The Rising of Bella Casey Read online

  Not something that troubled Bella Casey for her head was full of books. Carlyle, Molière, Racine, Joyce’s Handbook of School Management, the pedagogical teachings of Pestalozzi. She was relieved that her interest did not run to young men. Once or twice, she had been invited by Mabel Bunting or Iris Dagge, to pair off with a friend of their young men, for a foursome was more respectable than two alone. But since she was only brought along as gooseberry, she had no thoughts of romance for herself in these expeditions. She would often listen to the girls at the College talking, sighing over this fellow or that, wondering if they’d worn a brighter dress or a different pin in their hat whether they’d have been noticed by some swain or other. Romantic speculation would run through the dormitories like a high fever, particularly before College socials to which the male students from Kildare Place were invited.

  These were strictly supervised affairs, with Miss Swanzy on patrol for indiscretions, but even there Bella had never met a young man who was worthy of the kind of fascinations that kept her classmates up all night. She wondered if she was deficient in some way. The Kildare Place students reminded her of nothing more than her brothers and their pals. Mick and Tom often brought friends home, but for their own entertainment, not for Bella’s benefit. They were in the habit of returning in high good humour from the pub and carrying on as if home were a wing of the tavern. The Bugler Beaver was a face that appeared many times. She remembered the first time, for unwittingly she’d made a show of herself.

  She had been roused well after midnight by the sounds of revelry coming from the kitchen and thinking it was only her brothers carousing, she went to quieten them. They had an invalid in the house. Pappie was confined to bed after taking a fall at the Mission in which he’d hurt his back, but did those boys take a blind bit of notice of that? No, they carried on regardless. Bella stormed into the kitchen, dressed only in her night clothes, her hair all down, ready to give them a piece of her mind.

  ‘For pity’s sake, boys, can’t you pipe down?’ she started in a well-worn litany of complaint before she realized there was company in. At least she had her good cotton gown on and had taken the trouble to throw her Ulster on over it, so she was half-ways decent, if a trifle eccentric-looking in this strange mix of the bed-chamber and the street. Her feet were bare and for some reason that was the first thing the Bugler looked at as he rose to greet the tousled apparition before him.

  ‘And who’s this charming maid with the nut-brown hair?’ the Bugler asked, quoting a parlour song she recognised.

  ‘That’s my sister, Bella,’ Tom said a little sourly.

  ‘The scholar, is it?’ the Bugler enquired. ‘You’re going to be a teacher, I hear, Miss Casey.’

  ‘Oh give over, Nick, with your Miss Casey,’ Mick interrupted, ‘our Bella has enough airs and graces as it is.’

  This was her constant tribulation – trying to hold her head high at the College among those who would look down on her, while being accused at home of having ideas above her station. But despite Mick’s surly interjection, the Bugler sounded impressed and that, in turn, impressed Bella.

  ‘Are we keeping you up, Miss … Bella?’ he asked contritely.

  His expression was half-admiration, half-mocking. His dark hair, she noticed, was glossy in the candlelight and his manner, even in the midst of drinking, full of a kind of courteous mischief.

  ‘Not at all,’ she said in a complete reversal of what she meant to say. ‘I just came for a drop of water.’

  Nicholas Beaver was a handsome man, she had to admit. The kind you’d follow with your eyes on the street if you were a certain kind of girl. Not that Bella was that class of a girl. He was tall, well-built, with a fine pair of shoulders. His Spaniard’s hair and moustache gave him a foreign look, though his eyes were the colour of gunmetal. The streets of Dublin were fairly thick with uniforms. Full of themselves, Bella thought, just because they sported braided finery they thought they could cock their hats at any girl they pleased and she’d come running. But not Bella Casey; not everyone who wears a tricorne is Lord Wellington, she would remind herself.

  ‘Well, boys,’ the Bugler said having the grace to look shamefaced, ‘I suppose it is time that good people were in their beds.’

  Bella watched him go, feeling like a scold.

  The young men from Kildare Place who came for the socials were much the same. Either raucous and harmless like overgrown cubs, or they were the opposite, too earnest and dry without an animating spark. One of them, Bella remembered, a certain Charles Bentham droned on in her ear for an age about some Hottentot sect led by a Yogi, if you please, that believed that God was not a personage as we all believed – he said it contemptuously, including Bella in this company – but existed as a presence in every living thing. She had never heard such a preposterous notion and was surprised that any so-called Christian would be espousing such shocking suppositions. And to think this young man would soon go forth to tutor young minds …

  ‘He does go on so,’ a young woman in the company said conversationally when Mr Bentham was called away. ‘He might be my cousin but he could talk for Empire.’ She introduced herself as Lily Clesham.

  Bella had a hard time understanding Lily at the start for she spoke in a soft, complicated way. She was from somewhere out west, Galway or Clifden or somesuch. Bella had never had a close association with a country person before. There weren’t many country people on Dorset Street bar the cattle drovers who used to usher their beasts down to the bull ring on fair day and leave in their wake steaming heaps of … what Bella referred to as Thomas Brady, to be polite. It repulsed her, to be truthful, to see those wild-eyed animals skeetering and flailing about, slithering in their own muck.

  ‘So, you are on the Long Course,’ Lily said, ‘and on a scholarship!’

  Out of others’ mouths this might have sounded snooty, but Lily was genuinely admiring and Bella immediately warmed to her.

  ‘And you?’ Bella asked.

  ‘I’m training with the Irish Church Mission in Clonsilla.’

  ‘My Pappie works for them!’ Bella rushed in, pleased to be able to boast a connection, ‘nothing official you understand – he’s a book-keeper – but he’s pure devoted to their work.’

  ‘Well, that’s something we hold in common,’ Lily said smiling. ‘My father’s a clergyman so they’re both in the business of saving souls.’

  She invited Bella to sit and soon they were trading information as if they were old friends. Once Lily got her certificates there was a position waiting for her in one of the ragged schools run by the Church Mission in Galway, close to her father’s rectory at Ballyconneely. Bella would remember the name though she never saw the place, except through Lily’s eyes, who viewed it through a rose-coloured mist.

  ‘Oh Bella,’ she would say, ‘you’ll have to come and see it for yourself.’

  Lily was always homesick, always hankering after the stone house on the brow of the hill with the view of the island. Omey, it was called. But when she said it, Bella saw O May like a declaration of love in a Shakespeare sonnet. Maybe it was Lily’s poetic way of talking, but Bella had never felt that way about any place. She was proud, of course, of the home she’d come from. But she didn’t love the streets and the houses all about them, the stuff the city was made of, not in the way Lily loved the rocks and trees of Ballyconeelly and its wild tormented sea. The granite prow of Trinity College, the stout majesty of the Custom House, the fine houses of the gentry on Fitzwilliam Square, these were places of which you could be justly proud, but she couldn’t, in conscience, say she loved the cracked pavement stones or the slimed cobbles that she walked on daily, or the shuttered-up pawn shops or the dim little dairies or the tenement houses with their rickety children and the smell of Thomas Brady in the yards seeping into your nostrils. She couldn’t say she loved them.

  Unlike most of the girls, Lily did not come to the College shindigs on the look-out for a sweetheart. No, she had already met a certain Mr Frede
rick McNeice and she told Bella there was an understanding between them. So when Bella and Lily met at these do’s, it was one another’s company they sought out. In time, they would not depend on organised socials to meet, but on Saturdays when they were both free, they would stroll around the Green and if they had a shilling to spare take tea at the Imperial. If not, they would brew up in the College kitchens and retreat to the deserted dormitory, for most of the girls would be out on passes. There they could while away several hours undisturbed, stretched on Bella’s bed, the curtains drawn around them.

  ‘It would not pain me much if I were to follow in the footsteps of Miss Arabella Swanzy,’ Bella confided in Lily. She had found in Lily someone with whom she could hypothesize about her future without sounding presumptious. ‘She has an office of her own and a title after her name. I don’t think less of her because she has never wed.’

  ‘All the same, Bella, if you were to marry, who would you choose?’

  ‘If I were to marry …’ she replied. ‘I would want someone respectable, someone elevated and refined, a schoolmaster perhaps, or a clergyman ….’

  But in truth, it was Lily she was thinking of. She endlessly compared herself with Lily − and found herself wanting. Lily was charitable where she nursed resentments. Lily’s nature was to be rich in hope whereas she found herself surrendering to the ugly persistencies of doubt.

  ‘Yes,’ Lily said dreamily, ‘a heart’s companion.’

  Some impetuous urge overtook Bella and she planted a kiss on her friend’s lips. Lily turned a grey gaze on her; a flicker of doubt crossed her features. Bella cursed her unruly impulsiveness for, clearly, she saw now, it had been to Mr McNeice that Lily was referring.

  ‘Some day, Bella,’ Lily said gravely, ‘all of your gifts will be recognised.’

  But privately, Lily was not so sure. Although she and Bella were of an age, she’d always felt motherly towards her friend, on account of being motherless herself, perhaps. She confided in her young man.

  ‘Do you think Bella’s unstable, is that it?’

  ‘No, no,’ Lily replied, already feeling she was betraying her friend. Fred was a dear man, but he was clumsy in female territory, a tentative traveller. A time would come after the babies came when Fred would become afraid of her changeable emotions, her down-thrown moods.

  ‘Maybe she’s a little in love with you,’ he offered, trying to chivvy her out of her sombre mood. ‘And who would blame her?’

  ‘No, no, it isn’t that either,’ Lily said, pushing away his compliment. ‘It was just so unexpected. Bella is usually so guarded, so proper, and then to be so suddenly at the mercy of her emotions. I worry for her.’

  ‘Oh come now.’ Fred was tiring now of this talk about a woman he had never met. ‘I’m sure she’s well able to fend for herself. Hasn’t she had to strive to get this far?’

  But that was just the trouble, Lily wanted to say. Bella’s striving seemed to come at the expense of her heart, a heart that seemed given to inflammation on being granted the most commonplace of kindnesses.

  THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY

  She was Principal Infant Teacher at St Mary’s School on Dominick Street, the first of her class to secure a position. Take that, Prudence Collier, she thought. The position came with living quarters and though they were modest and high up in the attics, Bella was extremely proud of her two rooms. True, you had to stoop by the three low windows to look down on to the street, but it felt safe up there, both fortress and haven. There was one big room with two windows facing west which housed a plain deal table and chairs, one large armchair, a rag rug thrown over the bare floorboards and a small fire grate. In the corner there was a little pantry with a stone sink. Oh yes, there was running water and a privy below in the yard. The bedroom was pokey enough with an iron bed wedged under the third window but there was a little locker beside it – for keeping her drawers and other unmentionables – and a pine press where she could hang her clothes. She brought her own homely touches to the place, lace curtains for the windows, an eiderdown for the bed, a brand new kettle and a pair of small framed prints – The Flower Girl and The Gleaners – which she had bought from a dealer in Francis Street. She completed the effect with some books from home − the three volumes of Shakespeare she’d won for gaining high honours in Final Standard, and several of her Pappie’s Dickens to take the bare look off the place.

  In the mornings Bella would travel down from the eaves to open the street door and for a few moments before the throngs of children arrived, she felt quite the lady of the manor. Though some of the houses at the far end of Dominick Street had seen better days – Dublin was like that, pockets of finery in a threadbare fabric – it was still an elegant address and bore itself proudly, or so Bella fancied. Even St Saviour’s at the top end was a handsome edifice if you could get past the crowds of Romanists filling bottles of what they called holy water from a butt on the southern side of the chapel. The street rolled gently away towards Great Britain Street. At that hour there was only the odd dray cart or milk float to disturb the peace and so it was easy to imagine herself as mistress of this great house. Sometimes though, in the evenings, hers seemed like a high lonely state. The schoolroom way down in the basement was far distant. The floors in between with their fine stuccoed rooms – including even a ballroom – were empty and pregnant with shadows. But she had little time to consider the ghosts that might haunt the place; she was too taken up with her new duties. Even after the last of the children was seen off the premises, the desks had to be cleaned and dusted, the slates and chalk put away, the schoolroom fire tamped down. Then there was the record-keeping. Sometimes, Miss Quill, who taught First and Second Class in the neighbouring room, would stay on after hours to check stationery orders and fuel requisitions with Bella, but Miss Quill lived out and by 5pm each evening, Bella was alone, often plangently so.

  She was standing at her teacher’s desk, set into a raised platform overlooking the empty classroom, when the Reverend Archibald Leeper paid his first visit. There were a hundred things needing doing that day. The desks were all askew, the stove door was wide open and billowing smoke into the room. She was not used to its vagaries yet; it was always too hot or too cold, the children either scalded or shivering, provoking their piteous chilblains and all manner of running fevers. The older girls in First Class could be relied on to feed the stove but the infants couldn’t be permitted to go too close to the fire.

  ‘Miss Casey,’ the Reverend Leeper commanded.

  He was standing in the doorway of the schoolroom, his fingers steepled to his lips. She didn’t know how long he had been there, or whether he had overheard her contemplating her chores, which she was in the habit of whispering aloud when she thought herself alone. The Reverend had been on the Board of Guardians that had interviewed her for the position, but like all men of the cloth, he seemed to fade into his canonicals and she had not taken much account of him, bar remembering a thin pale face, a hank of limp tawny hair on his brow, a bony hand extended into the dim hallway when he opened the door to her.

  ‘Follow me, if you please,’ he had said as they trod through the gloom and down a back-stairs. Her eyes, she remembered, had taken some time to adjust to the ill-lit interior from the brash glare of the July day. As if sensing her discomfort, he had turned to her on the stair and said, ‘Watch your step.’ She should have heeded.

  ‘Reverend Leeper,’ she managed to reply now when she had recovered from her startlement.

  He ambled into the room. On his way he picked up a slate that had been tipped to the floor in haste when she had rung the afternoon bell. He placed it in her hands like a rebuke.

  ‘I am dismayed, Miss Casey, to find that so early in your probation you have been negligent in your duties,’ he said.

  Bella tried to quell her alarm. What had she done? What had she not done? He paced the floor, his arms behind his back like a constable and refusing to look her in the eye.

  ‘You will recall at your
interview,’ he went on as if reading her thoughts for though he left pauses in the conversation they were not meant for the listener to interject, ‘that your listed duties included leading the church choir. But you have not deigned to grace us with your presence.’

  He made a barrack-room turn and halted.

  ‘With your fine musical training from the College and your lovely voice, so amply demonstrated at your interview, may I add, it should be no burden to you …’

  ‘On Sunday, is it?’ she asked.

  ‘The house of the Lord is open daily, is it not, Miss Casey?’

  He made her name sound like a deprecation.

  ‘Choir practice on Tuesday evenings and Saturday afternoons, and the weekly services I don’t need to tell you about since you are such a devoted parishioner.’

  He smiled at her, but it seemed sickly and insincere. He was not a healthy man, she saw now. He had the pallor of an invalid as if he never saw sunlight, his scalp pale beneath his thin hair. His eyes were so deep-set beneath a bony brow that it was hard to tell what colour they were rightly. He had to keep on moistening his meagre lips as if they were parched. He seemed prematurely aged though he was not much past thirty, she guessed.

  ‘We will see you so, Miss Casey,’ he concluded brusquely, ‘seven-thirty service. Don’t be late.’

  And that is how it started, with a call to worship.

  She was up at cockcrow the following morning and setting out by seven, her crimson cape thrown around her and her boots ringing out on the cobbles of Coles Lane. The malty whiff of the brewery singed the air. Seagulls wheeled and clamoured.

  The Reverend Leeper was already in situ when she climbed the narrow staircase to the gallery in St Mary’s.

  ‘Miss Casey,’ he said testily, ‘we have been waiting for you.’

  But I am not late, she thought, but he was already half-way through his introductions. There were two ladies, Miss Florence Horner, a seamstress by trade with a fine voice and Mrs Mabel Lecky who could hardly carry a tune but who boomed a lot, as well as three pupils from the Model School, Grace Winter, Muriel MacHenry and Gertrude Sargent, a giddy trio who had to be constantly called to task. There were two gentlemen, the brothers Orr, Henry and George, who worked as chandler’s clerks and though well into their forties, showed no signs of committing themselves to the state of matrimony. They did everything together and any woman taking one of them on would have the other to contend with, too. Maybe that’s why they were still unclaimed, Bella thought, notwithstanding they were respectable gents who were well turned out and changed their collars daily. But when you addressed one, they answered in unison as if they had never shed their childish brotherhood, like those twins tied at the hip who travel around with the circus.