For over a month now, my whole world has been gradually eroding, becoming unfamiliar and strange.
For someone who thought she could cope with just about anything, the news about the cancer caused sinister undulations to appear like ripples on a pond, spreading and overlapping as I watched in dismay.
I tried to convince myself that everything would eventually be all right. The tumour was small and discovered early. In less than a month it was successfully removed, but the ripples of dread remained.
Routine jobs went by the wayside, for what was the point in worrying about anything? I struggled against this apathy, for it would do nobody any good to simply do nothing, would it?
But my heart resisted.
Maybe I had to wait until the dust settled.
People understood, but I didn’t. Guilt followed me around like a sick dog. I was slowly driving myself insane. I tried to read, but everything I picked up seemed dull and uninteresting. Writing was worse as my brain remained empty.
I turned to my pile of books again, determined to find some relief from the insanity that was threatening to derail me. The fourth book I tried was Bellman & Black by Diane Setterfield. I had previously read her first book, The Thirteenth Tale and thoroughly enjoyed it.
Amazon blurb…
A haunting Victorian ghost story of love, loss and the mystery of death from the bestselling author of THE THIRTEENTH TALE.
As a boy, William Bellman commits one small cruel act that appears to have unforeseen and terrible consequences. The killing of a rook with his catapult is soon forgotten amidst the riot of boyhood games. And by the time he is grown, with a wife and children of his own, he seems indeed, to be a man blessed by fortune.
Until tragedy strikes, and the stranger in black comes, and William Bellman starts to wonder if all his happiness is about to be eclipsed. Desperate to save the one precious thing he has left, he enters into a bargain. A rather strange bargain, with an even stranger partner, to found a decidedly macabre business.
And Bellman & Black is born.
The strange title and the stark black cover did not inspire me but the opening chapter spoke of rooks, those large, black moody birds and something happened. A mysterious thread wove itself into my tortured mind and soothed me. The spellbinding magic of the writing caught me up and suddenly nothing else mattered anymore.
I shouldn’t have been surprised, for a watercolour of rooks or ravens had been haunting me for months, and I love it when coincidences present themselves.
One passage in particular was beautifully written. A bird is trapped in a chimney and in its panic to escape; it flies around the room, colliding with the walls and ceiling, leaving ghostly-feathered images of soot in its wake.
Slowly, almost painfully, the story gets darker. Mysteries were born yet unexplained. The part where the main character William Bellman loses nearly everything he cares for made painful reading.
I was reminded of one of my favourite TV programme where the vibrant imaginings of the great Da Vinci’s mind appear magically on the screen. Such is the power of this authors imagination.
Inexorably, you are drawn into the mystery so that it haunts every page, reminiscent of Bronte’s Jane Eyre.
Although I consider Bellman & Black to be a remarkable ghost story, sometimes it was hard to distinguish exactly who or what is doing the haunting.
And through it all, the presence and the blackness of the rooks…
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