Bellman & Black by Diane Setterfield Read Free Book Online Page B

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.
    “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?”

CHAPTER TEN

    “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 alongthe upper and lower cross bars, but it