Bellman & Black (3 page)

The rook on the church roof gave an unhurried flap, lifted effortlessly from the roof, and soared away.

·  ·  ·

“I’d like to do it,” Will told his mother in the small kitchen. “You won’t mind?”

“And if I do?”

He grinned and put an easy arm about her shoulders. At seventeen, there was still novelty in the pleasure of being so much taller than his mother. “You know I wouldn’t hurt you if I could help it.”

“And there’s the rub.”

·  ·  ·

A while later, in a secluded spot screened by sedges and rushes, Will’s easy arm was around another shoulder. His other hand was invisible beneath a mass of petticoat, and the girl sometimes placed her hand over his to indicate slower, quicker, a change of pressure. Clearly he was making progress, he thought. At the start she had kept her hand over his all the time. The girl’s white legs were whiter still against the moss, and she had kept her boots on: they would have to make a run for it if they were disturbed. Her breath came in sharp gasps. It still surprised Will that pleasure should sound so like pain.

She fell abruptly silent and a small frown of concentration appeared on her face. Her hand pressed so hard over his it was almost painful and her white legs clamped together. He watched closely, fascinated. The flush on her cheeks and chest, the quiver of her eyelids. Then she relaxed, eyes still closed, and a small pulse beat in her neck. After a minute she opened her eyes.

“Your turn.”

He laid back, arms behind his head. No need for his hand to teach her. Jeannie knew what she was about.

“Don’t you ever think you’d like to come and sit on top of me and do it properly?” he asked.

She stopped and wagged a playful finger at him. “William Bellman, I mean to be an honest married woman one day. A Bellman baby is not going to get in my way!”

She returned to her task.

“Who do you take me for? Do you think I wouldn’t marry you if there was a baby coming?”

“Don’t be daft. Course you would.”

She caressed him, gently enough, firmly enough. It was just right.

“Well, then?”

“You’re a good boy, Will. I’m not saying you’re not.”

He took her hand and stopped it, propped himself up on his elbows to see her face properly.

“But?”

“Will!” Seeing he would not be satisfied without an answer, she spoke, hesitant and tentative, the words born straight from her thoughts. “I know the kind of life I want. Steady. Regular.” He nodded her to go on. “What would my life be if I were to marry you? There’s no way of knowing. Anything might happen. You’re not a bad man, Will. You’re just . . .”

He laid back down. Something occurred to him, and he looked at her again.

“You’ve got someone in mind!”

“No!” But her alarm and her blush gave her away.

“Who is it? Who? Tell me!” He grabbed her, tickled her, and for a minute they were children again, shrieking, laughing, and play fighting. Just as quickly adulthood repossessed them and they set to finishing the business they were there for.

By the time the leaves and the sky came back into focus above his head, he discovered his brain had worked it out for him. It was respectability she wanted. She was a worker, unimpressed by the easy life. And if she was killing time with him, while waiting, it meant it was someone who hadn’t noticed her yet. There were not so very many candidates the right age, most of them you could eliminate for one reason or another. Of the remainder, one stood out.

“It’s Fred from the bakery, isn’t it?”

She was appalled. Her hand flew to her mouth then, more aptly, but too late, covered his.

“Don’t tell. Will, please, not a word!” And then she was crying.

He put his arms around her. “Hush! I won’t tell. Not a soul. Promise.”

She sobbed and hiccoughed and then was quiet and he took her hand in his. “Jeannie! Don’t fret. I bet you’ll be married before the year is out.”

They parted, heading off in different directions in order to arrive home by different paths.

Will walked the long route, upriver and over the bridge, down the other side. It was early evening. Summer was clinging on. It was a shame about Jeannie in a way, he reflected. She was a good sort of girl. A rumble came from his stomach and reminded him that his mother had some good cheese at home and a bowl of stewed plums. He broke into a run.

W
illiam extended a hand. The hand that met it was like a gauntlet, thick pads of skin as unyielding as cowhide. Probably the man could hardly bend his fingers.

“Good morning.”

They were in the delivery yard, and even in the open air the stink coming from the Spanish crates was high. “Unpacking, counting, and weighing all go on here,” Paul explained. “Mr. Rudge is in charge, he’s been with us—how many years is it?”

“Fourteen.”

“Six men here with him today. Some days more, some days less. It depends on the deliveries.”

Paul and Mr. Rudge talked for ten minutes, underweight crates and settling and the Valencia supplier and the Castilian one. Paul followed the order of the work: The crates were levered open and tipped up, the fleeces dragged out—their stink with them—to be attached to the hook; then all the business with the weights, the fleeces rising, suspended like grubby clouds, and when the balance was found, Rudge—talking to Paul all the while, speaking of Valencia and Castile as though they were places just beyond Chipping Norton—noted the weight and signaled for the next. Then the fleeces returned to earth to be carted away for cleaning. William studied the work, all eyes, keen to take in every detail. And as he watched, so he was watched in turn. None stared openly, all appeared to be looking at their work. But out of the corners of their
eye and out of the backs of their heads, he felt their gazes all over him.

Paul and his uncle followed the donkey to the next stage.

“Let me introduce my nephew, William Bellman,” said Paul Bellman. “William, this is Mr. Smith.”

A rough hand in his. “Good morning.” William watched. William was watched. And so it went on all day.

The wool had to be cleaned, dried, and picked. William concentrated hard. Willying, scribbling, oiling, carding, slubbing: he tried to commit it all to memory.

“Sometimes it goes on from here to the dye house, to be dyed in the wool, but since it can also go as finished cloth, we’ll leave it till later.”

There came an introduction with no handshake. In the spinning house the eyes that scrutinized him were all female ones—and they were not shy of looking either. He gave a half bow to Clary Rigton, the most senior of the spinsters, and giggles burst out in the room, immediately repressed.

“Onward!” Paul said.

To weaving, where the shuttles traveled so fast the eye could scarcely keep pace and the cloth grew so fast you might believe the rattling rhythm alone was enough to beget cloth. To fulling, with its urine and hog’s dung fumes, filth to clean filth. To the tenterfield, cloth stretched out on frames, yard upon yard of it, drying in the fine weather—

“Unless it’s wet, in which case,” and off they strode again. Paul opened a door on the air house. “Self-explanatory, really,” and gave William a glimpse of a long, narrow room, perforated all along the walls. “And once it’s dry, the cloth next passes—”

On they went.

“—to finishing,” but they were not finished at all, for
finishing
meant scouring and more fulling and more drying and raising, where William was too dazed to do more than stare as the cloth passed through a machine and emerged with a haze of fiber on its surface, like felt.

William’s nostrils were on fire with the smell of it all and his ears were ringing with the noise. His feet ached, for they had crossed the site a hundred times, from north to south, from east to west, from field to yard to house to shed, one building to another, following the cloth.

“Shearing,” Paul said, opening another door.

The door closed behind them and William was stunned. For the first time that day, he found himself in a place of hush. It was so quiet in the room that his ears seemed to vibrate. There were no hands to shake. The two men—equal in height, in stature—barely glanced up, so great was their concentration. They worked their blades along the cloth from end to end, in a silent and precisely choreographed ballet, and where the blades passed over the cloth, they left not so much as a memory in the pile. The haze was cut away, it drifted like down, slowly to the floor, and what was left behind was perfect and firm and clean and sound: finished cloth.

William didn’t know how long he stared at it. He was in a numb reverie.

“Mesmerizing, isn’t it? Mr. Hamlin and Mr. Gambin.”

Paul looked at his nephew. “You’re tired. Well, that’s enough for one day, I should think. There’s only pressing after this.”

William wanted to see the pressing.

“Mr. Sanders, this is my nephew, William Bellman.”

A handshake. “Good evening.”

Sheets of heated metal had been inserted between pleats of folded cloth and were cooling. Along the wall packaged lengths of cloth awaited dispatch.

“There,” said Paul as they came away. “So now you’ve seen it all.”

William’s eyes were glazed with looking.

“Come on. Get your coat. You look worn-out.”

William held his coat between his hands. Cloth. Made from fleeces. It was nothing short of miraculous.

“Good evening, Uncle.”

“Good evening, William.”

Before he was quite out of Paul’s office, he spun on his heels.

“The dye house—!”

Paul lifted a weary hand in the air. “Another day!”

·  ·  ·

“So, how was it?”

Dora understood not one word in three of her son’s reply.

He hardly chewed her food before swallowing, but nineteen to the dozen he talked, and his mouth was full of billies and jennies and burling rooms and double giggs and fulling stocks and she knew not what else. “Rudge does deliveries, and Bunton has charge of cleaning. The senior spinster is Mrs. Rigton and—”

“Was Mr. Bellman there? The old Mr. Bellman, I mean?”

He shook his head, his mouth full of food.

“Mr. Heaver is the fuller and Mr. Crace is in the tenterfield—no. Is that right?”

“Don’t speak with your mouth full, Will. You know, your uncle doesn’t expect you to know everything on the first day.”

In fact the chop and potato was already cold, but that hardly mattered. William ate without tasting. In his mind he was still at the mill, seeing it all happen, working out how it all fitted together, every process, every machine, every man and woman, all part of the pattern.

“And the others? Everyone else? Did they take to you, do you think?”

He gestured to his mouth and she had to wait.

She never learned the answer. He swallowed, closed his eyes, and his head began to nod.

“Up to bed, Will.”

He jerked awake. “I said I’d go down the Red Lion.”

She looked at her son. Red eyed, white with tiredness. She didn’t know when she’d seen him happier.

“Bed.”

And he went.

S
o had they taken to William Bellman at the mill?

A nephew was an object of curiosity, and William’s arrival was much discussed.

The first result was the resurrection of the old scandal surrounding his father. What was known was this: Phillip, brother of Paul, had run away to marry Dora Fenmore against his parents’ wishes. She was pretty enough to justify his actions, poor enough to explain theirs. A year later he ran away again—this time leaving his wife and baby son behind him.

Seventeen years being neither a very short nor a very long time, Phillip was remembered and misremembered in equal measure. The story itself was weighed and picked and cleaned and oiled and spun and woven and pounded with hog’s dung until it bore about as much resemblance to reality as a cloth cap to a sheep in a field. By the hundredth retelling Phillip Bellman himself could have eavesdropped without recognizing his own story. With every retelling the roles of hero and villain, betrayer and betrayed, were shuffled, sympathy being reallocated accordingly.

The truth of the matter went like this: