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was said, had no high opinion of the lad. A nephew, once you came to think on it, was a walking uncertainty. It could be anything or it could be nothing at all.
    Theories wandered far and wide, and at the end the only thing that could be pronounced with confidence was spoken by Mr. Lowe the dyer, who was the one person who had not yet seen him: “He is not heir. He is not master over us.”

CHAPTER FOUR

    “M r. Lowe,” said William, extending a hand. “I’m William Bellman.”
    The man spread his palms and William saw that his hands and arms were black to the elbow. He’d shaken hands yesterday with calluses, scars, and burns. He couldn’t see what harm a bit of staining would do, but the lack of warmth in the man’s eyes told him not to insist.
    Moreover it appeared Mr. Lowe had no intention of speaking.
    “My uncle showed me the work of the mill yesterday. You may have heard.”
    An incline of the head. As if to say, I have heard and I am not greatly interested.
    “We did not come to the dye house though. I hoped you might have a few minutes to show me what it is that you do here.”
    The man raised an eyebrow. “We dye.”
    “Of course.” Will smiled. The other man did not. Presumably he had not intended humor.
    “Perhaps you would prefer me to come back some other day.”
    A muscle twitched in the man’s face. A tic or a communication? Whatever it was, it wasn’t an invitation.
    Will knew when he wasn’t wanted.
    ·  ·  ·
    In the courtyard crates were being offloaded.
    William approached Rudge.
    “Need a spare pair of hands?”
    “You again? Haven’t you seen enough yet?” This was better. Rudge was smiling as he extended his great leather glove of a hand. They shook.
    “I’m here to work today.”
    “With these hands?”
    Will knew what work was, he’d chopped enough timber and scythed enough hay.
    Rudge handed him a jimmy, and for half an hour Will levered crates open. Then he lugged fleeces. Then he attached them to the hook. The men were reticent, awkward at first, but the work left no room for the intricacies of sentiment. He was a pair of hands, there with the next fleece when the first was weighed, and as he found his place in the process they forgot who he was and called “Next!” and “Ready!” to him with the same ease they had for each other. “Here!” and “Ready!” he called back, as if he had never done anything else.
    When his palms got sore he rubbed grease in and bandaged them—“like a hundred little knives, a fleece is, when you start out,” they told him—but worked on, till the delivery was cleared, and when they were done and he said good-bye, all the men could say about him was that he’d put his back into it.
    In the next days and weeks, Will did every job that a pair of willing hands could do in the production of cloth. In the spinning house, the women laughed and flirted—as did he—but he also sat for long hours at a jenny and blundered with his bag of fluff till his hands were sore. That was nothing new! Every job he did found a new patch of tender, uninjured skin to torment. Over and over again his yarn broke, a thousand times he found himself spinning thin air, but by the end of the day he had spun a length of thickish, uneven yarn.
    “I’ve seen worse from a beginner,” Clary Rigton admitted, and a saucy, dark-haired girl who’d been giving him the eye added, “And for a man, it’s a blimmin’ miracle!”
    In the fulling stocks, he inhaled a lungful of noxious fumes from theseg barrel and fainted clean away. He came to his senses, nauseated and gasping for air. When he got his breath back he laughed at himself, and said to the apprentice who had helped him outside, “You’re brother to Luke Smith, aren’t you? Is he still arm wrestling?” He knew it was not by accident that the lid was whipped away just as he came by, but by the end of the day he was in with the apprentices enough to have a game of cards with them, and he even made a