The Rising of Bella Casey by Mary Morrissy Page A

Reverend, she thought immediately. Had it come to this that he could worm his way into the middle of their grieving? Then she shook herself; it couldn’t be. Could it?
    ‘What admirer?’ she asked, making to snatch the note from his hand. Mick winked at her and feinted a few times.
    ‘Ah, Bella,’ he taunted as the pair of them danced around the letter, ‘don’t you know that a certain bugler is sweet on you?’
    Fear gave way to relief.
    ‘Give it over here,’ she cried, ‘and quit your teasing.’
    ‘What’s going on out there?’ Mother called out.
    ‘Give it over,’ she hissed, ‘before we draw Mother down upon us.’
    Mick surrendered the letter.
    ‘You’ll have to open it straight away – he’ll be wanting an answer.’
    She fixed in her mind the picture of the Bugler Beaver in thegraveyard in his jaunty regimentals, standing guard beside Pappie.
    ‘Bella?’ Mother called.
    ‘You can tell Corporal Beaver, the answer’s yes,’ she said though she did not even know the question.

    She shut the door behind the boys and leaned up against it, still holding the unopened letter. Bella was written on the outside (no more Miss Casey, she noticed) in a steady, robust hand with no curlicues, the hand of a practical man. It wasn’t cramped like a clerk’s or illegible like a doctor’s. It could have been the script of a teacher so well-modulated was it, but it had a confident flair, an impatient progress, the letters sloping forward as if each one was rushing to embrace the next. She opened the envelope and unfolded the note.
    ‘Dear Bella,’ it read. ‘Slip out if you can. Am having a jar with Mick and Tom in Nagle’s but can make my excuses and meet you at the Rotunda Rooms at 9. Say you’ll come. Nick.’
    There wasn’t much to it, though quite what she had been expecting she couldn’t rightly say. It sounded terse, a command rather than a request. But those last words – say you’ll come – betrayed an urgency that twinned with her own. Was
this
the way out?

    She sat in the parlour till going on half past eight. Mrs Tancred was in residence and looked like she might stay the whole night.
    ‘Mother,’ she said quietly, using words she’d been rehearsing for over two hours. ‘I’m going to slip out for a breath of fresh airbefore it gets dark. Maybe take a turn by the canal.’
    Before she had a chance to reply, she turned to Mrs Tancred and used her sweetest tone. ‘Would you sit with my mother a while longer, Mrs Tancred, for I wouldn’t want her to be alone on this of all nights.’
    ‘Gladly, Bella, I’d be happy to.’ She beamed at Bella munificently for Mrs Tancred was the kind of woman who was never happier than when she was being considered as indispensable in the affairs of others.
    ‘My head is throbbing,’ Bella said by way of explanation, ‘after the exigencies of the day.’
    ‘I know, I know, Bella, it’s been a long day for all of us,’ Mrs Tancred said, clutching her own temples in sympathy. ‘Sure your mother is dead on her feet.’
    Mother sat with her head bowed. Bella was not even sure if she was awake or asleep.
    ‘Is that alright with you, Mother?’
    Mother made no reply. She wouldn’t say anything derogatory in front of a neighbour. As Bella put on her hat and threw a shawl over her shoulders, she added, ‘I won’t be long, Mother.’
    ‘Oh, please yourself, Madam,’ Mother replied tartly, ‘for you do always.’

    Well, Mrs Tancred thought, the hide of Missy, off out to see a young man on the very night of her father’s funeral. Oh you couldn’t pull the wool over her eyes. A breath of fresh air, a strollby the canal, is it? The only business done there was of the unsavoury kind, in the shadow of the bridges. Not that she’d accuse Bella Casey of that. But Mrs Tancred, mother of three daughters, knew well when a lie was being told. She had a nose for it. What amazed her was that it was Bella Casey making those ramshackle excuses. She’d