The Rising of Bella Casey Page 4

  ‘Your mission is to lead the choir, Miss Casey, conduct them and expand their repertoire,’ the Reverend intoned, ‘so that they’ll be ready for christenings and confirmations, complines and evensong.’

  Bella struggled through the early morning service. How much easier it was to instruct infants than full-grown adults whose wills were set and whose dispositions not so malleable. She was aware all the time of Reverend Leeper’s listening ear below and braced herself for the reprimand that was bound to come.

  ‘You have a very sweet voice, my dear,’ he said after the choir had dispersed. She found herself unaccountably blushing. She did not expect compliments from the Reverend; indeed there was something unseemly about his flattery. Shouldn’t he be preoccupied with the welfare of her soul rather than the timbre of her voice? It caught her off-guard.

  ‘Thank you, Reverend,’ she said.

  They were standing in the portal of the church. The street, which had been dawn-blushed and silent when she had entered, was now agog with activity. The ring of a tram, the gay whistling of porters trundling crates of fruit from the markets, the footfall of clerks hurrying to their offices. She was mindful of the clock. She had a roomful of infants waiting and not so much as a sup of tea taken. And yet, the Reverend Leeper held her there, engaging in frivolous small talk. A silence fell between them that, laced with unease.

  ‘Well, Miss Casey, off with you now. Have you no duties to attend to?’

  A hot flare bloomed on her cheeks but this time it was injustice that inspired it. She felt corrected for being courteous, as if her politeness was some kind of needy appetite for praise. The Reverend was like light and shade, she thought as she hurried away, like a spring day when the sun is shy about coming out from behind low cloud and when it does, it shines but weakly and you know soon that it will be eclipsed again.

  For several weeks the Reverend Leeper’s conduct followed the same pattern. He would scold her for being late or for failing to keep the choir together, even for wrong notes that Mr Cecil Anketell would coax out of the organ (the wrong note came more easily and sweetly to him than the right one) as if she could, somehow, control the old codger’s short sight and his hazy notion of the rudiments of music. Mr Anketell was as wheezy as his instrument. When he pulled on the stops, Bella was not sure if it was the organ or his own chest that was barking. Often he would forget which hymn number the choir was on and be off with ‘O God of Bethel, by whose hand’ when they were pursuing ‘Lead Kindly Light’.

  ‘Miss Casey,’ Reverend Leeper would call out from the body of the church. ‘The choir and the organist are not meant to be in competition.’ As if the disharmony were all her doing.

  It never seemed to occur to him to admonish Mr Anketell. But she resolved, for the time being at any rate, to keep her trap shut, as Mick and Tom would say. Nonetheless, she grew to dread the words ‘Miss Casey’ from the Reverend Leeper’s lips for they always heralded either a complaint or some unexpected declaration of concern.

  ‘Miss Casey, what time do you call this?’

  ‘Miss Casey, you look a little flushed this morning, I hope you’re not coming down with a fever.’

  ‘Miss Casey, perhaps you’d stay behind when choir practice is over. I need a word with you about school matters.’

  School matters?

  She waited among the silent pews while the Reverend Leeper divested himself. The Ten Commandments were inscribed in gold script under the stained-glass apse window and she found herself reading through them as if to examine her own conscience. It seemed the church walls spoke. There was a strange gloom in an empty church after evensong, not altogether unpleasant, but she came to associate its silence with her own apprehension. Sometimes she thought the Reverend Leeper deliberately made her wait to augment her nervousness, to give her more time to fret. But that could not be; a man of God would not be so petty.

  School matters?

  Bella could think of no reason why he should want to question her about her classes. She had followed strictly the tenets of her training – cultivate a humble, teachable disposition, avoid all negligence in personal appearance, let your manners be cheerful, sober and decorous. In fact, if there had been a complaint, it was that she was too conscientious. On seeing that she had pinned a map to the blackboard showing all the Crown’s Possessions in red, Mr Braithwate, the schools inspector, had remarked that it was rather ambitious to try to teach geography to infants.

  ‘Miss Casey,’ the Reverend Leeper began, emerging from the shadows, making her start even though she had been hovering for ten minutes, anticipating his presence. ‘I’ll be needing to see your log books and records tomorrow evening in the schoolroom, if you please.’

  Bella felt a stirring of mutiny. This was the Canon’s job and he had taken scant interest in the books, throwing only a hasty eye over them when he came to instruct the children in Scripture.

  ‘The Canon usually…’ she began.

  ‘The Canon is indisposed, ‘the Reverend interrupted, ‘so I’ll be taking over some of his duties.’

  Her heart sank. The elderly Canon had baptised her – and all the Caseys – at the font in St Mary’s. She had always looked on him as a kind of fatherly guardian; she could not imagine ever feeling that way about the Reverend.

  ‘Tomorrow then,’ the Reverend said, ‘at five.’

  Bella turned to go and as she did, he summoned her back.

  ‘Miss Casey?’

  She faced him, full of spite within, and not even caring if it showed in her face.

  ‘I have to say the colour red becomes you. Gives a fine glow to your cheeks.’

  He smiled his wet smile, expecting some grateful acknowledgement. But Bella would not give him the satisfaction. As she hurried off, though, she cursed the blessed crimson cape. Next time she would travel without her cloak.

  In preparation for the Reverend’s visit, she spent a good hour slaving over the entries in her books to make sure they were up to the minute. She had kept the school stove lit even though it would mean cutting back on coal over the next few days. The children would have to go without so that the high and mighty Reverend Leeper might keep his feet warm.

  ‘You must understand, Miss Casey, that it is vital the accounts be kept up to date, in case an inspector might call.’

  But that is the inspector’s business, she thought to herself, not yours. The Reverend paid particular attention to the Fees Outstanding.

  ‘The sooner these parents pay, the sooner you’ll qualify for your increment,’ he said as if she had never spoken.

  ‘If you’ll pardon me, Reverend Leeper, should we not give leeway on late payments to those families in distress …’

  She had stopped feeding the grate by this stage in the hope that it might remind him that he had warmer places to be, such as his own hearth, where a wife waited.

  ‘It is your future I am thinking of, Miss Casey.’

  He laid a hand on her forearm. She felt a strange charge, even through the thick serge of the coat she had thrown around her shoulders to cheat the chill. She had never stood this close to him before.

  ‘Now,’ he said with a click of his heels, ‘it is time to inspect the teachers’ quarters.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘It is part of the school premises, Miss Casey,’ he snapped.

  ‘The Canon has never …’

  ‘I am in charge now and I insist upon it,’ he said testily. ‘The teacher’s accommodations must be kept to the same high standard that you clearly keep in your schoolroom.’

  There it was again, a rebuke lying down with a compliment.

  Bella locked the schoolroom door and led the way up the back stairs. As they ascended – it was black dark now – she tried to make an inventory in her mind as to what state she had left the place when she had hurried out that morning. Might there be a petticoat lying in sight, or worse? But surely the Reverend would not want to see the bedroom? What business would he have in there? Afterwards
, remembering what she had thought on the stair, Bella wondered whether even contemplating such a lewd proposition had somehow directed events. At the head of the stairs, she opened the door and stood back to let the Reverend Leeper enter. He stood rather imperiously, silhouetted in the window through which the faint glimmer of gaslight could be glimpsed. She hurried into the scullery to light a candle for she knew there was no paraffin for the lamp. She realised how nervous she was when it took her three strikes of the match to set the flame aglow.

  ‘Well,’ he said looking around as she bore the candle tremulously toward him. ‘That’s much better.’

  He looked around him. ‘It is spartan, but it’s clean.’

  She felt herself bridle. Would he have preferred trinkets, cheap china pieces, swathes of damask on the windows, a tapestry footstool, an overstuffed armchair? He prowled around, inspecting her books on the shelves she had made up out of an old orange box and stained to look like oak, and paused over her two framed prints. As she brought out the candle and set it down on the table – a little leafed one that Mother had bequeathed her from home – he roused himself from his intense examination of her possessions, deemed so meagre, and turned his gaze on her. In the candlelight his face seemed cadaverous, his bleared eyes sunk in deep hollows. He stood for several minutes inspecting her – that was the only word for it, as if she were on the parade ground.

  ‘Well, Miss Casey,’ he said finally, ‘may I remark how pretty you look in this light.’

  He advanced towards her and took both of her hands in his, then turned the palms upwards as if he might read her fortune.

  ‘Oh Isabella …’ he murmured.

  It was so long since anyone had used her full name that for a moment, Bella failed to recognise herself. And she was so used to Miss Casey this and Miss Casey that, that she was lulled in a strange way.

  ‘I have been longing for this moment …’ There was a small, pulsing comfort in his touch as he caressed her hands. ‘You must have felt it too, surely.’

  What Bella felt was a sensation of unmooring, as if she had drowsed at the theatre and woken suddenly to find herself at a different play. A melodrama of the romantic kind. And she was a player who did not know her lines.

  ‘Of course, we must be chaste and pure in our affections …’

  She tried to squirm her fingers free, but he held them firm.

  ‘Grant me a hearing, Isabella, dear.’

  Stupidly, she was still waiting for him to speak of the school accounts and she did not wish to give offence in any way in case it might colour the outcome. She was waiting for this soft and foolish Reverend Leeper to give way to the stiff and formal version she was used to.

  ‘Our love must be like that of brother and sister …’

  ‘Love?’ she heard herself say, though once it was out of her mouth it sounded contemptuous.

  He leaned forward and planted a chaste kiss on her cheek. His lips trembled as if his heart were in his mouth.

  ‘Hush now,’ he whispered as if her discomfiture had nothing to do with him. Then, swiftly, he made for the door where he paused again.

  ‘Oh and Miss Casey?’ She did not turn to face him so he spoke to her back. ‘I will be checking the school logs every week until the end of term. I have to say, your book-keeping leaves a lot to be desired.’

  After his departure, she stood rubbing the spot on her cheek where the Reverend had brushed his lips. It was the only way she could convince herself of what had occurred. Then when she had convinced herself, she gave into fuming. Why, she berated herself, was she so slow to anger? To think that for all these months while she had been labouring to gain the Reverend’s approval, he had been nursing his untoward desire and waiting for his moment. He had thoroughly ambushed her, as surely as if he had crept up behind her on the street and demanded monies. But what troubled her more was that she had somehow played a part in the wickedness herself. Hadn’t she let him hold her hand, caress it, without a word of protest? How could she have been so dim-witted, so acquiescent? The truth was that she had given into a vapourish female kind of weakness, like one of those silly ninnies at the College who prated on about their beaux. Was she, in the end, no better than they were? Every flurried thought led to a new question. How could she face the Reverend in the schoolroom or the church? What to say? And what more might he demand of her? But no, she reassured herself, he was a clergyman. Anyway, if there was any more trouble, couldn’t she set her brothers on him? Mick and Tom would sort him out in a flash, clergyman or no. But that would involve admitting what had already taken place, which she could barely admit to herself. And what exactly could she accuse him of – a declaration of love? Hardly a hanging offence. And she could not deny the thrilling flattery of having become, with no effort of her own will, an object of devotion even if it was the Reverend Leeper for whom, heretofore, she had felt only a baffled repulsion. He might have been her superior – in the school, at church – but in this matter he was but a slave to his carnal thoughts. And he a married man! Bella had seen his wife only once, a slender thread of a woman with a defeated look.

  ‘Poor woman,’ Miss Quill had told her, ‘God has deigned that she never carry a child to term.’

  Bella had thought Mrs Leeper merely pale and wan; now she wondered how much of her demeanour could be laid at her husband’s door.

  She decided to tell no one of the encounter, either at home or abroad. Perhaps after his transgression, the Reverend would govern his instincts and honour his promise of renunciation, she thought. But the opposite was the case. His protestation of love seemed to open a door. It did not make him any more tender in his official dealings with her, but it heralded a campaign of creeping liberties. He brushed against her seemingly by hazard in the schoolroom one day after Scripture class. He accosted her in the basement hallway by the teachers’ press when the children were gone, and pressed his reluctant embraces upon her. He would often crush her to him urgently − in the classroom, or on the stairs − then release her, pushing her away. It seemed he drew her close only to repel her more violently, as if he was testing himself against her. He acted as if it was she who had steered his hand to her bodice or forced him to caress her face. One evening, after choir practice, he went further, planting a kiss on the nape of her neck in the dark of the gallery stairs as they were descending. She did not say anything because when she turned around to speak, he only issued his customary warning.

  ‘Watch your step, Miss Casey.’

  She fretted that it was something in her that had encouraged his bewildering conduct. She examined her conscience but she could not think what it was. For all her education, she was not schooled to deal with this. A match girl would have been better able to swat him away with a loud reproach and a careless laugh. But she with her Teacher’s Certificate and salaried position could resort neither to vulgar directness nor feigned nonchalance. She tried to avoid him, but it was no easy task with his constant visitations, the checking of her records, the choir rehearsals and all the other little businesses of the school that required his say-so. With each passing month she felt more frantic, more desperate to extricate herself. But how could she do that without losing everything she held dear – her position, her respectability, her reputation?

  Her vigilance was so taken up with the matter of Reverend Leeper that she failed to realise the import of other changes about her, of a far graver nature. It was over a year since her Pappie’s fall at the Meeting Rooms. (He had overstretched himself hanging a banner for the Harvest Festival and had crashed to the ground crushing something in his spine.) But he had gone into something of a decline, which the doctors couldn’t explain. The Mission had had to let him go, and though there was some compensation, the family could no longer afford to live on Dorset Street and had moved to a more modest address at Innisfallen Parade, a terrace house at street level. They still had all of their own furniture, though, including the Elysian, which consoled Bella. Home would always be where the piano was. But it
was here that Pappie really began to fail. His face grew gaunt, his hand turned to claw. He spent much of his time sunk in the armchair in the front room before a low fire. Afterwards Bella would wonder if some other illness was afoot. Had her father, in the midst of stout health, been growing the contagion of his own death? As the months went by, he no longer had the strength to stand upright and Mick and Tom moved his bed downstairs into the front room. Mother set up a pallet on the other side of the fireplace and she kept the grate stoked all night for Pappie felt the cold keenly. But despite all these portents, Bella only realised the gravity of his illness when he called her, Mick and Tom to his bedside.

  ‘You know I’m for the dark,’ he said, his voice rasping.

  Mother had propped him up high on a bank of pillows to help his breathing.

  The boys shuffled. Bella could feel tears welling up but she determined not to give in to them, though she had full cause to, thinking of all the times she had been consumed with trifles of her own when he had been busy preparing himself to meet his Maker.

  ‘I want you three to take care of your mother since I will not be here to do it.’