With the Rest I Will Agree

by Ackroydian Temporal Layering, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

I

Writ upon the clean Leaf bound in betwixt the Second and the Fourteenth of September, in Rider's British Merlin for the Year 1752

My Master says there is no Day to-morrow. He said it at Supper over the Bacon, as a Man says there is no more Beer, and Mrs Lester laughed and said then she need not wash the Shirts, and the Journeymen laughed also, all save old Ebenezer Purle, who came over with the Furnace when we removed into the Artichoke and has cast Bells for forty Years. He put down his Knife and said that he was born upon the Ninth of September in the Year 1689, and he would be glad to know where the Parliament proposed he should keep his Birth-day henceforward. My Master said, In the Grave, Eben, which is where we shall all keep ours; and so the Matter was turned off, and we went to Bed.

But I have the Almanack before me as I write, and it is true; Mr Rider has printed it so. Here is Wednesday the Second, and under it, with no more Ceremony than a Man uses in stepping from one Stair to the next, stands Thursday the Fourteenth; and between them there is a black Rule of the Thickness of a Hair, and that is all that is left of eleven Days. I have measured it with my Thumb-nail. I have held it to the Candle, to see whether anything were writ there small, as the Lord's Prayer is writ upon a Farthing by those who shew such Curiosities at Bartholomew Fair; and there is nothing. Into that Hair's-breadth the Parliament has put the Third, the Fourth, the Fifth, and so down unto the Thirteenth, and shut the Lid upon them.

I am Jonas Hatchard, Apprentice to Mr Thomas Lester, Bell-Founder, of Whitechapel, in the fourth Year of my Indenture. I can read and write because my Mother would have it so, and I keep this Almanack because she gave it me at New Year's Tide with clean Paper bound in between every Leaf, that I might set down my Work and my Wages and my Sins; and hitherto I have set down chiefly the first. Now there is a clean Leaf where eleven Days ought to be, and it seems to me a Shame that good Paper should go to waste merely because the Time it was meant for has been taken away. So I shall write here what I do upon the Days that are not; and if any Man asks me what I did upon the Seventh of September 1752, I shall shew him, and he will be obliged to confess that I did something, though he cannot tell when.

This is what lies in the Yard. There is a Bell of near thirty Hundred-weight going into Essex, the Mould of it standing in the Pit half dried. There is a Treble come back to us cracked out of Surrey, which we are to break up and cast again, and which lies upon its Side against the Wall with its Mouth open like a Fish upon a Slab. And there is a Thing that no Soul knows of but myself, which is a small Bell no bigger than a Man's Head; the Core and the false Bell and the Cope of it I have made with my own Hands, out of the Loam that is left at the End of the Day, working after the Journeymen are gone home, for Mr Lester allows me the Use of the Stove so long as I keep the Fires and sweep the Floor. Our Loam is made of Sand and Clay and the Dung of Horses and the Hair of Goats, beaten together, and it stinks, and it holds. I have swept the Strickle round the Core as I have seen Eben do it a thousand Times, and the Shape came up out of the Mud as if it had been waiting there.

The Metal I have also. After every Pour the Gets and Runners are knocked off and swept up and put back into the Pot, save those few which I have not swept up. I do not count it Theft. It is Metal which had no Bell to be.

The Third, which is not.

When the Clock of St Mary Matfelon struck Twelve I was in the Stove-house with the Door shut, and I waited to see what would come to pass. A Dog barked in the Road. The Watchman went by crying Past Twelve o'Clock and a fine Night, and he did not cry which Day it was, and I do not believe he knew. Then nothing more. I put Coals upon the Stove and set my little Mould before it to dry, and turned it, and sat with it as a Woman sits with a sick Child. The Loam gives off a Smell in drying like a Stable after Rain. I have done this Work before, by Day, under Eben's Eye; it is not the same Work by Night, and alone, in a Time that belongs to no Man. The Fire burns very quiet. I think it is listening.

The Fourth, which is not.

I have not slept, and I am not weary. The Candle I lit at Twelve stands at the same Length. I went out to the Gate and looked into the Road, and there was no Soul in it, not a Carter going to the Hay-market, not a Drunkard, not a Dog; only the Moon over the Roofs of Mile-End, and the Moon had not moved. I came back in and laid my Hand upon the Mould. It is drier. So the Mould at least has Days, whatever the Parliament may say of me.

The Fifth, which is not.

I have the Cope lifted off and the Letters laid out ready upon the Bench, which are to be pressed into the Inside of it. They must go backward, so that they will stand the right Way about upon the Bell; and that is the first Mystery of our Trade, that whatsoever is to be read in the Light must first be written in the Mirror. I have not yet determined what my Bell shall say. It cannot say THOMAS LESTER MADE ME, for he did not. It cannot say JONAS HATCHARD MADE ME, for an Apprentice who puts his Name to his own Work before his Time is out may find his Indenture lengthened by a Year for his Vanity. And I will not have it say WITH THE REST I WILL AGREE, as so many of ours do say, for it has no Rest. It is to hang in no Steeple. I do not know that it will agree with any Thing.

The Sixth, which is not.

I thought to-day of my Mother, who lies in the Ground at St Botolph's these two Years, and who was used to say that the Hours of a Life are numbered by God as the Hairs of the Head are numbered. I asked myself whether God has numbered these. If he has not, I am living upon no Account, as a Man drinks in a Tavern where the Landlord keeps no Slate. If he has, then the Parliament has struck them off his Books, and I would not be the Member who answers for it.

The Seventh, which is not.

I have broke up the Gets with the small Hammer and put them in the Crucible of the little Furnace that we use for Clock-bells and Hand-bells, and I have blown it up with the Bellows until my Arms were dead. Copper with a fourth Part of Tin, or near it; I have weighed nothing, having no Scale to spare, but I know the Colour of it in the Pot as I know my own Hand. The Metal in the Crucible went from black to red to a Colour I have no Name for, the Colour of the Inside of a Man's Eye-lid when he looks at the Sun. And still the Candle is the same Length. And still the Moon is over Mile-End.

The Eighth, which is not.

I have determined it. I have set in the Cope, in our small Letters, backward, SEPTEMBER THE 9 1752, and nothing more. No Name. It shall say when it was made, and every Man that reads it shall know that it was made at a Time that is not, and so it shall belong to no Man, neither to my Master nor to me nor to the King. And I have given it the Ninth for Eben, because he was born upon it and now has no Birth-day; and it seems to me that if he cannot keep it, the Bell may keep it for him.

I have lowered the Cope over the Core, the false Bell being broke out from between them, and I have rammed the Mould into the little Pit and sealed it. There is a Space within it now of the exact Shape of a Bell, and nothing in it. I sat a long Time looking at the Sand over it. It is a strange Thing to have made a Hollow so carefully.

The Ninth, which is not.

I poured at what would have been Noon. The Metal went down the Runner with a Noise like Linen tearing, and the Smoke came up through the Vents yellow and sweet, and I stood back as Eben taught me, for a Mould that is wet will throw the Metal out at a Man's Face. It did not. It took it all and was quiet. I said Eben's Name over it, and wished him Joy of his Birth-day, and then I sat down on the Floor and laughed until I wept, I know not why.

The Tenth, which is not.

Cooling. A great Bell must lie in the Pit some Days; mine is small, and I could have dug it out within a few Hours, but I would not hurry it. I swept the Floor. I fed the Fire. I read over what I have writ upon this Leaf, and it seems to me the Hand is steadier than my Hand is wont to be.

The Eleventh, which is not.

I dug it out. The Loam came away in Pieces with the Hair still in it, burnt to a Fur. The Bell is the Colour of a new Penny that has been in a Fire. I wire-brushed the Crown and the Shoulder, and the Letters stood up upon the Waist as clean as a Copper-plate: SEPTEMBER THE 9 1752. I turned it in my Hands. It is heavier than a Thing of that Size has any Right to be.

The Twelfth, which is not.

I hung it from the Beam by a Cord through the Canons and struck it with the Wooden Mallet; and it agreed with nothing. I sang against it, as Mr Lester sings against a Bell to try it, for he has the truest Ear in London and I have a little of his; and the Note was not any Note I could sing. It sat between two, as a Man sits upon a Wall between two Fields. I struck the cracked Treble from Surrey that lies against the Wall, and that answered with nothing but a Rattle, like a Cough. I struck mine again.

And the Sound did not stop. A Bell will hum after it is struck, the Hum dying away under the Note; but this did not die away. It went on, and as I listened it seemed to me there were Voices in it, very far down, as when the whole Parish is talking in the next Room and a Man cannot make out the Words but knows by the Sound of them that they are about their Business: buying, and quarrelling, and calling Children in, and saying the Hour. I put my Ear to the Lip of it. I heard a Woman say the Fourth, as plain as I have writ it, and a Man answer her. They were the Days. All the Things that would have been said upon them were in the Metal, and could not get out, having nowhere to go.

The Thirteenth, which is not.

I have hid it. There is a Place under the Floor of the Stove-house, at the back, where the Cellar of the old Inn was filled in, and a Brick or two is loose there, for I have loosed them. I dug down until I came upon the old Arch, and there was a Hollow under it full of Dust and Oyster-shells, and I wrapped my Bell in a Sack and laid it in. It is not mine, nor my Master's, nor the King's, having been made in no Man's Time. Before I covered it I struck it once more with my Knuckle, and the Voices went on, and I laid the Bricks over it, and it was quiet.

II

The bricks came up in one piece, still mortared, like the lid of a box.

That was how Fran Tilley described it to me on the phone, and that is how it looked when I got there: a slab of six or seven old stocks, bonded, leaning against the wall of what had been the furnace room, with a square hole beside it going down into black. The floor around it was taped off. There was an arc lamp on a tripod and a generator going outside in the yard, and the whole building smelt of wet plaster and pigeons.

I had not been inside the foundry since the June it closed. I had worked there eight years, first sweeping up and then in the tuning shop, holding bells steady on the lathe while Alan took the metal off them in curls. I knew the furnace room. I knew where the hole was. It was under the place where we used to stack the old moulding boxes, and I must have stood on it a thousand times.

"You can see the inscription," said Fran. "That's why I called you. I didn't want to move it till someone told me what it was."

She was the archaeologist on the watching brief. She was younger than me and wore a hard hat with stickers on it. She held the lamp while I got down on my knees.

The bell was lying on its side in a bed of dust and oyster shell, half wrapped in something that had been sacking and was now more like a crust. It was small, a handbell size, perhaps eleven inches across the mouth. It had canons, not a handle, so it had been made to hang. The bronze had gone the colour of strong tea. Along the waist, in small raised capitals, the letters were as sharp as if they had been cut that morning.

SEPTEMBER THE 9 1752

"No founder's name," I said.

"Is that odd?"

"Lester put his name on everything. Thomas Lester made me. Lester and Pack. Even the bad ones."

"That isn't the odd part," said Fran.

She had her phone out. She held it down to me in the lamplight, and on the screen was a page of a calendar, a facsimile of something old. September 1752. Wednesday the second. Thursday the fourteenth. Nothing in between.

I looked at the screen for a long time, and then at the bell.

"It's the changeover," said Fran. "Julian to Gregorian. They took eleven days out. There wasn't a ninth of September in 1752. Not here."

I put my hand on the bell. It was cold, the way bronze is always cold underground, but under my palm the cold seemed to have a grain to it, like wood.

We lifted it out between us. It was heavier than it should have been. A bell that size, of that profile, ought to be twelve kilos or so, and I have lifted enough of them to know; this was nearer twenty. Fran got it onto a padded crate and photographed it from four sides with a scale bar, and wrote numbers on a label, and all the time I was looking at the letters. They were Lester's letters. I would have known them anywhere. Every founder had his own set of stamps, and these were the small ones he used on the waist, with the serif on the 9 that turns up like a lip.

"Can you ring it?" Fran said.

"It isn't mine to ring."

"It isn't anyone's yet. That's the point of me." She almost smiled. "I'll write that you tested it. For identification."

There is a way to do this properly. You hang the bell free and you strike it with a hide mallet near the lip, and then you listen to it, or you put it through a strobe or a spectrum app and read the partials off the screen: hum, prime, tierce, quint, nominal, the five tones every bell is made of, one on top of another. An old bell, cast before anyone tuned them true, will have its partials all over the place, a sharp hum, a flat tierce, a nominal that argues with the rest. You learn to hear the argument. That was what I did for eight years. I listened to bells disagree with themselves, and then I helped Alan cut them until they stopped.

We had no frame. I tied a length of blue polypropylene through the canons and hung it off the bracket of a pipe that had once carried gas to the furnace. I had a mallet in the van. I fetched it. Fran stood by the lamp with her arms folded. The two lads from the site crew had come to the doorway to watch.

I struck it once.

I have heard a great many bells. I have heard the tenor at St Paul's from inside the tower with my hands over my ears, and I have heard maiden bells come off the mould needing nothing done to them, which is almost never. This was not like any of them. The note came up clean and then it would not settle; my phone, on the floor where I had propped it, ran its needle back and forth between B and C and would not choose. It was sitting in the gap. Fifty cents off either side. Exactly between.

And it did not stop. A bell of that size will hum for twenty seconds, thirty at most, and you can hear the hum go down under the strike note and fade. This hum went on. It did not grow fainter. After a minute one of the lads in the doorway said, "Is it meant to do that?" and nobody answered him.

I went close. I knelt and put my ear near the lip, not touching.

There were voices in it.

It was not a recording. It was not words. It was the sound you hear on a summer evening through a wall, when a street is full of people and you are indoors: talk with the edges taken off, a rise and fall of many people at once, a child, someone calling, a cart. It came from very far down in the metal. I listened until my knees hurt. I thought I heard a woman say a word that might have been fourth. I thought I heard someone laugh.

Then the generator outside cut out, and the lamp went with it, and in the dark the bell went on humming as if nothing had happened.

III

Writ upon the Leaf of Thursday the Fourteenth of September, which is

Mrs Lester called me down at Six, the same as any Morning, and there was Bacon, and my Master came in rubbing his Hands and said, Well, Jonas, you have slept through eleven Days, and you are not the only one; the whole Kingdom has done it, and woke none the wiser. The Journeymen laughed. I looked at my Hands under the Table, and the Skin of the Palms was burnt and blistered from the Bellows and the Crucible, and there was Loam under every Nail.

Old Eben asked was it the Fourteenth, then. My Master said it was. Eben said then he was sixty-three Years of Age without ever having come to it, for he should have come to it upon the Ninth, and there was no Ninth; and he would like to know who had had his Birth-day of him. He said it as a Jest, but he did not laugh, and nobody laughed for him. I said, I wish you Joy of your Birth-day, Eben, and they all looked at me, and I said no more.

To-day we broke up the cracked Treble from Surrey with the great Hammer, and the Pieces went into the Pot. I swept the Floor of the Stove-house. When I came to the Place at the back where the Bricks are, I swept round it.

At Night, when the Yard is still and the Journeymen gone home, I go into the Stove-house in my Stockings, and lie down upon the Floor, and put my Ear to the Bricks. It is ringing yet. Very low, so that a Man who did not know would take it for the Blood in his own Ear. I can hear them down there, all the People of the eleven Days, going about their Business in the Dark: buying, and quarrelling, and calling the Children in, and saying the Hour.

IV

I lay on the floor in the dark with my ear near the lip of it, and I could hear them down there.

Fran found the torch on her phone and the light came round the room, over the stained brick and the pipe bracket and the blue rope, and over me lying on the floor of the furnace room in my good jeans. She did not say anything about that. The lads had gone back to the yard to restart the generator. The bell was still turning very slowly on its rope, and still humming.

"I'll have to log it," she said at last. "It goes to the owners. They'll probably want it in the café."

"They'll put it on a shelf," I said.

"Probably."

"With a little card."

"Jo," she said, "it's a bell."

The generator coughed outside and caught, and the lamp came back, white and flat, and the room was only a room again, a gutted Georgian building waiting to be something else. I got up. I brushed the dust off. I wrote what she asked me to write on her form: small bell, canons intact, Lester stamps, inscription September the 9 1752, no founder's name, hung and struck for identification, strike note indeterminate. I signed it. I put the date, the twenty-eighth of October 2026, and I looked at the date a long time after I had written it, as though it might not hold.

She went to the van for bubble wrap. While she was gone I stood by the bell with the mallet in my hand.

I should say that my name is Joanna Hatch, and that I have no family who were ever in the bell trade that I know of. My father drove a bus. The nearest my people came to a foundry is that my grandmother was christened at St Botolph's, and so was half the East End.

I should say that I put my hand on it to stop it, the way you damp a bell, palm flat on the waist. That is what I meant to do. The bronze was warm now under my hand, where before it had been cold, and the letters stood up against my palm, and I could feel each of them, the S and the E and the P, the turned-up lip of the 9, as if I were reading them in the Dark with my Fingers; and the Hum went into my Hand and up my Arm and into the Bone behind my Ear, and I thought, It has no Rest. It is to hang in no Steeple. It does not agree with any Thing.

Fran came back with the roll of bubble wrap under her arm. "Ready?" she said.

I took my hand away. The bell went on humming, between B and C, between the second and the fourteenth, very low, like a parish talking in the next room. I took the mallet and struck it once more, near the lip, and listened to it refuse.

✾ ❦ ✾ ❦ ✾

Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem quīntum Kalendās Novembrēs (28 October 2026), ā Petrō Ackroydō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Ackroydian Temporal Layering, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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