Belle's Song Read online

  BELLE’S SONG

  K. M. GRANT

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  Author’s Note

  Selected Timeline

  Also By K. M. Grant

  Imprint

  To MS, with love

  1

  London, August 1387

  It happened in that season that one day

  In Southwark, at the Tabard …

  Tragedy and opportunity, conspiracies and compulsions. And love. Unexpected love. Once-in-a-lifetime love. Love as real and true as I am. I’ll find it hardest to tell of the tragedy, since it was partly—no, entirely—my fault. And it was a real tragedy, at least for my father. It altered his life and not in a good way, although, like most tragedies, the actual tragic event was not the end of the matter. The opportunity, indeed, emerged from the tragedy, and love sprang from the opportunity. How can anybody wish opportunity and love away? Yet the opportunity and how I live now doesn’t make the tragedy less tragic. Life’s a bit of a muddle like that, I find.

  Why tell my story? you may ask. That’s easy. Somebody should know the whole truth. People know parts, you see, but only one person knows everything and I’m frightened that he’s dead. So if I die too, and of course one day I will, then nobody will know everything except God, and he won’t be telling because he’s only interested in his own story. If you’ve got a story, better tell it yourself.

  So, here goes. My father was a bell founder: that is, he made bells, which is a difficult profession involving large weights, hot metal, and hairbreadth calculations. Until the tragedy, he was always busy. London, where we lived, was greedy for bells, and the bells my father made pealed proof of his talent and diligence several times an hour. If my father was downcast or worried, my mother would stand outside our door, hands on flirtatious hips, and identify each individual tone. “St. Martin Vintry, St. Jude’s, St. Mary’s on the Wharf, St. James Garlickhythe, St. Michael at Paternoster, White Friars, St. Paul’s, St. Mary Overie.” My father would pretend he wasn’t listening, but as her litany drew to an end he’d throw out long arms to catch her waist and then whirl her about until she had to remind him that whirligigs cannot make dinners. Their love reminded me of a bell. It resounded, if you know what I mean.

  I was an only child, which, for a bell founder, is an unhappy circumstance. It’s really a family trade. I was also the wrong sex, being a girl, although this did at least allow my father to call me Belle, which was the kind of joke he liked. “Sound the bell, Belle!” “Peel your apple, Belle!” “Belle, get your clapper swinging!” when I lingered in my bed. He denied himself no pun, no wordplay, no easy joke. As my figure grew more bell-like, others took up the chant. My name, I have to say, has been a trial.

  Nor, to my father’s great disappointment, did it generate an interest in bell founding. Not then and not now. I’ve never been a practical girl. I’ve no feel for the workman’s lathe or even the domestic broom, which is why, after my mother died, our house was a mess.

  I can see now that the loss of his love nearly killed my father, half through grief and half through anger. For months, tears streaming down his face, he raged against a God who decreed that a good woman, his woman, and a woman who, incidentally, had already survived the plague, should be unexpectedly and hideously carried off by a stupid pox. No priest could supply the answer. Nor could I fill the ache in his arms for the feel of her waist or even cheer him with the bell litany. I had no gift for that. My gifts were all to do with the made-up, not the real. So we fell into bad habits, he and I. After my father’s tears had dried into a salty riverbed of wrinkles, his rants were directed not at God but at me, as though the dirty pots and disheveled laundry were somehow a betrayal of my mother’s memory. I’m afraid I simply took no notice. I mean, what did the house matter? It was just an extension of my father’s workshop, and without my mother to fill it with light and baking, just a place for eating and sleeping. More and more, I lived in my head and, by and by, through my compulsions.

  If you’re also a life-in-the-head person, you’ll know that it’s half joy, half trouble. I found it made me few friends, and I could hardly complain. If, most of the time, you’re pretending to be somebody else, people soon lose interest in who you really are. Indeed, I didn’t really know who I was myself and concocted a variety of persona, sometimes human, sometimes animal. Goddesses, ermine, and unicorns were my favorites. Sometimes I even imagined myself a knight, although I didn’t want to be a man.

  Worse than my imaginings, so far as my father was concerned, was the undoubted fact that when you’re a goddess battling with the devil or a unicorn caught in a thicket, you just don’t smell scorching bread. Nor, when you’re an ice-white queen straddling the back of a blood-red horse or a dear little ermine snug against a knight’s breast, do you bother about soiled linen or remember to feed the chickens. Chickens! I only ever fantasized about them in a pot.

  My most pressing compulsion began as a game and became serious only after my mother died, probably because she wasn’t there to laugh it away. Not that the compulsion was sinister, unless you find the number three sinister. I’d say it was more of a nuisance. It began by my having to do a kind of three-skip bounce before mounting our pony and progressed to cutting all my food into three or multiples of three and going up the stairs only in threes. With eight stairs, this meant that at the top or the bottom I had to put in an extra step so that there were nine footfalls. If I forgot—well, I never forgot. I couldn’t really, because the counting was soon accompanied by bargaining. Once, for example, it came to me that if I didn’t see three gray ponies by the time I reached the end of our street, something bad would happen on my way home. I did see three, only one of them was really a horse. On my way home, a woman emptied a bowl of slop onto my head. Another time, I saw two one-horned oxen and had to scour the city to find a third, because if I didn’t, the next visitor to the house would bring bad news. Luckily I did find another and the next visitor to the house was the apothecary, who told my father the plague was not expected to return. Had I not seen that third onehorner, I know the news would have been different. Then there was the morning I had to catch three leaves between the first toll of the compline bell and the last. If I failed, God would take three days off my life. I did catch a third leaf, but only just, and it had another leaf attached to it. I’m still uncertain whether this was a good or bad sign. I think I may live three extra days, but I’m pretty sure that the last one will contain a surprise. In my experience, bargains have to be very precisely kept.

  Why three? I don’t know, except that three is the number of the Trinity, the number of tasks a knight usually has to perform on a quest, and the number of curses an old beggar woman once showered on me to make me give her three pennies.

  I might as well tell you now that life-in-the-head and my obsession with three weren’t my only peculiarities. For my twelfth birthday—my second motherless one—I wanted a company of musicians to follow me about. Not the tiddly-taddly horn and drum offered by every tinker in every marketplace, much as I loved dancing to jolly rhythms at the midsummer fair or during the Christmas feast. No. The music I craved was as yet unwritten for instruments as yet uncrafted—music, so I rather pompously told my father, to wrench tears from the driest of eyes and swell the soul even of the godless. In other words, music to go with the stories I inhabited. My father, who, de
spite his grief and my domestic failures, had tried hard to make my birthday as my mother would have made it, listened with some patience and was not unsympathetic. However, since a perfect bell peal was the only music he really liked (I’m fond of triple peals, any others make me nervous), I know he didn’t fully understand.

  He did understand, though, that the house was a pigsty and, birthday or not, told me that if he came across yet another rotten egg, never mind swelling the souls of the godless, he’d make music like the devil. We ended that birthday with a row that contained no music of any kind, and though I found I couldn’t leave him without an embrace, it was three cold kisses that I planted on his cheek before we parted for the night.

  Later, when the poxy strummers who played at the Tabard Inn next door struck up their chorus, I crept out and hurled six rotten eggs through their window. The rest I dispatched into the brothel farther down the road. How dare those ladies be happy?

  Now to the tragic event itself. I say only one thing in my defense. I was so sorry afterward I thought I might die and I must have relived the moment a million times, pinpointing the very second, less than a second, before which everything was normal and after which nothing was normal again. I would lie awake, rubbing the doll my mother knitted for me against that special place between the bottom of your ear and your chin, and as I rubbed, would rewrite the moment, rewrite the whole day, then go on to rewrite my whole life so that I was a different person, a nice person, a daughter of whom my father could be proud. But rewriting would not change the facts. Indeed, the only thing to change was Poppet, who I rubbed so hard that all the features of her face were scoured away. Soon, just like me, she didn’t know who she was anymore. In the end, to stop her vanishing altogether, I covered what was left of her face with a washcloth.

  I think it was the day I covered her face that I took to rubbing my shins with a pumice stone. It was a surprise, the first time they bled. I’d started with the pumice stone before, taking one from my father’s toolbox to help get rid of the smoky stubble that was beginning to speckle my legs. Hair should only be on your head, although the priests want even that covered. They say it leads a man to sin. That’s ridiculous. No man would be led to sin by my red tangles. Nevertheless, the priests are right about one thing: only a man-God would allow hair to grow where no girl wants it. Anyway, after the tragedy, as well as the hair on my legs, I rubbed away my skin. It was an accident at first, and I was frightened by the blood. It was also a curious, biting pleasure. After that I couldn’t stop myself. Every time my flesh tore, part of me was horrified, but a greater part rejoiced in the ugliness and the pain because it obliterated everything else. I suppose a gallon of wine would have done the same, but I didn’t like the taste. For several years now I have tried to keep the pumice out of reach. I’m not always successful. Even as I write this, I’m tempted, and when I’m tempted, I sometimes rub my ankle for a second or so. Ankles bleed a lot.

  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 o
nce 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.