Bellman & Black (13 page)

When his cousin was gone, William took up his pen and fresh paper with great satisfaction. There was a project that had been close to his
heart for a long time. Paul, aware of the level of investment required, had been cautious of the risk. William had read up on hydraulics. He knew the principles inside out, and enough of the detail to have been able to make some preliminary sketches himself. He had assessed the terrain and researched the experts in the field. With the right man, the risk was negligible—and he knew which was the right man. All the while the situation with Charles had been unresolved he had been unable to act. But now!

He wrote to the engineer, lost himself in the pleasure of making explanatory sketches. Several hours passed.

He looked at the clock. Supper time. He ought to go home.

On the other hand, it was the ideal moment to find Turner at his farmhouse and make him an offer for that bit of land that he couldn’t refuse.

C
harles found his cousin’s wife to be a charming, capable person, just the wife a man such as his cousin needed. The children were lively, happy, curious souls. He sat in the small living room that he remembered from his childhood. His grandmother had not been pleased by his visits to his cousin’s home, but his father had not discouraged it. Memories of his aunt, William’s mother, came to mind, and he told some little stories about her.

Rose saw that her husband’s cousin was surprised by the rapt attention these anecdotes aroused. “We are learning more from you in a few minutes than my husband has told us in years,” she explained. “Will you stay and eat with us? Dora will show you her drawings while I am cooking.”

It was light and there was warmth in the air. Charles sat in the garden with the young artist at work. She showed him page after page of sketches, each one just a few broken lines, interrupted, aborted, incomplete, and yet to Charles’s eye at least, distinctly avian.

Dora flicked through quickly, creasing the pages in her dissatisfaction.

“Careful.” He put out a hand to halt her. “What’s this?”

“A rook. He comes into the garden, over there. I see him from my window.”

Charles drew the book nearer to him. There were faults. No one had taught the child the correct way to hold a pencil, and she applied too much pressure on the paper. Her efforts to draw feathers were naive. The bird
had no eyes. Yet it was distinctly corvid. The claw grip on the branch, the angle of the legs, the balance and weight of the body were all there. There was enough clarity to convince, despite the inexperience.

“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.”

O
n 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. 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.

W
illiam 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 afternoon.”

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.”