The Rising of Bella Casey (26 page)

T
he slaughter of an archduke and his duchess by a madman on the streets of Sarajevo, seemed so unlikely to touch their small lives that Bella's only thought when it happened was that this young assassin must be a young man much like Jack, a hot-head bent on villainous upheaval. She issued a silent prayer that he might not end up like this Princip fellow – with bloodstained hands. Otherwise, the war in Europe made not much odds at the start, for everyone thought it a skirmish that would be over by Christmas. But when James made his announcement one Friday evening, it brought the Great War home.

‘It's the Empire's hour of need,' he said plainly when Bella asked why.

She should not have been surprised. He'd finished his
apprenticeship
and with printer's ink on his hands he was churning out recruitment posters with Kitchener's pointed finger. Day in, day out he saw other young men going out on the troop ships and it must have seemed to him an exciting adventure to head off to a war. There were uniforms out and about the streets once again, but not the cocky regimentals of Nick's day, but workaday khaki.

James was a mystery to her. Young Valentine, her Baby John, she knew their hurts and prides as well as she knew her own. But James, being the eldest son and the pride of his father, had, in the end, to stand up to Nick on Bella's behalf. Ever since, he had held himself apart as if that dastardly business had demeaned him, not her.

‘But we have need of you at home,' she replied.

‘Ah Mam, I want to follow my father into colours,' he said, ‘it's in the blood.'

What else, she wondered, was in the blood.

‘But you're only a child.'

‘Old men are being called – look at Uncle Mick called back to the Engineers. If he can serve, then I can. I won't be left out of it.'

There was no point in arguing that every soldier fighting meant a family at home going without for the Army paid a
pittance
for patriotism. There was no point in arguing at all. The boy's mind was made up.

When told of James's enlistment, Jack took up the contrary position.

‘This war,' he said, ‘is Ireland's opportunity.'

‘Opportunity for what?' she asked, exasperated, for his cryptic words irritated her, laden with doom and foreknowledge.

‘For Home Rule, for freedom, for revolution.'

It disturbed her, this kind of talk for it spoke of a cruel
indifference
to his own flesh and blood.

‘How can you talk like that with two of your own heading for the fields of France?' she asked.

‘Just like the business with the Boer,' he pronounced, ‘it's not our war.'

There it was again, the old division. The us and them. What had started as an argument between her husband and her brother, two sides of the one coin she'd always thought, had spread out like a wasting disease, so that in the end not one of them was untouched. It had infected Tom and Isaac who'd thrown their lot in with the enemy and had been aggravated by her mother who'd used boycott as an antidote. Now the sickness was spreading. Wars and strife, assassination, revolution. She remembered a conversation she'd had with Valentine just days before James had enlisted.

‘What would happen, do you think, Mam,' he had enquired, ‘if all the coal that rested in the cellars of the gentry were to ignite like all hell broke loose and engulf all above ground in a
consuming
conflagration?'

He was apt to make such observations, was Valentine. He worked as a coal factor. Oh, it was a cruel job – out in all
weathers
and breathing in coal dust at every hand's turn. His skin was permanently sooted, his lungs clogged up. At night his coughing kept the entire house awake. It was a pain to Bella to see him age before her eyes for the work gave his face a pitted, haunted look. And he had been so bright at school, quick especially at the mathematics, but now all he calculated was the heft and haul of coal sacks on his back. His view was of gaping coal holes, which were, he said, like the very gates of Hades.

She did not have an answer for Valentine but she realised that her son's musings were taking on the hue of premonition. There were movements afoot too large to counter. What chance the puny turnings of a single heart when set against the angry baying of the crowd? Despite their kinship, she saw now that the
division
between her and Jack could never be undone. He would always side with the others – the Gaelic speakers, the Romanists, the haters of the Crown. There was no healing it, she realised. Truce couldn't do it, nor appeasement. Not even love. The big world would have its way and do them all down in the end. And then the Rising happened.

H
earing the strains of Beethoven’s
Moonlight Sonata
emanating
from the Beavers’ front room, Sadie Kinch couldn’t resist knocking. Was it a gramophone the Beavers were after
getting
? And where from? The music halted as soon as she rapped on the wood. Well, thought Sadie, her ladyship couldn’t very well pretend she wasn’t in – as she was wont to do – with that
high-falutin
’ music going on inside. Mrs Beaver opened the door a fraction.

‘Yes, Mrs Kinch?’ she demanded in that way she did, as if she were a school warden or, worse, a police constable and you had been caught with your hand in the till.

‘Oh, is it yourself playing that lovely music?’ Sadie said,
peering
into the room through the restricted aperture and spying the decorated corner of the piano lid.

‘Can I help you?’ Mrs Beaver said, though she was not in the way of dispensing much in the way of largesse; the Beavers were as poor as church mice.

‘I was just passing,’ Sadie said, ‘on my way into town … and then I heard that heavenly music.’ A lie, for Sadie Kinch thought what she heard dreary as a funeral dirge. A good old come-all-ye, or something sentimental was more her style (‘When You Said You Loved Me’ was her own favourite; her husband had sung it at their wedding.) But Mrs Beaver would be too posh for that.

‘It’s Beethoven,’ Mrs Beaver said, seeming to relent.

‘Beethoven,’ Sadie repeated sagely. Foreign, she thought.

‘I didn’t know you had a piano,’ Sadie said, inching forward. ‘Is it new?’

‘A legacy,’ Mrs Beaver said, opening the door a little wider. ‘From a relation of ours.’

‘Oh, I see,’ Sadie said. ‘Well, I always say no home is complete without a piano.’

‘That’s true,’ Mrs Beaver replied, looking so moistly at the piano it could have been a sleeping child. Sadie felt the tide
turning
. This was the first time she and Mrs Beaver had agreed on anything.

‘Would you play a little more?’ she ventured. ‘I’ll just stand on the threshold here … and you carry on.’ That way she could give the piano the once-over.

This suggestion seemed to discombobulate Mrs Beaver. She made no reply but shyly – yes, Sadie thought, who would have
thought Mrs Beaver shy? – she sat on the kitchen chair pulled up in front of the piano and raised her hands above the keys. The legacy, Sadie noted, did not include a piano stool.

‘Well, that’s a very fine specimen, and no mistake,’ Sadie said in the hope of forestalling the dreary music. ‘What kind of wood is that?’

‘Rosewood,’ Mrs Beaver said, ‘Indian rosewood.’

‘An aunt did you say? That left it to you?’ Sadie persisted. It was a month since the Rising and the flotsam of it was still
bobbing
up in houses across the city.

‘I didn’t say,’ Mrs Beaver replied. She was a stickler for
everything
being present and correct – even when she was about to be unmasked as a looter. ‘But yes, an aunt it was – from the Archer side of the family – my mother’s people.’

‘Isn’t it a pity they didn’t take more care of it?’ Sadie said. ‘There are a few scrapes here on the cabinet, I see, as if it had been mistreated.’

‘The men who delivered it were none too gentle, Mrs Kinch, and so it got a bit damaged in transport.’

‘Isn’t that shocking altogether! Your beautiful legacy
manhandled
in that way! But I suppose the wonder of it is that they
managed
to deliver it at all with all the mayhem on the streets …’

Mrs Beaver gave Sadie her haughtiest look then, as if she’d detected a bad smell in the room. She looked her down and up, her eyes coming to rest on Sadie’s hat, a black velvet
confection
with red and gold threaded through the band, on its first
street outing.

‘Isn’t that a lovely hat you’re wearing, Mrs Kinch?’ she said. ‘Did your husband get it for you?’

Damn her, Sadie thought, always getting the upper hand. She’d kept the hat under wraps for weeks.

‘Well, I can’t dawdle, Mrs Beaver. Thanks ever so for the recital.’

She hurried off – wait until Mrs Clarke heard this! Sure, an old hat was small beer when set against a piano.

The Broadwood was a worldly thing, a possession not rightly hers, a spoil of war. Everything about it was wrong. Bella knew the dangers of investing in the material, attaching to belongings emotions that more rightly sit with God. But the Broadwood made a fool of her. Made her bashful and blushing and all of a dither. For it was more than mere acquisition. It was as if she’d never owned a piano and this was her first. Which it was, in a roundabout way. She’d only had a lease on the Elysian. And the Cadby had been robbed from her long before it had been sold off. But the Broadwood, the Broadwood was all hers. Hadn’t she come by it by her own efforts? Hadn’t she risked life and limb for it? Her own and her son’s. Not that she was proud of that. But she had it now with no harm done and possession made her defiant. She would not make the same mistake twice. This piano would not be taken to the pawn, or used to ward off want. No, she would never part with the Broadwood. It might have been
ill-gotten but it stood in for every refinement she had nurtured in her breast through long years of privation. It seemed to open the door on her girlish self, so serious and high-minded and bent on improvement. When Bella considered
her
, she felt motherly towards her.

It was a queer sensation, like miraculously raising up a
daughter
who had been given up for dead. Thought lost but now found. For the first time in decades, Bella thought about her first vocation, and with it a string of propositions that she found herself in idle moments threading together like small beads. It was preposterous to believe that she could ever regain a
schoolroom
. Somewhere there were papers to the effect that she was an unfit person to be in charge of young minds, albeit stamped by a man deranged by his own corruption. But with a piano in residence, could not the schoolroom come to her? She saw herself again as a teacher, schooling the children of the gentry in scales and in notation and with it regaining some semblance of her former self. She imagined a brass shingle outside her door. She even sketched the wording.
Mrs Beaver, Music Teacher, Lessons Given in the Pianoforte. Rates Moderate
. That would put a stop to all those prophets of doom, her own flesh and blood included, who took her for some broken-down creature, who failed to see the flame of elevation that burned fiercely within. She was careful to say nothing of the run of her thoughts, lest she open herself up to ridicule. She could imagine her neighbours cackling at the very idea. Mrs Beaver – the teacher? To the hard-headed, to those
done in by poverty of the mind, her ambitions might appear as fatuous or worse, a fabulation that a crazed mind might produce, as outlandish as Nick marching to Amiens Street Station in full regalia and thinking it to be Bombay.

Her present surroundings, she knew, could not support such fancies. What well-born child would venture down Brady’s Lane to practise her Czerny five-finger exercises? What respectable gentlewoman from Rathgar or Malahide, would risk the slings and arrows of East Wall to perfect her polonaise? Polonaise – imagine Sadie Kinch trying to get her tongue around that? But if Bella were living at a
good
address, a little house in Portobello or Rathmines, maybe, where the neighbours kept their doors shut and passing strangers would not be subject to suspicious scrutiny or downright hostility, then … The phantasm only went this far but it sustained her, even though she could not see how she might make the journey from Brady’s Lane to such Elysian fields.

It was her landlady, Mrs Irvine, who put the idea of charring work into her head for she asked outright when her regular woman let her down.

‘Would you consider it, Mrs Beaver? You’d be doing me a great favour. A shilling a go,’ she said, ‘that’s the going rate.’

Bella had never been so offended. What do you take me for, she was about to answer this woman’s impertinence, I am a teacher, not a skivvy! (Her secretive ambition had got ahead of her.) But a shilling a go? Oh, the glinting silvery promise of it.
Here
was
the means to effect her transformation. But in the same instant, she saw the parlous legacy of her own useless vanity. In their direst hour of need, she had never considered putting her own hand to work. She had relied on a kind of exalted innocence – but it was a treacherous innocence, she saw now. She had forced James and Valentine out of school and into manual labour; she’d even sacrificed her precious Susan to slavery, and never once had she thought to offer the sweat of her own brow to spare them. She had begged and borrowed, and now stolen; could scrubbing floors be lower than any of these? And wasn’t it in service to a higher ideal – the little house in Rathmines, the teacher’s shingle outside the door. She would open up a Post Office Savings Book and put a sum by weekly for this purpose alone so that it would not dwindle away in quotidian necessities. Two shillings a week, could she manage that…

‘What do you say, Mrs Beaver?’ Mrs Irvine asked.

‘Yes,’ Bella said, ‘yes, I say yes.’

Her body revolted against the hard graft. Her skin erupted as if in some enraged passion. Great blisters sprouted on her hands and arms and travelled to her shoulders in angry suppuration as if her very being broke out against the work. The dispensary doctor diagnosed erysipales. The external signs could be easily explained away – too much lye and soap, she told the boys when her face took on a scaly aspect. A lifetime of deception had made her adept. But the internal symptoms were far more frightening
for they seemed lodged in her mind and could not be put down to mere erysipales. Her temples would throb with piercing shafts of pain that altered the world of solid things, turning them into a miasma like sun glinting on water. It might have been a pleasant sensation – almost like a glimpse of Heaven itself so bright and shimmering was the light – but for the darting spasms of pain that accompanied it. But she didn’t tell anyone of these blinding moments for they had the hue of another ailment whose signs she knew all too well. A disease whose name she would not utter.

No matter her affliction, though, she determined her work at Mrs Irvine’s must go on. She douched the threshold, scoured the kitchen flags, polished the brasses and wiped the wainscots with an energy she had never applied in her own house for this work she saw now was both her punishment and her redemption.

Mrs Irvine had a fine red-brick in Drumcondra, two
receptions
and a garden. When she saw the comforts that Mrs Irvine enjoyed, Bella gave in momentarily to a mean misgiving. Our rent has kept her here in this high style, she thought. But it was a sentiment too close to Jack’s line of sedition for her liking so she did not indulge it. She preferred to imagine progressing to such an establishment herself rather than waste her time on rancorous envy. Hadn’t she escaped the tenements, after all? An
establishment
like this was not beyond her.

When she had proved herself a steady sort, Mrs Irvine
promoted
her to prestige tasks. She was even trusted with the silver.
A week before Christmas, when she arrived for duty, she was shown into the dining room and there it was, a splendid tea
service
arrayed on an inscribed tray.

‘A wedding gift, Mrs Beaver,’ she said, ‘so treat it with kid gloves, if you please.’

The service looked as if it had never been used.

‘Beautiful,’ she mused, ‘but dust collectors, I’m afraid, Mrs Beaver.’

If these were mine, Bella thought, I would have them out on show – the teapot with its swan’s neck spout, the milk jug’s puggish pour, the curlicued extravagance of the sugar bowl. She started with the teapot – something about its imperious spout. She poured the silver polish from the tin onto the rag, smearing it over the dulled contours of the pot. How quickly these
beauties
lost their sheen if left unattended. She worked the oozing fluid into the join of the spout and the hinges of the lid then let it be for a while so it could soak in. It was a strange thing, but when she applied the polish first, it muddied up the silver something dreadful. It made it cloudy and dull and left pinkish streaks behind, as if she were making more dirt, not getting rid of it. It was hard to credit that with several buffings the surface would come up so sparkling that it would give her back her own reflection, but enhanced.

The tray was the last to be done. She ran her fingers along the cursive lettering, feeling the tiny pieces of dirt lodged in the loops of the writing. This would be the very devil to clean. She smeared
the polish on, working it into the pitted tracks the writing made. The silver drank the fluid greedily. She took off the rubber gloves that Mrs Irvine had given her, the better to work the cloth, cloaked around her thumb nail, into the etched inscription. She worked blindly. It was like trying to find the pearl in a shell of grit. She must have spent twenty minutes at it, edging her finger into each last indentation. When she was done, she brought the tray to the window to examine her handiwork. So intent had she been on perfection, of bringing the silver to a pitch of shine, she hadn’t bothered to read what she’d been burnishing. She tilted the tray towards the blanched winter light. The
inscription
was perfectly legible now. Isabella Casey, it read, Mistress of her Circumstances.