Belle's Song (2 page)

Back to the tragedy.

For all our arguments, my father indulged me. He didn’t rely on me to dig the bell pit, shape a core, or mold a cope. He mixed the copper and alloy himself. He sharpened his own lathe. He didn’t even press me
to keep his account book or clean his overalls. Far from it. He employed a boy as well as an apprentice so that I could spend time learning to read and write. The only thing I was occasionally required to do, and only if the work was local and the boys were busy or unwell, was watch the ropes when the bell was swung into the tower, to see that they uncoiled properly as the pulley wheel strained. For big bells, the ropes were thick and the pulley turners were huge men, often from the local tug-of-war team. To get the biggest heave, they set their heads low between great shoulders and kept their eyes on the back of the man in front. Hence the need for someone to watch.

I wasn’t required to touch the rope. I just had to watch and shout if something seemed amiss. Just watch and shout.

It was a big bell, perhaps the biggest my father had founded, and he was so proud of it. The Black Friars had had a competition for the privilege of crowning their huge new church, and my father had won. At the announcement, he smiled properly for the first time since my mother’s death and set to work with a will. It was quite an undertaking. The boards from the mockup mold were as tall as me, and the wax filled one of his biggest vats.

I’m putting the real moment off, I know. It’s just that writing this down is like picking an old wound. Even
now the rawness catches me, although not unawares. I’m always aware. Not, of course, that my wound is anything like my father’s.

The bell tower was of solid stone, so my father was confident it could take the weight. Indeed, as the work progressed, he was confident about everything. Perhaps we should have learned from the pox that tragedy takes advantage of confidence.

I wasn’t really watching the rope. When had it ever tangled? I stood, half slouching, reading a little book that my father had purchased at Paternoster Row and given me on my fifteenth birthday just past. It was tales of King Arthur’s knights. I had nearly finished it and was sighing for the flawed chivalry of Lancelot, Arthur’s broken heart, and Guinevere’s faithlessness. I was at Camelot, rising mistily through the lake. I pressed my arms flat against my sides and was the sword in the stone, being slowly drawn by Arthur. A living sword! Why not? In a second I was no longer aware of my father shouting, the wheel beginning to turn, the bell rising inch by inch, the clapper swinging like the tongue in a dead hog’s head. All I knew was Arthur running his hand over me. I was glittering at his touch.

Four men cranked the wheel, treading their circle, muscles bulging under rolled-up shirtsleeves and pearl-sized beads of sweat bouncing into the dust. Perhaps
if there had been six, or even just three, what happened wouldn’t have happened. Anyway. Up, up went the bell, a smooth hoist, a perfect hoist, the ropes uncoiling in copybook style. Now Arthur had raised me above his head, every fiber of my being thrilling. I was flashing in the sun, twisting and turning as he swiped me through the air. Up and down, round and round. He would never let me go. He whirled me so hard that I was suddenly giddy. To stop myself falling, I stepped sideways and put out my hand. Such a little step. Such a tiny mistake. That’s the second I relive and relive as though through reliving it I could change it. Why did I move
sideways
? Why didn’t I step forward or backward, or just fall over? Sometimes it seems impossible that I didn’t.

I’m gritting my teeth. I’m forcing myself to continue.

I’m slight and not very tall but I broke the stride of one of the hoisting giants and he faltered. That’s all it took. Just a momentary falter and the momentum was lost. There was no hovering of the bell, no hesitation. It plummeted, its huge weight blowing two birds clean out of the tower window. My father didn’t think first about himself: he thought about me. His head whipped around to make sure I was safe before he leaped. It was too late. The rim of the bell caught his legs and, with the clapper gently booming, broke them into pieces.

Everybody was kind. Not your fault, they said. One
of the hazards of bell founding, they said. But it was my fault, and they knew it and I knew it, and God knew it and would punish me. My father had asked me to watch out for him. I had agreed and then been quite elsewhere. After he had been carried off, I threw King Arthur into the corner. Though the book was expensive, I never retrieved it.

Over the next few days, the neighbors crowded about. Look on the bright side, they urged. It’s a miracle that your father isn’t dead! But his legs were dead, quite dead. Even the best physician, summoned and paid for by Master Miller, could do nothing about that. I suppose it was a miracle that both limbs were saved from amputation, although it’s not much of a miracle to avoid the doctor when you can no longer even piss on your own.

I won’t dwell on the pain my father must have suffered. Not that he didn’t shout and swear and even scream, particularly when the bone setter tried to straighten things out. I think that the noise was for my benefit. My father knew that a martyrish silence would have been worse for me, so once he was conscious again he hollered when he felt the need, and sometimes even when he didn’t so as to give me a decent excuse to hold his hand and pretend I was doing something useful. When I was not home he was completely silent. I know that because the plump and garrulous
widow, who appointed herself his nurse, told me. I suppose she thought it would make me feel better. At mealtimes, she took to answering for him when I asked him a question. Pretty soon I longed to take her by the scruff of the neck and hurl her into the cook pot.

Sometimes, at night, when the widow was snoring by the fire, my father and I would both cry for my mother. When he comforted me—him comforting
me
!—a stone formed in my stomach. The pumice was my best friend then, and I think it must have taken the place of the unicorn and the ermine because I don’t remember ever being either of those creatures again.

Enough of that. Now for the opportunity—well, perhaps more an adventure, except that traditional adventures are organized affairs where people make plans and stick to them with courage and determination. My adventure wasn’t at all like that. For a start, it occurred quite by chance and most of it, just like my life, was haphazard. My death will be like that too, I expect. I’ll be dreaming of glory as I’m squashed by the butcher’s cart.

Anyhow, in the late summer following the accident, my father was in the Tabard. He had recently taken to going there in a wheeled chair constructed by Peter Joiner and decked out in fine style by the ladies from the brothel. Even that tiny journey was exhausting, for August storms bring August mud, but the lure of the
Tabard’s host, a man of vast and irrepressible cheer, was as strong as the lure of ale.

Master Host was always full of gossip and kept a good deal of company. He was also a man of opinions. Where others were more circumspect, he spoke freely about our current king’s troubles, making his own views perfectly clear, though what they were I couldn’t tell you because his views were as changeable as the tide. One day he loved King Richard, the next he despised him. One day we absolutely must make peace with the French, the next we most certainly must not. I wasn’t much interested. I did know that England’s king was wayward and that France was a trouble, but only because kings are always wayward and France had been a trouble my whole life. I’d never met King Richard, of course, and I wasn’t frightened of the French. There is a rough sea between us and them, and any French merchants I encountered at the Tabard, or even the occasional captive French knight I saw paraded through the streets, winked rather than threatened, particularly as my childish body bloomed into something a man could get his hands around. And anyway, men are always fighting. It gives them something to talk about.

In keeping with his forthright manner, Master Host didn’t skirt around my father’s helplessness as others did. He called Father “the Emperor” and, when he heard the grinding of the chair’s wheels, would shout,
“Make way for the imperial chariot!” When he could see my father struggling against the deep gloom into which he had sunk, he devised entertainments, one of which was using a row of tankards as skittles and seeing how many my father could down with a stuffed goat’s bladder. It pained my father to throw, I know, but the host whispered that the exercise would make his back stronger. Nor was any money accepted, for as you may imagine, money was now short. “You can pay for your liquor when you’re back on your feet,” Master Host declared, sweeping the proffered coins into Father’s lap. Though the phrasing made me wince, he didn’t apologize. “There’s more ways of standing than on a couple of flat soles,” he said, looking my father directly in the eye. It was a robust approach, certainly.

This day, the host was busier than usual. Having heard of its fine food and clean wines, a whole party of persons had arranged to meet at the Tabard. When I went to fetch Father home for his dinner, the place was so busy I could scarcely push my way through, and when I did I found him being berated by a man whose face was so red and warty he could, without disguise, have played Lucifer in the mystery play. “
Questio quid juris?
” the wart man kept repeating amid a glaze of spit and breakfast remains. “What’s the point in law?”

When I appeared, Father seized me. “This is my daughter, Belle,” he said. “She’s come to take me home.”

The man took no notice. “I ask you again, my crippled friend.
Questio quid juris?
” he bellowed. Only when he looked at me properly did his voice descend into a tomcat purr. “Your daughter, you say? Legs still working when you conceived her, I would imagine.” He winked outrageously. My father’s face set like stone. The man belched. “Well, as I say, a very creditable daughter, to be sure, though I prefer more flesh in those places a man looks for it.” He belched again. “Tell me, little lady, do you call the color of your hair ‘warning sunset’ or ‘moldy pumpkin’? Never mind. You’ve eyes pretty enough to make up for it. Let me kiss your hand. The name is Aristotle Seekum.” He wiped his mouth and leered over my fingers. “I’m Archdeacon Dunmow’s summoner.”

His title was meant to impress, but since he was clearly a toad, I pulled my hand away. “Dinner’s ready,” I said to my father and tried to push the chair out.

But Master Toad stood his ground, smacking thick lips. “Not so fast, my fine mistress, for your father’s sake. You see, I’ve been trying to root out who was to blame for his accident. He tells me it’s a personal matter and I say nonsense to that! There may be a point in law! And if there is, he may be entitled to some redress. What man doesn’t want money for his pain? Just because your father lacks the will to pursue the point himself doesn’t mean somebody more knowledgeable can’t
pursue it for him. Indeed, there is amongst our company a sergeant from the Inns of Court personally known to me. For a small fee, I’m certain he’d gladly take up this worthy cause.” He flicked my locks with a pointed fingernail. “Compensation is always useful. You’d like more ribbons and silks, would you not, poppet?” He peered about, trying to find the sergeant in the crowd.

Every hair on my father’s head bristled, and mine too. I should have been more circumspect, but how was I to know all that was to follow? “The accident was my fault,” I said loudly, “and I prefer parchment and pen to ribbons and silks. By the way, I’m sorry for your boils. Who’s to blame for them? Do you get more compensation if even your mother won’t kiss you?” The summoner’s mouth still agape, I shoved past.

Sitting near the door, slightly apart from the crowd, sat a quick-eyed older man and a youth with skin white as whey. They’d not heard the exchange with the summoner, but when they saw me struggling and my father being uncomfortably jostled, the youth—really just a boy—got up. He was tall, for all that he stooped like a strand of windswept barley, and he wore hinged eyeglasses cracked in lens and frame. His arms must have been strong, though, for my father’s no feather and the boy lifted him clean out of his chair, hoisted him above the melee, and carried him into the street. It was
much easier to manage the chair without my father in it and though I clobbered a few shins, I maneuvered out of the inn without further difficulty. The boy carefully lowered my father back onto his cushion, awkwardly accepted some equally awkward thanks—being rescued was hard for Father—and quickly turned away, leaving a smell of something pungent but not unpleasant that I couldn’t quite place.

Dinner, which Widow Chegwin had cooked and sat with us to eat, was taken in silence. She’d made the house neat as a new pin, my father’s bed all fluffed up and inviting. She’d even untangled the knots in the wool for the three-sided cushion I was clumsily trying to embroider. I’d been furious with her in the morning because, can you believe it, she’d washed Poppet. Washed her! Of course Poppet was dirty and of course I only imagined she still carried Mother’s scent, but the widow, thrilled that Poppet now smelled of violets, simply couldn’t grasp that inside the doll’s worn and battered body had nestled dust from happier times. As long as the dust was there, some of that happiness remained. Now it was all gone. As a consequence, I’d spent much of the day pumicing my legs. Yet even as I’d bitten down on a piece of leather, for the pain was very great, and cursed the widow in the language of the gutter, I’d been ashamed. For all her inconsequential cooing and dementing interference, what would
my father’s life be like without her? I gave him nothing: not a clean house, not a decent meal, not even an embroidered cushion. Even now, as we were sitting at supper, a meal which, naturally, I’d had no hand in preparing, I wasn’t concentrating on being considerate. Instead, I was telling myself a salty tale in which the milky fish on my plate was going to eat me rather than me eat it.