Bellman

by Diane Setterfield

  “This bit is wrong,” she was saying, “and this, here,” indicating with her pencil the very weaknesses he had seen for himself. Well, it showed promise that she knew where her failings were. Though only ten, it was clear she had an eye.

  Charles knew where his failings were. There was the great one. The one that exiled him and brought him joy and which he could not bring himself to hate. And all the smaller ones, among which was his failure to be a great painter. Someone had told him once that the desire to do something well is a good indicator of talent. In his case he had found this not to be true. He was no artist. He loved it, he was a good judge of art, but his own efforts were feeble, no matter how strong the desire. He knew how to look at the world and he could conceive the work of art that would convey what he saw, but he had not the ability to execute it. At best he might have made a good teacher. A man of means does not teach girls to paint, though. It would be entirely ridiculous. What remained for him then was to be what he was: a collector. By buying art he enabled others, more talented than himself, to live and thus to paint. He lived at one remove from his passion, but he was largely reconciled to it.

  Perhaps Dora had what he lacked. She was unschooled and haphazard in her approach, but she was observant, her hand was accurate, she was unafraid of the paper.

  “Look.” He took up a pencil and showed her how he held it. “Then you can do this . . . and this . . . “

  She took the pencil from his fingers and made her own attempt.

  “I see. Like this.”

  “That’s it.”

  And now, called out of nowhere by his twin on paper, the rook himself appeared, losing altitude rather gracelessly, but landing with a certain aplomb nonetheless. Charles was amused and moved to see Dora’s face grow serious as she was absorbed in her observation. She watched closely as the bird pecked about inquisitively in the roots of the lawn, quite fearless of its human companions.

  She did not attempt to draw but only watched until, having exhausted its curiosity, the bird casually flapped and rose with muscular power into the air. Then she put pencil to paper.

  The rook appeared anew on a fresh white page. He noticed that she had already assimilated the new way of holding the pencil, and you could see the improvements in the greater freedom of her line. When she had done all she could, she put her head on one side to consider her effort. “It’s better, isn’t it? The way to draw a bird,” she explained as she passed the drawing to him, “is to begin by looking really hard. Then, after it has flown away, you still have it, in your mind’s eye.”

  “A very good method it is too.”

  “Are you going back to Italy tomorrow?”

  “I am.”

  She turned her face fully to him and gave him a long and serious stare.

  “Are you fixing me in your mind’s eye?”

  “Before you fly away.” She nodded. “There. I’ve got you now.”

  Chapter Twenty

  On the morning of his departure, Charles met his father’s solicitor.

  “I’ll not be staying in England. I have commitments abroad,” Charles told him. “William Bellman and I have come to terms over the management of the mill.”

  He passed a copy of the contract he had made with William to the solicitor, who read it. Coming to the part about William’s salary, he put his hand to his chin and smoothed his beard. “Generous salary. Still”—glancing at Charles—“he’s a capable man. You wouldn’t want to lose him to a competitor.”

  Charles’s heart leaped. The thought hadn’t occurred to him.

  The solicitor read on. “Fifty-fifty profit share . . . “ He frowned.

  “Yes?”

  “Unusual.”

  Charles was hardly in a position to judge.

  “And your cousin will be making future investment in the mill, but will take any additional profit resulting. Unorthodox . . . “

  Charles was considering what it would mean if William went to manage a competitor’s mill. “He is my cousin. We shouldn’t overlook the family connection.” He half smiled to himself. That is how his father would have put it.

  The solicitor reflected. “Your uncle had a lot of faith in William Bellman. That’s clear enough in the agreement that they signed when he made him secretary. Of course, if you were minded to reconsider the profit sharing it would be an easy enough matter to review the contract with Mr. Bellman. It sounds as if it were concluded in something of a hurry, and you had made that long journey and were doubtless still reeling from the news of your father’s demise. If in the light of day you thought better of that paragraph, one might exert pressure on Mr. Bellman to redraft . . . “

  Exert pressure? On William? Charles baulked. In any case, he wanted to be in Oxford by three, a driver was waiting to take him to the coast for tomorrow’s crossing.

  “The contract is entirely to my liking.”

  At the new note in Charles’s voice the solicitor looked up.

  “Well . . . “ So that was it. Charles had got what he wanted by this contract. And whatever that something was, he wasn’t going to let go of it. So be it. The solicitor hadn’t been looking forward to wrangling with William Bellman in any case.

  Talking it over with himself later the solicitor found that he was reassuring himself he had acted in his client’s best interest. “It’s not as if it’s going to be much, is it? Profits over and above the current level . . . “ He shook his head. The mill was already running at full tilt. How much more profit could there possibly be?

  Charles found himself ready to leave earlier than planned. The coach was there, why wait? He was not sorry to go. Italy was home now. The person he loved was there. He did not wish for anything here, neither the mill nor the house. He was glad to say good-bye to them both. He had no regrets about leaving. All the same, it was curious to think that he need never come back now.

  As it traveled out of Whittingford, the coach took him along the road that led to his cousin’s house. He had scarcely seen William. But he could see the mill was safe in his hands. William was safe in Rose’s hands. There was much to admire in William’s life, though heaven knew, Charles couldn’t live it, not for a single day. He had spent one unexpectedly happy hour here though: drawing rooks with his cousin’s daughter. He wished—the thought was shockingly new to his mind, desire and its impossibility dawning on him in the same moment—that he could be father to a girl like Dora and sit in a garden on sunny afternoons, teaching her to draw.

  Remembering the rook they had drawn, he turned and looked the other way. Over the bank, across the field and to the group of oaks, thickly foliated now as they had been when he was ten. There had been a stone that had drawn a perfectly arched line in the sky, with William and his catapult at one end of it and a young rook on a branch at the other. It had seemed miraculous then. It presented itself to him as a miracle even now. Fred had been there. And Luke, who was now dead, he recollected; his father had written to tell him. Luke it was who had opened out a wing and released from the blackness those dazzling colors. They still dazzled now, so much so that he had to wipe away a tear.

  Arriving early in Oxford he had time to go to Turl Street and buy sketchbooks and pencils. He made arrangements for them to be delivered to Dora, then his onward coach was ready and he began the next stage of his journey.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  William thought about the Stroud men, who were trying to buy his hands, the weavers and fullers and packers he had trained and shaped so they fitted his mill like a dream. Everyone thought the answer was money, but it wasn’t. Why pay higher wages for the same output? He was reluctant to pay money to stand still. Money should work harder than that.

  He had a better idea.

  One fine morning, William was in the kitchen when the boy came to deliver the bread. “Tell your father I want to see him, will you? He can call on me here, this afterno
on.”

  At three o’clock Fred Armstrong, the baker, arrived at William’s kitchen door.

  The two men shook hands.

  There was a time Fred Armstrong had been a familiar of this cottage. In the days of their boyhood, he and William had eaten apples here, on this step, before he went away to school with his Bellman cousin.

  Thinking of it now, with William here, shaking his hand like a stranger, the memory seemed improbable. Should he call the man William? Ten years ago they had drunk together sometimes at the Red Lion. And now his childhood friend was manager of the mill—and a stranger. Perhaps he should say Mr. Bellman?

  Fred looked around at the packing cases. “You’re moving, I hear.”

  “That’s right. We’ll be in the Mill House from tomorrow.”

  “Is the bread all right? If anything’s wrong . . . “

  “The bread is good. I’d like more of it.”

  They stood leaning over the kitchen table, and William set out his plan. So many hundred bread rolls delivered every morning to the mill, by a certain time.

  Fred was perplexed.

  “This is how much I’ll pay you for it . . . “ William scribbled the figure on a piece of paper. It was a large sum, large enough to cause Fred to raise his eyebrows. “That’s a unit price of—” and William added the price per roll.

  The baker took off his hat and scratched his head. “It can’t be done.”

  “Can’t it?”

  “It’s not a question of price. I’ve only got two boys working for me, and it’d need another two ovens to make this quantity.”

  “Sit down.” William nodded at a crate.

  Side by side the mill manager and the baker bowed their heads over a sheet of figures. Whatever they might have been in the past, they were sound men of business now. They calculated reductions that could be made in the cost of the flour, given the larger orders that would be placed, added in the cost of the two new ovens. How many extra workers would the baker need? The cost of that.

  “I’ve a man who sees the lads who come to the mill asking for work. Anyone that looks suitable for a bakery job, he’ll send them along.” Line by line, figure by figure, the whole impossible deal was worked out, from the loan that William would make Fred for the new ovens, to the temporary return of Fred’s father to the bakery to see them over the early days. Every difficulty was resolved, every obstacle leveled. And finally, the extra profit that Fred could expect to make “ . . . in a week . . . “ the pencil jotted, “ . . . a month . . . “ another squiggle, “and per year . . . “ The final flourish.

  By the time the deal was concluded with a handshake, Fred had found his footing with William again.

  “Your cousin Charles was in Whittingford a little while back?” Fred mentioned, making small talk before taking his leave.

  William nodded.

  “And as for Luke . . . “

  William was inspecting a crate, ticking something off a list.

  “It was you pulled him out of the millrace, I seem to remember?”

  William nodded so vaguely, his eyes elsewhere, that it was clear he wasn’t really listening. Well, if you’re moving house tomorrow, you’ll be busy. He knew what it was like. He was a busy man too.

  They shook hands again and Fred went home.

  “That’s the second good turn Will Bellman’s done me in life,” he told Jeannie later that day.

  “What was the first?”

  “I’d not have dared court you back then if he hadn’t talked me into it. I wasn’t much of a one for knowing how to talk to womenfolk, if you remember.”

  Jeannie remembered. And while she remembered a day on the riverbank, her naked legs concealed by the bulrushes, her husband remembered the day a perfect catapult launched a stone on a perfectly curved trajectory across the sky and brought down a perfect black bird that had glints of purple, amethyst, and blue in its blackness.

  “He’s moving his family into the Mill House tomorrow,” he told his wife. “Charles the cousin’s not interested in running the place himself, apparently.” And at supper, when the memory was still on his mind, “I always knew he’d do well, that Will Bellman.”

  ***

  A baker in a small town cannot order two new ovens without it being talked about. Word got out. William was going to give breakfast to his workers. The dairy man would be delivering milk as well. The competitors laughed. Had the man gone soft in the head?

  William was taking a risk, he knew that. How much sickness and absence could be eliminated by the provision of one bread roll and a glass of milk per day to four hundred workers? How many families could be convinced to stay at Bellmans instead of leaving for Stroud?

  It wasn’t certain that it would work, but then nothing was certain in life. You dealt in probabilities, and Bellman’s calculations told him his plan would probably work. You had to be bold.

  In the event, he found he had if anything underestimated the impact his bread rolls and milk would have. Fewer absences, less sickness, increased productivity. And it became easier and easier to take people on. The queues of people wanting work at Bellman’s Mill grew longer and longer, and only his castoffs could be tempted to Stroud.

  With that problem solved, he could concentrate on boosting the power. With the railway bringing coal and his plans for creating a reservoir on Turner’s field, he could as good as double capacity. The engineer was starting on Monday.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Phil dragged one of the red felt bags to the table and Paul carried the other over his shoulder like a thief with his swag. Dora brought the big bowl, and their mother, Rose, the flagon. When everything was ready on the kitchen table Phil and Paul climbed onto chairs. William untied the knots that drew the bags shut and the boys took one each.

  “Ready, steady, go!”

  There was a great clinking and chinking as the coins spilled out of the bags and the boys hurrah’ed as loud as they could. Phil groped into the bottom of his bag in case there was a stray penny, but there wasn’t, while Paul considered the coins that came three-quarters up the sides of the bowl. “Here’s a really dark one, look,” he said as he stirred the money with his fingers.

  The next moment was Dora’s. Conscious of her responsibility, anxious to lose not a single drop, she tipped the heavy vessel and poured. The tang of vinegar hit them all at the back of the nostrils, except Paul, who was prepared, fingers clamping his nostrils shut.

  “Can we stir?” the boys wanted to know.

  William eyed Rose. He was inclined to be indulgent on these weekly occasions.

  “Their hands will smell of vinegar all night and all day,” she said, but she knew it brought her husband pleasure to see his children so happy. “All right then.”

  And the two boys put their hands in and mixed and stirred the vinegar and coins as if it were a Christmas cake. When Paul judged the coins sufficiently mixed, William locked the bowl in a metal box with a big key and the boys were made to wash their hands three times.

  No matter how hard they scrubbed with soap, the smell of vinegar lingered. They fell asleep with the tang of it still in their nostrils, looking forward to the next day, when the best part would come. When they awoke, the vinegar smell was the first thing they were aware, of and they wriggled out of bed full of anticipation.

  Even Dora, who was older and had participated in the ritual a hundred times, never tired of seeing the darkened, cloudy vinegar drain away through the holes in the colander, leaving the coins so bright and shiny they looked newly minted. After rinsing in several changes of water, Rose set Paul and Phil to drying the coins and sorting them into denominations, with Dora to supervise and catch the stray coins that wanted to roll onto the floor.

  Today William drew his daughter aside. “How old are you now, Dora?”

  “I am ten. You know I am ten.”

&
nbsp; “What a fine coincidence! I happen to need a helper this afternoon, and it must be a person who is at least ten.”

  She didn’t dare believe what she thought he was asking. “Do you want me to help you with the pay day?”

  It was her mother who generally helped with the pay day, but heavily pregnant, Rose now sometimes needed to rest in the afternoons. So to the intense chagrin of Paul and Phil, when Susie and Meg, the day helps, carried the table out from the hall to the porch, Dora was allowed to sit behind her father and count out the coins from the tray while her father wrote down the amounts paid out next to every man’s name in the ledger.

  All afternoon she counted—so much for the fullers, so much for the spinsters, this big pile for her favorites, Hamlin and Gambin, the shearmen—and made not one mistake, though the work was fast and there was a lot of chat and joking to distract her. When the final worker had been paid—Mute Greg was the last, he had an extra amount for his donkey—Dora was perplexed. There was one coin left over on the tray. It was supposed to work out to the penny. Doubtfully she looked at her father.

  “Who have you forgotten?” he asked.

  “Nobody!” she said. “And there is no job that is paid a penny a week.”

  He kissed her troubled little face.

  “What about the little girl who counts out the money? Is she worth a penny a week?”

  She scolded him for making her believe she had made a mistake, he accepted his telling off gracefully, and having got the upper hand, Dora took advantage and negotiated further pennies for her fellow coin cleaners. “You wouldn’t want them going to clean money for some other mill, would you, Father?”

  “No, I wouldn’t,” he had to agree.

  ***

  “She drives a hard bargain,” he told Rose later, laughing, as he undid his wife’s shoes, which were pinching her ankles.

  “And me?” his wife asked. “What do I get? I carried the flagon of vinegar, remember?”