The Rising of Bella Casey (5 page)

‘You’ll have to show me,’ he said.

‘Show you …?’

‘This cushy school you teach at,’ he replied. ‘When I was a lad, the leather was our teacher, which didn’t make me partial to book learning.’

‘Well, you have a fine hand, so your education wasn’t wasted on you.’

He halted in his tracks and looked at her abashed.

‘Truth is, Bella, I didn’t scribe that note myself. ’Twas your Mick penned it for me, for I wouldn’t trust my own penmanship with a teacher.’

It was her turn to colour. Imagine, she had not recognised her own brother’s hand! But then, a girl does not expect a love letter from her brother. No wonder Mick had been sniggering before he surrendered the note for he knew already what it contained.

‘But I dictated it,’ Corporal Beaver went on, ‘so the sentiments are mine, all mine.’

He laid a hand at her waist to emphasise the point. ‘Tell me more about this Pestalozzi chap.’

And so she prattled on as they ambled towards the river. Past Nelson’s Column, past the tram timekeeper in his half tall hat calling out his litany of destinations – Palmerston Park, Sydney Parade, Howth – past the Happy Ring House.

‘Oh look at me going on so,’ she said, ‘it must be the grief talking. Pappie, God rest him, was always keen to hear of my doings …’

She found her voice trailing away, remembering a particular Sunday evening when she had come home from the College to relieve Mother in the sick room. Pappie had been steeped in slumber that night and she remembered thinking her vigil had been fruitless. To her shame, the change in him, his very frailty, had made her wary of him. Anyway, she was stuck in her books, swotting up on Joyce’s
Handbook of School Management
, on which Miss Swanzy was threatening to examine them the
following week, and she was beside herself for fear she’d fail. She had been hard at it when Pappie cocked open an eye and said softly.

‘Fetch down the Shakespeare, Bella, there’s a good girl, and give us a bit of
King Lear
. I do love the way you read that.’

And what had she said to him?

‘Ah, not now Pappie, sure amn’t I too busy with my own books?’

A thankless child, sharper than a serpent’s tooth.

The tears came in an undignified squall at the memory. The Corporal moved quickly, folding her in his arms, there on the street, and he let her cry until she had wept her fill on his
golden-crested
shoulder. When she was sated, he fished out of his
uniform
pocket a large handkerchief and tilting her chin towards the light, he mopped her damp face like he would have a child’s.

‘People will think I’ve got you into trouble,’ he said finally.

She was too embarrassed to look at him. In the Casey
household
water drops were considered women’s weapons and she had turned Corporal Beaver into a comforter when she had
determined
to be bright as a sovereign. He took her arm and led her into the portico of a shop and retrieved a silver hip flask from his tunic. How capacious those uniforms are, she thought, and so taken up with decoration you could hardly imagine they could hide such deep pockets which seemed on the surface thin as pursed lips. Tossing his head back, the Corporal drank deeply. With a satisfied sigh, he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

‘Care for a drop, milady?’ he asked holding out the flask to Bella. She saw at closer inspection it was made of plate.

She shook her head.

‘My god,’ he said, laughing. ‘A Casey that doesn’t take a drop?’

Alcohol had never passed her lips, but now she was being offered a flask on the street! If Reverend Leeper were to see this … But perhaps this is what he did see, some laxity of morals she barely knew in herself. But no, she would not let the Reverend be the judge of her.

‘Ah, go on,’ the Corporal said, ‘it’ll be a comfort to you.’

Bella thought of Pappie – there was no escaping him on that day – and felt the sprouting tears again. So, to create a diversion, she took the flask and drank. It was cold as she washed it around her mouth, but when she swallowed it, it burned her up as if someone had set her alight. It brought scalding tears to her eyes, but at least this time, she could blame it on the spirits.

‘There, there, girl,’ the Corporal said as the whiskey inflamed her breast and she coughed and spluttered.

He clapped her back and then his mouth was on hers, and it was Nicholas Beaver she was imbibing. The taste of him, even without the whiskey, was intoxicating and as their inflamed breaths mingled and his tongue found its way into the arched vault of her mouth, it was as if her whole body had been roused from slumber.

‘Bella, Bella,’ he whispered as they drew apart. ‘Did anybody tell you, you’re a fine silk shawl in a crowd of cotton?’

As she pushed open the hall door of Innisfallen Parade, she prayed that the household would be abed. She stole into the
parlour
, remembering that only yesterday in this very room they had shut the wooden door on Pappie. She remembered the
hearsemen
driving the screws home, each one with a grinding squeal, as if the wood refused the brass. It seemed like another age, so
distant
was that scene – the black-plumed horses, the clods landing on the coffin lid. The fire was almost out and there was no sign of Mother or Mrs Tancred. She expected to hear Mother’s voice call out from the back room, but instead another voice greeted her, the wretched whimper of a child torn from sleep. Jack, bleary with some night-horror, stood in the doorway rubbing his eyes.

‘Where’s me Da?’ he cried in a bewildered tone.

‘Your Pappie’s gone to Heaven,’ Bella said softly.

‘Ma says he’s in the ground; she says he’s in Mount Jerome.’

‘Mother’s right, my pet.’

‘Won’t me Da be cold out there?’

‘Your Pappie’s quite safe,’ she said refraining from using the Da word.

‘But what happens when it rains?’ he asked, agitated again.

‘Pappie’s body was buried in the ground, but his spirit is where rain or wind can’t touch him, his spirit has entered the Great Silence.’

She gathered the child up in her arms to dispel whatever demons had woken him, burying her head in the crook of his little neck.

‘Bella, you’re hurt!’ he said.

‘Hurt?’

‘Look, look,’ he said pointing to her throat.

She rose and looked at herself in the mirror over the mantel. There was a strawberry bruise where Nicholas Beaver had left his mark. She smarted with shame that she had come into such a squalid reckoning of her womanhood on this of all days.

‘Are you going to die too?’ the child asked, frantic.

‘No, no, my pet, that’s just a little scratch. Don’t you know your sister would never leave you? Sure who’d look after Jack Casey if I were not here?’

And that, finally, seemed to comfort him.

T
he following day she returned to her post. The Reverend Leeper appeared at dinner-time as she was supervising the children in the yard.

‘Miss Casey,’ he said, ‘Accept my deepest condolences on your loss.’

‘Thank you,’ she managed to murmur. When he was being benign, she found herself softening towards him.

‘You have been sorely missed, my dear.’

She regretted instantly her concession. The endearment seemed brazen; the possessive added as an insult.

‘Isabella …’ he breathed leaning in to her, out there in the middle of the playground in front of all the children. She would not look at him.

‘Mavis, if you please!’ she called out. Mavis Tallant was
engaged in a tussle with Essie Beale over the slate for piggybeds. Both girls looked at Bella in dumb surprise for it was unusual for Miss Casey to interfere in schoolyard disputes.

‘Hand it over, Mavis,’ Bella repeated loudly. ‘It’s Essie’s turn.’

The child slung the slate to the ground so violently that it came skeetering towards the Reverend, landing at his feet. He took a step back.

‘Mavis!’ she scolded loudly, though, secretly, she had never been so glad of a gratuitous show of spite.

‘Really, Miss Casey, you must learn to take a firmer hand with such vile behaviour. Come here, girl.’

Mavis reluctantly came forward. If truth be known, she was a dull-witted child, pasty and cross-eyed. Bella would never manage to teach her her alphabet, let alone master reading; she would be another recruit for the candle factory.

‘Hold out your hand, young lady, till Miss Casey punishes you.’

He nodded to Bella expecting her to have a cane about her person whereas it was gathering dust in the dunce’s corner. The intercourse between teacher and children is imposed otherwise than by blows, so says Pestalozzi, she wanted to quote. She never used a bamboo on her charges; the fool’s cap, maybe, or the shame-bench, but never the birch.

‘I will see to the reprimand later, Reverend Leeper,’ she said. ‘Off with you now, Mavis, and behave yourself.’

The September sun suddenly withdrew, leaving spatterings
of shadow, the schoolhouse chimney embalmed in the yard. Obscurely, Bella knew that there would be a penalty for defying the Reverend over Mavis. Perhaps it was that which prompted her, or was it the secret armour of Corporal Beaver, or the
insidious
appropriation of her name in public, but whatever it was, she found herself saying without having had a notion of it a minute earlier.

‘If you please, Reverend Leeper, in the future, I think it better if we confine our conversation to school matters.’

He looked at her quizzically.

‘For the sake of the children,’ she added pointedly. And with that she loosed her grip on the tongue of the school bell and raised a din so loud that even if the Reverend had had an answer, it would have been drowned out.

She was on her hands and knees cleaning out the schoolroom grate that evening when he came upon her.

‘Miss Casey!’ he commanded.

She clambered awkwardly to standing, but before she could properly right herself, he grabbed her by the shoulder and spun her around as if she were a child’s top. The dust pan she had in her hand went flying; the brush fainted at her feet. They stood in swirls of fine ash, flakes of it falling on his shoulder speckling his clerical black, the rest of it settling on her hair.

‘Dust thou are, Miss Casey, and unto dust thou must return,’ he said and for a moment Bella thought it a kind of absolution,
as if he were calling a halt to the terrible turbulence between them. Then he caught her roughly by the arms and kissed her hungrily. If his previous approaches had been timid and tainted with shame, this was a gesture oiled with pride. It was only after he had settled himself, tamping down his meagre hair, sweeping away the residue of the ashes from his shoulder caps, that he spoke.

‘You must realise, Miss Casey, that the way you spoke to me in the yard this morning has tested me beyond the limits of
endurance
. You see now the fruits of your challenge to my authority. You have forced me to defile the chasteness of our association.’

He paused, but it was only to draw breath for he was quite worked up now. His eyes narrowed with contempt.

‘You have provoked me,’ he seethed. ‘You Jezebel!’

He backed away as if she were contagious, then with a tug at his collar and cuffs, he was gone.

How had she inflamed him so? Was it drink that had spurred him on? A weakness for the drop might have accounted for his stormy changes of mood though she had never got the whiff of drink from him. She had seen enough of Mick and Tom’s
excursions
to the ale house to know that men fired up with alcohol can become easily riled. She had witnessed many’s the argument at home after closing time about Parnell and Home Rule and the like. Indeed, she had joined in for she had strong views on Ireland’s ‘gintleman leader’ who, it was reputed, had made a show
of himself by casting an untidy eye on Mrs Kitty O’Shea.

‘He should have more respect for himself,’ she remembered saying.

Not to speak of his talk of breaking the link with England when God-fearing people were loyal to queen and country and proud of it.

‘Oh we all know, Miss High and Mighty, he has no right to be making a fool of himself over a woman, married or no, Bella. We all know your views on the topic,’ Mick had barked at her. He could get woefully wound up over the slightest difference of opinion, but though he might have ranted and raved about matters political with a few drinks on board, it had never made him amorous, if that’s what you could call the Reverend’s state. Were men’s appetites so unstable, Bella wondered. Could her sober teaching dresses showered in chalk, and her hair bunned and pinned and her unpolished lips undo a man so that when he looked at her, what he saw was a brazen temptress?

Her second meeting with Corporal Beaver was in broad daylight, for which she was glad. He had made an arrangement to
rendezvous
– he liked to use such words, she noticed, for their military ring and as a nod to her acquaintance with French – outside the Penny Bazaar on Henry Street. She was still in mourning but the weeks that had elapsed since Pappie’s death made this assignation seem less furtive than the first. She felt entitled to wear her scarlet patelot over her inky dress to brighten the effect for the Corporal
would surely come in his ceremonials. She worried over what she would say when she met him again, fearing that the memory of her spilt tears might create awkwardness. But, she reasoned, he had issued the invite to meet this time, and he was waiting for her at the doors of the arcade. He was always on time. The army training, she supposed.

‘Bella!’ he called to her as she approached and he took her hand. It was flesh on flesh this time. She felt reassured. They were just stepping inside the covered arcade when her name was called again.

‘Miss Casey!’

The Reverend Leeper stood before them. In a moment, the expedition turned sour. Must he taint every last thing that was hers, hers alone?

‘Miss Casey,’ he said again and nodded stiffly at the corporal.

‘May I introduce Lance Corporal Nicholas Beaver,’ Bella said, ‘of the King’s Liverpool’s.’

‘Corporal Beaver,’ he acknowledged, though Bella fancied he lingered on the rank to make a point.

He seemed disconcerted. Was it such a surprise that she might have a young man of her own? Or that he was as prepossessing as Corporal Beaver? Even if she were never to clap eyes on Nicholas Beaver again, he had done her a favour by his very handsome presence.

‘And where are you serving, young man?’ the Reverend asked as if the Corporal was an errant child.

‘Wherever I’m sent,’ Corporal Beaver replied in what Bella thought a churlish manner. ‘It is in the nature of a soldier’s life.’

But what he said was true even if it sounded graceless. He was often on the move. He had recently returned from Belfast where his battalion had to quell riots on the streets over all this Home Rule business. The Reverend looked down and noticed her hand clasped in the Corporal’s. Good, she thought. And even though it was awkward, she wanted to linger over the encounter if only to impress upon the Reverend that she had a protector to hand.

‘Well, Miss Casey, I hope you enjoy this lovely afternoon, despite your recent bereavement,’ he said finally, squinting up at the sun which had made a fitful appearance in a pillowy sky. ‘I must be on my way for I am in the midst of my sick visitations.’

He seemed intent on cataloguing his good works for their
benefit
, Bella thought.

‘Oh and Miss Casey, don’t forget this evening’s choir practice.’

He doffed his hat then and went on his mirthless way.

‘I’ve no time for those God-wallahs,’ Corporal Beaver said when he was out of earshot. ‘Always trying to make a chap feel small.’

How quickly he’d got the measure of the clergyman, Bella thought, though his obvious lack of piety alarmed her. But then did ‘God-wallahs’ like the Reverend Leeper deserve anyone’s respect? He, whose said devotion hid a pageant of lies.

They entered the Bazaar, a long high room with beams of
mottled
light streaming through the high windows in the gallery.
There was a throng of strollers and browsers, and she and the Corporal stopped here and there, while Bella fingered an
embroidery
or picked up an ornament or one of the other assorted
trinkets
that were on show.

‘What is it like,’ Bella asked him, for the Reverend’s questions had put her in mind of it, ‘the army life?’

‘It’s an uncertain one, that’s for sure. A chap never knows where he might end up,’ the Corporal replied, ‘so he learns to make a home of where he is.’

‘Still and all, it must be a doleful thing, to be parted from your family,’ she said.

‘I was only fifteen when I signed up so you could say the
barracks
is as close to any home as I know,’ he replied.

‘And what about your mother and father?’ she asked for he had made no mention of them. All she knew of him was that he came from the county Waterford.

‘Da was in the colours, but he’d been pensioned out an
invalid
. He wasn’t out a year when he passed. My mother said it was the army as what ruined him, but I think it was the grog that done him in, not the soldiering.’

Did him in
, she said to herself silently.

‘She was dead set against me going, but it was bred into me, you could say, for every morning we rose to the sound of soldiers drilling in the barracks yard, answering to the reveille …’

‘All the same, it must be lonesome,’ she said.

‘Ah, the boys do their best to make even the dreariest barracks
room cheery. At Christmas time we even makes our own
decorations
– paper chains and wreaths made out of holly.’

Make, make,
she wanted to say. She decided there and then that if something came of this liaison, then a few lessons out of the Excelsior
Grammar Book
wouldn’t go astray.

They had come to a stall of little brassy ornaments and
figurines
arranged in tiers on a red velvet drape. There were little monkeys and tiny thimbles and miniature boxes, but her eye lit on a silvery birdcage, constructed as intricately as a cathedral, but small enough to fit in your palm.

‘Oh look,’ she cried and lifted it up.

‘No bird I know would fit in there,’ the Corporal scoffed. But Bella ignored him. She loved the delicacy of this pretty item with no other function than to please the eye.

‘It is a thing of beauty all the same,’ she said.

‘If you’re so taken with it, you should have it,’ the Corporal said. ‘You can have it as keepsake, Bel, for you’ll not be seeing much of me in future. We are to be posted to Queenstown.’

She felt her heart sink and it showed in her face.

‘There you have it, Bel, that’s the army life for you.’

The following Monday evening the Reverend called to her
quarters
, standing at the threshold while she guarded the entrance.

‘I see,’ he said in even tones, ‘that you have found another on whom to lavish your affections.’ Lavish – those luxuriant words he used! ‘Am I so easily forgotten?’

She tried to answer, summoning up false reason.

‘But Reverend Leeper, as you said, we cannot …’

‘Exactly so, Miss Casey.’ When he reverted to formality she knew she was in for punishment.

‘But to flaunt your young man in front of me like that, it speaks of cruelty.’

‘Cruelty?’ she repeated.

‘Don’t play the innocent with me, Miss Casey,’ he said, ‘when you are only out to torment me.’

Then he stormed off, clattering down the staircase like a
fugitive
being pursued. But he came back, as she knew he would. Twice that same week and more persistent. He would stretch out to caress her cheek, or breathe her name greedily into the shell of her ear. She remained flinty during these onslaughts. But it hardly seemed to matter for even in her silence, he saw, or fancied he saw, coquetry. Or if not in her muteness, then in the curl of her hair or the hem of her dress. Sometimes, he would get fierce in his affections and pinion her to the wall, pressing his lanky weight upon her so that she feared she might be subjected to the ultimate degradation. After such an episode, weeks might go by and, labouring under some new regimen of his own
devising
, he would stay away. But these lacunae were almost worse since they were filled with a terrible imminence. Each knock on the door could be his, each step on the stair. His behaviour ran its course like an unpredictable illness, a high temperature, a flushed brow, a derangement of the senses followed by a dormant
phase of easeful slumber, a calm convalescence. But Bella never knew what stage in the cycle he was at, or what pitch of agitation he might have reached while absent. And then, just as she was beginning to despair, a chance event in the world of men offered a reprieve. Mick and Tom enlisted.