Free Bellman & Black by Diane Setterfield Page A

flew out of range. In fact it is more to do with survival. Any tool fresh from the forge will look fine. Use it for a few years to hack the soil, break bones, hammer sea creatures against rock, and see how handsome it looks then. The beak of the rook is ideally adapted for survival, and a pretty beak soon turns ugly.
    The rook is a skilled survivor. He is ancient and has inhabited the planet longer than humans. This you can tell from his singing voice: his cry is harsh and grating, made for a more ancient world that existed before the innovation of the pipe, the lute, and the viol. Before music was invented he was taught to sing by the planet itself. He mimicked the great rumble of the sea, the fearsome eruption of volcanoes, the creaking of glaciers, and the geological groaning as the world split apart in its agony and remade itself. This being the case, you can hardly be surprised that his song has not the sweet loveliness of the blackbird in your spring garden. (But if you ever get the chance, open your ears to a sky full of rooks. It is not beautiful; it is magnificent .)
    Because of his many centuries of experience the rook is tough. He will fly through a heavy downpour and in high wind. He dances with lightning, and when it thunders he is first to go out on the rampage. He soars blithelyin oxygen-starved air over the mountaintops and without a care in the world flies over the desert. Plague and famine and battlefield are all familiar to the rook. He has seen it all before, and knows how to make the best of it. For a rook is comfortable pretty much anywhere. He goes where he pleases and, when he pleases, comes back. Laughing.
    Temperature, altitude, danger . . . The things that form barriers to humans are not barriers to rooks. His horizons are broader. This is why it is the rook that accompanies departing souls through a thick fog of mystery to that place where no air is needed and drought really doesn’t matter. Having deposited in that place the soul that your body has relinquished, they return—via other worlds and feasts of unicorn tongue and dragon liver, to this one.
    ·  ·  ·
    There are numerous collective nouns for rooks. In some parts people say a clamor of rooks.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

    T he months passed after Dora Bellman’s funeral. Then more months. When almost a year had gone by, to fill an empty Sunday afternoon, William rode the seven miles to Nether Wychwood, where his mother’s brother farmed. On the way he rehearsed a conversation he meant to have next week with the plate supplier over carriage terms: What objections was the man going to come up with, and what would he say to head them off? By the time he clattered into the courtyard of the square, stone farmhouse, he was satisfied that he had found the way to present the matter so that the man would be sensible of the benefits to himself and not only to the mill. Good.
    He had seen something of his uncle’s farm, and they were sitting down to good bread and butter and seed cake when they heard the kitchen door open and feet come running in. A boy of six or seven, out of breath and urgent: “Our best cow has fell in a ditch and we can’t get ’er out. Can Mr. Thomas come? Straight away if you please, and I’m to ask politely but be sure to bring him.”
    Will rose in the same instant as his uncle, and they put their bread and butter back on the plate, with only the first bite taken.
    It was a deep ditch, a foot of brown water at the bottom of it. The bank had collapsed, and no wonder, it was three-quarters stones. What little earth it contained was thin and flavorless; nothing had wanted to root in it and hold the bank together. Will cast his eye around to get the measure of the situation. A fence had been erected—after some earlierslide, presumably—but now a recent, second collapse had taken half the fence with it. The cow, wedged on her flank by the bank on two sides and by the landslide on the other, flailed her one free foreleg,