Bellman

by Diane Setterfield

  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.”

  Paul closed his eyes to curb his impatience. When he opened them again he saw afresh how old his father was. Fragility, folly, and authority that had clung beyond its time. Compassion moved him to speak more kindly than he felt.

  “There is no need to call him that boy. He has a name, Father. He is a Bellman.”

  The face of the old man twisted beyond anger, into
disgust, as he waved Paul’s words away in a violent gesture of rejection.

  It was a gesture and an expression that gave Paul reason to ponder. In his prime his father had been able to temper his anger, moderate his dislike of his younger son. Now that he was older, his feelings more frequently got the better of him. On and on his father went, listing the failings and weaknesses of William Bellman, and Paul let the voice go by like the Windrush while he fished in a single spot.

  He is a Bellman, he had said, and his father had swept the words away like so much rubbish . . .

  But no one could fail to see that William was Phillip’s son. It would be ludicrous to deny it.

  There was another possibility, and it slipped into Paul’s mind now and found a space that it fitted into perfectly. It was so obvious, he couldn’t even bring himself to feel surprised. In fact, he wondered why it had taken him so long to work it out.

  His mother had been a pretty, sentimental woman, whose only real interest in life was the state of her own feelings. Her foolishness was that of the heart. His father’s foolishness consisted in believing that having married such a woman - for her land and the heir he soon got from her—e could thereafter expect her to sit at his side, neglected and irrelevant, in quiet contentment for the rest of her days. She was not a bad woman, but she was one who thrived on affection, who longed to be adored, and in the face of an irascible husband who made no secret of his lack of romantic feeling, was it any wonder her love turned to enmity? Boredom, vanity, the desire for revenge—any one of these would have sufficed to make her vulnerable to soft words from another. With the three together, the thing was almost inevitable. And so Phillip was born. A Bellman by name, indulged in everything by his whispering, spoiling mother, but rejected in a hundred private ways by her husband. Thereafter the family had lived under one roof but split in two, Phillip with his mother on the one side, Paul and his father on the other. Secretly, out of sight, the boys had found each other in brotherhood. In the house, in the presence of their parents, they had mutely fallen into line at opposite ends of the battleground.

  Paul wished his father had been a kinder man. He wished his mother had been a wiser woman. But there was nothing to be gained from wishing. People were what they were and his parents—Paul could not bear to hate, he needed to forgive them - had not set out to make each other unhappy.

  Now a look and a gesture from his father rejecting William’s entitlement to the Bellman name had been the key to deciphering the mystery of Paul’s childhood. It wasn’t William who was not his father’s son. It was Phillip.

  In this new light, Paul thought about his mother whose unhappiness he had not understood as a child, and regretted he had not paid more attention to her while she lived. He thought about his brother—his half-brother—and discovered that he loved him and disapproved of him in just the same proportions as before. He thought about Dora and wished she could have had the luck to meet a better man than his brother. (He came close to wishing that she had met him instead of his brother, but it was hard to see how that would have helped matters.) Finally he thought about William. If he was not a Bellman, what was he?

  While Paul was still turning these thoughts over in his head, his father’s account of William’s faults and failings came to an end. He was waiting for Paul to respond.

  “I’ll look into it,” he heard himself say. “Tomorrow.”

  He went then to his own rooms.

  William is my nephew and is doing well at the mill and I love him, he thought. In some ways, it’s actually very simple.

  Chapter Seven

  “The samples?” William’s face lit up. “Yes, I did cut pieces from some of the samples. Let me show you!”

  He pulled some crumpled strips of cloth from his pocket and laid them on the desk. They were in different shades of crimson: maroon, garnet, madder, cherry, brick, claret . . .

  “This is the cloth that was left too long in the fulling. This one was from April. Remember the rain? It had had to be dried entirely indoors, with no sun on it at all. And this one—this is interesting, see—is one of Roper’s specials. She makes a yarn that has less twist to it . . .”

  So William could tell by the look and feel of a piece which cloth had come from which loom; he recognized the yarn from individual spinsters, he had the history of each piece clear in his mind. That didn’t matter today.

  “William,” Paul interrupted. “Tell me. What have you done to upset Mr. Lowe?”

  “I’ve done a dozen things to upset Mr. Lowe. Most of them he doesn’t know about, I hope. What’s he complaining of?”

  “You are distracting his apprentices. That’s one thing.”

  “How else can I find out about dyeing? Mr. Lowe won’t tell me a thing.”

  “Haven’t you been here long enough to know that dyeing is a world unto itself, William? You can’t go in expecting Mr. Lowe to open up his secrets to you. There’s an art to it. It’s—”

  “Alchemy, yes. That’s what he wants you to think!”

  “William!”

  His nephew looked pained.

  “I’ve explained this before, William, so this is the last time. Mr. Lowe’s father invented a recipe for blue dye which is so clean that it means that we sell more blue cloth than any mill within a hundred miles. We are lucky to have Mr. Lowe here at all. We got him when the outlook was bad over in Stroud and the mills were failing. They have made more than one attempt to get him back since things looked up. We cannot afford to upset him.”

  William did not fidget or close his eyes or look away. He was listening, but it was plain he was not persuaded.

  “If Mr. Lowe does not want you in his dye house, you must respect his reasons. He doesn’t want every Tom, Dick, and Harry knowing his professional secrets. That is his livelihood at stake.”

  “His crimsons aren’t up to much,” William grumbled. “In any case, it’s your land, your building, your mill.”

  “It’s traditional. Dyers have always been their own men. They have their own ways. And they are too important to lose. I won’t have Lowe going back to Stroud because you’ve upset him.”

  There was a pause in which William’s expression told him nothing was resolved. William opened his mouth to protest, but Paul raised a hand to stop him. ‘Give credit where it’s due, William. Mr. Lowe knows what he’s doing. If the crimsons are unstable, don’t go laying it at Mr. Lowe’s door. It’s the water makes them so.”

  William shook his head firmly. “So he told you that too. He’s lying. It’s nothing to do with the water.”

  “You have been here just short of a year, William. I am warning you, watch what you say.”

  “What he says about rain diluting the water is nonsense. He doesn’t use water from the river. He uses spring water. It’s consistent. Never changes.”

  Paul hesitated.

  “It’s not alchemy. He wants us to think it is, because it leaves him in the clear. He makes a good blue because he has the recipe; you’re going to keep him on till the end of his days for his blue, and he knows it. As for crimsons, what difference does it make to him how they come out? He can use old dye, chop and change the quantities at random, and when it comes out dull and brown, blame the water!”

  He embarked on a gesture of frustration, caught sight of his pile of cloth strips and stopped. “Look! Uncle Paul—”

  Paul pushed the fabric firmly away. “His blacks?”

  “He makes a good black because with the iron in the water round here you couldn’t fail.”

  Could that be true? Paul had to admit, it might be. The whole area was renowned for its blacks.

  William fidgeted with the cloth he had separated from the rest. He looked as if he was making up his mind to something.

  “His blue is good, Uncle. His black is good. The other colors are hit and miss because his dye cupboard is a shambles and he doesn’
t keep proper records.”

  Paul put his head in his hands, and William started to look like a man who had said more than he should.

  “You have been into Mr. Lowe’s dye cupboard.”

  “Yes.”

  Paul felt weary to the core. He was more than willing to defend his nephew against his father, but he needed William to meet him halfway. The boy showed no remorse, though, and had no sense of the boundary he had transgressed.

  “You had help.” It wasn’t a question.

  William said nothing. A friend of a friend with a brother in the dye house, a few drinks in the Red Lion, money had changed hands. Subterfuge, distraction, the borrowing of a key.

  “I’d have done it another way, if there had been another way. Mr. Lowe gave me no choice.”

  “Mr. Lowe is very particular about the sanctity of his dye cupboard.”

  “And now I know why.”

  William said nothing, but he laid the cloth he had chosen against the black leather inlay of the desk, and stroked it flat against his palm. It was bloodred, as fresh and clean as if a blade had just this second sliced his skin.

  “Go home, William.”

  “What? Now?”

  Paul nodded.

  “Am I to come back?”

  “Take a few days off. I need to think it over.”

  When he heard the door close behind him, Paul groaned.

  Chapter Eight

  Dora turned out her son’s pockets to launder his clothes. Once it had been stones and pencils that made the holes in his pocket, now it was a penknife and other small tools that came in handy for freeing a tangle of yarn in the machinery or loosening a bolt. Today with his handkerchief she drew out strips of scarlet cloth. Some thick, some thin, of different textures, weights, and shades. The color varied from the lightest red to the darkest; most were evenly dyed, a few were patchy. The pieces were a few inches long and had been chopped with no great care. Whatever they were, with William no longer at the mill, they would not be wanted.