Bellman & Black (6 page)

He embarked on a gesture of frustration, caught sight of his pile of cloth strips and stopped. “Look! Uncle Paul—”

Paul pushed the fabric firmly away. “His blacks?”

“He makes a good black because with the iron in the water round here you couldn’t fail.”

Could that be true? Paul had to admit, it might be. The whole area was renowned for its blacks.

William fidgeted with the cloth he had separated from the rest. He looked as if he was making up his mind to something.

“His blue is good, Uncle. His black is good. The other colors are hit and miss because his dye cupboard is a shambles and he doesn’t keep proper records.”

Paul put his head in his hands, and William started to look like a man who had said more than he should.

“You have been into Mr. Lowe’s dye cupboard.”

“Yes.”

Paul felt weary to the core. He was more than willing to defend his nephew against his father, but he needed William to meet him halfway. The boy showed no remorse, though, and had no sense of the boundary he had transgressed.

“You had help.” It wasn’t a question.

William said nothing. A friend of a friend with a brother in the dye house, a few drinks in the Red Lion, money had changed hands. Subterfuge, distraction, the borrowing of a key.

“I’d have done it another way, if there had been another way. Mr. Lowe gave me no choice.”

“Mr. Lowe is very particular about the sanctity of his dye cupboard.”

“And now I know why.”

William said nothing, but he took a piece of cloth from the black leather inlay of the desk, and stroked it flat against his palm. It was bloodred, as fresh and clean as if a blade had just this second sliced his skin.

“Go home, William.”

“What? Now?”

Paul nodded.

“Am I to come back?”

“Take a few days off. I need to think it over.”

When he heard the door close behind him, Paul groaned.

D
ora turned out her son’s pockets to launder his clothes. Once it had been stones and pencils that made the holes in his pocket, now it was a penknife and other small tools that came in handy for freeing a tangle of yarn in the machinery or loosening a bolt. Today with his handkerchief she drew out strips of scarlet cloth. Some thick, some thin, of different textures, weights, and shades. The color varied from the lightest red to the darkest; most were evenly dyed, a few were patchy. The pieces were a few inches long and had been chopped with no great care. Whatever they were, with William no longer at the mill, they would not be wanted.

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.

P
aul 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. She 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 vigor. 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—Paul 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—be it 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?”

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, 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.