I felt a sudden easing of my mind, for it seemed I was not expected to learn how to run the machines. I was not to work on the manufactory floor. No doubt my relief was clearly visible on my face.
“You will, of course,” Mr. Wilson went on, “begin with the simplest of tasks, which you undoubtedly already know.” He picked up a pen. “This, for example, needs sharpening. When you have taken care to sharpen our pens and fired up the grate, Wrisley will show you around the mill. Though your business is in this room, it is to be expected that you have at least a minimum of knowledge of what goes on out there, else there will be too much that will escape your understanding.”
I was already reaching for his pen, but he held out his hand to stay my arm. “Did you sleep well?”
Torn between manners and truth, I equivocated. “I was nervous, sir. I didn’t know what was to be expected of me.”
“You were frightened.”
“I was, a little, sir.”
He leaned back in his desk chair. “You might one day have good reasons for that,” he said, “but not, we should hope, in the immediate future. You have had a good education, Rochester, have you not?”
“I have, sir.” I could have added that I was fluent in French and Latin and knew Greek as well and could recite Julius Caesar’s speeches by heart, and could play out the Battles of Borodino or Trafalgar or even Thermopylae on his desktop, or calculate the dimensions of a hundredweight of wool or the weight of fifty bushels of corn. But I did not know how to write a bank draft, or the procedures to cash one, nor did I know how to keep financial records. “Still, sir,” I added cautiously, “I think I have a lot to learn.”
For the first time, I saw a smile break across his face. “That is the most important piece of information any person in the world needs to know,” he said.
“Would you prefer me to do the pens first or the grate?” I asked.
“It’s blasted cold in here, don’t you think, Bob?” he said.
“I do, sir,” Mr. Wrisley said. So I took the last of the coal from the scuttle, poured it into the stove, and, throwing in a twist of paper, managed to coax a faint glow of ash into a fire.
It was after noon before Mr. Wrisley found time to take me on a tour of the three floors of the mill. The first processes were done on the lowest level, below the ground floor, after the wool was received and graded in a separate shed, where it was washed and dyed and combed. It was relatively quiet in the receiving sheds, but when we returned to the mill itself, I had such difficulty hearing Mr. Wrisley’s soft voice above the clatter and roar of the machines as he tossed around unfamiliar terms for the processes and the machines—slivers and slubbings and shoddy; water frames and draw frames and shuttles—that I despaired of ever understanding half of them, and I was terrified that I would be expected to.
Indeed, it took weeks before some of those terms had much meaning for me. But one of the first things I did learn was that Mr. Wilson employed mainly women and children because they were cheaper labor than men and easier to handle—“much less trouble,” as Mr. Wrisley confided. Mr. Wrisley clearly thought himself considerably above those workers, which made me wonder where I stood in such a hierarchy. I had never thought about those things at Thornfield, and at Black Hill there was only Mr. Lincoln and Athena and North, and we boys—except for Carrot, perhaps—occupied a place somewhere between them. But at the mill, it was clear that differences existed, though I had little idea how to negotiate them gracefully, or even, sometimes, to whom I should defer and who should defer to me. This was the real world, and I realized I would have to feel my own way. There was much to learn.
For the most part, the women and older girls ran the machines, sometimes having responsibility for as many as four frames, needing to keep an eye on all those bobbins, even climbing up on benches to replace them while the shuttles kept moving back and forth, taking care not to catch clothing or hair in the machinery, for to do so was to court disaster. The men served mostly as overlookers and loom tuners, watching that the women kept up with the work, and repairing frames that jammed. The women were not allowed to leave their machines for even a moment, so it was the task of the children to fetch new bobbins and run the full ones to the looms where they were needed.
Back in the countinghouse, Mr. Wilson set me to making copies of two letters that he had written. Copies of all letters were kept in letter boxes as records of business dealings, and the job of copying became one of my main responsibilities. As I quickly came to understand, that is one of the best ways to learn the operation of any business or manufactory.
The machines ran from six in the morning until six at night or later, and Mr. Wilson stayed nearly as long almost every day. He took me home with him that first evening; Mrs. Wilson had tea ready for us the moment we walked in the door. It appeared I was to stay at their home—for the time being, at least—and that fact was a great relief to me, as I had begun to wonder, as the day progressed, if the cot in the countinghouse was to be my permanent residence. The Wilsons were both close to sixty years of age, I should guess, and Mrs. Wilson was a delicate woman with pale skin, fair hair gone to gray, and a warm smile. They had no children, and it seemed to me that they had not yet worked out how they were going to treat me—was I a guest or a member of the extended family, the son they might have had or just another employee?
Mrs. Wilson spent a great deal of her time doing various kinds of handwork, and I had not been there a week before she presented me with a scarf she had knitted for me. By then it had turned unusually warm, and I had no real need of such an item, but nevertheless I wore it to the mill each day (and to church on Sundays) for a month, regardless of the weather. She even admonished me, once or twice, that I did not need to wear it when the days were so warm, but I laughed and told her I liked it, which was true. I refrained from adding that no one had ever done such a thing for me before.