Bellman

by Diane Setterfield

While William was out, Dora sat by her window to make the most of the last hour of light. She cut and folded the pieces of fabric into petal shapes, and put a couple of stitches in each to make them hold their shape. Then she started to join them, the smallest in the middle, increasing in size as she went.

  This was an activity that reminded her of her past. More than once in her girlish days she had made flowers out of scraps of cloth to adorn a coat or a hat. She had been wearing a golden rose corsage on the day she met Phillip. She had made it out of an old apron that she had dyed herself with half a teaspoon of turmeric, and he had commented on it.

  Dora did not breathe a word of criticism about her husband, nor any word of praise either. Indeed no word ever passed her lips about him, good or bad; it was a decision she had taken early on. Once you said a thing, it could never be taken back and would be taken up and repeated and altered and told again, no matter how misshapen and out of true. Better to say nothing. Others might conclude that she had simply forgotten all about Phillip Bellman, but the truth was that her feelings were as intense as ever, though they had changed. In the first days she had been beside herself with worry, believing her husband to be missing through some accident or injury. It was only when a month had passed with no word from him and no answer to any of Paul’s thorough inquiries, that she accepted the fact of her abandonment.

  Then she had grieved. Every day she cared for her son, loved him, and taught him the world and kept him from harm, while he taught her a merriment she otherwise came close to forgetting, but once he slept, she wept. The memory of those long nights spent grieving for happiness lost could still make her shudder now. She had never known pain like it. When had it slipped into anger? She could not tell. It must have been gradual. The feelings must have existed alongside each other in her heart for some time before she became aware that the anger was the uppermost.

  First it was Phillip’s family she had blamed. In her heart she had raged against Phillip’s father, who had punished his son’s elopement with the imposition of what to Phillip had felt like hardship. He had hated the smallness of this cottage, the lack of servants, the humiliation of it. She had raged against his mother who had withdrawn not money but love. Eventually her rage turned itself on Phillip himself. He it was who had abandoned them. What spite against parents can justify a man abandoning his child? And she thought the journey of feeling would end there, but latterly she had come to feel that it was neither loss nor anger that preoccupied her, but sadness. The sadness of knowing that the happiest and best days of her life had been false. His love had not been real—nor hers. She had been dazzled by him: by his handsome face, and his compliments and—she was ashamed—by his money. No man had called her beautiful before, and in the face of his adoration, in awe at her own power, she had agreed to run away with him. The intensity of feeling was so great it had never occurred to her it might not be love.

  The only thing that differentiated them was that she had been as good a mother to their child as she knew how to be, and if her efforts were worth anything at all, William Bellman would be a better man than his father. It was her redemption.

  Now though, William was so miserable at being sent away from the mill that she could not even settle her thoughts with the prospect of her son’s future success. Her son was all her life now, and the old griefs of her own lost happiness were as nothing compared to seeing her child in pain. He did not complain at Paul’s treatment of him but had gone straight back to Davies, his former employer, the very next day, losing not a single day’s work. But he missed the mill. It was his element, and he belonged there, and without it he was suffering.

  Now, as she finished stitching her rose, William himself came in.

  “Can you see to sew in this light, Mother? What pretty thing is that?”

  “A rose. It is not for a woman my age. I will put it in a drawer until the day you bring your betrothed home.”

  Seeing the dyed scraps she had used for the rose, he grimaced, before quickly covering his pain with a smile for her sake. Looming over her as tall and handsome as his father, her boy took the rose from her hands and held it to her hair.

  “Wear it. Wear it in your hat when we go to the wedding, and I will be glad to have the prettiest mother in Whittingford on my arm.”

  She was touched by his efforts to hide the extent of his unhappiness from her. After so many years of looking after him, it was still novel to have him wishing to protect her.

  “Let me talk to Paul,” she told him. “I can tell him that you were overcome by enthusiasm, that you have learned your lesson . . . “

  A spasm gripped his face, and he turned abruptly away. “Yes. Please.” His voice was strained and muffled.

  I’ll be crying in a minute, she thought as she took her hat from the peg and then realized it was too late for sewing now.

  Behind her back she felt William turn, and he gripped her shoulders in a brief, ferocious embrace. Then he was gone.

  Had he learned his lesson though? The trouble with William was that his enthusiasm knew no bounds. When he once got it into his head to do a thing—and she was his mother, she should know—there was just no stopping him.

  Chapter Nine

  Paul turned away from the Windrush and into the high street. His thoughts had grown uncomfortable to him, and he wanted the diversion of activity and people.

  As he drew level with the church, Paul spotted William in his chorister’s gown on the church steps. A crowd was milling in the churchyard, and among them was Dora. Dora had a rose in her hat.

  It would not do to meet them now. He had not yet made up his mind.

  Nice day for a wedding. He had heard it was the baker’s son marrying today. He didn’t know the girl, but she was a sweet-looking miss, all smiles and blushes as her new husband shook hands with William, then embraced him with unusual vehemence. William bowed to the pair, smiling, and Paul felt a paternal pride. He knew how much William wanted to be at the mill, knew what his error was costing him in heartache. Yet today his friend was marrying, and he smiled and shook hands and only he—he and Dora—knew what the effort was costing him.

  Paul missed William at the mill too. After one short year, he had come to rely on him. Wherever something went wrong—mechanical, human, administrative—there would be William, scratching his head, cudgeling his brains, putting his shoulder to it, begrudging neither time nor energy till the trouble was sorted. He smoothed out machines, misunderstandings, tangles of yarn, figures, paperwork. His deft hands, physical strength, ability to talk to the workers, made him useful in situations beyond his years. A hundred times a day Paul thought, That’s a job for William, or, William will sort that out. Now each time he thought it, he had to ask himself, How will I ever manage without him?

  But William had put him in an impossible position.

  Paul had no liking for Mr. Lowe. It was his father that had taken him on. Mr. Lowe’s authority in the dye house had come about during old Mr. Bellman’s time. There were a lot of fathers in the case, Paul reflected, unhappily. Mr. Lowe made a good, clean blue because his father made a good, clean blue, and he, Paul Bellman, had never been into Mr. Lowe’s dye house because his father had never been into Mr. Lowe’s dye house, and habits and ways get fixed like that, father to son, and ever on.

  And William? Fatherless son of a fatherless son, William was free of all that. He rose above habit, saw through tradition, understood things the way they were. The past had no hold on him. Perhaps that’s why his vision of the future was so strong. Without the past to cast its long shadow, might you see the future more clearly? You could almost envy him.

  Paul had been spotted. Dora was there, at his side.

  “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?�
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  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, as 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; he felt a smile rise 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 lent 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 ask
ed 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?”