Bellman & Black (7 page)

“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?”

“Y
ou 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?

B
ehind 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.”

I
t 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.