Bellman & Black

by Diane Setterfield

  “That’s a pretty rose you have in your hat.”

  “It is not the time to talk of roses. Paul, he may be smiling today, but underneath it he is so unhappy. Is there nothing that can be done to put things right?”

  He took a deep breath. “Perhaps there is something.”

  Dora was startled.

  “Give me the rose.”

  Bewildered she raised her hand to her hat. “This? But it is stitched on.”

  She let him put his penknife to her hat to pluck the bloom.

  “Fetch William.”

  She signaled to her son to approach.

  “These are all the same dye batch, I take it? Only the cloth is different?” Paul indicated the various petals.

  “Yes.”

  Paul applied the blade to the base of the brightest red petal and excised it. Peering through his looking glass at the cut edge of the petal, he could just make out that the cloth was red all the way through. The dye had penetrated to the very heart of the wool. He examined a few of the duller shades to compare. All had a core of white.

  Now Paul and William began to talk. Fast and technical, so that she understood the excitement better than the meaning. Ann Roper and her low-twist yarn, and fresh madder from Harris’s not Chantrey’s, and air drying, and double-dyeing, and record keeping . . .

  “—and if we do all that,” William concluded, “there’s no reason why we shouldn’t get consistent crimson, soft as this, bright as this every time.”

  Dora looked from her son’s face to Paul’s. She didn’t know quite what was happening, and her poor rose had been so tortured and cut about that it was irretrievable, but she could see from both their faces that there was a chance everything was going to be all right again.

  “And Mr. Lowe . . .”

  Dora held her breath and prayed for William to hold his tongue.

  Paul’s smile grew wary. “What about him?”

  “If he were to be brought to thinking it was all his idea . . . ?”

  Paul took William’s hand in his and squeezed it firmly. “Just leave Mr. Lowe to me, eh?”

  CHAPTER TEN

  “You want to give us a bit of warning next time!” said Rudge, coming into Paul’s office.

  “About what?”

  “Bright red! Drills right into a man’s brain, I can tell you. From right over the other side of the valley you can see it. Set my eyes all ajangle, I thought they were going to explode in my head.”

  Paul went to see for himself.

  It was a perfect day for drying. The sun was warm but not too strong, there was an even heat in the air and a soft breeze. The din of the fulling mill was something Paul was used to; it hardly interfered with the pleasure he took in the blue sky and the green and gold irregularly shaped fields in the distance.

  As he rounded the dye house and the view of the tenterfield opened up before him, Paul came to a sudden halt. To the left and the right, his long line of frames receded into the distance, and stretched along them, vivid as fresh-spilt blood, was yard upon yard of crimson cloth. For a moment that was all Paul could see, and he understood that Rudge was only half exaggerating when he spoke of exploding eyes. He felt a pleasurable excitement flood his mind and a quickening of his pulse; a smile rose irresistibly to his lips. Then he saw that he was not the only one.

  Crace, his overseer at the tenterfield, walked the length of the racks, stopping here and there as if to gauge the evenness of the tension along the upper and lower cross bars, but it was clear enough that this was a pantomime for the boss’s benefit: he was there for one reason only, and that was to relish the color.

  Paul hailed him.

  “Have you ever seen a better crimson, Mr. Crace?”

  “I can’t say as I have.”

  “Nor I. Not here, nor anywhere.”

  Leaning in the doorway of the dye house, Lowe himself had come out to see how his color was drying.

  “Bright enough for you, Mr. Bellman?” he asked.

  “Dazzling, Mr. Lowe.”

  Lowe inclined his head and returned to his dye house.

  Paul’s arrival had sent the dozen or so lowlier employees scurrying back to their work, but evidently the crimson was the talk of the mill, and everyone who could was coming to take a look. Nor was it only the mill folk who took an interest. Along the far fence, clusters of people leaned and looked, riders slowed, all come for the glorious spectacle of the new crimson.

  · · ·

  “How does it look?” William was impatient.

  “Congratulations,” Paul told him. “We’re going to do well out of it.”

  His nephew’s face relaxed.

  “You did right not to go over yourself. Lowe is pretending not to notice that he is the star turn, but he is enjoying every minute. What’s on your mind, Will?”

  “The frames.”

  “In the tenterfield? What about them?”

  “We have the length for an extra one at the end of the tenterfield, but the ground drops and the copse at the corner will cast a shadow so that’s no good, and I can’t see that Mr. Gregory will sell us any of the East field, not for love nor money—”

  Paul laughed. “But does it matter? We rarely use all five as it is—”

  “Yes, but when the orders start coming in for the crimson . . .”

  “Hold your horses, William. We don’t know yet what orders will come in for the crimson.”

  But William didn’t hear. “So far as I can see, it’s either buy up some land on the other side, there’s nothing to cast shade on that length of field belonging to Mr. Driffield, and he’d sell at the right money, or else build another drying house and do more drying inside. And with the quality of the color, if we had the softness from indoor drying, we could raise our prices. I’d be in favor of that except for the time it’ll take to build it. Unless Mr. Driffield would rent us the land for the time it takes to build the drying house . . .”

  “Aren’t you getting ahead of yourself?”

  “What time is it?”

  Paul consulted his watch. “Ten to three.”

  “He’ll be on his way.”

  The merchant would be arriving by the Burford Road. He would have an unimpeded view of the crimson cloth for a full ten minutes of his journey.

  At five o’clock Paul had orders for a thousand yards of crimson cloth by the end of September and the same again a month later.

  He went directly to Mr. Driffield on his way home and arranged to rent a length of his field.

  A year. All this the boy had brought about in a year. What could he do if he were given free rein?

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Behind the scenes were arguments William was not privy to.

  “Father, you made me manager of the mill. You must let me manage the mill. I intend to make William my secretary.”

  “But Charles is to inherit! Your own son!”

  “Charles has no interest in managing the mill. That is abundantly clear to me, as it should be to you. If we insist on him taking on a job in which he has no interest and for which he has—let us face facts—no aptitude, we can expect only one thing. The mill will fail. William is part of the family. He is willing and he is more than able. In two years he has learned more about the running of the mill than Charles, who has barely put his nose into the place since the day he left school.”

  “Charles will be interested soon enough. When he inherits—”

  “Charles wishes only to travel and paint. He doesn’t know how to speak to the men or the customers. He is bored by the money. When he inherits, the first thing he will do is put a manager in. We do our best by the mill and by Charles by making sure that such a man is ready and waiting. Charles does not want to be at the mill. William wants nothing more. Why should not both of them lead the lives they wish? Both benefit? And let the mill thrive.”

  Old Mr. Bellman’s views of the matter were unalterable and Paul would not be swayed. It was a stalemate. In the end it was agreed that Charles would
go off for the twelve months of traveling he had asked for, and that William would be invited to act as secretary to Paul for that year. At the end of which time . . .

  Paul’s father gave way because he saw the future as clear as a bell.

  “When Charles comes back, he’ll be ready for it. And when young William realizes what’s at stake, he’ll soon take fright. All that work for a mill you can’t call your own? He’ll back off. Take my word for it!”

  At the end of twelve months Charles, inspired by the palazzos and basilicas of Italy, refused to come home at all, and far from “backing off,” William was throwing himself into new projects and ventures, and the Bellman mill was prospering as never before.

  This had happened though:

  Old Mr. Bellman sneezed and then coughed. A summer cold, not uncommon, though it lingered and turned into something more serious. He had a fire lit in his bedroom on the first floor and spent the days with a rug over his knees, looking out over the fields where the rooks were coming down to jab at the earth with their stony beaks.

  It was the maid who found him.

  If in his last minutes he had reviewed his life—his unhappy marriage, his wife’s infidelity, the revenge he took on her second son—and if at the last minute he had had a change of heart and realized that his domestic unhappiness was in part the result of his own harshness, then not a trace of any of this showed on his face. Rigid, glaring, set in a frown, his face was so much what it had been in life that the maid spoke to him three times before she realized he was dead.

  William was in London when it happened. A series of meetings with the India and General Company. “Send me,” he had begged. “They’ll think I’m still green and it will put them off their guard.” He came back clutching a nice batch of orders to find that old Mr. Bellman—he had never thought of him as grandfather—was not only dead but in the ground.

  “I’m sorry to hear it, Uncle.”

  “Show me these orders.”

  Paul nodded. “You’ve done well. These dates will dovetail nicely with the Portsmouth orders. Do you ever think of your father, Will?”

  Will shook his head.

  “You don’t wonder where he is? Whether he is alive or dead?”

  Will applied himself to the question, as though with effort he might find among his recollections some small overlooked instance of such curiosity.

  He shook his head. “Never.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  It came like this.

  Dora Bellman felt tired. That’s unlike me, she thought.

  She took a bowl and went to pick blackberries. Perhaps the fresh air would stir her. In the distance, beyond the farmland, was the tenterfield: lengths of white cloth all in a row, and a few tiny stick men, moving between them. Not William; even at this distance she would know him. Was it a good drying day for them today? A strong breeze was stirring the treetops and the rooks were cawing in vulgar merriment as they roiled and tumbled on the high air currents.

  The bowl was half full of fat berries and her fingertips were stained red when a vast fatigue came over her. The bowl fell; berries rolled on the ground. When her legs gave way, not wanting to fall onto the scattered fruit, she grasped at the hedgerow for support, but she slumped all the same, and scratched her hands. The blackberries bled into the fabric of her dress.

  Astonished dismay: at spoiling her dress, at showing her calf, at dying.

  Think of William . . . say a prayer . . .

  First though, she must rearrange her skirt—

  · · ·

  It was the Misses Young who brought the news. Never before had there been a reason for them to come to the mill; their appearance was so unexpected that only some out-of-the-ordinary occurrence could explain it. The possibilities were few, the look on their faces narrowed it down, and when they asked for William, the news was as good as out: Mr. William’s mother was dead.

  But William did not know.

  “Oh, William!” and “William, dear!” exclaimed the Misses Young in sorry chorus as they entered the room where he was.

  William turned a surprised and half-amused face to them. The Misses Young. At the mill. Whatever next! In their funny matching dresses and their overdone hats, eyes wide and something unfathomable in the way they looked at him. For some reason the older Miss Young was clutching a white bowl stained with red. Had they come straight from their kitchen? How peculiar!

  “How can I help you?” he prompted.

  Two pairs of eyes fastened on him. Let him understand! Let him at least start to understand!

  William was politely puzzled. Why were they goggling at him, as if they were waiting for something from him, when he was waiting for them?

  Old Miss Young opened her mouth to speak, but the absoluteness of his ignorance made it hard to begin. Mutely she offered the bowl, like an explanation.

  He was perplexed and did not take it.

  It was Paul who understood. He recognized the terrible compassion that means only one thing and rose from his seat.

  “Dora Bellman,” he said.

  Then the story was told. The Misses Young took turns in the telling, their voices fluttered and wavered, interrupted and overlapped, but the story emerged. A walk in the lanes—the wind getting up—such a wind, it nearly blew Susan’s hat off—a shortcut home—turning the corner—something on the verge—Mrs. Bellman! Poor Mrs. Bellman!—and the blackberries—and this white bowl—look!—unbroken, miraculously unbroken.

  They said nothing about having arranged their neighbor’s skirt to cover her calves. It was not seemly to mention it.

  William, like a bystander, witnessed his uncle receiving the news. It seemed to him that the world had taken a wrong turning: it needed only a word or a gesture from him to set it on track again, but he was paralyzed and his tongue was frozen, and so, temporarily, he was unable to restore the world to what it ought to be.

  Only when the old Miss Young turned to him with the bowl, so that he might see for himself, was his tongue released.

  “Yes,” he agreed. “I see. Not a crack in it.”

  · · ·

  That evening and for the next few days, Paul kept his nephew under his wing. He ceded to the Misses Young in their wish to be helpful, and it was clear that Will would not go cold or hungry or lack for clean shirts. Paul’s job was to find occupations for Will. It was not difficult. Decisions had to be made: Wednesday or Thursday for the funeral? Eleven o’clock? Which hymns? Letters had to be written to Dora’s brother at Nether Wychwood and other relatives. And then there were the visitors. Singers from the choir, workers from the mill, drinkers from the Red Lion, spinsters whose fences he had mended, men with whom he’d once had a game of cards, butchers, bakers, candlestick makers, and the sisters of all these, and the daughters. In fact Paul had not realized so many pretty girls lived in the town. Was there anyone that his nephew didn’t know? A hundred hands wanted shaking, a hundred tongues expressed their condolences. Thank you, said William, and Kind of you, endlessly.

  Between his uncle and the helpfulness of the Misses Young and all these other people, William was never alone, not for an hour, except to sleep. He went to bed with the distant, certain expectation that overnight the world would put itself right. He slept for long hours: endless, dreamless sleep, which did not refresh, and when he woke the world bewildered him by persisting in its wayward course. He felt weighed down and dreary. A fog settled between him and his own thoughts, and behind it, unformulated, unexamined, was this: How long before things go back to normal?

  His mother was dead: he had seen the body; yet this knowledge refused to find a settled place in his mind. It came and went, surprised him every time he chanced upon it, and there were a million reasons not to believe it. His mother was dead, but look: here were her clothes and here her teacups, here her Sunday hat on the shelf over the coat hook. His mother was dead, but hark: the garden gate! Any moment now she would come through the door.

  The feeling that it was all a chara
de persisted, and on the morning of the funeral he was more than anything irritated that it had come to this. He dressed in his Sunday suit and laced his good shoes, but nothing altered his expectation that the next caller at the door would be his mother herself. All dressed up on a Wednesday? Whatever’s got into you all? As the procession of men left for the church, inside the cottage the Misses Young were making tea so that the women could do their feminine mourning in domestic comfort. She will be here by the time I get back, he thought.

  William had sung at a good many funerals. He knew the service well. All the same, today everything appeared false to him. He was in the front pew and not the choir stall. The church was not the church he knew but a stage: Reverend Porritt masquerading as himself, the coffin an ugly prop. It was unsettling. When Dora Bellman’s name emerged, in slack mournfulness from Reverend Porritt’s lips, Will wanted to give him a punch on the nose.

  At the singing, Will’s voice cracked.

  Something in his chest was restless. It expanded painfully inside him, pressed against his heart, compressed his lungs.

  What on earth was the matter with him?

  After a few bars of croaking he reduced his effort to a mumble, and without his shepherding the communal voice strayed and wandered most painfully.

  And now a new discomfort. He wanted to scratch the back of his neck. Below his hairline, that place under the collar, a vertebra near the top of the spine, the one where the bone marrow stirs when someone has their eye on you . . .

  Will wanted to rub the back of his neck, and he wanted to turn and see who was staring at him. Don’t fidget in church! He could hear his mother’s voice speaking the words. Today was hardly the day to disobey. He repressed the urge.

  How did he come to be here, anyway? How could such a thing—such a stupid thing—have come to pass?

  He sighed, exasperated, and his hand twitched with the urge to rub his neck, but the thing that was pressing his lungs and squeezing his heart turned the sigh into a cry, and he felt Paul’s arm around his shoulders. His uncle was still supporting him as they walked from the church and into the open air.