Bellman & Black by Diane Setterfield

Author:Diane Setterfield
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Publisher: Atria/Emily Bestler Books

CHAPTER SEVEN

It would take fifteen months to complete the shop, twelve for the construction work and three for the fitting out. Bellman had seen Fox at work long enough to know that he could be left to oversee the construction of the building for weeks at a time. That was good. It meant Bellman could get on with the rest.

Bellman had expanded his own mill, but even so large a mill as his own could not supply all the cloth needs of a shop the size of Bellman & Black. So in bumpy carriages and on horseback he covered hundreds of miles.

In Scotland he inspected peat-black tweeds and cashmeres. On the quayside at Portsmouth and Southampton he opened crates of foreign silk, rubbed the slippery folds between his fingers, shook out a length to judge the weight, drape, opacity. He went to Spitalfields and farther, to Norwich, in search of the flattest, most light-draining crepe that could be had. He visited mills in Wales, Lancashire, and Yorkshire, crisscrossed the country, tirelessly, looking for bombazine and paramatta and mourning silk and merino and woolen barege and grenadine and barathea.

“Show me your black,” he announced on arrival. Bellman always looked at the black first. It emptied the eye and the mind of passing impressions, cleared the visual palate as it were. His eye was expert, he could spot a touch of green in this one, a blue tendency in another, a purplish tint here. Nothing to be concerned about from a commercial point of view: there had to be a black for every complexion, one black for fair hair and another for brunettes, redheads needed blacks all their own . . . Once in a while he found what he termed a true black. These were hard to come by. Most people couldn’t tell the difference, but Bellman would lose himself for a minute in the depths before ordering as many yards as could be produced.

If he was pleased with the blacks, he would go on to see what the clothier might do to supply him in semimourning and quarter mourning. So every visit saw him plunged into deepest mourning before moving on through shades of gray from the darkest to the palest, emerging at last into the mauves and puces of quarter mourning.

Bellman grew to be a stranger to color. When he looked out of the carriage window en route from one mill to the next, he found himself thinking that the bold green of the grass was verging on the indecent, and the azure sky on a summer day struck him as vulgar. On the other hand, he saw endless degrees of gravity and tenderness of feeling in an overcast November landscape, and as for a midnight sky, now there was beauty no fabric could match—though he searched high and low for one that came close.

Bellman sent home to Mrs. Lane endless parcels of fabric samples with detailed instructions. “These dozen squares to be cut in half and one half

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