great as if the building had been materially present. His glance swept the length of the full-height ground-floor windows with their mirrored black and silver fascia and paused at the grand entrance in the middle of the frontage. A few steps, the oak double door with brass footplates and ornamental knocker. When open, the doors would be high enough to permit two men to pass through, one on the shoulders of the other. Over this door was to be a projecting platform. It would provide a porch, shelter from bad weather, somewhere to stop and shake out an umbrella, or for the nervous or hesitant, simply gather oneself before entering.
Bellman’s eyes rose to the platform and squinted. On top of it was to be mounted a large insignia, elaborately carved and expensively gilded. It would represent the name of the shop. He peered and puzzled, but this spot, twenty feet above the ground and in the dead center of his project, refused to be anything but mistily blurred and wet air.
What was the shop to be called?
Bellman did not know.
He had not neglected the matter, far from it. In fact, he had consulted Critchlow and the other haberdashers on this very question in the early days, but none had wished to lend the shop his name. Having launched their daughters into marriage with respectable, impoverished gentlemen, they now waited to marry their granddaughters to greater status. For the success of such an endeavor, the wealth they had accumulated from retail needed to hide its origins, for it is well known that the purity of gold increases the further removed it is from labor. The impression must be given that a man’s riches spring from his noble nature as naturally and spontaneously as water springs from the earth.
“No,” they had said. “Let the shop be called Bellman’s.”
Why did he hesitate? Bellman had no qualms about giving his shop his name. The notion of a grand marriage for Dora did not enter his head. Nor was it modesty that held him back. There was something unfinished in his thinking about the name, and today, when the rain had dissolved all busyness and activity around him and left only this misty haze, was as good a day as any to complete it.
Standing alone before the mirage of his shop, Bellman’s thoughts turned to the man in black.
Was it any wonder that he had let the question of Black lapse for so long? For almost a year, Bellman had worked on the project. He had developed it from an idea to a financial reality, then nursed it into legal existence. The legal side of things had required lengthy and delicate negotiations that had consumed him for months; the land purchase had not gone smoothly; the architects had stubbornly refused to understand what he wanted—good lord, he had ended up practically drawing the plans himself; there had been contractors to engage, more negotiations, more contracts . . . Night after night he had sat by candlelight, working out solutions to problems that others deemed insoluble. In all that time he had not thought too closely or too often of Black, and frankly, what could be more natural? Bellman’s diary was very full. Every hour from morning till night was accounted for, days and weeks ahead. He moved from meeting to meeting, from decision to decision with scarcely a pause to draw breath. He never ate a meal without either company or his papers and notebook beside him at the table. He reserved little difficulties to be thought about while he brushed his teeth and dressed in the morning. Bath time was the occasion to lock himself away with knotty problems that could be unraveled while the steam rose off the water.
When problems arose that did not lend themselves to being broken down into components, tabulated and calculated in order to afford a neat solution, Bellman’s habit was to put them aside in a category marked “waste of time.” One of the first keys to success, he considered, was to recognize the difference between problems you could do something about and problems you could do nothing about. A great many people, he had noticed, spent large parts of their time worrying about things they were powerless to alter. Had they concentrated all this energy on things they could influence, think how different their lives would be. He advocated concentrating on those things where you had some guarantee of an outcome. Every minute of Bellman’s day was spent actively pursuing some benefit or other, and for months now it had not been clear that there was any benefit to be had from thinking about Black, so in he went to the category of “unprofitable’ and there he stayed.
Now Black’s idea was about to become material. As soon as this weather cleared up, construction would start. Naturally the problem of Black was starting to appear to Bellman in a more pressing light. It bothered him that his recollection of his meeting with Black was so unclear. Clarity was everything in a business relationship. What did Black expect of him? And what could he expect of Black? He felt anew the sense of indebtedness that haunted him. Black had been the one to recognize the magnitude of the opportunity, he had wanted to share it with Bellman; it was essential that the man should be adequately recompensed. What had they agreed?
He closed his eyes and thought.
“Percentages . . . “ he muttered. “Division of responsibilities . . . Dividends . . . “
He strained to hear an echo from the past, an indication of the conversation they might have had, the deal they might have struck. Nothing came to his ear.
Well, there was only one thing for it. He would do something that would make plain to Black that he had not been overlooked. It would be an invitation to him—wherever he was—to come forward and claim his due. It would be evidence—not that it would come before a court of law, of course not, there would be nothing so extreme—that he, Bellman, had no intention of claiming as his own that portion of the bu
siness that was rightly Black’s.
He would call the shop Bellman & Black.
Opening his eyes onto the misty mirage of his emporium, he found the point where the platform projected over the front entrance and his imagination placed a grand double B on it.
That would do it!
“Hoy!”
A loud cry broke into Bellman’s reverie. He discovered himself somewhat adrift in his own mind, and it took him a long moment to recover himself. He was a long way from reality, the four floors of stone and glass before him had to dissolve into rain, and it was with mild astonishment that he found himself in front of a great gash in the ground. When a creature crawled out of it, slick with rain and mud, Bellman took a step back and almost let out a cry of alarm.
“Look at this!” the creature exclaimed, demonstrating itself thus to be a living thing and human. He stood up and held out to Bellman what looked like a stone. His voice was cultivated, expensively schooled, but his appearance and behavior was more than strange. Bellman wondered whether it was a madman. Then, seeing that the man stood straight and held himself still, and that the light in the man’s eyes was enthusiastic, not wild, Bellman felt a little reassured. He glanced at what the man was holding.
“It’s a stone.”
“Ah! That’s where you’re wrong!”
The man rubbed some of the mud away. “See the tool marks? They are man-made.”
There were indeed abrasion marks that William had taken for striations in the stone.
“And?”
“It’s not carved as such. The stone already had a form that called the shape to mind, and these marks are just to emphasize it. See the knot in the stone that gives the idea of the eye?”
The man began to talk. He had been in Egypt lately, was what he called an archaeologist—“I dig up the past,” he explained—and was now home in London for a few months. He would go back to Egypt. “But when I saw this site I thought it looked just like an excavation and I couldn’t resist coming to have a look. There have been men crawling all over it, but today, thanks to the rain, I have my chance.”
“I am glad that somebody profits from the rain. Every day that the construction is not finished costs me. Is it worth something, your stone?”
“Worth?”
“Money. What would a museum give you for it? A collector?”
“A museum! Why nothing! This is London, not Egypt! I don’t know why the past of Egypt is worth something when the past of London is worth nothing, but there it is.”
“I can tell you the reason for that easily enough. In London it is the future that matters.”
“And what is it to be, in the future, this site of yours?”
“It will be Bellman and Black’s. An emporium of mourning goods.”
“You are Mr. Black?”
Bellman felt a lurch in his chest. “I am Mr. Bellman.”
“Well, Mr. Bellman, you should do nicely with your mourning goods. Death comes to us all. The future, eh? Mine. Yours. Everyone’s.”
The young man’s eyes followed the curving flight of the rook that turned and swooped, brilliant with rain, through the air that was to be Bellman’s emporium.
“They used to put the dead out on stone platforms for their bones to be picked clean by the rooks. Did you know that? Long time ago. Before our crosses and spires and prayer books. Before’—he swept his hand in a broad, vague gesture, taking in the pit, Regent Street, London, who knows what else—“before all this. Perhaps the ancient ancestor of that rook there”—it swooped and flapped and dropped with exactitude onto a piece of rock waiting to be tipped into the foundations—“feasted on an ancient ancestor of mine. Or yours, come to that.” Through the downpour he caught a glimpse of Bellman’s disgust. “Every era has its own ways, eh? Who knows what will come next, eh? They burn the dead in Italy, I hear.” He shook his head and smiled at Bellman. “Must be going. The old man will be wondering where I’ve got to.”
He went.
Had Bellman just had an encounter with a half-wit? Had he really spoken the words Bellman thought he had heard? It seemed scarcely credible. Man crawls out of the mud, talking a lot of nonsense about rooks . . . An eccentric, at the very least.
The cloth of Bellman’s coat was sodden over his shoulders. The rain had crept fiber by fiber through his overcoat, jacket, shirt, and underclothes. His skin was clammy.
Bellman turned the stone over in his hand. Was that the eye the fellow meant? A round indentation in the stone, revealing in the center a dot of the shining core. It looked for all the world like a little eye gleaming at him. Curious, he rubbed the last of the mud off. These must be the tool marks . . . Feathers? Yes, here was a wing and, turning it over, another. The still-falling rain brought out the iridescence in the stone. Flashes of purple, kingfisher blue and green came to life in the black as he held it.
Horrible thing!
With a shudder, William tossed it away from him and into the pit. It traced a curve in the air, a graceful parabola that recalled a feeling of something from long ago.
It disturbed a bird where it fell. Like a black rag the creature rose up into the wetness; the first powerful flap of its wings lifted it through deliveries and as far as ground-floor umbrellas, with the second it ascended to coats and hats on the first floor. Up it rose through the offices, into the seamstresses’ atelier and out of the building though the atrium’s glass ceiling.
Bellman turned away, sick at heart, longing for a fire and his work.
“Bellman and Black,” he announced that night at Russells, his club in Mayfair where he met at regular intervals with his haberdashers.
“Excellent!” said Critchlow. “It never hurts to indicate two owners in a company name. Gives a sense of solidity. Security. Two heads are better than one, that kind of thing.”
The second haberdasher nodded. “And a clever choice of name too. What is the first thing people think of when they need mourning goods? They think of black. And having thought it, they will already be halfway to thinking of our company!”
The third haberdasher smiled. “It sounds right, don’t you think? Musical. As if the two names were meant to go together. I’m all for it. Gentlemen”—he raised a glass—“to the success of Bellman and Black!”
Bellman raised his glass and sipped, but he didn’t stay long enough to finish the glass. His feet were damp and he had work to do.
Chapter Seven
It would take fifteen months to complete the shop, twelve for the construction work and three for the fitting out. Bellman had seen Fox at work long enough to know that he could be left to oversee the construction of the building for weeks at a time. That was good. It meant Bellman could get on with the rest.
Bellman had expanded his own mill, but even so large a mill as his own could not supply all the cloth needs of a shop the size of Bellman & Black. So in bumpy carriages and on horseback he covered hundreds of miles.
In Scotland he inspected peat black tweeds and cashmeres. On the quayside at Portsmouth and Southampton he opened crates of foreign silk, rubbed the slippery folds between his fingers, shook out a length to judge the weight, drape, opacity. He went to Spitalfields and farther, to Norwich, in search of the flattest, most light-draining crepe that could be had. He visited mills in Wales, Lancashire, and Yorkshire, crisscrossed the country, tirelessly, looking for bombazine and paramatta and mourning silk and merino and woollen barege and grenadine and barathea.
“Show me your black,” he announced on arrival. Bellman always looked at the black first. It emptied the eye and the mind of passing impressions, cleared the visual palate as it were. His eye was expert, he could spot a touch of green in this one, a blue tendency in another, a purplish tint here. Nothing to be concerned about from a commercial point of view: there had to be a black for every complexion, one black for fair hair and another for brunettes, redhead
s needed blacks all their own . . . Once in a while he found what he termed a true black. These were hard to come by. Most people couldn’t tell the difference, but Bellman would lose himself for a minute in the depths before ordering as many yards as could be produced.
If he was pleased with the blacks, he would go on to see what the clothier might do to supply him in semimourning and quarter mourning. So every visit saw him plunged into deepest mourning before moving on through shades of gray from the darkest to the palest, emerging at last into the mauves and puces of quarter mourning.
Bellman grew to be a stranger to color. When he looked out of the carriage window en route from one mill to the next, he found himself thinking that the bold green of the grass was verging on the indecent and the azure sky on a summer day struck him as vulgar. On the other hand, he saw endless degrees of gravity and tenderness of feeling in an overcast November landscape, and as for a midnight sky, now there was beauty no fabric could match—though he searched high and low for one that came close.
Bellman sent home to Mrs. Lane endless parcels of fabric samples with detailed instructions. “These dozen squares to be cut in half and one half hung in a south-facing window, the other half left in a closed drawer; after one month the two halves to be reunited to test for light-fastness.” Or else, “One half to be washed, dried, and ironed fifty times, then compared with its twin for fade.” Mrs. Lane grumbled and wrote a letter of complaint. Did he not think she had enough to do, what with Dora and a house to keep? So Bellman took on a girl who thought it a great lark to be paid to scrub squares of cloth against a board with soap as hard as she could, and start all over again as soon as the pieces were dry.
There was an old dyer in the north, whose reputation for black was unequaled. He was soon to retire and had no sons to pass his secrets to. Bellman offered him a large incentive to talk about black. The dyer agreed, but when Bellman presented himself to learn the secrets, the man’s lifelong reticence got the better of him, and he was reluctant to speak.
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