Bellman

by Diane Setterfield

  They parted, heading off in different directions in order to arrive home by different paths.

  Will walked the long route, upriver and over the bridge, down the other side. It was early evening. Summer was clinging on. It was a shame about Jeannie in a way, he reflected. She was a good sort of girl. A rumble came from his stomach and reminded him that his mother had some good cheese at home and a bowl of stewed plums. He broke into a run.

  Chapter Two

  William extended a hand. The hand that met it was like a gauntlet, thick pads of skin as unyielding as cowhide. Probably the man could hardly bend his fingers.

  “Good morning.”

  They were in the delivery yard, and even in the open air the stink coming from the Spanish crates was high. “Unpacking, counting, and weighing all go on here,” Paul explained. “Mr. Rudge is in charge, he’s been with us—how many years is it?”

  “Fourteen.”

  “Six men here with him today. Some days more, some days less. It depends on the deliveries.”

  Paul and Mr. Rudge talked for ten minutes, underweight crates and settling and the Valencia supplier and the Castilian one. Paul followed the order of the work: the crates were levered open and tipped up, the fleeces dragged out—their stink with them—to be attached to the hook; then all the business with the weights, the fleeces rising, suspended like grubby clouds, and when the balance was found, Rudge—talking to Paul all the while, speaking of Valencia and Castile as though they were places just beyond Chipping Norton—noted the weight and signaled for the next. Then the fleeces returned to earth to be carted away for cleaning. William studied the work, all eyes, keen to take in every detail. And as he watched, so he was watched in turn. None stared openly, all appeared to be looking at their work. But out of the corners of their eye and out of the backs of their heads, he felt their gazes all over him.

  Paul and his uncle followed the donkey to the next stage.

  “Let me introduce my nephew, William Bellman,” said Paul Bellman. “William, this is Mr. Smith.”

  A rough hand in his. “Good morning.” William watched. William was watched. And so it went on all day.

  The wool had to be cleaned, dried, and picked. William concentrated hard. Willying, scribbling, oiling, carding, slubbing: he tried to commit it all to memory.

  “Sometimes it goes on from here to the dye house, to be dyed in the wool, but since it can also go as finished cloth, we’ll leave it till later.”

  There came an introduction with no handshake. In the spinning house the eyes that scrutinized him were all female ones—and they were not shy of looking either. He gave a half bow to Clary Rigton, the most senior of the spinsters, and giggles burst out in the room, immediately repressed.

  “Onward!” Paul said.

  To weaving, where the shuttles traveled so fast the eye could scarcely keep pace and the cloth grew so fast you might believe the rattling rhythm alone was enough to beget cloth. To fulling, with its urine and hog’s dung fumes, filth to clean filth. To the tenterfield, cloth stretched out on frames, yard upon yard of it, drying in the fine weather—

  “Unless it’s wet, in which case,” and off they strode again. Paul opened a door on the air house. “Self-explanatory, really,” and gave William a glimpse of a long, narrow room, perforated all along the walls. “And once it’s dry, the cloth next passes—”

  On they went.

  “—to finishing,” but they were not finished at all, for finishing meant scouring and more fulling and more drying and raising, where William was too dazed to do more than stare as the cloth passed through a machine and emerged with a haze of fiber on its surface, like felt.

  William’s nostrils were on fire with the smell of it all and his ears were ringing with the noise. His feet ached, for they had crossed the site a hundred times, from north to south, from east to west, from field to yard to house to shed, one building to another, following the cloth.

  “Shearing,” Paul said, opening another door.

  The door closed behind them and William was stunned. For the first time that day, he found himself in a place of hush. It was so quiet in the room that his ears seemed to vibrate. There were no hands to shake. The two men—equal in height, in stature—barely glanced up, so great was their concentration. They worked their blades along the cloth from end to end, in a silent and precisely choreographed ballet, and where the blades passed over the cloth, they left not so much as a memory in the pile. The haze was cut away, it drifted like down, slowly to the floor, and what was left behind was perfect and firm and clean and sound: finished cloth.

  William didn’t know how long he stared at it. He was in a numb reverie.

  “Mesmerizing, isn’t it? Mr. Hamlin and Mr. Gambin.”

  Paul looked at his nephew. “You’re tired. Well, that’s enough for one day, I should think. There’s only pressing after this.”

  William wanted to see the pressing.

  “Mr. Sanders, this is my nephew, William Bellman.”

  A handshake. “Good evening.”

  Sheets of heated metal had been inserted between pleats of folded cloth and were cooling. Along the wall packaged lengths of cloth awaited dispatch.

  “There,” said Paul as they came away. “So now you’ve seen it all.”

  William’s eyes were glazed with looking.

  “Come on. Get your coat. You look worn-out.”

  William held his coat between his hands. Cloth. Made from fleeces. It was nothing short of miraculous.

  “Good evening, Uncle.”

  “Good evening, William.”

  Before he was quite out of Paul’s office, he spun on his heels.

  “The dye house—!”

  Paul lifted a weary hand in the air. “Another day!”

  ***

  “So, how was it?”

  Dora understood not one word in three of her son’s reply.

  He hardly chewed her food before swallowing, but nineteen to the dozen he talked, and his mouth was full of billies and jennies and burling rooms and double giggs and fulling stocks and she knew not what else. “Rudge does deliveries, and Bunton has charge of cleaning. The senior spinster is Mrs. Rigton and—”

  “Was Mr. Bellman there? The old Mr. Bellman, I mean?”

  He shook his head, his mouth full of food.

  “Mr. Heaver is the fuller and Mr. Crace is in the tenterfield—no. Is that right?”

  “Don’t speak with your mouth full, Will. You know, your uncle doesn’t expect you to know everything on the first day.”

  In fact the chop and potato was already cold, but that hardly mattered. William ate without tasting. In his mind he was still at the mill, seeing it all happen, working out how it all fitted together, every process, every machine, every man and woman, all part of the pattern.

  “And the others? Everyone else? Did they take to you, do you think?”

  He gestured to his mouth and she had to wait.

  She never learned the answer. He swallowed, closed his eyes, and his head began to nod.

  “Up to bed, Will.”

  He jerked awake. “I said I’d go down the Red Lion.”

  She looked at her son. Red eyed, white with tiredness. She didn’t know when she’d seen him happier.

  “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 thick-ish, 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.”