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soft words from another. With the three together, the thing was almost inevitable. And so Phillip was born. A Bellman by name, indulged in everything by his whispering, spoiling mother, but rejected in a hundred private ways by her husband.Thereafter the family had lived under one roof but split in two, Phillip with his mother on the one side, Paul and his father on the other. Secretly, out of sight, the boys had found each other in brotherhood. In the house, in the presence of their parents, they had mutely fallen into line at opposite ends of the battleground.
    Paul wished his father had been a kinder man. He wished his mother had been a wiser woman. But there was nothing to be gained from wishing. People were what they were and his parents—Paul could not bear to hate, he needed to forgive them—had not set out to make each other unhappy.
    Now a look and a gesture from his father rejecting William’s entitlement to the Bellman name had been the key to deciphering the mystery of Paul’s childhood. It wasn’t William who was not his father’s son. It was Phillip.
    In this new light, Paul thought about his mother, whose unhappiness he had not understood as a child, and regretted he had not paid more attention to her while she lived. He thought about his brother—his half-brother—and discovered that he loved him and disapproved of him in just the same proportions as before. He thought about Dora and wished she could have had the luck to meet a better man than his brother. (He came close to wishing that she had met him instead of his brother, but it was hard to see how that would have helped matters.) Finally he thought about William. If he was not a Bellman, what was he?
    While Paul was still turning these thoughts over in his head, his father’s account of William’s faults and failings came to an end. He was waiting for Paul to respond.
    “I’ll look into it,” he heard himself say. “Tomorrow.”
    He went then to his own rooms.
    William is my nephew and is doing well at the mill and I love him, he thought. In some ways, it’s actually very simple.

CHAPTER SEVEN

    “T he samples?” William’s face lit up. “Yes, I did cut pieces from some of the samples. Let me show you!”
    He pulled some crumpled strips of cloth from his pocket and laid them on the desk. They were in different shades of crimson: maroon, garnet, madder, cherry, brick, claret . . .
    “This is the cloth that was left too long in the fulling. This one was from April. Remember the rain? It had had to be dried entirely indoors, with no sun on it at all. And this one—this is interesting, see—is one of Roper’s specials. She makes a yarn that has less twist to it . . .”
    So William could tell by the look and feel of a piece which cloth had come from which loom; he recognized the yarn from individual spinsters, he had the history of each piece clear in his mind. That didn’t matter today.
    “William,” Paul interrupted. “Tell me. What have you done to upset Mr. Lowe?”
    “I’ve done a dozen things to upset Mr. Lowe. Most of them he doesn’t know about, I hope. What’s he complaining of?”
    “You are distracting his apprentices. That’s one thing.”
    “How else can I find out about dyeing? Mr. Lowe won’t tell me a thing.”
    “Haven’t you been here long enough to know that dyeing is a world unto itself, William? You can’t go in expecting Mr. Lowe to open up his secrets to you. There’s an art to it. It’s—”
    “Alchemy, yes. That’s what he wants you to think!”
    “William!”
    His nephew looked pained.
    “I’ve explained this before, William, so this is the last time. Mr. Lowe’s father invented a recipe for blue dye which is so clean that it means that we sell more blue cloth than any mill within a hundred miles. We are lucky to have Mr. Lowe here at all. We got him when the outlook was bad over in Stroud and the mills were failing. They have made more than one attempt to get him back since things