Bellman & Black

  “That’s right. We’ll be in the Mill House from tomorrow.”

  “Is the bread all right? If anything’s wrong . . .”

  “The bread is good. I’d like more of it.”

  They stood leaning over the kitchen table, and William set out his plan. So many hundred bread rolls delivered every morning to the mill, by a certain time.

  Fred was perplexed.

  “This is how much I’ll pay you for it . . .” William scribbled the figure on a piece of paper. It was a large sum, large enough to cause Fred to raise his eyebrows. “That’s a unit price of—” and William added the price per roll.

  The baker took off his hat and scratched his head. “It can’t be done.”

  “Can’t it?”

  “It’s not a question of price. I’ve only got two boys working for me, and it’d need another two ovens to make this quantity.”

  “Sit down.” William nodded at a crate.

  Side by side the mill manager and the baker bowed their heads over a sheet of figures. Whatever they might have been in the past, they were sound men of business now. They calculated reductions that could be made in the cost of the flour, given the larger orders that would be placed, added in the cost of the two new ovens. How many extra workers would the baker need? The cost of that.

  “I’ve a man who sees the lads who come to the mill asking for work. Anyone that looks suitable for a bakery job, he’ll send them along.” Line by line, figure by figure, the whole impossible deal was worked out, from the loan that William would make Fred for the new ovens, to the temporary return of Fred’s father to the bakery to see them over the early days. Every difficulty was resolved, every obstacle leveled. And finally, the extra profit that Fred could expect to make “. . . in a week . . .” the pencil jotted, “. . . a month . . .” another squiggle, “and per year . . .” The final flourish.

  By the time the deal was concluded with a handshake, Fred had found his footing with William again.

  “Your cousin Charles was in Whittingford a little while back?” Fred mentioned, making small talk before taking his leave.

  William nodded.

  “And as for Luke . . .”

  William was inspecting a crate, ticking something off a list.

  “It was you pulled him out of the millrace, I seem to remember?”

  William nodded so vaguely, his eyes elsewhere, that it was clear he wasn’t really listening. Well, if you’re moving house tomorrow, you’ll be busy. He knew what it was like. He was a busy man too.

  They shook hands again and Fred went home.

  “That’s the second good turn Will Bellman’s done me in life,” he told Jeannie later that day.

  “What was the first?”

  “I’d not have dared court you back then if he hadn’t talked me into it. I wasn’t much of a one for knowing how to talk to womenfolk, if you remember.”

  Jeannie remembered. And while she remembered a day on the riverbank, her naked legs concealed by the bulrushes, her husband remembered the day a perfect catapult launched a stone on a perfectly curved trajectory across the sky and brought down a perfect black bird that had glints of purple, amethyst, and blue in its blackness.

  “He’s moving his family into the Mill House tomorrow,” he told his wife. “Charles the cousin’s not interested in running the place himself, apparently.” And at supper, when the memory was still on his mind, “I always knew he’d do well, that Will Bellman.”

  · · ·

  A baker in a small town cannot order two new ovens without it being talked about. Word got out. William was going to give breakfast to his workers. The dairyman would be delivering milk as well. The competitors laughed. Had the man gone soft in the head?

  William was taking a risk, he knew that. How much sickness and absence could be eliminated by the provision of one bread roll and a glass of milk per day to four hundred workers? How many families could be convinced to stay at Bellmans instead of leaving for Stroud?

  It wasn’t certain that it would work, but then nothing was certain in life. You dealt in probabilities, and Bellman’s calculations told him his plan would probably work. You had to be bold.

  In the event, he found he had if anything underestimated the impact his bread rolls and milk would have. Fewer absences, less sickness, increased productivity. And it became easier and easier to take people on. The queues of people wanting work at Bellman’s Mill grew longer and longer, and only his castoffs could be tempted to Stroud.

  With that problem solved, he could concentrate on boosting the power. With the railway bringing coal and his plans for creating a reservoir on Turner’s field, he could as good as double capacity. The engineer was starting on Monday.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Phil dragged one of the red felt bags to the table and Paul carried the other over his shoulder like a thief with his swag. Dora brought the big bowl, and their mother, Rose, the flagon. When everything was ready on the kitchen table Phil and Paul climbed onto chairs. William untied the knots that drew the bags shut and the boys took one each.

  “Ready, steady, go!”

  There was a great clinking and chinking as the coins spilled out of the bags and the boys hurrah’ed as loud as they could. Phil groped into the bottom of his bag in case there was a stray penny, but there wasn’t, while Paul considered the coins that came three-quarters up the sides of the bowl. “Here’s a really dark one, look,” he said as he stirred the money with his fingers.

  The next moment was Dora’s. Conscious of her responsibility, anxious to lose not a single drop, she tipped the heavy vessel and poured. The tang of vinegar hit them all at the back of the nostrils, except Paul, who was prepared, fingers clamping his nostrils shut.

  “Can we stir?” the boys wanted to know.

  William eyed Rose. He was inclined to be indulgent on these weekly occasions.

  “Their hands will smell of vinegar all night and all day,” she said, but she knew it brought her husband pleasure to see his children so happy. “All right then.”

  And the two boys put their hands in and mixed and stirred the vinegar and coins as if it were a Christmas cake. When Paul judged the coins sufficiently mixed, William locked the bowl in a metal box with a big key and the boys were made to wash their hands three times.

  No matter how hard they scrubbed with soap, the smell of vinegar lingered. They fell asleep with the tang of it still in their nostrils, looking forward to the next day, when the best part would come. When they awoke, the vinegar smell was the first thing they were aware of and they wriggled out of bed full of anticipation.

  Even Dora, who was older and had participated in the ritual a hundred times, never tired of seeing the darkened, cloudy vinegar drain away through the holes in the colander, leaving the coins so bright and shiny they looked newly minted. After rinsing in several changes of water, Rose set Paul and Phil to drying the coins and sorting them into denominations, with Dora to supervise and catch the stray coins that wanted to roll onto the floor.

  Today William drew his daughter aside. “How old are you now, Dora?”

  “I am ten. You know I am ten.”

  “What a fine coincidence! I happen to need a helper this afternoon, and it must be a person who is at least ten.”

  She didn’t dare believe what she thought he was asking. “Do you want me to help you with the pay day?”

  It was her mother who generally helped with the pay day, but heavily pregnant, Rose now sometimes needed to rest in the afternoons. So to the intense chagrin of Paul and Phil, when Susie and Meg, the day helps, carried the table out from the hall to the porch, Dora was allowed to sit behind her father and count out the coins from the tray while her father wrote down the amounts paid out next to every man’s name in the ledger.

  All afternoon she counted—so much for the fullers, so much for the spinsters, this big pile for her favorites, Hamlin and Gambin, the shearmen—and made not one mistake, though the work was fast and there was a lot of chat
and joking to distract her. When the final worker had been paid—Mute Greg was the last, he had an extra amount for his donkey—Dora was perplexed. There was one coin left over on the tray. It was supposed to work out to the penny. Doubtfully she looked at her father.

  “Who have you forgotten?” he asked.

  “Nobody!” she said. “And there is no job that is paid a penny a week.”

  He kissed her troubled little face.

  “What about the little girl who counts out the money? Is she worth a penny a week?”

  She scolded him for making her believe she had made a mistake, he accepted his telling off gracefully, and having got the upper hand, Dora took advantage and negotiated further pennies for her fellow coin cleaners. “You wouldn’t want them going to clean money for some other mill, would you, Father?”

  “No, I wouldn’t,” he had to agree.

  · · ·

  “She drives a hard bargain,” he told Rose later, laughing, as he undid his wife’s shoes, which were pinching her ankles.

  “And me?” his wife asked. “What do I get? I carried the flagon of vinegar, remember?”

  “Do you want a penny too? I don’t know how long I can afford to keep running the mill at this rate.” He feigned reaching into his pocket for a coin.

  “A kiss will do for me.” She laughed, showing the gap in her teeth.

  “You can have a thousand. And cheap at the price!”

  He leaned over her rounded belly and kissed her.

  Then he kissed her again.

  · · ·

  “I don’t know how I would manage without you,” he murmured, late that night, his fingers patiently untangling a knot in her hair on the pillow.

  “Mm,” she agreed sleepily. “Did you wash your hands? I can still smell vinegar.”

  They fell asleep but not for long.

  Rose woke with a sharp cry in the night, and some hours after that the new baby arrived. A little girl, Lucy.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  It was a good painting. Perhaps it was better than good. The subject was well executed. The bird looked out at the viewer with a dark eye glinting with intelligence and character, and behind it was a landscape that was sure to be Italian, though to Charles’s mind it recalled the Windrush. Should he buy it?

  He was off his usual track. He had come to Turin because the house he called home was unendurable to him. The young painter who had shared it with him for the last year and a half had gone. “I have to get married,” he had explained. “I have my parents to think of. My life is not like yours.” Charles had wept. What had he expected? It wasn’t the first time. It wouldn’t be the last. Everyone got married in the end. But this pain was worse than the last. He had entertained unrealistic hopes. He couldn’t bear the loss of them.

  So he had come traveling, and here he was in Turin, in a gallery, looking at a painting that reminded him of another home he couldn’t bear to be in.

  The painting reminded him of a day in his childhood. There had been a rook then. A catapult. His eyes glazed momentarily with tears as he thought of William, his easy happiness, his facility, the way his life fell into place as naturally and as simply as could be. He thought of Dora, his cousin’s little girl. Of blackness and color.

  He would buy the rook painting for Dora.

  He pinched his tears away and turned to the owner of the gallery. Would he deliver the painting to him at his hotel? Later today? Grazie.

  · · ·

  A few hours later the receptionist at the hotel took delivery of the painting and beckoned a boy to take it up to the English signor. When his knock went unanswered, the boy assumed Signor Bellman was out and unlocked the door. In this way Charles’s body was found.

  · · ·

  Word came from Italy. A strange letter in a strange language. William had to fetch a man from Oxford to tell them what it said.

  “But we had no word he was ill . . .” Rose protested. “Was it an accident? What did he die of?”

  The translator coughed gently. “The letter does not state the cause.”

  William showed the Italian out.

  “Did my cousin die by his own hand?” he asked at the door in a low voice.

  The stranger moistened his lips. “The letter leaves room for the reader to draw such a conclusion.”

  Charles had written a few times since his brief visit after his father’s death. Rose took the letters from her desk, and read parts of them aloud. Charles had had some verses published in a magazine, though it wasn’t a very significant magazine. He had visited a particularly lovely part of Italy, and he described the mountains in some detail. He had bought a small French table on a trip to Paris. The workmanship was second to none, but it didn’t fit in the space he had envisaged for it.

  William did not like the pages in his wife’s hand. Black ink on white. A dead man speaking through his wife’s lips. He could not find the words to tell her so.

  She put the letter down with a sharp little cry. “Oh, William! To think! He was no older than you!”

  He was three weeks older than me, William thought.

  William left Rose to her reading and went to his abacus.

  · · ·

  A fortnight later a second letter arrived. This time the words were in English. They were strung together in a strange order: legalistic sentences with baroque flourishes you had to read twice. The gist was clear enough.

  For a man of wealth, Charles had not lived particularly extravagantly. He had liked wine and cigars moderately; he had liked paintings and furniture a great deal, but the house he had leased was a small one and he had furnished and decorated it accordingly. Otherwise his expenditure had been modest.

  Charles’s furniture had been left to a named individual who was described as a “painting friend.” It was a generous bequest, though not scandalously so.

  The money, the mill, and the Mill House went to William.

  Dora was to have the paintings.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  There was a part of William’s mind that counted. It counted, whether he wanted it to or not. He could not stop it. He was three weeks younger than Charles. Twenty-one days exactly. They had news of Charles’s death six days after it occurred. That left fifteen days. William tried to keep busy, he tried to use work to distract himself from the eternal abacus in his mind, but to no avail.

  He counted down the days and the day arrived. I am the age my cousin was on the day of his death. It being Sunday, there was no immersion in noise and activity at the mill to soothe him. In his chest something hopped and cavorted irregularly, adding to his anxiety.

  · · ·

  “Rose!”

  The children stopped the ball game. Paul turned to Dora. She would know whether they were right to be alarmed: she was ten.

  It came again, this time in a great roar. “ROSE!”

  Dora dropped the ball. “Look after Lucy,” she told the boys.

  Paul and Phil took up sentry positions, next to their sleeping baby sister, and Dora ran over the lawn to the house.

  Dora found her father by following the sound: he was whimpering as if in pain and gasping helplessly on the floor of the study. Face white as a candle, he twitched and trembled all over.

  “Mother isn’t back yet,” she said tentatively. “And Mrs. Lane is out.”

  “The chimney!” His voice was shaky.

  She looked at the chimney. The remains of last night’s fire was dead in the grate.

  “Listen!”

  Dora listened. Her hearing was acute. She heard the ticking of the clock in the hallway. The far-off rush of the river. The creak of the floorboard as she leaned forward. The movement and resettling of her hair around her ears as she turned her head. The rapid in and out of her father’s breath.

  “There’s nothing,” she said, and in the same moment he burst out: “There!”

  And actually she had heard something. In the instant she had spoken, all but drowned out by her own voice, some
thing soft and indistinct, as close to silence as it is possible for a sound to be.

  She approached the chimneypiece and rested her ear to it, intent.

  Her father was gasping in panic; she put a finger to her lips to quiet him, and he watched her, wide eyed.

  It came again. A muffled sound of movement accompanied, this time, by a hushed fall of powdery soot that sent a jolt through her father’s body.

  “There is a bird trapped in the chimney.”

  He stared at her.

  “That is all it is.”

  He could barely stand, but she made him get up, led him to the drawing room, and settled him in the big armchair with his feet up. She fetched a blanket and tucked it gently round him. She put a hand on his forehead and smoothed his hair back.

  “There,” she said. “All right now.”

  Back in the study she shut herself in and stood on a chair to open the sash windows as wide as they would go. While she waited she entertained herself with the abacus and added “Give Dora a penny” to the list of jobs in her father’s notebook.

  With a gritty rush of soot something black burst into the air. A panic of wings, flapping collision—thud!—against ceiling, window, wall. Then a wing-stir of air brushed her cheek and, miraculously, the stunned bird found the open window and was gone.

  Fine gray plumes of coal dust still drifted gently in the room. The tang of soot was at the back of Dora’s throat and on her tongue.

  And look! How sad! How beautiful! The bird had left pictures behind: blurred impressions of plumage, imprinted on the wall and the ceiling. There was one, ghost gray, on the window.

  She climbed back onto the chair to close the sash. Face close to the glass, she studied the soot burst. Here were delicate and precise reproductions of feather parts: a central shaft and serried barbs. Here was the calligraphic mark of a feather tip.

  Father mustn’t see it.

  Dora rubbed the bird away with her sleeve. It left a black mark at her wrist.

  Poor creature.

  Not hoping to see anything, Dora looked for a moment at the sky. There was nothing there.