The Rising of Bella Casey (4 page)

In preparation for the Reverend’s visit, she spent a good hour
slaving over the entries in her books to make sure they were up to the minute. She had kept the school stove lit even though it would mean cutting back on coal over the next few days. The children would have to go without so that the high and mighty Reverend Leeper might keep his feet warm.

‘You must understand, Miss Casey, that it is vital the accounts be kept up to date, in case an inspector might call.’

But that is the inspector’s business, she thought to herself, not yours. The Reverend paid particular attention to the Fees
Outstanding
.

‘The sooner these parents pay, the sooner you’ll qualify for your increment,’ he said as if she had never spoken.

‘If you’ll pardon me, Reverend Leeper, should we not give leeway on late payments to those families in distress …’

She had stopped feeding the grate by this stage in the hope that it might remind him that he had warmer places to be, such as his own hearth, where a wife waited.

‘It is your future I am thinking of, Miss Casey.’

He laid a hand on her forearm. She felt a strange charge, even through the thick serge of the coat she had thrown around her
shoulders
to cheat the chill. She had never stood this close to him before.

‘Now,’ he said with a click of his heels, ‘it is time to inspect the teachers’ quarters.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘It
is
part of the school premises, Miss Casey,’ he snapped.

‘The Canon has never …’

‘I am in charge now and I insist upon it,’ he said testily. ‘The teacher’s accommodations must be kept to the same high
standard
that you clearly keep in your schoolroom.’

There it was again, a rebuke lying down with a compliment.

Bella locked the schoolroom door and led the way up the back stairs. As they ascended – it was black dark now – she tried to make an inventory in her mind as to what state she had left the place when she had hurried out that morning. Might there be a
petticoat
lying in sight, or worse? But surely the Reverend would not want to see the bedroom? What business would he have in there? Afterwards, remembering what she had thought on the stair, Bella wondered whether even contemplating such a lewd proposition had somehow directed events. At the head of the stairs, she opened the door and stood back to let the Reverend Leeper enter. He stood rather imperiously, silhouetted in the window through which the faint glimmer of gaslight could be glimpsed. She hurried into the scullery to light a candle for she knew there was no paraffin for the lamp. She realised how nervous she was when it took her three strikes of the match to set the flame aglow.

‘Well,’ he said looking around as she bore the candle
tremulously
toward him. ‘That’s much better.’

He looked around him. ‘It is spartan, but it’s clean.’

She felt herself bridle. Would he have preferred trinkets, cheap china pieces, swathes of damask on the windows, a tapestry
footstool
, an overstuffed armchair? He prowled around, inspecting her books on the shelves she had made up out of an old orange
box and stained to look like oak, and paused over her two framed prints. As she brought out the candle and set it down on the table – a little leafed one that Mother had bequeathed her from home – he roused himself from his intense examination of her possessions, deemed so meagre, and turned his gaze on her. In the candlelight his face seemed cadaverous, his bleared eyes sunk in deep hollows. He stood for several minutes inspecting her – that was the only word for it, as if she were on the parade ground.

‘Well, Miss Casey,’ he said finally, ‘may I remark how pretty you look in this light.’

He advanced towards her and took both of her hands in his, then turned the palms upwards as if he might read her fortune.

‘Oh Isabella …’ he murmured.

It was so long since anyone had used her full name that for a moment, Bella failed to recognise herself. And she was so used to Miss Casey this and Miss Casey that, that she was lulled in a strange way.

‘I have been longing for this moment …’ There was a small, pulsing comfort in his touch as he caressed her hands. ‘You must have felt it too, surely.’

What Bella felt was a sensation of unmooring, as if she had drowsed at the theatre and woken suddenly to find herself at a different play. A melodrama of the romantic kind. And she was a player who did not know her lines.

‘Of course, we must be chaste and pure in our affections …’

She tried to squirm her fingers free, but he held them firm.

‘Grant me a hearing, Isabella, dear.’

Stupidly, she was still waiting for him to speak of the school accounts and she did not wish to give offence in any way in case it might colour the outcome. She was waiting for this soft and foolish Reverend Leeper to give way to the stiff and formal
version
she was used to.

‘Our love must be like that of brother and sister …’

‘Love?’ she heard herself say, though once it was out of her mouth it sounded contemptuous.

He leaned forward and planted a chaste kiss on her cheek. His lips trembled as if his heart were in his mouth.

‘Hush now,’ he whispered as if her discomfiture had nothing to do with him. Then, swiftly, he made for the door where he paused again.

‘Oh and Miss Casey?’ She did not turn to face him so he spoke to her back. ‘I will be checking the school logs every week until the end of term. I have to say, your book-keeping leaves a lot to be desired.’

After his departure, she stood rubbing the spot on her cheek where the Reverend had brushed his lips. It was the only way she could convince herself of what had occurred. Then when she had convinced herself, she gave into fuming. Why, she berated
herself
, was she so slow to anger? To think that for all these months while she had been labouring to gain the Reverend’s approval, he had been nursing his untoward desire and waiting for his
moment. He had thoroughly ambushed her, as surely as if he had crept up behind her on the street and demanded monies. But what troubled her more was that she had somehow played a part in the wickedness herself. Hadn’t she let him hold her hand, caress it, without a word of protest? How could she have been so dim-witted, so acquiescent? The truth was that she had given into a vapourish female kind of weakness, like one of those silly ninnies at the College who prated on about their beaux. Was she, in the end, no better than they were? Every flurried thought led to a new question. How could she face the Reverend in the schoolroom or the church? What to say? And what more might he demand of her? But no, she reassured herself, he was a
clergyman
. Anyway, if there was any more trouble, couldn’t she set her brothers on him? Mick and Tom would sort him out in a flash, clergyman or no. But that would involve admitting what had already taken place, which she could barely admit to herself. And what exactly could she accuse him of – a declaration of love? Hardly a hanging offence. And she could not deny the thrilling flattery of having become, with no effort of her own will, an object of devotion even if it was the Reverend Leeper for whom, heretofore, she had felt only a baffled repulsion. He might have been her superior – in the school, at church – but in this matter he was but a slave to his carnal thoughts. And he a married man! Bella had seen his wife only once, a slender thread of a woman with a defeated look.

‘Poor woman,’ Miss Quill had told her, ‘God has deigned that
she never carry a child to term.’

Bella had thought Mrs Leeper merely pale and wan; now she wondered how much of her demeanour could be laid at her
husband’s
door.

She decided to tell no one of the encounter, either at home or abroad. Perhaps after his transgression, the Reverend would govern his instincts and honour his promise of renunciation, she thought. But the opposite was the case. His protestation of love seemed to open a door. It did not make him any more tender in his official dealings with her, but it heralded a campaign of
creeping
liberties. He brushed against her seemingly by hazard in the schoolroom one day after Scripture class. He accosted her in the basement hallway by the teachers’ press when the children were gone, and pressed his reluctant embraces upon her. He would often crush her to him urgently − in the classroom, or on the stairs − then release her, pushing her away. It seemed he drew her close only to repel her more violently, as if he was testing himself against her. He acted as if it was she who had steered his hand to her bodice or forced him to caress her face. One evening, after choir practice, he went further, planting a kiss on the nape of her neck in the dark of the gallery stairs as they were descending. She did not say anything because when she turned around to speak, he only issued his customary warning.

‘Watch your step, Miss Casey.’

She fretted that it was something in her that had encouraged his
bewildering conduct. She examined her conscience but she could not think what it was. For all her education, she was not schooled to deal with this. A match girl would have been better able to swat him away with a loud reproach and a careless laugh. But she with her Teacher’s Certificate and salaried position could resort neither to vulgar directness nor feigned nonchalance. She tried to avoid him, but it was no easy task with his constant visitations, the checking of her records, the choir rehearsals and all the other little businesses of the school that required his say-so. With each passing month she felt more frantic, more desperate to extricate herself. But how could she do that without losing everything she held dear – her position, her respectability, her reputation?

Her vigilance was so taken up with the matter of Reverend Leeper that she failed to realise the import of other changes about her, of a far graver nature. It was over a year since her
Pappie’s
fall at the Meeting Rooms. (He had overstretched himself hanging a banner for the Harvest Festival and had crashed to the ground crushing something in his spine.) But he had gone into something of a decline, which the doctors couldn’t explain. The Mission had had to let him go, and though there was some
compensation
, the family could no longer afford to live on Dorset Street and had moved to a more modest address at Innisfallen Parade, a terrace house at street level. They still had all of their own furniture, though, including the Elysian, which consoled Bella. Home would always be where the piano was. But it was
here that Pappie really began to fail. His face grew gaunt, his hand turned to claw. He spent much of his time sunk in the armchair in the front room before a low fire. Afterwards Bella would wonder if some other illness was afoot. Had her father, in the midst of stout health, been growing the contagion of his own death? As the months went by, he no longer had the strength to stand upright and Mick and Tom moved his bed downstairs into the front room. Mother set up a pallet on the other side of the fireplace and she kept the grate stoked all night for Pappie felt the cold keenly. But despite all these portents, Bella only realised the gravity of his illness when he called her, Mick and Tom to his bedside.

‘You know I’m for the dark,’ he said, his voice rasping.

Mother had propped him up high on a bank of pillows to help his breathing.

The boys shuffled. Bella could feel tears welling up but she determined not to give in to them, though she had full cause to, thinking of all the times she had been consumed with trifles of her own when he had been busy preparing himself to meet his Maker.

‘I want you three to take care of your mother since I will not be here to do it.’

Then Bella understood the finality of this summons.

‘And in the case of Isaac and Jack, to look out for them
especially
for they will not have the benefit of a father, as you have had.’

He stopped to take breath and in the noisy silence of him drawing in enough air to continue, Tom had crumpled to his
knees at the side of the bed weeping with a terrible clamour in big manly croaks. A lump was blossoming in Bella’s throat. She gripped the iron foot of the bed and bit down on her lip to stop it trembling.

‘See to it, Bella,’ Pappie went on, for it was a struggle for him to speak and he was determined to get to the end of his piece, ‘that Jack gets to school every day. We don’t want him ending up as a dunce. I know I can’t depend on this pair of blackguards in that regard.’

That really set Tom off. So much so that Mother had to hurry into the room and steer him away.

‘Come here,’ Pappie said then to Bella, almost in a whisper.

He reached out his waxen hand.

‘You’re a good girl, Bella, and you’ve made your father very proud.’

And then she could hold her tears no longer. Out they came in a childish spurt and she was all set to confess about Reverend Leeper for she knew she was not worthy of his blessing. But she stopped herself; it would have broken his heart to know that she had been besmirched even in the smallest way. Better that he go ignorant in his pride, firm in the knowledge that she was a good and faithful daughter. If he had lived, perhaps all manner of things would have been different. But without him, there was no one to think the best of her, and so she began to fall in her own estimation.

P
appie was buried on a tender day in September with some sun, a little blustery wind and a pale sky filled with racing cloud. It was a fine funeral with three carriages, twenty-six cabs and six side-cars. The undertaker and his assistant wore
silver-buttoned
long coats of Prussian blue and black top hats, the horses – one black, one roan – were kitted out in embroidered head-dresses with black plumes.

Once inside the gates of Mount Jerome, Bella and Mother alighted from the carriage. The wide avenue petered out into narrow pathways between the green-furred gravestones, and they made their way on foot to the spot where Pappie would be buried. Mick and Tom and two men from the Mission shouldered the coffin along with two of the hearsemen. It tilted to one side on account of Mick being smaller than the others, Bella noticed, but
she countered this with the thought that Pappie would have been proud of the boys at that moment for they looked like the men he had wanted them to be, stiff and serious in their good suits, and sober. But as soon as the Canon had said his piece –
dust to dust, the way we all go in the end
– and the gravediggers had begun to shovel the clods of earth over the coffin, she knew her brothers’ minds would turn towards diversion.

It came in the person of the Bugler Beaver, whom Bella spied once the coffin was lowered, moving through the crowd in his gay scarlets.

‘Sorry for your trouble, Miss Casey,’ he said and bowed a little like a real gentleman.

He took her gloved hand in both of his. He, too, was wearing gloves – spotless white ones – and even though their flesh did not meet, Bella felt a certain intent in his touch. This much she had learned. The recognition came as a soft shock; she could no longer count herself innocent.

‘What’s that fella doing here?’ Mother said
sotto voce
as the Bugler turned away.

‘To pay his respects to Pappie,’ Bella whispered harshly.

‘Sure, he never even met your father,’ Mother said.

Mick collared his military friend, clapping an arm across his gold-encrusted shoulders and muttered urgently. ‘What about a jar with Tom and myself in The Bleeding Horse?’

‘Now now, son,’ Mother said.

Mick scowled. He took the Bugler aside and there was some urgent whisperings between them, some male hugger-mugger afoot.

‘Bella?’ Mother called.

She was climbing into the carriage and settling herself on the seat with Jack on her lap.

Presently Mick joined them, lumbering aboard reluctantly and Tom followed him. The carriage took off with an enormous lurch. Through the window, Bella watched as the figure of
Corporal
Beaver, standing alone by the graveside, receded from view. The other mourners had scattered so her last sight of Pappie was of the Bugler, standing guard at the open grave.

It was a desolate sensation returning home to the darkened rooms with the blinds down, the clocks stopped. It seemed to Bella as if the house held its breath, the floorboards waiting for Pappie’s tread. Only his belongings were still in residence – his jacket hanging on the hook of the parlour door; his books by the bedside. He had got only half-way through Trollope’s
The Way We Live Now
, she noticed, thinking how poignant that he would never know now how the tale finished. His Bible lay on the counterpane. She opened it and riffled through its pages. In the inside back cover he had inscribed the marks from her report cards at the College. Her 52 out of 60 for penmanship, her 56 for spelling, even her poor 28 for grammar. It made her heart seize and she shut the good book quickly so as not to be reminded. Of
his absence; of her own promise.

She set to and made an early tea. Mrs Tancred, next door, had left some eggs and they sat down to eat in a silence as solemn as the Last Supper, broken only by Isaac who remarked there wasn’t much eating in an egg, not for a man. He was all of twelve but he had developed notions of himself, particularly with his father gone. They were the only words exchanged between them. Bella was glad of it – it seemed an offence to chatter. When they had finished and Bella was stacking the plates, Jack came up to her and nuzzled into her side.

‘When is me Da coming home?’

Of late, being distracted, Mother had let him pal around with that Connor boy, a Catholic of decidedly rough manners who called his own father just plain Da.

‘Who’s looking after me Da?’ he persisted. ‘Why aren’t you up in the room looking after me Da?’

She hated hearing Pappie being reduced to the level of Mr Connor, a common labourer.

‘Oh Jack, will you stop it before you give us all a headache,’ she snapped at him.

‘Bella!’ Mother said and whisked the child on to her lap.

‘He’s only making us all feel mournful with his lonesome whingeing,’ Bella said trying to justify being short with him.

They each lapsed into their own thoughts after that. Jack fell into a drowsy sleep; Mick lit up his pipe; Tom read the
newspaper
. Then somewhere in the distance a church bell chimed
the seventh hour. Mick and Tom hauled themselves out of their stupor and donned their greatcoats.

‘We’re off for a quick drink,’ Mick announced for both of them. That’s the way it was with those two. Mick rowed out and Tom got carried in his wake. He halted at the door. ‘A word
outside
, Bella, if you please.’

She followed them out into the hall.

‘I have something for you, Bella,’ he said, ‘though I’m not sure it’s at all suitable.’

‘What? What do you mean?’

‘I have a little
billay do
for you,’ he said, plucking a letter from his inside pocket. ‘From an admirer.’

She blanched. The Reverend, she thought immediately. Had it come to this that he could worm his way into the middle of their grieving? Then she shook herself; it couldn’t be. Could it?

‘What admirer?’ she asked, making to snatch the note from his hand. Mick winked at her and feinted a few times.

‘Ah, Bella,’ he taunted as the pair of them danced around the letter, ‘don’t you know that a certain bugler is sweet on you?’

Fear gave way to relief.

‘Give it over here,’ she cried, ‘and quit your teasing.’

‘What’s going on out there?’ Mother called out.

‘Give it over,’ she hissed, ‘before we draw Mother down upon us.’

Mick surrendered the letter.

‘You’ll have to open it straight away – he’ll be wanting an answer.’

She fixed in her mind the picture of the Bugler Beaver in the
graveyard in his jaunty regimentals, standing guard beside Pappie.

‘Bella?’ Mother called.

‘You can tell Corporal Beaver, the answer’s yes,’ she said though she did not even know the question.

She shut the door behind the boys and leaned up against it, still holding the unopened letter. Bella was written on the outside (no more Miss Casey, she noticed) in a steady, robust hand with no curlicues, the hand of a practical man. It wasn’t cramped like a clerk’s or illegible like a doctor’s. It could have been the script of a teacher so well-modulated was it, but it had a confident flair, an impatient progress, the letters sloping forward as if each one was rushing to embrace the next. She opened the envelope and unfolded the note.

‘Dear Bella,’ it read. ‘Slip out if you can. Am having a jar with Mick and Tom in Nagle’s but can make my excuses and meet you at the Rotunda Rooms at 9. Say you’ll come. Nick.’

There wasn’t much to it, though quite what she had been
expecting
she couldn’t rightly say. It sounded terse, a command rather than a request. But those last words – say you’ll come – betrayed an urgency that twinned with her own. Was
this
the way out?

She sat in the parlour till going on half past eight. Mrs Tancred was in residence and looked like she might stay the whole night.

‘Mother,’ she said quietly, using words she’d been rehearsing for over two hours. ‘I’m going to slip out for a breath of fresh air
before it gets dark. Maybe take a turn by the canal.’

Before she had a chance to reply, she turned to Mrs Tancred and used her sweetest tone. ‘Would you sit with my mother a while longer, Mrs Tancred, for I wouldn’t want her to be alone on this of all nights.’

‘Gladly, Bella, I’d be happy to.’ She beamed at Bella
munificently
for Mrs Tancred was the kind of woman who was never happier than when she was being considered as indispensable in the affairs of others.

‘My head is throbbing,’ Bella said by way of explanation, ‘after the exigencies of the day.’

‘I know, I know, Bella, it’s been a long day for all of us,’ Mrs Tancred said, clutching her own temples in sympathy. ‘Sure your mother is dead on her feet.’

Mother sat with her head bowed. Bella was not even sure if she was awake or asleep.

‘Is that alright with you, Mother?’

Mother made no reply. She wouldn’t say anything derogatory in front of a neighbour. As Bella put on her hat and threw a shawl over her shoulders, she added, ‘I won’t be long, Mother.’

‘Oh, please yourself, Madam,’ Mother replied tartly, ‘for you do always.’

Well, Mrs Tancred thought, the hide of Missy, off out to see a young man on the very night of her father’s funeral. Oh you couldn’t pull the wool over her eyes. A breath of fresh air, a stroll
by the canal, is it? The only business done there was of the
unsavoury
kind, in the shadow of the bridges. Not that she’d accuse Bella Casey of that. But Mrs Tancred, mother of three daughters, knew well when a lie was being told. She had a nose for it. What amazed her was that it was Bella Casey making those ramshackle excuses. She’d always been a girl for the books, never gave her mother a day’s worry and now, all of a sudden …

Guiltily, Bella made her way down Dorset Street, looking over her shoulder as she went for fear that – what? – Mother might be following and learn her true intentions. It was ridiculous, she knew. Perhaps it was the ghost of her father she feared would appear, doomed for a certain term to walk the night. But Pappie had died in a state of grace; he had no need to linger. She turned the thought on its head. Perhaps Corporal Beaver’s declaration of interest coming at this moment was due to Pappie’s
intercession
? There, she felt better. She was glad to reach the illuminated streets and the sounds of revelry on Rutland Square. There might have been rowdies spilling out on to the street from pubs and wine lodges but they left her alone. Maybe it was out of respect for her mourning garb.

The season was on the change and the nights were drawing in so it was verging on darkness. She could feel her heart
thumping
faster than was usual but it wasn’t romantic fervour, but the subterfuge that agitated her. Small doubts niggled at her – was Corporal Beaver’s manner a mite oily, his looks on the flashy
side, his eye a tad gamey, his manner too charming to be entirely sincere? But she countered with herself, wasn’t she settled now, with a year’s teaching behind her and an increment on the way? Wasn’t it high time for her to be considering her marriage lines? But what swayed her most in this argument with herself was the Reverend. A few days’ respite from him, even if it was to mourn for her dear Pappie, had convinced her. She had to find a way to escape from his avid clutches. Without Pappie, the breastplate of her armour against the world had been removed. Even though he had known nothing of her predicament, she felt weaker without him. Anyway, it was too late to turn back now for the Corporal was already there, standing under a halo of golden lamplight.

‘Is it yourself, Bella?’ he asked simply as she approached as if they had met by chance rather than by assignation.

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘it is.’

‘I knew you’d come,’ he said.

How, she wondered, how did he know? Was there something about her that spoke so loudly of easy virtue when that was not at all her nature? What made him so sure that a respectable
daughter
, such as she was, would venture out and her father not cold in his grave? But she banished these disputatious thoughts. She was here, wasn’t she?

They strolled down Sackville Street as light ebbed from the ashen sky. Corporal Beaver was attentive to a fault, steering her with the faintest touch to her elbow and prompting her into
conversation with a gentle but confident air.

‘You are now a fully-fledged schoolma’am, the boys tell me,’ he said.

It gratified her to know that he had been following her
progress
.

‘Yes,’ she said for she could think of no way to elaborate. She should have pressed him for some details of his occupation at this point but she found herself miserably mute.

‘How do you keep them all in check?’ he asked. ‘Bad enough to keep the barrack-room in order, but a squad of snotty children!’

‘We try to keep their noses clean,’ she retorted.

‘Touch-ay,’ he said winking.

The humour seemed to lubricate their exchange and though she had been shy at the start, the words began to flow when she spoke about her work.

‘Lead by example, that is what Mr Pestalozzi, the great
educator
, would say.’

‘Pestalozzi – would he be an Italian now?’ the Corporal asked. He drew the eye out of Italian, she noticed.

‘No, no, he was Swiss,’ she replied. ‘In each child, Pestalozzi said, is a little seed that contains the design of the tree so the
educator
must take care that no untoward influence disturbs Nature’s march of developments. Before a child learns words by rote, he must understand and so the teacher must show the meaning of the word in a practical way.’

‘So you demonstrate …’ he said.

‘Exactly so!’ She was excited that he was so quick on the uptake.

‘Like the great generals,’ he went on, ‘with their battle plans.’

‘From the known to the unknown, that’s how Pestalozzi put it,’ she said. ‘Life shapes us and the life that shapes us is not a matter of words but action.’

The Corporal was silent and Bella feared she had lost him. She had committed the sin of straying into abstraction where Pestalozzi would insist on the concrete. So she went on to describe the schoolroom in Dominick Street with its smoking stove and clouded windows. She chattered on about the motto she penned on the blackboard each day –
A Healthy Mind in a Healthy Body, A Place for Everything and Everything in its Place, Inaction Begets Misdeeds, A Mended Woollen Smock is Better than A Silken Robe That Has Not Been Paid For
– for even small children, she told him, must have something to aim for, some higher ambition to lift them out of whatever brute circumstances they might find themselves in.