The morning brought William three letters. Yes, yes, and yes.
Good.
He could see the future. He could make it happen. He set about things.
CHAPTER FIVE
First the land. No simple matter, that. Then lawyers to see off the small tradesmen scratching a living there. Meanwhile architects and draftsmen to work on designs.
“Five storeys,” Bellman told them, “and the essence of it should be light. The center of the roof to be an octagonal glass window to the sky, and the entire building to be pierced through the middle, so that light will fall through the center of the shop and not only through the windows.”
“Hmm,” the architect said and stroked his beard. “Alternatively—”
“An atrium,” said William. “Exactly as I have described. How else can my seamstresses see to stitch? How else can my customers see the black detail on a pair of black gloves at four o’clock on a November afternoon?”
The architect presented plans for the building: there was no atrium. “It is hardly practical,” he pleaded. “It will be too hot in summer. Think of the maintenance costs! And is it safe?”
William sketched out the atrium himself in his calfskin notebook, tore it out, and handed it to the man. “Go to Chance in Birmingham for the plate glass. You must get these men”—another scribble and torn-out page—“for the installation. They are familiar with the ridge-and-furrow system. There is a system that will raise the entire glazed ceiling to let the hot air escape in summer. And if you don’t know how to do it, I’ll subcontract the entire roof to one of Paxton’s men.”
The architect produced new plans in accordance with Bellman’s wishes.
A manager of works was needed. Bellman’s architect knew just the man.
“Come with me, I’ll take you to him now.”
The man’s office was as comfortable as any reception room. He was plump and jovial, the buttons of his waistcoat shone, and he shook Bellman’s hand with confidence. Bellman suppressed a grimace at the handshake: it was the man’s clean nails, the soaped and scented softness of his skin. He stayed ten minutes with him then took his leave.
“He’s not the one,” he said. “He has not the voice for speaking to laborers. If a thing is to be done well, it cannot be done from the fireside. You have to be there yourself.”
“With respect, sir,” the architect said, “Bensen has a very experienced team of intermediaries and he has vast experience. You need someone who is your equal in talent and experience, someone who can take the responsibility of the construction off your shoulders, leaving you free for the rest of the enterprise,”
Bellman shook his head. It was not his way.
Someone younger, he thought. Calloused. Closer to the men. Closer to the work. He asked around, and his enquiries led him to a man called Fox.
They met in a small park, round the corner from a noisy construction site. Fox wore heavy boots, had dirt under his nails, and when he spoke to his men, he sounded like one of them. Fox reminded him a little of himself when young: talented, hungry for a big project. Bellman set out his terms plainly. He meant to pay Fox less than the fat man with the soft hands had wanted—a lot less—but the young man stood to gain not only a lengthy and lucrative contract but also something far more valuable: a reputation.
“Night and day, I’ll work,” he promised, and Bellman believed him. The project would be the making of Fox, they both knew it. They shook hands, both satisfied.
Together Bellman and Fox visited stonemasons, builders, and carpenters. Fox spoke their language—“My father was a builder in Exeter”—and Bellman watched and listened. Then he asked questions and Fox fell silent, listening to Bellman ask about materials, the raw costs, the transport costs. He watched Bellman scribble sums in the notebook he always carried in his deep pockets, work out reductions, take it upon himself to draft letters to quarriers and timber merchants. Sometimes coming away from a potential tradesman and shaking their heads together over a man’s perilously weak grasp of his own business, Fox would say, “Ah, but he’s got a good lad working for him. Did you see the work he was doing? Very nice. Now the lad would be an asset . . .”
“Steal him away,” Bellman directed, and Fox set about the theft of the apprentice.
· · ·
The enterprise was not only a building to be constructed out of stone, but also a legal entity that had to be made secure and watertight with pages of impenetrable jargon. Bellman spent long hours in lawyers’ offices poring over paperwork, puzzling out contracts of labyrinthine complexity. He arrived at these meetings with a series of commonsense questions and listened to the answers with a quite uncommon intelligence. The instructions he gave were decisive, and framed in the lawyers’ own language. If there was any aspect of ownership, responsibilities, and entitlements he was in doubt about, it did not appear so to the lawyers, who were impressed by his decisiveness and acuity.
The third aspect of the venture was financial. The grand entrance hall of the Westminster & City Bank was an impressive place. Half a mountain of Italian marble sliced into slabs for the floor and walls, hammered, chiseled, and pumiced into columns, expensive, hard, intimidating. Few entered here without an inner tremor: respectable ladies felt their voices tremble like schoolgirls as they asked for their balances, and baronets adopted an exaggerated swagger as they made a withdrawal. Even the blameless vicar suppressed a nervous cough. It was impossible to escape the awareness that somewhere in this place dozens of suited clerks labored like angels over their ledgers, entering in black copperplate the sage economies and financial imprudences of every customer, keeping account of every transaction in guineas, shillings, and pence, until the day of reckoning. No, the grand hall of the Westminster & City was not a comfortable place. No matter how stain free one’s balance, it caused the souls of even the most prudent to quail.
Quailing was quite unknown to William Bellman. He took the steps three at a time and entered the hall with as much awe as a bee that flies into Westminster’s other great cathedral and comes to rest on the altar there. Quite by chance, Mr. Anson, a senior manager at the bank, was passing through the hall as Bellman strode in, and had noticed his indifference to the grandeur. A strong, dark man, possessed of great energy and force, he entirely bypassed the clerk at the desk where an ordinary customer would have made an appointment, preferring to cast an observant eye over everyone in the hall. When it alighted on Mr. Anson he stepped purposefully toward him and introduced himself and his requirements in a few words. “Are you the man to help?”
Anson was not used to being accosted in this informal fashion, but something in Bellman’s manner and demeanor told him it would be worth his while giving him a few moments, and a few moments were enough to persuade him to give the man a longer hearing.
In a private room Bellman set out his financial projections. It was a large loan that Bellman wanted. The construction of the shop was being paid for out of capital, but a loan was wanted in order to stock the shop. Anson considered the figures Bellman had prepared.
“So you are in need of a loan and will be holding the shop account here too. A personal account as well, perhaps?”
“Two.”
“Two personal accounts? Both for yourself.”
Bellman nodded without explanation.
Well, that was unusual, but he could see no administrative or legal impediment. Anson looked at the proposed turnover figures. Overoptimistic, he thought, but if Bellman achieved even half of what he intended he would be doing well enough to cover the repayments. The outlook was rosy. There was nothing to stop him agreeing to a deal today, and besides, he had the feeling that if Bellman didn’t get the answer he wanted here and now he would take his figures and his business to another bank.
“Glad to be able to help,” he said and offered a hand. Bellman took it and gave it a firm, single shake by the end of which he was already on his feet and ready to leave.
Anson accompanied Bellman back to the hall.
They shook hands again, and the banker watched his new customer cross the marble floor toward the exit with the same assured and purposeful gait he had used when entering, undaunted by the great vault above his head, undiminished by the expanses of marble around him. How unusual, he reflected. This is a man to whom a bank is just a place to put money. If money were raindrops then the Westminster & City is no more than a water butt. Large, expensive, and made of marble, but a water butt nonetheless.
Turning into the corridor leading to his colleague’s office in search of the paper he had left there this morning, he congratulated himself. If Bellman’s venture did as well as he thought it might, then he, Anson, had just done the best day’s business in his life—and in less than three-quarters of an hour.
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. Having launched their daughters into marriage with respectable, impoverished gentlemen, they now waited to marry their granddaughters to greater status. For the success of such an endeavor, the wealth they had accumulated from retail needed to hide its origins, for it is well known that the purity of gold increases the further removed it is from labor. The impression must be given that a man’s riches spring from his noble nature as naturally and spontaneously as water springs from the earth.
“No,” they had said. “Let the shop be called Bellman’s.”
Why did he hesitate? Bellman had no qualms about giving his shop his name. The notion of a grand marriage for Dora did not enter his head. Nor was it modesty that held him back. There was something unfinished in his thinking about the name, and today, when the rain had dissolved all busyness and activity around him and left only this misty haze, was as good a day as any to complete it.
Standing alone before the mirage of his shop, Bellman’s thoughts turned to the man in black.
Was it any wonder that he had let the question of Black lapse for so long? For almost a year, Bellman had worked on the project. He had developed it from an idea to a financial reality, then nursed it into legal existence. The legal side of things had required lengthy and delicate negotiations that had consumed him for months; the land purchase had not gone smoothly; the architects had stubbornly refused to understand what he wanted—good lord, he had ended up practically drawing the plans himself; there had been contractors to engage, more negotiations, more contracts . . . Night after night he had sat by candlelight, working out solutions to problems that others deemed insoluble. In all that time he had not thought too closely or too often of Black, and frankly, what could be more natural? Bellman’s diary was very full. Every hour from morning till night was accounted for, days and weeks ahead. He moved from meeting to meeting, from decision to decision with scarcely a pause to draw breath. He never ate a meal without either company or his papers and notebook beside him at the table. He reserved little difficulties to be thought about while he brushed his teeth and dressed in the morning. Bath time was the occasion to lock himself away with knotty problems that could be unraveled while the steam rose off the water.
When problems arose that did not lend themselves to being broken down into components, tabulated, and calculated in order to afford a neat solution, Bellman’s habit was to put them aside in a category marked “waste of time.” One of the first keys to success, he considered, was to recognize the difference between problems you could do something about and problems you could do nothing about. A great many people, he had noticed, spent large parts of their time worrying about things they were powerless to alter. Had they concentrated all this energy on things they could influence, think how different their lives would be. He advocated concentrating on those things where you had some guarantee of an outcome. Every minute of Bellman’s day was spent actively pursuing some benefit or other, and for months now it had not been clear that there was any benefit to be had from thinking about Black, so in he went to the category of “unprofitable” and there he stayed.
Now Black’s idea was about to become material. As soon as this weather cleared up, construction would start. Naturally the problem of Black was starting to appear to Bellman in a more pressing light. It bothered him that his recollection of his meeting with Black was so unclear. Clarity was everything in a business relationship. What did Black expect of him? And what could he expect of Black? He felt anew the sense of indebtedness that haunted him. Black had been the one to recognize the magnitude of the opportunity, he had wanted to share it with Bellman; it was essential that the man should be adequately recompensed. What had they agreed?
He closed his eyes and thought.
“Percentages . . .” he muttered. “Division of responsibilities . . . Dividends . . .”
He strained to hear an echo from the past, an indication of the conversation they might have had, the deal they might have struck. Nothing came to his ear.
Well, there was only one thing for it. He would do something that would make plain to Black that he had not been overlooked. It would be an invitation to him—wherever he was—to come forward and claim his due. It would be evidence—not that it would come before a court of law, of course not, there would be nothing so extreme—that he, Bellman, had no intention of claiming as his own that portion of the business that was rightly Black’s.
He would call the shop Bellman & Black.
Opening his ey
es onto the misty mirage of his emporium, he found the point where the platform projected over the front entrance and his imagination placed a grand double B on it.
That would do it!
“Hoy!”
A loud cry broke into Bellman’s reverie. He discovered himself somewhat adrift in his own mind, and it took him a long moment to recover himself. He was a long way from reality, the four floors of stone and glass before him had to dissolve into rain, and it was with mild astonishment that he found himself in front of a great gash in the ground. When a creature crawled out of it, slick with rain and mud, Bellman took a step back and almost let out a cry of alarm.
“Look at this!” the creature exclaimed, demonstrating itself thus to be a living thing and human. He stood up and held out to Bellman what looked like a stone. His voice was cultivated, expensively schooled, but his appearance and behavior was more than strange. Bellman wondered whether it was a madman. Then, seeing that the man stood straight and held himself still, and that the light in the man’s eyes was enthusiastic, not wild, Bellman felt a little reassured. He glanced at what the man was holding.
“It’s a stone.”
“Ah! That’s where you’re wrong!”
The man rubbed some of the mud away. “See the tool marks? They are man-made.”
There were indeed abrasion marks that William had taken for striations in the stone.
“And?”
“It’s not carved as such. The stone already had a form that called the shape to mind, and these marks are just to emphasize it. See the knot in the stone that gives the idea of the eye?”
The man began to talk. He had been in Egypt lately, was what he called an archaeologist—“I dig up the past,” he explained—and was now home in London for a few months. He would go back to Egypt. “But when I saw this site I thought it looked just like an excavation and I couldn’t resist coming to have a look. There have been men crawling all over it, but today, thanks to the rain, I have my chance.”