Chapter 6
The night watchman had been correct about my knowing when to rise, but I was so tormented about my new situation—so different was it from what I had expected—that I barely slept.
Why was I there? Was I to be an apprentice in a woolen mill?
Was this to be the end of a proper education for me?
Would I never get to Jamaica, after all?
And what about Thornfield? Thoughts slid around in my brain and kept me awake, but even if I had slept like the dead, I would have been awakened by the bell tolling above me.
Within minutes after that, I heard the sounds of foot treads in the mill, the murmurs of voices, and then the loud clattering as the machines started up, and I rose from my cot and stepped to the wall of windows looking onto the mill floor.
In the dim early-morning light, people of all aspects and ages—including boys and girls younger than I—moved purposefully, setting up their tasks for the day.
Their countenances told me that they were involved in difficult, serious, deadening work, and I felt a chill of fear run down my back.
Why would my father send me to such a place?
Then, still staring, I was struck with a realization.
I had thought they were men and women equally, but now I saw that by far the most were women.
Women, in the chill atmosphere of the mill in early spring, wrapped as best they could manage in ragged shawls, hair bound in rags or covered in tattered mobcaps.
I had never seen such sorry-looking people; even the stableboys at Thornfield had been better dressed than these.
The girls’ dresses were faded to nearly colorless, as if they had been handed down from sister to sister or cousin to cousin, and it seemed that many of the girls wore more than one layer of dress, as it was the only way to keep warm.
The boys—fewer in number than the girls—wore trousers either too long or too short, worn through at the knees, their hair curling over their collars.
The few men, as well, wore ragged sweaters under threadbare woolen jackets.
They grunted greetings to one another and nodded to the women and mostly ignored the children, some of whom seemed as young as six or eight years of age and who were already gathering up spindles from wooden boxes in a far corner.
Despite the commotion and the people in the mill, I was still alone in the room in which I had slept.
The fire had gone out in the grate and it was cold indeed.
There was no sign of the man or the boy from the night before, but I found a bucket of water beside the grate and I splashed my face and wet down my hair to make myself as presentable as possible.
There being nothing further to do, I stepped over to the windows again, fascinated and terrified by this image of how my life was to be in the next months or years.
The previous night those machines had seemed merely hulks in the dark, but now—under the light of lanterns hanging from the walls—they were clearly the most complicated equipment I could have imagined, dwarfing the busy people on the mill floor.
And when the machines started up, the clatter of them, even with the door to the office closed, was nearly deafening.
I had been standing there only a few minutes when the door opened.
Mr. Wilson did not bother to introduce himself, nor did he need to.
Clearly, he was in charge. “Rochester?” he said to me as he entered.
He spoke loudly, as was necessary above the roar and clatter of the machines.
Behind him, another man slipped in and made his way directly to a stool at the high table with barely a glance and certainly not a word to me.
“Yes, sir, I am,” I responded, apprehension rising in my throat.
“You came all the way from Black Hill; that’s a far distance to ride in the cold.”
“Yes, it is, sir.” I should have felt relief for his apparent concern with my well-being, but I was still terrified of what was in store for me.
He turned and hung his hat on the hatstand near the door by which he had entered, and before he turned back he asked, “Do you know what this place is?”
“Yes, sir, I think I do, sir. It’s Maysbeck Mill, a woolen mill for the making of broadcloth, I think, sir.”
Mr. Wilson frowned at me. “A worsted mill,” he corrected, and he walked to his desk. “And this room?”
I gazed about. I didn’t know what the room would be called. “It’s the office, I think, sir.”
“The countinghouse.”
“Oh yes. The countinghouse.” I knew the term from the nursery rhyme but had always imagined the king sitting on his throne in a vast and opulent room, counting his stacks of golden guineas, not in a small, spare, noisy adjunct to a mill.
He stared at me over the rims of his eyeglasses.
“Where the accounts are done,” I added, extemporizing, “where the payments are received and the bills are paid and the records are made.”
He leaned back in his chair. “Very good. And this gentleman working so busily already is Mr. Wrisley. Bob Wrisley to me, but Mr. Wrisley to you.”
I nodded at the man on the stool, who seemed younger now than I had thought. I stepped over to Mr. Wrisley and shook his hand. “I’m very pleased to meet you, Mr. Wrisley, sir,” I said.
“And I, you,” he said, with a quick nod.
“And your job here—” Mr. Wilson said, already reaching for a sheaf of papers on his desk.
“Yes, sir?” It was to come now. I thought of the ragged workers on the mill floor below.
“Your job here is to learn all that is done in a countinghouse, from maintenance of supplies to the receipt of payments and bills, the paying of wages and bills, and the records of correspondence sent and received.” He paused a moment to scan through the sheet of paper in his hand, then laid it aside and looked again over his eyeglasses at me.
“Indeed, you are correct: this is a mill for the making of worsted wool, but the important thing for you is not what kind of mill it is, but that it is a manufacturing business. Your father has contracted with me that you learn how such a business is run.”
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.