Free Bellman & Black by Diane Setterfield

toppled and fell plumb to the flagstones, as if some vengeful spirit was trapped inside and knew only this way out. He swept up the pieces and buried them, then a gulf opened beneath his heart, and a fearful vertigo took hold of him.
    It wasn’t the first time. This one you could understand: his mother’s teapot, a burial, reminders of a loss he preferred not to think about. But the feeling—a sinking diaphragm, nausea stirring, darkness gaining on him—came upon him at other times. He couldn’t predict these crises. It might be an unexpected interruption that set it off or the gap between one task to the next; it might be waking too early and being alone in the dark.
    It was a hard thing to put words to: sometimes he experienced it as a great void, a universal and eternal nullness. Watching other people—Paul, Ned, Fred and Jeannie—he came to believe that he was alone in seeing it. At other times the black mood seemed to him as a dark and menacing thing inside himself, and that was worse. Something putrid, monstrous, was poisoning his blood and his thoughts. He was ashamed of it and glad that others did not see.
    It was a source of puzzlement to remember a time when the world had seemed an entirely benign sort of place. He had rarely been ill and never for long; he had never gone hungry; he had been met everywhere with smiles and friendship; his efforts had been rewarded, his failings largely forgiven. Though he was a boy who knew how to get into trouble he had the useful knack of being as good at getting out ofit. What little there had been to frighten or pain him was left behind in the forgotten days of childhood: as a man he saw no reason to be afraid. Now some great hand had peeled back the kind surface of that fairy-tale world and shown him the chasm beneath his feet.
    Still he was not defenseless. He had his triad of weapons: sleep, drink, and work—the most powerful of them all.
    William had never shirked at the mill. But now he filled every minute of the day with activity. He lived in fear of idleness, sought out tasks to fill every chink and every nook of his waking day, and if a job was finished five minutes earlier than he’d allowed, he grew fretful. He learned to keep a list of small jobs to fill those dangerous spaces in his day. Accompanying Paul to a meeting with a haberdasher in Oxford, he stopped off in Turl Street to purchase a calfskin notebook for the express purpose of writing these lists. He kept it close by him: in the office it was always on his desk; on-site at the mill or traveling it was to hand in his pocket. He slept with it by his bed, reached for it the moment he awoke. When the monster reached its claw for him, sometimes just the touch of the calfskin cover was enough to hold it at bay while he armored himself with work.
    They came and they went, these crises, and he covered up for himself as best he could. When one passed, leaving him short of breath, heart beating like the clappers, he hoped it would be the last.
    Outwardly, within three months of the funeral William was the same man he had ever been: energetic, smiling, full of life. Only Paul, his closest observer, noticed the change that had come over him: William was perhaps working a bit too hard. He encouraged him to rest, take a book upriver, ride out to visit his mother’s brother, go fishing. But William resisted solitude as he resisted leisure. On the surface he was all ebullience and activity. Inside, hidden even from himself, he proceeded through life as though he had learned the ground beneath his feet was mined and at any step his footing might give way beneath him.

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    T he juvenile rook has a fine black beak. By adulthood the beak is craggy gray. Moreover, where it meets the face it is bordered with a pitted, warty excrescence that is—I don’t mince my words—ugly. Some say it is an incomplete fairy-tale vengeance: the spell destined to turn him into a stone statue of himself touched only his beak before he