Bellman & Black (5 page)

“And Charles? How is he?”

Now it was Paul’s turn to look worried. “Oh, the same as ever. Supposed to be studying, but I hear word that he is too busy painting to be bothered with exams.”

“Painting is better than card playing, I think. And there are no spinsters to tempt him there.”

“Temptation takes many forms. Charles is keen to travel. My father does not wish him to go, of course.”

“He wants him at the mill. It is only natural.”

There was a chill in her words, and who could blame her. His father wished for the grandson that was absent from the mill, and begrudged the one that was there.

Paul sighed. “I am afraid it does not come naturally to Charles to wish to be there. Not at present, anyhow. And now I have probably said too much.”

William emerged from the vestry with the other choristers.

They made friendly farewells, found their family members, and wrapped up against the advent chill, separated into pairs and little groups for the icy walk home.

“What kept you so late in the vestry today, Will?”

“Talk. Fred is engaged to be married.”

“Fred Armstrong from the bakery? Who is the girl?”

“Jeannie Aldridge.”

His mother gave him a look out of the corner of her eye. “I thought at one time you were keen on Jeannie Aldridge.”

William shrugged and made an indeterminate noise that might have meant
Yes
or
No
or
What was that, could you say it again please,
but that probably meant,
It’s none of your business, Mother
.

P
aul was not worried about the spinsters. He had the notion William sought his romantic escapades outside the mill. As for the card playing, well, that was foolish of him. He would have to speak to him about that. The boy would understand why it had to stop. Paul just hoped his father hadn’t got to hear about it.

That very evening the topic of William arose at one of the regular conferences held between the old Mr. Bellman and the new.

“He’s not pulling his weight, eh? This William of yours,” Mr. Bellman senior said.

“He seems to be doing all right to me.”

“That’s not what I’ve been told.”

Once a week old Mr. Bellman did his rounds, and it was understood from the color of his questions that he was not unwilling to hear criticism of William. There were those who, out of loyalty to the old man or out of mischief, were willing to oblige.

“What is it you’ve heard?” Paul sipped his whiskey.

“Standing around, hands in pockets, staring into space while others work.”

His father looked fiercely at him. It was an expression that had frightened Paul as a child, and led him to believe that his father was all-powerful. Now, translated onto this thin, lined face with rheumy eyes, the same expression only saddened him. “And I do not like what I hear of his behavior with the spinsters. And the boy has been a distraction
to the apprentices. He draws them into gossip and idle mischief.”

Paul took a sip of whiskey and tried to speak mildly.

“Is it possible, Father, that you’ve been speaking to people who have an axe to grind against William? There are jealous souls at the mill, as elsewhere.”

His father shook his head. “He was seen standing idle for over an hour, staring at the Windrush like—like a lady poet.”

“Ah.” It was hard not to laugh. “That will be the day the millwright came. He gave Will a lesson in engineering, and Will was memorizing it.”

“Is that what he told you? He won’t be able to explain away his insubordination so easily, I’ll be bound.”

“What insubordination is this?”

“He has been rude to Mr. Lowe.”

“And Mr. Lowe told you this?”

Paul was incredulous. Mr. Lowe was so miserly with words that his apprentices held competitions to see who could draw more than ten words out of him on any one occasion. On those rare occasions when one of them did, the victor won a jug of cider at the Red Lion, the cost shared by all the others. How many words would it have taken Lowe to complain to his father about Will? What had brought this about?

“He is a distraction, Paul. How is the work to be finished on time if the apprentices are not at their work?”

Paul frowned. Things had gone slowly of late in the dye house.

Seeing his son’s hesitation, the old Mr. Bellman pressed home his advantage. “Have you looked into the samples cupboard lately? I was there on Friday afternoon, but
you
go! See with your own eyes. I’m telling you, that boy’s no good.”

Paul closed his eyes to curb his impatience. When he opened them again he saw afresh how old his father was. Fragility, folly, and authority that had clung beyond its time. Compassion moved him to speak more kindly than he felt.

“There is no need to call him that boy. He has a name, Father. He is a Bellman.”

The face of the old man twisted beyond anger, into disgust, as he waved Paul’s words away in a violent gesture of rejection.

It was a gesture and an expression that gave Paul reason to ponder. In his prime his father had been able to temper his anger, moderate his dislike of his younger son. Now that he was older, his feelings more frequently got the better of him. On and on his father went, listing the failings and weaknesses of William Bellman, and Paul let the voice go by like the Windrush while he fished in a single spot.

He is a Bellman,
he had said, and his father had swept the words away like so much rubbish . . .

But no one could fail to see that William was Phillip’s son. It would be ludicrous to deny it.

There was another possibility, and it slipped into Paul’s mind now and found a space that it fitted into perfectly. It was so obvious, he couldn’t even bring himself to feel surprised. In fact, he wondered why it had taken him so long to work it out.

His mother had been a pretty, sentimental woman whose only real interest in life was the state of her own feelings. Her foolishness was that of the heart. His father’s foolishness consisted in believing that having married such a woman—for her land and the heir he soon got from her—he could thereafter expect her to sit at his side, neglected and irrelevant, in quiet contentment for the rest of her days. She was not a bad woman, but she was one who thrived on affection, who longed to be adored, and in the face of an irascible husband who made no secret of his lack of romantic feeling, was it any wonder her love turned to enmity? Boredom, vanity, the desire for revenge—any one of these would have sufficed to make her vulnerable to soft words from another. With the three together, the thing was almost inevitable. And so Phillip was born. A Bellman by name, indulged in everything by his whispering, spoiling mother, but rejected in a hundred private ways by her husband.
Thereafter the family had lived under one roof but split in two, Phillip with his mother on the one side, Paul and his father on the other. Secretly, out of sight, the boys had found each other in brotherhood. In the house, in the presence of their parents, they had mutely fallen into line at opposite ends of the battleground.

Paul wished his father had been a kinder man. He wished his mother had been a wiser woman. But there was nothing to be gained from wishing. People were what they were and his parents—Paul could not bear to hate, he needed to forgive them—had not set out to make each other unhappy.

Now a look and a gesture from his father rejecting William’s entitlement to the Bellman name had been the key to deciphering the mystery of Paul’s childhood. It wasn’t William who was not his father’s son. It was Phillip.

In this new light, Paul thought about his mother, whose unhappiness he had not understood as a child, and regretted he had not paid more attention to her while she lived. He thought about his brother—his half-brother—and discovered that he loved him and disapproved of him in just the same proportions as before. He thought about Dora and wished she could have had the luck to meet a better man than his brother. (He came close to wishing that she had met
him
instead of his brother, but it was hard to see how that would have helped matters.) Finally he thought about William. If he was not a Bellman, what was he?

While Paul was still turning these thoughts over in his head, his father’s account of William’s faults and failings came to an end. He was waiting for Paul to respond.

“I’ll look into it,” he heard himself say. “Tomorrow.”

He went then to his own rooms.

William is my nephew and is doing well at the mill and I love him, he thought. In some ways, it’s actually very simple.

“T
he samples?” William’s face lit up. “Yes, I did cut pieces from some of the samples. Let me show you!”

He pulled some crumpled strips of cloth from his pocket and laid them on the desk. They were in different shades of crimson: maroon, garnet, madder, cherry, brick, claret . . .

“This is the cloth that was left too long in the fulling. This one was from April. Remember the rain? It had had to be dried entirely indoors, with no sun on it at all. And this one—this is interesting, see—is one of Roper’s specials. She makes a yarn that has less twist to it . . .”

So William could tell by the look and feel of a piece which cloth had come from which loom; he recognized the yarn from individual spinsters, he had the history of each piece clear in his mind. That didn’t matter today.

“William,” Paul interrupted. “Tell me. What have you done to upset Mr. Lowe?”

“I’ve done a dozen things to upset Mr. Lowe. Most of them he doesn’t know about, I hope. What’s he complaining of?”

“You are distracting his apprentices. That’s one thing.”

“How else can I find out about dyeing? Mr. Lowe won’t tell me a thing.”

“Haven’t you been here long enough to know that dyeing is a world unto itself, William? You can’t go in expecting Mr. Lowe to open up his secrets to you. There’s an art to it. It’s—”

“Alchemy, yes. That’s what he wants you to think!”

“William!”

His nephew looked pained.

“I’ve explained this before, William, so this is the last time. Mr. Lowe’s father invented a recipe for blue dye which is so clean that it means that we sell more blue cloth than any mill within a hundred miles. We are lucky to have Mr. Lowe here at all. We got him when the outlook was bad over in Stroud and the mills were failing. They have made more than one attempt to get him back since things looked up. We cannot afford to upset him.”

William did not fidget or close his eyes or look away. He was listening, but it was plain he was not persuaded.

“If Mr. Lowe does not want you in his dye house, you must respect his reasons. He doesn’t want every Tom, Dick, and Harry knowing his professional secrets. That is his livelihood at stake.”

“His crimsons aren’t up to much,” William grumbled. “In any case, it’s your land, your building, your mill.”

“It’s traditional. Dyers have always been their own men. They have their own ways. And they are too important to lose. I won’t have Lowe going back to Stroud because you’ve upset him.”

There was a pause in which William’s expression told him nothing was resolved. William opened his mouth to protest, but Paul raised a hand to stop him. “Give credit where it’s due, William. Mr. Lowe knows what he’s doing. If the crimsons are unstable, don’t go laying it at Mr. Lowe’s door. It’s the water makes them so.”

William shook his head firmly. “So he told you that too. He’s lying. It’s nothing to do with the water.”

“You have been here just short of a year, William. I am warning you, watch what you say.”

“What he says about rain diluting the water is nonsense. He doesn’t use water from the river. He uses spring water. It’s consistent. Never changes.”

Paul hesitated.

“It’s not alchemy. He wants us to think it is, because it leaves him in the clear. He makes a good blue because he has the recipe; you’re going to keep him on till the end of his days for his blue, and he knows it. As for crimsons, what difference does it make to him how they come out? He can use old dye, chop and change the quantities at random, and when it comes out dull and brown, blame the water!”