Mr. Rochester

by Sarah Shoemaker

  Despite the commotion and the people in the mill, I was still alone in the room in which I had slept. The fire had gone out in the grate and it was cold indeed. There was no sign of the man or the boy from the night before, but I found a bucket of water beside the grate and I splashed my face and wet down my hair to make myself as presentable as possible. There being nothing further to do, I stepped over to the windows again, fascinated and terrified by this image of how my life was to be in the next months or years. The previous night those machines had seemed merely hulks in the dark, but now—under the light of lanterns hanging from the walls—they were clearly the most complicated equipment I could have imagined, dwarfing the busy people on the mill floor. And when the machines started up, the clatter of them, even with the door to the office closed, was nearly deafening.

  I had been standing there only a few minutes when the door opened. Mr. Wilson did not bother to introduce himself, nor did he need to. Clearly, he was in charge. “Rochester?” he said to me as he entered. He spoke loudly, as was necessary above the roar and clatter of the machines. Behind him, another man slipped in and made his way directly to a stool at the high table with barely a glance and certainly not a word to me.

  “Yes, sir, I am,” I responded, apprehension rising in my throat.

  “You came all the way from Black Hill; that’s a far distance to ride in the cold.”

  “Yes, it is, sir.” I should have felt relief for his apparent concern with my well-being, but I was still terrified of what was in store for me.

  He turned and hung his hat on the hatstand near the door by which he had entered, and before he turned back he asked, “Do you know what this place is?”

  “Yes, sir, I think I do, sir. It’s Maysbeck Mill, a woolen mill for the making of broadcloth, I think, sir.”

  Mr. Wilson frowned at me. “A worsted mill,” he corrected, and he walked to his desk. “And this room?”

  I gazed about. I didn’t know what the room would be called. “It’s the office, I think, sir.”

  “The countinghouse.”

  “Oh yes. The countinghouse.” I knew the term from the nursery rhyme but had always imagined the king sitting on his throne in a vast and opulent room, counting his stacks of golden guineas, not in a small, spare, noisy adjunct to a mill.

  He stared at me over the rims of his eyeglasses.

  “Where the accounts are done,” I added, extemporizing, “where the payments are received and the bills are paid and the records are made.”

  He leaned back in his chair. “Very good. And this gentleman working so busily already is Mr. Wrisley. Bob Wrisley to me, but Mr. Wrisley to you.”

  I nodded at the man on the stool, who seemed younger now than I had thought. I stepped over to Mr. Wrisley and shook his hand. “I’m very pleased to meet you, Mr. Wrisley, sir,” I said.

  “And I, you,” he said, with a quick nod.

  “And your job here—” Mr. Wilson said, already reaching for a sheaf of papers on his desk.

  “Yes, sir?” It was to come now. I thought of the ragged workers on the mill floor below.

  “Your job here is to learn all that is done in a countinghouse, from maintenance of supplies to the receipt of payments and bills, the paying of wages and bills, and the records of correspondence sent and received.” He paused a moment to scan through the sheet of paper in his hand, then laid it aside and looked again over his eyeglasses at me. “Indeed, you are correct: this is a mill for the making of worsted wool, but the important thing for you is not what kind of mill it is, but that it is a manufacturing business. Your father has contracted with me that you learn how such a business is run.”

  I felt a sudden easing of my mind, for it seemed I was not expected to learn how to run the machines. I was not to work on the manufactory floor. No doubt my relief was clearly visible on my face.

  “You will, of course,” Mr. Wilson went on, “begin with the simplest of tasks, which you undoubtedly already know.” He picked up a pen. “This, for example, needs sharpening. When you have taken care to sharpen our pens and fired up the grate, Wrisley will show you around the mill. Though your business is in this room, it is to be expected that you have at least a minimum of knowledge of what goes on out there, else there will be too much that will escape your understanding.”

  I was already reaching for his pen, but he held out his hand to stay my arm. “Did you sleep well?”

  Torn between manners and truth, I equivocated. “I was nervous, sir. I didn’t know what was to be expected of me.”

  “You were frightened.”

  “I was, a little, sir.”

  He leaned back in his desk chair. “You might one day have good reasons for that,” he said, “but not, we should hope, in the immediate future. You have had a good education, Rochester, have you not?”

  “I have, sir.” I could have added that I was fluent in French and Latin and knew Greek as well and could recite Julius Caesar’s speeches by heart, and could play out the Battles of Borodino or Trafalgar or even Thermopylae on his desktop, or calculate the dimensions of a hundredweight of wool or the weight of fifty bushels of corn. But I did not know how to write a bank draft, or the procedures to cash one, nor did I know how to keep financial records. “Still, sir,” I added cautiously, “I think I have a lot to learn.”

  For the first time, I saw a smile break across his face. “That is the most important piece of information any person in the world needs to know,” he said.

  “Would you prefer me to do the pens first or the grate?” I asked.

  “It’s blasted cold in here, don’t you think, Bob?” he said.

  “I do, sir,” Mr. Wrisley said. So I took the last of the coal from the scuttle, poured it into the stove, and, throwing in a twist of paper, managed to coax a faint glow of ash into a fire.

  It was after noon before Mr. Wrisley found time to take me on a tour of the three floors of the mill. The first processes were done on the lowest level, below the ground floor, after the wool was received and graded in a separate shed, where it was washed and dyed and combed. It was relatively quiet in the receiving sheds, but when we returned to the mill itself, I had such difficulty hearing Mr. Wrisley’s soft voice above the clatter and roar of the machines as he tossed around unfamiliar terms for the processes and the machines—slivers and slubbings and shoddy; water frames and draw frames and shuttles—that I despaired of ever understanding half of them, and I was terrified that I would be expected to.

  Indeed, it took weeks before some of those terms had much meaning for me. But one of the first things I did learn was that Mr. Wilson employed mainly women and children because they were cheaper labor than men and easier to handle—“much less trouble,” as Mr. Wrisley confided. Mr. Wrisley clearly thought himself considerably above those workers, which made me wonder where I stood in such a hierarchy. I had never thought about those things at Thornfield, and at Black Hill there was only Mr. Lincoln and Athena and North, and we boys—except for Carrot, perhaps—occupied a place somewhere between them. But at the mill, it was clear that differences existed, though I had little idea how to negotiate them gracefully, or even, sometimes, to whom I should defer and who should defer to me. This was the real world, and I realized I would have to feel my own way. There was much to learn.

  For the most part, the women and older girls ran the machines, sometimes having responsibility for as many as four frames, needing to keep an eye on all those bobbins, even climbing up on benches to replace them while the shuttles kept moving back and forth, taking care not to catch clothing or hair in the machinery, for to do so was to court disaster. The men served mostly as overlookers and loom tuners, watching that the women kept up with the work, and repairing frames that jammed. The women were not allowed to leave their machines for even a moment, so it was the task of the children to fetch new bobbins and run the full ones to the looms where they were needed.

  Back in the countinghouse, Mr. Wilson set me to making copies of two letters that
he had written. Copies of all letters were kept in letter boxes as records of business dealings, and the job of copying became one of my main responsibilities. As I quickly came to understand, that is one of the best ways to learn the operation of any business or manufactory.

  The machines ran from six in the morning until six at night or later, and Mr. Wilson stayed nearly as long almost every day. He took me home with him that first evening; Mrs. Wilson had tea ready for us the moment we walked in the door. It appeared I was to stay at their home—for the time being, at least—and that fact was a great relief to me, as I had begun to wonder, as the day progressed, if the cot in the countinghouse was to be my permanent residence. The Wilsons were both close to sixty years of age, I should guess, and Mrs. Wilson was a delicate woman with pale skin, fair hair gone to gray, and a warm smile. They had no children, and it seemed to me that they had not yet worked out how they were going to treat me—was I a guest or a member of the extended family, the son they might have had or just another employee?

  Mrs. Wilson spent a great deal of her time doing various kinds of handwork, and I had not been there a week before she presented me with a scarf she had knitted for me. By then it had turned unusually warm, and I had no real need of such an item, but nevertheless I wore it to the mill each day (and to church on Sundays) for a month, regardless of the weather. She even admonished me, once or twice, that I did not need to wear it when the days were so warm, but I laughed and told her I liked it, which was true. I refrained from adding that no one had ever done such a thing for me before.

  They put me in a little room on the top floor, under the eaves of their town house, which was cozy in cold weather but airless in the summer. There was in fact a second bedroom across the hall from theirs on the floor below, but it was almost never used. A room of my own—on a whole floor!—was an incredible luxury after sharing a room and almost always a bed with one or two or even three other boys at Black Hill. Even back at Thornfield-Hall, I’d shared the nursery with whatever governess was in residence.

  Mrs. Wilson asked if she might call me “Eddie,” and much as I wished to hear someone use my given name, after being called “Young Master” and “Jamaica” and now “Rochester,” I could scarcely object when she confided that it had been the name of her beloved brother, who had died “too young” of consumption. Mr. Wilson, of course, never called me anything but my surname. It was pleasant at their home, and quiet after the constant roar and clatter of the machines, and it was there that I became more fully aware of Mr. Wilson’s deficit of hearing. I had not noticed it at the mill, as we all spoke rather loudly to be heard over the machines, but in their quiet house, I discovered, one still had to speak up to be heard. It was a common ailment of mill workers—something they called cloth ear—but I was still young enough to believe myself impervious to such ailments.

  Evenings after tea were spent in the parlor, Mrs. Wilson at her handwork, and Mr. Wilson reading the newspaper. For the first time, I had regular access to newspapers—the Leeds Intelligencer every week, but also sometimes the Mercury or the Times from London—and the fact that I devoured them seemed to please Mr. Wilson, who was wont to bring me into conversation regarding some piece of news in almost every issue. At first I had little idea what he was talking about: The Corn Laws; the Tories (whom he hated) and the Whigs (whom he tolerated); the Luddites, whom he of course despised; and the Jacobites, whom he dismissed entirely. I thought I had received a decent education at Black Hill, but with Mr. Wilson I realized how narrow had been my previous training.

  As Mr. Wilson explained, large landholders throughout the country had been consolidating their holdings—just as Rowland had proposed to my father years before—inclosing the common land and throwing out their renters, who were left with no way to make a living. These folk flooded into the towns and cities searching for work, but at the same time, the introduction of machines to replace human hands further reduced the work available. It was an unfortunate but necessary side effect of a business like Mr. Wilson’s, for Maysbeck Mill’s machines now did the work that skilled spinners, weavers, and fullers had once done. I could not help feeling pity for the desperate countryfolk who overran every town and city, but at the same time, I saw how it frustrated Mr. Wilson: didn’t they understand that in the cities there were not nearly enough jobs for them all?

  Given the sorry state of things, it was not surprising that manufactories like ours became the targets of hooligans bent on smashing the machines that had replaced working folk. Indeed, Mr. Wilson employed a night watchman to guard his mill: Bert Cornes, whom I had met the night I arrived. He was rough looking and coarse speaking, with a nose permanently misshapen in fights. I surely would not have wanted to be at the receiving end of his cudgel, but the few times I saw him, he was never less than pleasant to me.

  As for the routines of the countinghouse, the importance of the records became clearer and clearer. The wagonloads of wool had to be weighed and classed and sorted, and the tally slips taken to the countinghouse, where the receipts were written and the payments made. Additional accounts were kept of the dyes used, the idle time for machinery repair or rethreading, and of course of the workers’ attendance—for a worker who was not at her machine by ten minutes after six would not be paid for that half day. And of course, there were bank receipts reflecting deposits that came in from Mr. Wilson’s agents in London and Manchester and abroad. In short, the work of the countinghouse, and indeed the entire work of the mill, could be and was measured in terms of costs and receipts.

  Early on, I was tasked with running tally slips from the sorting floor to Mr. Wrisley, and I enjoyed going out into the manufactory, watching amazed as the wool sliver was pulled and twisted finer and finer in each successive frame, while upstairs the looms magically (to my unsophisticated eyes) turned that thread into plain or plaid or striped cloth. In my initial ignorance, I imagined the workers my age becoming my friends, teasing and joking and laughing with me at the break for lunch, as I had played sometimes with the stableboys at Thornfield-Hall. But the mill boys were leery of me, and the adults gave me a wide berth.

  After a time, I was given other jobs as well, even taking over some of the tally work from Mr. Wrisley. I was no end of proud of myself, and I kept the tally books as neatly and as perfectly calculated as anyone could wish. But that kind of work meant less time spent on the floor of the mill, and I had by then noticed one particular girl. I had not even seen a girl when I was at Black Hill, and, earlier, as a young boy at Thornfield I had occasionally played with Gracie, the older sister of one of the stableboys, but this was different. This girl was my own age or thereabouts, with wheat-colored hair, strands of which sometimes escaped from the mobcap she always wore, and the lightest blue eyes I had ever seen before or since. She worked in the sorting crib, her quick hands adept at classing the bales as they were brought into the mill, and, as well, she combed the raw wool with heated combs into the sliver with which the spinning process began. I don’t know what attracted me to her, except that she seemed different from the others. None of the boys would have anything to do with me, Mr. Wrisley was twenty years older than I, and Mr. and Mrs. Wilson, while kind, were even older. I yearned for a companion.

  Weeks went by as I tried to catch her eye, further weeks while I imagined all sorts of ways in which I might meet up with her “by accident” away from the mill, and as time passed, I became more and more focused on her, on the thought of talking with her, on the thought, to tell the truth, of just being with her. And then Mrs. Wilson, unwittingly, showed me the way. We had eaten raisin tea cakes one evening, and I had had more than my share. In the morning Mrs. Wilson sidled up to me, put an arm around my waist, and smiled at me the way she sometimes did, thinking perhaps of her dead brother, Eddie. She slipped a hand into my jacket pocket. “A special treat,” she whispered.

  But when I arrived at the countinghouse and put my hand into my pocket, I found she had secreted not one but two tea cakes there, and immediatel
y I began to imagine how I might present my gift to Alma—for that was the girl’s name—and I pictured her soft lips spreading into a smile.

  It was afternoon before I could make an excuse to go to the sorting crib, where in my fantasies she always was waiting for me. But when I found her, she had her hands deep into a bale of wool. Two or three wool brokers were standing around aimlessly, waiting for the tally, which they could exchange at the countinghouse for credit.

  “Good afternoon, Alma,” I said. It was the first time I had spoken directly to her.

  She paused and glanced up, confused and seemingly dismayed.

  Nevertheless, I grinned, just as I had imagined I would do. “Good afternoon,” I said again.

  “Good afternoon, sir,” she whispered.

  “Not ‘sir,’” I said. “Edward.”

  She stared down at her hands, saying nothing more. I was suddenly aware that the men were watching us.

  “You could call me Edward,” I said softly, hoping they didn’t hear.

  Still she said nothing, nor did she look up, but she did turn an unnerving shade of red.

  “I have something,” I murmured, pulling out the cloth-wrapped packet. “Would you like a tea cake?”

  “No, sir,” she whispered, her face still turned away. “No, thank you.”

  “I have two. I can’t eat them both.” I pulled open the packet so that she could see, but she didn’t look.

  “I will have one and you may take the other.” I made a big show of withdrawing one tea cake and taking a bite, but it was all lost on her because she still wasn’t watching.

  “Well then,” I said, uncertain of my next move. My daydreams had not anticipated this lack of response. Or for an audience of men, for that matter, who stared stone-faced at me. In my imagination, Alma would by now have succumbed to my blandishments, but now I hardly knew what to do. “Well then,” I said again, “I will just leave it here for when it suits you to eat it.” And I beat a retreat, uncertain what else I could have done or said, but quite sure that this time, at least, there was nothing else left for me. When next I came to the sorting crib, the tea cake was gone and the cloth neatly folded where I was sure to see it.