They put me in a little room on the top floor, under the eaves of their town house, which was cozy in cold weather but airless in the summer. There was in fact a second bedroom across the hall from theirs on the floor below, but it was almost never used. A room of my own—on a whole floor!—was an incredible luxury after sharing a room and almost always a bed with one or two or even three other boys at Black Hill. Even back at Thornfield-Hall, I’d shared the nursery with whatever governess was in residence.
Mrs. Wilson asked if she might call me “Eddie,” and much as I wished to hear someone use my given name, after being called “Young Master” and “Jamaica” and now “Rochester,” I could scarcely object when she confided that it had been the name of her beloved brother, who had died “too young” of consumption. Mr. Wilson, of course, never called me anything but my surname. It was pleasant at their home, and quiet after the constant roar and clatter of the machines, and it was there that I became more fully aware of Mr. Wilson’s deficit of hearing. I had not noticed it at the mill, as we all spoke rather loudly to be heard over the machines, but in their quiet house, I discovered, one still had to speak up to be heard. It was a common ailment of mill workers—something they called cloth ear—but I was still young enough to believe myself impervious to such ailments.
Evenings after tea were spent in the parlor, Mrs. Wilson at her handwork, and Mr. Wilson reading the newspaper. For the first time, I had regular access to newspapers—the Leeds Intelligencer every week, but also sometimes the Mercury or the Times from London—and the fact that I devoured them seemed to please Mr. Wilson, who was wont to bring me into conversation regarding some piece of news in almost every issue. At first I had little idea what he was talking about: The Corn Laws; the Tories (whom he hated) and the Whigs (whom he tolerated); the Luddites, whom he of course despised; and the Jacobites, whom he dismissed entirely. I thought I had received a decent education at Black Hill, but with Mr. Wilson I realized how narrow had been my previous training.
As Mr. Wilson explained, large landholders throughout the country had been consolidating their holdings—just as Rowland had proposed to my father years before—inclosing the common land and throwing out their renters, who were left with no way to make a living. These folk flooded into the towns and cities searching for work, but at the same time, the introduction of machines to replace human hands further reduced the work available. It was an unfortunate but necessary side effect of a business like Mr. Wilson’s, for Maysbeck Mill’s machines now did the work that skilled spinners, weavers, and fullers had once done. I could not help feeling pity for the desperate countryfolk who overran every town and city, but at the same time, I saw how it frustrated Mr. Wilson: didn’t they understand that in the cities there were not nearly enough jobs for them all?
Given the sorry state of things, it was not surprising that manufactories like ours became the targets of hooligans bent on smashing the machines that had replaced working folk. Indeed, Mr. Wilson employed a night watchman to guard his mill: Bert Cornes, whom I had met the night I arrived. He was rough looking and coarse speaking, with a nose permanently misshapen in fights. I surely would not have wanted to be at the receiving end of his cudgel, but the few times I saw him, he was never less than pleasant to me.
As for the routines of the countinghouse, the importance of the records became clearer and clearer. The wagonloads of wool had to be weighed and classed and sorted, and the tally slips taken to the countinghouse, where the receipts were written and the payments made. Additional accounts were kept of the dyes used, the idle time for machinery repair or rethreading, and of course of the workers’ attendance—for a worker who was not at her machine by ten minutes after six would not be paid for that half day. And of course, there were bank receipts reflecting deposits that came in from Mr. Wilson’s agents in London and Manchester and abroad. In short, the work of the countinghouse, and indeed the entire work of the mill, could be and was measured in terms of costs and receipts.
Early on, I was tasked with running tally slips from the sorting floor to Mr. Wrisley, and I enjoyed going out into the manufactory, watching amazed as the wool sliver was pulled and twisted finer and finer in each successive frame, while upstairs the looms magically (to my unsophisticated eyes) turned that thread into plain or plaid or striped cloth. In my initial ignorance, I imagined the workers my age becoming my friends, teasing and joking and laughing with me at the break for lunch, as I had played sometimes with the stableboys at Thornfield-Hall. But the mill boys were leery of me, and the adults gave me a wide berth.
After a time, I was given other jobs as well, even taking over some of the tally work from Mr. Wrisley. I was no end of proud of myself, and I kept the tally books as neatly and as perfectly calculated as anyone could wish. But that kind of work meant less time spent on the floor of the mill, and I had by then noticed one particular girl. I had not even seen a girl when I was at Black Hill, and, earlier, as a young boy at Thornfield I had occasionally played with Gracie, the older sister of one of the stableboys, but this was different. This girl was my own age or thereabouts, with wheat-colored hair, strands of which sometimes escaped from the mobcap she always wore, and the lightest blue eyes I had ever seen before or since. She worked in the sorting crib, her quick hands adept at classing the bales as they were brought into the mill, and, as well, she combed the raw wool with heated combs into the sliver with which the spinning process began. I don’t know what attracted me to her, except that she seemed different from the others. None of the boys would have anything to do with me, Mr. Wrisley was twenty years older than I, and Mr. and Mrs. Wilson, while kind, were even older. I yearned for a companion.
Weeks went by as I tried to catch her eye, further weeks while I imagined all sorts of ways in which I might meet up with her “by accident” away from the mill, and as time passed, I became more and more focused on her, on the thought of talking with her, on the thought, to tell the truth, of just being with her. And then Mrs. Wilson, unwittingly, showed me the way. We had eaten raisin tea cakes one evening, and I had had more than my share. In the morning Mrs. Wilson sidled up to me, put an arm around my waist, and smiled at me the way she sometimes did, thinking perhaps of her dead brother, Eddie. She slipped a hand into my jacket pocket. “A special treat,” she whispered.
But when I arrived at the countinghouse and put my hand into my pocket, I found she had secreted not one but two tea cakes there, and immediately I began to imagine how I might present my gift to Alma—for that was the girl’s name—and I pictured her soft lips spreading into a smile.
It was afternoon before I could make an excuse to go to the sorting crib, where in my fantasies she always was waiting for me. But when I found her, she had her hands deep into a bale of wool. Two or three wool brokers were standing around aimlessly, waiting for the tally, which they could exchange at the countinghouse for credit.