Bellman & Black (40 page)

“What a life I have had!” he told Black, wonderingly. “Why, I could spend half a lifetime just thinking about it!”

“Remember!”

He remembered. Scene after scene, moment after moment, joys and sorrows and pleasures and loves and losses of all sorts, streamed out of the place where he had entombed them, a flow of days, hours, and seconds that seemed as if it would never end.

I am cold, he thought, and instantly he remembered that once, years before, he had shivered in blankets by the fireside of a small cottage, his daughter heavy on his lap. Gravely she raised her hand, and he felt the mysterious touch of her fingertips drawing down his eyelids.

A
t the top of the emporium in Regent Street, a draft slipped under a door and into one of the seamstresses’ bedrooms. It found a gap between neck and blankets, insinuated itself into the space between body and bedclothes. It chilled.

Lizzie stirred in her bed. She turned over, seeking a bit of warmth, but found only coolness. Her forehead and her nose were cold. Her eyes flickered, and she was awake. This, her sleepy mind knew, was not right. She rose and padded across the chilly room, thinking to close her window, but it was not open. The draft was from elsewhere.

On the walkway outside her bedroom door, the chill was evident. A cold breeze was coming in from above. Who on earth had raised the glass ceiling? It was opened to its full extent, and there was a clear three-foot gap all around the edge of the glazing, giving onto a cloudless sky of midnight black, with stars bright all over. It was the kind of sky that you might stand and stare at, entranced, only Lizzie’s bare feet were cold on the walkway and she was too tired for enchantment.

There was only one thing for it. She would have to go down and tell Mr. Bellman.

Her coat was behind the door; she put it on over her nightdress. She felt for her shoes in the dark, buttoned her naked feet into them by feel alone.

Rising and turning in one movement, Lizzie stepped onto the walkway, where an unexpected sound made her halt.

The beating of wings.

There came a feather-rush of air, it touched her eyelids, cheeks, and neck. Blackness she had never seen the like of before, flapping upward right in front of her. Something there and gone again. Craning her neck, she made sense of it: Could it be a bird?

It was! A rook.

An ungainly repositioning midair, then an adeptly gauged flap propelled it through the gap in the ceiling. Out! Black on black, it was almost invisible, yet for a few seconds she followed it with her eyes, for it blocked out the stars where it flew. Then it was gone.

She stood looking up, hands to collar, unaware of the cold, unaware of the hour. The rook was written blackly on the sky, on her eye, miraculous.

ON THE CROW

. . . he does not know what care is,

he does not know what sorrow is,

he does not know what remorse is,

his life is one long thundering ecstasy of happiness,

and he will go to his death untroubled,

knowing that he will soon turn up again as an author or something,

and be even more intolerably capable and comfortable than ever he was before.

—M
ARK
T
WAIN
,
FROM
F
OLLOWING
THE
E
QUATOR:
A J
OURNEY
A
ROUND THE
W
ORLD

T
he mourners had remembered William Bellman, and they had buried him. Now they had gone back to their lives. Only the household and its familiars remained in the reception room at Mill House, which is to say that along with Dora and Mary and Mrs. Lane, you could count Ned and Crace from the mill and Robert, who made the bread and who had lost his own father not so long ago. The only newcomers were George and Peter, orphaned nephews of Mary, lately taken in by Dora.

“Your father killed a rook once,” Robert told Dora. “When he was a boy. My father was there and never forgot it. Your father’s catapult was the envy of all the boys back then.”

He told her the story.

“My father never liked birds,” she said. “And yet they are so fascinating. There is a river of rooks that passes over this mill twice a day.”

He nodded. “The Flytesfield rooks.”

“Flytesfield?”

“It’s what they call it. Where the parish congregates.”

He saw the idea born in her expression, and she spoke it the very next moment. “Let us go there!”

It was nearly an hour’s ride to Flytesfield, and an uphill walk at the end of it, so that by the time they arrived, only a sliver of sky separated the white sun from the horizon. All carried things: the men carried Dora, who could not keep up over the rough ground; Mary and the children carried the oilcloth and cushions. When they arrived, they organized their cargo and themselves on the sloping ground, and settled, swathed in blankets.

It was no artist’s country, only a broad band of field, a stripe of trees, and above it the vast whiteness of an early winter sky.

“Where are they?” Mary’s nephew George was keen to know. “We can’t see them.”

“We’re the first. They’ll be on their way.”

Dora looked at her watch; peered at the sky through her binoculars.

“Look that way,” she suggested, pointing to the west.

Dots in the sky, too far away at first to even see that they were moving.

There they were, the first, from over Stroud way. She turned her binoculars this way and that and saw what the others could not yet see: more groups arriving from every direction. She dropped the binoculars to her lap, put a warming arm around George’s shoulder, and abandoned herself to the spectacle to come.

They came from north, south, east, and west. In groups of twenty or thirty they had set out from their different departure points, then found each other en route, and formed larger and larger parties, until now they converged on Flytesfield in long streams. After a few minutes the first of them dropped low, flapping and swooping, claws outstretched as they landed heavily on braced legs. More were coming behind them, and in no time twenty, a hundred, three hundred birds were strutting and cawing on the field beneath the spectating humans. The sky was thick with flight: the birds flowed toward their destination like black rivers, thousands of them, intent, purposeful, moving as one, and they funneled ceaselessly from air to land, an endless flood of them.

The sky was so full you might easily think all the rooks of the world were congregating here. They came and they came and they came. The landing rooks extended their spread on the earth like spilt oil, and before long the field was more black than brown. The cawing of the birds in their hundreds and thousands was an entirely different sound from the noise of a few. The individual cries melded together into a sound effect that was not musical, nor like the noise any living creature makes, but more like the sound of the planet itself. Now the field was three-quarters filled, and now more than that, and the spaces for newcomers grew smaller and
smaller. Sometimes, by misjudgment or overcrowding, the birds came to land on top of each other, toppling and tumbling to the ground.

At last the sky thinned, the light reasserted itself overhead. There came a gap in the siphoning of birds to ground, then another, and in a few more minutes the last birds flapped to earth, and there was a separation between empty sky above and the seething field below.

Now the world paused. The sun sank one degree lower in the sky. The air cooled a little. Five pairs of human eyes did not blink and thirty thousand rooks stilled their chattering tongues.

All was quiet. All was still.

Somewhere, invisibly, at the heart of the mass, a single rook readies its muscles. Now it flaps and rises. A thread of birds is drawn up, out of the mass, a line that rises, coiling and twisting into the dusky air. It thickens at its base, spirals up, and paints shapes on the sky: swirls and eddies, like black dye dropped into water. Endlessly and unexpectedly shifting, it is hard to believe that these are individual birds, it seems to be a single force that animates these fantastical forms in the sky.

The dark lake of birds shrinks as the black mass flows upward from its center, more and more joining the whirling dance flight until the last birds leave the ground and the entire parish is twisting and writhing as one force in the air. There is no time. Future and past are banished, and this moment is all.

These are shapes, Dora thinks, that she has seen before, a million years ago, in another world. They are incomprehensible, but she has known them in the past, and the day will come when she will know them again. For today she watches, holding her breath. She forgets the others, forgets herself, forgets everything but the bliss of the shapes that paint themselves on her soul as they paint themselves on the sky.

The watchers are so caught up in the spectacle of the black air that roils and dances over Flytesfield that no one notices the first birds dropping out of the sky and into the treetops. But it becomes clear as the light falls that the numbers of birds are thinning. The shapes grow pale
and lose some of their vitality. Then they break up altogether, and all that remains of them are a few hundred birds flapping their wings, waiting to drop down onto a branch. The winter branches are thickly foliated with rooks and you have to peer through the darkening evening to see the last birds settle.

When the mysterious sky dance is over, the spectators blink and breathe and come to themselves after their long enchantment. They feel mild surprise at finding themselves contained in their bodies on this sloping hillside: for the last half hour they have been elsewhere. Their souls resettle in their bodies. Fingers stretch and toes wriggle experimentally. Their rib cages and unfeathered flesh feel faintly foreign to them.

George looks without seeing: his little mind is overfull of rookery, and nothing else can make an impression. He yawns, then, without speaking, falls abruptly into deep sleep. Dora holds him while the others gather cushions and fold the oilcloth. No one in the party speaks, but when eye meets eye, there is a powerful sense of something shared.

Dora glitters, serenely exultant. It is what a rooking escapade does to a human. She looks as if she has gathered all the glory of the world into herself. To see it once is never to be without the feeling for the rest of your life. It is the rook whirl of excitement in the blood that lingers, the spirals of rooks still turning in the brain, in the eye, long after the actual rooks have settled on their branches.

Dora has been set right inside herself. Tomorrow and in the days afterward she will paint and paint well. The rooks unleash a freedom of the painting arm and of the mind that makes things possible . . .

Dora will be sad and happy and ill and well. She will live the best she can for as long as she can, and when she can do that no longer, she will die. And rooks will paint mysteries on the sky at dawn and dusk for as long as the world exists.

T
here are numerous collective nouns for rooks. In some parts people say
a storytelling of rooks.

·  ·  ·

All stories must come to an end. This one. Everyone’s. Your own.

The rook is a great lover of stories. He has been harvesting them for as long as there have been stories to harvest, which means for as long as there have been gods and men and rooks. And he has a good long memory for them.

When your story comes to an end, a rook will harvest it, as I harvested William Bellman’s story. So when you arrive at the last line of the last page, it is Thought or Memory or one of their many descendents who will be waiting to accompany you as the book closes on your story. En route, over the last blank page and beyond the covers to that other unknown place, your rook will harvest your story. Later, he will make his way back without you. And then, when the time is right, he will make his way to the white page of sky, where he will partake in the most important rook ritual of all.