Bellman & Black by Diane Setterfield Read Free Book Online

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 yousaid 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