Bellman & Black A Novel by Diane Setterfield

Author:Diane Setterfield [Setterfield, Diane]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Atria Books
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

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 Every man and beast that had shelter had withdrawn to it, so Bellman was alone in his contemplation—except for a solitary rook on a rooftop, indifferent to the rain, who eyed both man and site with an air of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.

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