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him. It was an expression that had frightened Paul as a child, and led him to believe that his father was all-powerful. Now, translated onto this thin, lined face with rheumy eyes, the same expression only saddened him. “And I do not like what I hear of his behavior with the spinsters. And the boy has been a distractionto the apprentices. He draws them into gossip and idle mischief.”
    Paul took a sip of whiskey and tried to speak mildly.
    “Is it possible, Father, that you’ve been speaking to people who have an axe to grind against William? There are jealous souls at the mill, as elsewhere.”
    His father shook his head. “He was seen standing idle for over an hour, staring at the Windrush like—like a lady poet.”
    “Ah.” It was hard not to laugh. “That will be the day the millwright came. He gave Will a lesson in engineering, and Will was memorizing it.”
    “Is that what he told you? He won’t be able to explain away his insubordination so easily, I’ll be bound.”
    “What insubordination is this?”
    “He has been rude to Mr. Lowe.”
    “And Mr. Lowe told you this?”
    Paul was incredulous. Mr. Lowe was so miserly with words that his apprentices held competitions to see who could draw more than ten words out of him on any one occasion. On those rare occasions when one of them did, the victor won a jug of cider at the Red Lion, the cost shared by all the others. How many words would it have taken Lowe to complain to his father about Will? What had brought this about?
    “He is a distraction, Paul. How is the work to be finished on time if the apprentices are not at their work?”
    Paul frowned. Things had gone slowly of late in the dye house.
    Seeing his son’s hesitation, the old Mr. Bellman pressed home his advantage. “Have you looked into the samples cupboard lately? I was there on Friday afternoon, but you go! See with your own eyes. I’m telling you, that boy’s no good.”
    Paul closed his eyes to curb his impatience. When he opened them again he saw afresh how old his father was. Fragility, folly, and authority that had clung beyond its time. Compassion moved him to speak more kindly than he felt.
    “There is no need to call him that boy. He has a name, Father. He is a Bellman.”
    The face of the old man twisted beyond anger, into disgust, as he waved Paul’s words away in a violent gesture of rejection.
    It was a gesture and an expression that gave Paul reason to ponder. In his prime his father had been able to temper his anger, moderate his dislike of his younger son. Now that he was older, his feelings more frequently got the better of him. On and on his father went, listing the failings and weaknesses of William Bellman, and Paul let the voice go by like the Windrush while he fished in a single spot.
    He is a Bellman, he had said, and his father had swept the words away like so much rubbish . . .
    But no one could fail to see that William was Phillip’s son. It would be ludicrous to deny it.
    There was another possibility, and it slipped into Paul’s mind now and found a space that it fitted into perfectly. It was so obvious, he couldn’t even bring himself to feel surprised. In fact, he wondered why it had taken him so long to work it out.
    His mother had been a pretty, sentimental woman whose only real interest in life was the state of her own feelings. Her foolishness was that of the heart. His father’s foolishness consisted in believing that having married such a woman—for her land and the heir he soon got from her—he could thereafter expect her to sit at his side, neglected and irrelevant, in quiet contentment for the rest of her days. She was not a bad woman, but she was one who thrived on affection, who longed to be adored, and in the face of an irascible husband who made no secret of his lack of romantic feeling, was it any wonder her love turned to enmity? Boredom, vanity, the desire for revenge—any one of these would have sufficed to make her vulnerable to