Bellman

by Diane Setterfield

  William waited, but there was no explanation.

  “I’m getting married tomorrow,” he said.

  There was no sign that Luke had heard him. After another silence, William made up his mind to go, but Luke’s voice came again: “Do you remember? I remember . . . “

  William turned. He walked home for his last night alone in his bed.

  I am getting married tomorrow, he told the house as he entered it. I am getting married tomorrow, he told the candle, snuffing it out. He laid down his head and whispered “I am getting married tomorrow’ to the pillow. And then, in the moment before he fell asleep, the thought came to him of a drunken night in the Red Lion: I’ve covered her up, nice and cozy.

  But it didn’t keep him awake. He was getting married tomorrow.

  ?

  Chapter Fifteen

  William Bellman no longer drank at the Red Lion. He played no more games of cards behind the fulling stocks. He had paid his debts, settled his slate. That part of life was over. At the age of twenty-six, the young man had a regular income, health, and the liking and respect of his fellow men. After five years of marriage, he had discovered more reasons to be in love with his wife than he knew on the day he had married her, and when they argued they did it rapidly, effectively, and made it up with good hearts. His daughter Dora was a healthy child, curious and quick to learn, and his baby boy, who in good Bellman tradition they had just named Paul, laughed at everything and grew strong.

  Life was good to William Bellman. Even those who did not know him but only saw him in the street could not help but be struck by the impression he gave of himself: here is a man who is healthy, happy, and successful said his gait, and even his clothes, from his hat to his boots, seemed to have a word to add about the positive qualities of their bearer.

  William was not unaware of his good fortune, but being more given to action than contemplation, he enjoyed his happiness rather more than he thought about it.

  Others were not so lucky.

  There came a hammering at the cottage door early one winter’s morning. William opened the door and snow blew in. It was Mute Greg, snow on his shoulders, shivering and with urgency in his eyes.

  Was it a fire? Had there been a break-in? Were the machines wrecked? It could not be unrest among the workers: he’d have known. Other millers then, jealousy . . .

  William piled his clothes on over his nightshirt and ran with Mute Greg back to the mill. When he was heading toward the buildings, Greg took his arm and tugged. Not that way. He drew a circle with his hand in the cold air: the wheel.

  There was no separation between the sky and the land. There was only snow. The only things not white were the oaks. In the upper branches were black clots of twigs, last year’s rooks’ nests. A few mill hands awaited them. These were the men with no homes, who slept in the mill, huddled around the stove that heated the warming plates for the first part of the night. If it was bitter cold they moved then to the seg barrels, put up with the foulness of the stink for the fermenting heat.

  William stood by them, and they considered the wheel. Something was impeding its movement. A branch, most likely. Perhaps the weight of snow had made it fall. Or else someone’s timber stack had toppled and a log had rolled into the water, been carried down river, jammed the wheel. Or some desperate soul had stolen a barrel of beer and after drinking the contents had dumped the barrel in the river for fear of discovery.

  Will took off his coat and jacket. Hesitation could only make it worse. He lowered himself in a single shocking moment into the water, and only frowned at its bitter sting. Quickly, before the cold could stun him absolutely, he waded to the wheel and peered at the dark shape through the splash and spume, trying to get a sense of its length and its lay. He must get a firm grasp on it in the first moment, before his hands were too cold to know what they were doing. He plunged his arms in to the shoulder, took hold, and heaved.

  The first effort achieved a minuscule shifting. At the second the obstacle came free. A hand flailed out of the water and gave William a thump on the mouth. For a second William thought it was his own fist, benumbed by the cold. He dragged the waterlogged cadaver to the edge; the men grasped the drowned man by his clothing while Greg reached out a hand to Bellman. They came out of the water together, the dead man and the living, icy water streaming off both their bodies.

  “What’s going on?” It was Paul, come running, alerted by a messenger. “Good Lord! Who is it? Anyone know?” And then, more urgently, “Get William home, quick, before he freezes to death. Get him dry. Get him warm.”

  William felt a fire inside him. He could not carry his own weight, needed a man on each side of him, his arms across their shoulders, and supported like that he could just manage to put one foot in front of the other.

  Behind him, they rolled the body over.

  “One of the Smith boys,” somebody said. “Better send to the forge and tell his brothers.”

  “They won’t want to know. He never had much to do with them. Nor anybody.”

  “He’ll have been dead drunk and fallen in. That’s what it is.”

  Paul spoke. “He dug the graves, didn’t he? Poor fellow.”

  William turned to look over his shoulder.

  On the snow, a flare of brightness. Copper hair, washed clean by the Windrush.

  An urgent rook in the treetops cawed a stony message that only the dead man heard.

  ***

  Rose stripped William, rubbed him dry, and draped blankets over him. She stoked up the fire. She boiled water and he drank honey water fortified with liquor. She heated more water for the tub, and he sat waist deep in it while she poured bucket after bucket of hot water over his shoulders. She dried him again, dressed him in more layers of clothing than he knew he had. She dragged the armchair close to the fire and sat him in it.

  First he was hot, then he was very, very cold.

  The baby slept, but Dora, made curious by the unusual activity, got in the way. Rose scolded her, sent her away. He heard his daughter weeping.

  “Let her come,” he said.

  The child climbed onto his lap, and his painful fingers managed to wrap his blanket around her. Enchanted by the novelty of the snow and having her father at home by day, Dora rested quietly against him. He felt her breathing grow steady and regular. The solid weight of her against his thighs and belly. How warm she was!

  William felt his eyes close. His body was paralyzed by weariness, and as he approached the border of sleep, memory rose up in his unguarded mind: Luke at the Red Lion, She was all right, your mother. Some other time, late at night, in the street: “D’you remember . . . ?”

  Unease brought William suddenly awake. At the moment of opening his eyes he registered a perception of something: a momentary darkening. Something had been there at the window, blocking the light. He had seen it—or if not seen then glimpsed. A dark figure, looking in at him. He stared in alarm at the window. There was no one there. Only a white landscape, broken only by the oak trees, stretching their black branches across the white sky. To get up and peer out would mean waking Dora, and in any case, his limbs were slow with sleep.

  Dora shifted slightly in his lap.

  Looking down, he met his daughter’s steady, sleepy gaze. Gravely she raised her hand, and he felt the mysterious touch of her fingertips drawing down his eyelids. Sweet child! His heart returned to its proper rhythm. How good it was to be warm. He could hear the fire crackling and billowing, smell the fragrance of something good in the kitchen.

  He settled into his cushions and into the certainty that whatever the woes and troubles that beset other people, he, William Bellman, was immune.

  There had been rooks once, in the oaks by the cottage, he remembered as he drifted into sleep. All through his childhood they had woken him with their cawing. All winter long the old nests were visible, like the ones by the wh
eel this morning. But they were gone now. Quite gone.

  ***

  Luke was buried. His family did not care enough to dig into their pockets for their dead brother, so it was Paul who came to an arrangement with Reverend Porritt. “Someone must do something for the poor fellow,” he said. William being in bed with a chill after his immersion, Paul thought he would be the only one to attend; he was surprised to see that the young baker was also there.

  After it was done and the gravedigger had been lowered into a grave of his own, Paul and Fred Armstrong shook hands.

  “I hear it was William who pulled him out,” Fred said.

  “It was.”

  “Will you mention it, perhaps, when you write to your son in Italy?”

  Paul was curious. “Did they know each other?”

  Fred hesitated. “Perhaps not. Not really. We were just children.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  “I wonder whether we should put some ears in the inns on the Stroud Road?” William asked.

  He might easily have used a more authoritative mode of speech. “Let’s send out the spies’ or “We must find out what the Stroud millers are up to,” but instead he “wondered whether’ and thus submitted his idea to Paul for approval.

  Paul was touched by this verbal tentativeness. His nephew knew as well as he did that in knowledge, understanding, and business sense they were on an equal footing. Ownership was another matter, of course. On those rare occasions when William and Paul disagreed, it was ownership that won the day. “It’s your mill, Uncle,” William would say, palms up, easy smile. But it wasn’t often that he went against any idea of William’s. These days, when his own judgment was at odds with William’s, it was himself that Paul was inclined to overrule.

  Eight years ago he had made William his secretary, and in those years the mill had gone from strength to strength. The books were full of orders. The mill hands were efficient and orderly. Profits had risen and continued to rise. They were investing in new machinery, investigating ways of boosting the steam power, expanding. He couldn’t have achieved it alone. If William was now concerned that the Stroud millers might be poaching hands it must be with good reason.

  “You know the right ears to send?”

  “I have someone in mind.”

  “Put them on it.”

  William glanced at the clock. It was five o’clock. “I’ll arrange it on my way home.”

  And William was happy at home too. Long gone were the days when the young man worked late at the mill, squinting at the ledgers till it was too dark to see. He had another life now.

  “What are your plans for Sunday, Will? Bring Rose and the children for lunch. It will be good to have some life in the house.”

  “We’ll come,” said William. “See you tomorrow.”

  Paul could have wished that William were his son. He might have looked at Dora and the two boys and wished they were his grandchildren. But he was careful with his desires. Wiser than his father, he knew that Charles would never marry, never return to Whittingford. No matter what reports reached his ears of Charles’s life in Italy, he would always love him. Better for Charles that the gossip was in a foreign tongue and whispered by strangers who had not known him as a child. Paul Bellman loved his son and his nephew, but what he admitted privately was this: loving William was a much more straightforward matter.

  ***

  After supper, William had Paul and baby Phil, on his lap and Dora was leaning on his arm. They were playing with a puzzle, three carved bits of ash that could, with a bit of cleverness, be made to interlink. William was amusing his children by being deliberately clumsy and failing to connect the pieces.

  It was Rose who answered the door. A girl, Dora’s age, out of breath, in the rain. “My mother says, can Mr. William come?”

  “It’s Mary, isn’t it? Mrs. Lane’s girl?”

  Rose went to William. “You are wanted. At your uncle’s house.”

  She brought his coat, frowning. “I wonder what it can be?”

  William did not seem concerned.

  Perhaps it was nothing.

  At the Mill House, Paul’s housekeeper was full of words. Too many, too fast, and in the wrong order. Something that had been done as soon as possible, but yet was too late, too late. William was still failing to make sense of it when she opened the study door and there was Paul, at his desk, back to the door.

  “What is it then, Uncle?” he asked.

  A gasp came from Mrs. Lane’s throat and she stopped in her tracks. Will stared at her.

  “But he is dead,” she said. “I have just been telling you. He is dead.”

  He shook his head, half laughed. “No, I was with him only two hours ago. He was perfectly all right.”

  “That’s right,” said Mrs. Lane. Two hours ago Mr. Bellman had come home from the mill, perfectly all right. And now he was dead. So quietly!

  She attempted to usher him into the room, to look, to see. William would not be drawn.

  “Mrs. Meade will come for the laying out, but he must be got upstairs. Do you think we can manage it? The two of us?”

  Paul’s back was very still. William could see it now, something unnatural in the sit of him. He was not held upright from the inside, by his own power. Gravity’s hold on him was delicately , and death had come so gently to him that he had not slumped forward or back or to the left or right, but downward only. A mere hand on that shoulder would be enough to destroy the balance and he would topple . . .

  He sought something to steady himself, something to grip onto. He found it: a list of tasks.

  “I will fetch men to move him. I will get word to Mrs. Meade and to the vicar. I will send to Charles.”

  Better now. The dizziness had receded.

  “You look very pale, Mrs. Lane. You have had a shock. I will have the housemaid make you a cup of tea. You are to sit down until the others come.”

  He left the room, turned on his heels to come back in.

  “Where is the key?”

  “The key?”

  “To the mill?”

  “Why . . . In his pocket, I suppose—”

  William eyed Paul’s tweed jacket. He could not touch it. He could not.

  “—the pocket of his overcoat, in the cupboard in the hall.”

  So that was all right, then.

  William instructed the housemaid to make tea, retrieved the key, and left.

  A pair of ragged rooks flew airily overhead, talking philosophy and laughing.

  ***

  William went first to the clerk’s house. There he raised Ned and his brother and sent them to his uncle’s house. On hearing the news, Ned’s mother offered to go to Mrs. Meade’s house, and he accepted her kindness. He left a message at the vicarage door for Reverend Porritt to go to Mill House as soon as he returned. When these things were done, he ran to the mill. He had never unlocked the main gate before; he did it now.

  In his uncle’s office he found Charles’s address and wrote a plain, informative letter to his cousin. He roused Mute Greg from his bed alongside the donkey and put the envelope into his hands. “Take this to Robbins. It must go now, tonight, without delay.”

  Next he looked through the charts and lists pinned to the wall, outlining the orders and productivity needed in the coming weeks. He went into the side room, and set his own schedule alongside his uncle’s diary. Obviously his uncle’s work would fall to him. It would be more time efficient to take over his uncle’s diary than to transfer the notes to his own papers. Those of his own jobs that could not be delegated he added to his uncle’s workload, his own quick and jagged hand squeezed between his uncle’s neater notes.

  And the rest of his work? To whom would he delegate? He thought rapidly, listed the men it would be most important to have around him, the ones who knew his mind best, the ones he c
ould rely on. He worked intently and with method. What was urgent? What might be left for a later time? What must be canceled, postponed, rearranged? He made lists, notes, clipped them together in careful order.

  William lost track of time, his mind engaged in the to-ing and fro-ing between the overall business of running a mill and the detail to which it all comes down to in the end. He was so absorbed that the hours were like minutes. His uncle’s solicitor needed to know what had occurred. The mill’s local suppliers and customers should hear from William himself and be reassured immediately that everything was in hand, rather than chance upon the news and be plunged into uncertainty. The vicar: better the funeral be Wednesday. No need to give any reason. Was it seemly to organize a man’s funeral in relation to the smooth running of a mill? Probably not. Yet for a vicar one weekday must surely be the same as any other. William couldn’t see what harm it did to organize things in such a way as to minimize disruption.

  Mute Greg returned. William gave him the dozen letters he had written. “Now these, Greg. Quick as you can.”

  William worked without recognizing the ease that came from losing himself in a project like this. His mind moved with satisfying smoothness from one detail to another, prioritizing, organizing, planning, deciding, instructing, calculating.

  When he emerged from this state of absorbed concentration, it was early dawn. He went to rouse the sleepers at the stove in the pressing house and gave his instructions. “Wait at the gate, and when these men arrive’—he named them: Crace, Rudge, a handful of others—“send them straight to me.”

  By seven o’clock the men were all present in his office. William could see from their faces that word was already out. He presented the fact of his uncle’s demise, and the men presented their condolences. It was so unexpected; Mr. Paul was a good man; God works in mysterious ways; only yesterday he had seemed well, etc. etc.

  When everything had been said about Paul that needed to be, William suggested that the mill’s work ought to be disrupted as little as possible by the unhappy event and indicated to each man what he had in mind to ensure continuity. “Yes,” each one said, “that should do it.”