The Rising of Bella Casey Read Online Free Page B

pals. Mick and Tom often brought friends home, but for their own entertainment, not for Bella’s benefit. They were in the habit of returning in high good humour from the pub and carrying on as if home were a wing of the tavern. The Bugler Beaver was a face that appeared many times. She remembered the first time, for unwittingly she’d made a show of herself.
    She had been roused well after midnight by the sounds of revelry coming from the kitchen and thinking it was only her brothers carousing, she went to quieten them. They had an invalid in the house. Pappie was confined to bed after taking a fall at the Mission in which he’d hurt his back, but did those boys take ablind bit of notice of that? No, they carried on regardless. Bella stormed into the kitchen, dressed only in her night clothes, her hair all down, ready to give them a piece of her mind.
    ‘For pity’s sake, boys, can’t you pipe down?’ she started in a well-worn litany of complaint before she realized there was company in. At least she had her good cotton gown on and had taken the trouble to throw her Ulster on over it, so she was half-ways decent, if a trifle eccentric-looking in this strange mix of the bed-chamber and the street. Her feet were bare and for some reason that was the first thing the Bugler looked at as he rose to greet the tousled apparition before him.
    ‘And who’s this charming maid with the nut-brown hair?’ the Bugler asked, quoting a parlour song she recognised.
    ‘That’s my sister, Bella,’ Tom said a little sourly.
    ‘The scholar, is it?’ the Bugler enquired. ‘You’re going to be a teacher, I hear, Miss Casey.’
    ‘Oh give over, Nick, with your Miss Casey,’ Mick interrupted, ‘our Bella has enough airs and graces as it is.’
    This was her constant tribulation – trying to hold her head high at the College among those who would look down on her, while being accused at home of having ideas above her station . But despite Mick’s surly interjection, the Bugler sounded impressed and that, in turn, impressed Bella.
    ‘Are we keeping you up, Miss … Bella?’ he asked contritely.
    His expression was half-admiration, half-mocking. His dark hair, she noticed, was glossy in the candlelight and his manner,even in the midst of drinking, full of a kind of courteous mischief.
    ‘Not at all,’ she said in a complete reversal of what she meant to say. ‘I just came for a drop of water.’
    Nicholas Beaver was a handsome man, she had to admit. The kind you’d follow with your eyes on the street if you were a certain kind of girl. Not that Bella was
that
class of a girl. He was tall, well-built, with a fine pair of shoulders. His Spaniard’s hair and moustache gave him a foreign look, though his eyes were the colour of gunmetal. The streets of Dublin were fairly thick with uniforms. Full of themselves, Bella thought, just because they sported braided finery they thought they could cock their hats at any girl they pleased and she’d come running. But not Bella Casey; not everyone who wears a tricorne is Lord Wellington, she would remind herself.
    ‘Well, boys,’ the Bugler said having the grace to look shamefaced , ‘I suppose it is time that good people were in their beds.’
    Bella watched him go, feeling like a scold.
    The young men from Kildare Place who came for the socials were much the same. Either raucous and harmless like overgrown cubs, or they were the opposite, too earnest and dry without an animating spark. One of them, Bella remembered, a certain Charles Bentham droned on in her ear for an age about some Hottentot sect led by a Yogi, if you please, that believed that God was not a personage as
we
all believed – he said it contemptuously , including Bella in this company – but existed as a presence in every living thing. She had never heard such a preposterousnotion and was surprised that any so-called Christian would be espousing such shocking suppositions. And to think this young man would soon go