Bellman & Black

  “Bed.”

  And he went.

  CHAPTER THREE

  So had they taken to William Bellman at the mill?

  A nephew was an object of curiosity, and William’s arrival was much discussed.

  The first result was the resurrection of the old scandal surrounding his father. What was known was this: Phillip, brother of Paul, had run away to marry Dora Fenmore against his parents’ wishes. She was pretty enough to justify his actions, poor enough to explain theirs. A year later he ran away again—this time leaving his wife and baby son behind him.

  Seventeen years being neither a very short nor a very long time, Phillip was remembered and misremembered in equal measure. The story itself was weighed and picked and cleaned and oiled and spun and woven and pounded with hog’s dung until it bore about as much resemblance to reality as a cloth cap to a sheep in a field. By the hundredth retelling Phillip Bellman himself could have eavesdropped without recognizing his own story. With every retelling the roles of hero and villain, betrayer and betrayed, were shuffled, sympathy being reallocated accordingly.

  The truth of the matter went like this:

  When he married, Phillip was perhaps not so much in love as he believed, but only dazzled by beauty and in the habit of taking what he wanted when he wanted it. His father was always hard on him, and Phillip fully expected him to harden his heart against the couple. However, he had counted on his mother to smooth things over for him. Mrs. Bellman was a foolish woman who, to spite her husband and for other private reasons, had indulged her younger son too much. She surprised him though by being not the least bit indulgent in the matter of his marriage. What he had not calculated for was the jealousy of his mother’s love. When his father sent them to live in a small cottage inconveniently situated on the edge of the town, Phillip’s considerable pride was hurt.

  With the birth of his son, Phillip expected his parents’ severity to soften. It did not. His reaction was spiteful: there were three male names in the Bellman family—Paul, Phillip, and Charles. Heedless of the price his son might pay for his act of familial vengeance, Phillip chose none of them: he named his son William, out of nowhere, for nothing and for nobody.

  Banished from the comfort of the parental home and short of money, he discovered he had paid too high a price for beauty. Love? He could not afford it. Three days after the christening, while his wife and infant were sleeping, he crept from his house by night, stole his father’s favorite horse, and left Whittingford to go who knows where and do who knows what. He had not been seen or heard of since.

  There was no reconciliation between Dora and her parents-in-law. She raised the child alone. Neither party cared to broadcast the details of the falling-out within the family, and since the only one who knew all the ins and outs of it was gone, that left ample scope for gossip.

  The truth is one thing, the imagination of a mill’s storytellers quite another. If a father gives a child a name that is not a family name, there has to be a reason, people said. It was tempting to cast Dora in the light of wayward wife. There are always men ready to imagine a quiet and pretty woman a wicked one. There was a serious impediment to this though: William had the square, unstill hands of Phillip Bellman, the long stride of Phillip Bellman, the easy smile of Phillip Bellman, and the noticing eyes of Phillip Bellman. He was, indisputably, his father’s son. He might not have had the Christian name you expect of a Bellman, but he had Bellman written all over him.

  “Spitting image!” said one of the old hands, and there was not a single dissenting voice.

  When the tale had been told so often that the tellers had exhausted every variation, the gossip changed direction. It was proposed and quickly agreed that a nephew was not a son. A son was an easy thing to understand. It was straightforward. Direct. A nephew, on the other hand, was on the slant, distinctly diagonal, and it was hard to know what it might mean. The new Mr. Bellman had taken his nephew under his wing, that was clear as day, but old Mr. Bellman, so it was said, had no high opinion of the lad. A nephew, once you came to think on it, was a walking uncertainty. It could be anything or it could be nothing at all.

  Theories wandered far and wide, and at the end the only thing that could be pronounced with confidence was spoken by Mr. Lowe the dyer, who was the one person who had not yet seen him: “He is not heir. He is not master over us.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “Mr. Lowe,” said William, extending a hand. “I’m William Bellman.”

  The man spread his palms and William saw that his hands and arms were black to the elbow. He’d shaken hands yesterday with calluses, scars, and burns. He couldn’t see what harm a bit of staining would do, but the lack of warmth in the man’s eyes told him not to insist.

  Moreover it appeared Mr. Lowe had no intention of speaking.

  “My uncle showed me the work of the mill yesterday. You may have heard.”

  An incline of the head. As if to say, I have heard and I am not greatly interested.

  “We did not come to the dye house though. I hoped you might have a few minutes to show me what it is that you do here.”

  The man raised an eyebrow. “We dye.”

  “Of course.” Will smiled. The other man did not. Presumably he had not intended humor.

  “Perhaps you would prefer me to come back some other day.”

  A muscle twitched in the man’s face. A tic or a communication? Whatever it was, it wasn’t an invitation.

  Will knew when he wasn’t wanted.

  · · ·

  In the courtyard crates were being offloaded.

  William approached Rudge.

  “Need a spare pair of hands?”

  “You again? Haven’t you seen enough yet?” This was better. Rudge was smiling as he extended his great leather glove of a hand. They shook.

  “I’m here to work today.”

  “With these hands?”

  Will knew what work was, he’d chopped enough timber and scythed enough hay.

  Rudge handed him a jimmy, and for half an hour Will levered crates open. Then he lugged fleeces. Then he attached them to the hook. The men were reticent, awkward at first, but the work left no room for the intricacies of sentiment. He was a pair of hands, there with the next fleece when the first was weighed, and as he found his place in the process they forgot who he was and called “Next!” and “Ready!” to him with the same ease they had for each other. “Here!” and “Ready!” he called back, as if he had never done anything else.

  When his palms got sore he rubbed grease in and bandaged them—“like a hundred little knives, a fleece is, when you start out,” they told him—but worked on, till the delivery was cleared, and when they were done and he said good-bye, all the men could say about him was that he’d put his back into it.

  In the next days and weeks, Will did every job that a pair of willing hands could do in the production of cloth. In the spinning house, the women laughed and flirted—as did he—but he also sat for long hours at a jenny and blundered with his bag of fluff till his hands were sore. That was nothing new! Every job he did found a new patch of tender, uninjured skin to torment. Over and over again his yarn broke, a thousand times he found himself spinning thin air, but by the end of the day he had spun a length of thickish, uneven yarn.

  “I’ve seen worse from a beginner,” Clary Rigton admitted, and a saucy, dark-haired girl who’d been giving him the eye added, “And for a man, it’s a blimmin’ miracle!”

  In the fulling stocks, he inhaled a lungful of noxious fumes from the seg barrel and fainted clean away. He came to his senses, nauseated and gasping for air. When he got his breath back he laughed at himself, and said to the apprentice who had helped him outside, “You’re brother to Luke Smith, aren’t you? Is he still arm wrestling?” He knew it was not by accident that the lid was whipped away just as he came by, but by the end of the day he was in with the apprentices enough to have a game of cards with them, and he even made a penny from it.

  In the tent
erfields William crouched low to be taught by rough-handed children how to stretch the wet cloth on the lower pegs of the frame for drying. He barrowed wool from here to there and back again with Mute Greg. He decanted fermenting seg into the fulling stocks. He was not too high to feed the donkey and shovel shit.

  At the other end of the scale, nor was William too low to meet the millwright. He stood beside the northerner, watching the mill wheel turn, all ears. There were different types of wheel, undershot and overshot, high breast, low breast. Will asked a question, then another. The millwright explained, first in general terms then, encouraged by the boy’s enthusiasm and general intelligence, in greater and greater detail. The diversion of rivers to create reservoirs of energy, the calculation and management of flow so as to engineer continuous, regular supply of power, all the ingenious means by which a man might harness nature to multiply his own efforts.

  When the man went to speak with Paul in the office, William remained standing by the wheel. Hands in pockets, blank faced, he stared at the water and the turning wheel. He went over and over the science of it all, time slipping by unremarked, and it wasn’t until Paul tapped him on the shoulder—“Still here?”—that he came out of his absorption.

  “What time is it?”

  And when he learned, he swiveled and took off at a run.

  “Got to see someone,” he shouted over his shoulder. “Red Lion.”

  By the time the month was out William Bellman had participated in every aspect of the mill’s work. He could not weave like a weaver, nor spin like a spinster. But he had operated every machine, even if only for an hour, and he knew how it was powered, what maintenance was necessary, what might go wrong with it, and how to put it right. He knew the language: both the formal names for things and the ones the workers invented at need. He knew the system, how one job fitted with another, how the teams managed between them. He could put a name to every face: whether overseer, senior man, or apprentice. He had looked everyone in the eye, and there was no one he had not spoken to.

  There were only two jobs he hadn’t done. In the shearing room Mr. Hamlin—or it might have been Mr. Gambin, they were as like as brothers—teasingly offered his blade.

  William shook his head with regret. “You make it look so easy!”

  Shearing was, quite likely, the most highly skilled job in the mill, and the one in which you could do the most damage by doing it badly. “If I tried for thirty years I could not do what you do.”

  And he had not worked at the dye house.

  · · ·

  As time went on and the mill hands saw more of William, their difficulty in placing him grew no less. He had attended the same school as Charles: to hear him speak, he was more of a gentleman than his uncle. On the other hand, when he caught his wrist on the hot edge of a pressing plate he swore like a fuller’s apprentice. There was confusion over how to address him: some called him William, some called him Mr. William. William himself seemed not to care and answered with the same easy willingness to both. He had the same manner for everyone; he smiled and shook hands indiscriminately.

  “He’s got no airs about him,” an admiring spinster told her sister. “He never talks down to us. At the same time, he never butters up.”

  So where did he fit? Master or hand? William was a puzzle and no mistake—but he was a puzzle they were getting used to.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “He’s doing well,” Paul told Dora. “Did you hear what Crace at the tenterfield said about him? If there’s a way of getting the sun to shine all night, trust young Will to find it.”

  She laughed.

  Paul liked to lay these compliments about her son at Dora’s feet.

  William was taking his time in the vestry. Too cold to wait in the churchyard, Dora stood at the back of the church; it was scarcely warmer, but at least it was out of the wind, which made your ears ache.

  “He’s not afraid of hard work. And he’s picked up the technical side of things remarkably well. The millwright mentioned what a clever lad he is. I believe he’d have stolen him away given half a chance.”

  “And now that he’s in the office?”

  “Ned Haddon was unsettled by it all at first. He knows perfectly well I don’t mean my own nephew for the fulling stocks, and must have been wondering what it means for his own position. But I don’t see William sitting at a desk scratching paper all day, do you? He needs a wider canvas than that.”

  “William has taken my recipe for fruitcake over to Ned Haddon’s mother. We had a basket of walnuts in return.”

  Paul smiled. “He has a way of getting on with people. And Ned is settled again now.”

  “Does he get on too well with some?”

  “The spinsters?”

  She pressed her lips together.

  “If I heard anything that worried me unduly, I would put a stop to it. He’s a young man, Dora. You know what young men are.”

  Dora glanced at him, the ghost of his brother was suddenly present, and he wished he could take back what he’d just said.

  “This talk of card playing . . .” she went on.

  “Is there talk of card playing?”

  “So I have heard.”

  “I’ll speak to him. Leave it with me.” His brother’s specter diminished. “William is a fine young man, Dora. Don’t worry.”

  “And Charles? How is he?”

  Now it was Paul’s turn to look worried. “Oh, the same as ever. Supposed to be studying, but I hear word that he is too busy painting to be bothered with exams.”

  “Painting is better than card playing, I think. And there are no spinsters to tempt him there.”

  “Temptation takes many forms. Charles is keen to travel. My father does not wish him to go, of course.”

  “He wants him at the mill. It is only natural.”

  There was a chill in her words, and who could blame her. His father wished for the grandson that was absent from the mill, and begrudged the one that was there.

  Paul sighed. “I am afraid it does not come naturally to Charles to wish to be there. Not at present, anyhow. And now I have probably said too much.”

  William emerged from the vestry with the other choristers.

  They made friendly farewells, found their family members, and wrapped up against the advent chill, separated into pairs and little groups for the icy walk home.

  “What kept you so late in the vestry today, Will?”

  “Talk. Fred is engaged to be married.”

  “Fred Armstrong from the bakery? Who is the girl?”

  “Jeannie Aldridge.”

  His mother gave him a look out of the corner of her eye. “I thought at one time you were keen on Jeannie Aldridge.”

  William shrugged and made an indeterminate noise that might have meant Yes or No or What was that, could you say it again please, but that probably meant, It’s none of your business, Mother.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Paul was not worried about the spinsters. He had the notion William sought his romantic escapades outside the mill. As for the card playing, well, that was foolish of him. He would have to speak to him about that. The boy would understand why it had to stop. Paul just hoped his father hadn’t got to hear about it.

  That very evening the topic of William arose at one of the regular conferences held between the old Mr. Bellman and the new.

  “He’s not pulling his weight, eh? This William of yours,” Mr. Bellman senior said.

  “He seems to be doing all right to me.”

  “That’s not what I’ve been told.”

  Once a week old Mr. Bellman did his rounds, and it was understood from the color of his questions that he was not unwilling to hear criticism of William. There were those who, out of loyalty to the old man or out of mischief, were willing to oblige.

  “What is it you’ve heard?” Paul sipped his whiskey.

  “Standing around, hands in pockets, staring into space while others work.”

  His father looked fiercely
at him. It was an expression that had frightened Paul as a child, and led him to believe that his father was all-powerful. Now, translated onto this thin, lined face with rheumy eyes, the same expression only saddened him. “And I do not like what I hear of his behavior with the spinsters. And the boy has been a distraction to the apprentices. He draws them into gossip and idle mischief.”

  Paul took a sip of whiskey and tried to speak mildly.

  “Is it possible, Father, that you’ve been speaking to people who have an axe to grind against William? There are jealous souls at the mill, as elsewhere.”

  His father shook his head. “He was seen standing idle for over an hour, staring at the Windrush like—like a lady poet.”

  “Ah.” It was hard not to laugh. “That will be the day the millwright came. He gave Will a lesson in engineering, and Will was memorizing it.”

  “Is that what he told you? He won’t be able to explain away his insubordination so easily, I’ll be bound.”

  “What insubordination is this?”

  “He has been rude to Mr. Lowe.”

  “And Mr. Lowe told you this?”

  Paul was incredulous. Mr. Lowe was so miserly with words that his apprentices held competitions to see who could draw more than ten words out of him on any one occasion. On those rare occasions when one of them did, the victor won a jug of cider at the Red Lion, the cost shared by all the others. How many words would it have taken Lowe to complain to his father about Will? What had brought this about?

  “He is a distraction, Paul. How is the work to be finished on time if the apprentices are not at their work?”

  Paul frowned. Things had gone slowly of late in the dye house.

  Seeing his son’s hesitation, the old Mr. Bellman pressed home his advantage. “Have you looked into the samples cupboard lately? I was there on Friday afternoon, but you go! See with your own eyes. I’m telling you, that boy’s no good.”