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penny from it.
    In the tenterfields William crouched low to be taught by rough-handed children how to stretch the wet cloth on the lower pegs of the frame for drying. He barrowed wool from here to there and back again with Mute Greg. He decanted fermenting seg into the fulling stocks. He was not too high to feed the donkey and shovel shit.
    At the other end of the scale, nor was William too low to meet the millwright. He stood beside the northerner, watching the mill wheel turn, all ears. There were different types of wheel, undershot and overshot, high breast, low breast. Will asked a question, then another. The millwright explained, first in general terms then, encouraged by the boy’s enthusiasm and general intelligence, in greater and greater detail. The diversion of rivers to create reservoirs of energy, the calculation and management of flow so as to engineer continuous, regular supply of power, all the ingenious means by which a man might harness nature to multiply his own efforts.
    When the man went to speak with Paul in the office, William remained standing by the wheel. Hands in pockets, blank faced, he stared at the water and the turning wheel. He went over and over the science of it all, time slipping by unremarked, and it wasn’t until Paul tapped him on the shoulder—“Still here?”—that he came out of his absorption.
    “What time is it?”
    And when he learned, he swiveled and took off at a run.
    “Got to see someone,” he shouted over his shoulder. “Red Lion.”
    By the time the month was out William Bellman had participated in every aspect of the mill’s work. He could not weave like a weaver, norspin like a spinster. But he had operated every machine, even if only for an hour, and he knew how it was powered, what maintenance was necessary, what might go wrong with it, and how to put it right. He knew the language: both the formal names for things and the ones the workers invented at need. He knew the system, how one job fitted with another, how the teams managed between them. He could put a name to every face: whether overseer, senior man, or apprentice. He had looked everyone in the eye, and there was no one he had not spoken to.
    There were only two jobs he hadn’t done. In the shearing room Mr. Hamlin—or it might have been Mr. Gambin, they were as like as brothers—teasingly offered his blade.
    William shook his head with regret. “You make it look so easy!”
    Shearing was, quite likely, the most highly skilled job in the mill, and the one in which you could do the most damage by doing it badly. “If I tried for thirty years I could not do what you do.”
    And he had not worked at the dye house.
    ·  ·  ·
    As time went on and the mill hands saw more of William, their difficulty in placing him grew no less. He had attended the same school as Charles: to hear him speak, he was more of a gentleman than his uncle. On the other hand, when he caught his wrist on the hot edge of a pressing plate he swore like a fuller’s apprentice. There was confusion over how to address him: some called him William, some called him Mr. William. William himself seemed not to care and answered with the same easy willingness to both. He had the same manner for everyone; he smiled and shook hands indiscriminately.
    “He’s got no airs about him,” an admiring spinster told her sister. “He never talks down to us. At the same time, he never butters up.”
    So where did he fit? Master or hand? William was a puzzle and no mistake—but he was a puzzle they were getting used to.

CHAPTER FIVE

    “H e’s doing well,” Paul told Dora. “Did you hear what Crace at the tenterfield said about him? If there’s a way of getting the sun to shine all night, trust young Will to find it.”
    She laughed.
    Paul liked to lay these compliments about her son at Dora’s feet.
    William was taking his time in the vestry. Too cold to wait in the churchyard, Dora stood at the back of the church; it was scarcely warmer,