Bellman & Black (4 page)

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.”

“M
r. 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 tenterfields 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.

“H
e’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.”