Gannet
Twenty-four days to the weld. Morning.
"I'll bank it," said Ruddock. "I'll not put it out."
"Then I cook," said Bryony.
They'd been round that three times already, with the clerk sniffing between them and the smith stood holding the wedge like somebody minding somebody else's baby. I'd said nothing. I could see both sides of it, and that's never been any use to anybody.
The harbour glass-works is at the far end of the quay, where the wind takes the smoke out to sea and not over the Row. A brick cone tall as a church, with a yard round it, and you feel it from the gate like the bake-house door of a Sunday. The heat comes out at you in a slab and sits on your face. The yard was heaps of broken glass in green and brown and blue that crunched under the cart wheels, and boys running with things on poles, and under the cone, in a mouth like a cave, the furnace, which I didn't look at long because it looked back.
Ruddock was the master. Broad, grey about the chops, forearms like legs of mutton and shiny with old burns, in a leather apron scorched brown down the front. He'd been up all night. You can tell with the ones who run a thing that never goes out. They sleep in bits and it comes out round the eyes like soot. His men had stopped work and stood about in ones and twos with their poles, looking at the Guild coats and not looking, as you do when the bailiff's at next door's.
Door three was behind the furnace, in what the Guild's list called the annealing vault. As far as I could follow, that's a long low brick tunnel along the furnace's back, where the made things go to cool slow in iron trays so they don't crack, with the furnace's own heat coming through the wall to see to it. Hollin Vane had hung his door in the end of that. I've given up asking why he put things where he did.
"It'll be the inside of a stove," said Bryony. She said it to the furnace mouth. "Plate'll be too hot to hold. Iron swells. The teeth sit different hot, they bind or they run loose, and either way I leave the skin of my hand on it. Put it out."
"And my pots go," said Ruddock.
Pots, I gathered, aren't pots. They're clay crocks broad as a barrel, that the glass sits melting in like stock in the copper, and if the fire's let die the clay cracks in the cooling. A pot is five weeks of a man's work and ninety marks of clay. He had three. He had eleven men on short money till they were full, and he owed the Guild, which meant me, I suppose, a bit. He said it all flat and in order. He'd done those sums at three in the morning and had them by heart.
She wasn't going to move him. She'd had her hands tucked up under her arms since the gate, like somebody keeping them from doing something.
"You're the one who tells," said Ruddock, turning to me. "It's all down the Row. What did the other two take?"
So I told him. The brass and the wax and the thumb. The jam pot with the chip in it, and the window open, and I'll see, and her legs gone on the Steps. I told it kindly, I hope, and I didn't dress it. I've never learned the other way.
When I'd finished, Ruddock was looking at Bryony, and Bryony was looking at the wall.
"Half," he said.
"Half's an oven," said Bryony.
"Half's what the pots will stand. An hour. I'll give you two if they're in a good temper." He went off across the yard shouting for the dampers, and his men went after him with their long hooks, and the roar in the cone went down a note, like a bull letting its breath go.
Bryony watched him go. Then she looked at me, sideways, the way you'd look at a pan you'd always had and just found out would do eggs.
"That worked," she said.
"I didn't mean it to."
"I know you didn't."
She put it somewhere.
Before we went in she asked him where the hatch was, and he showed us. It was in the yard's back wall behind the biggest heap of broken green, a square of iron about the size of a ledger, tarred round, with a lock on it black with soot. She stood in front of it a good while. She didn't put a finger to it. The captain had said no more hatches and I was to see to it, and I stood there seeing to it as hard as I could, with my hands behind my back like a boy in a china shop.
We went in through the back of the cone, the clerk with a wet cloth tied over his head like a pudding, and the smith behind him, and a boy with a bucket, and me last, stooping. The heat in the tunnel isn't the kind you walk into. You wade it. By the fourth stride my shirt was stuck to every bit of me, and the clerk's cold had run out of his nose and dried there, and he didn't care.
It was the same as the other two and I've still no better words: iron, dark, a square set in the frame for the hand. The iron round it had gone a colour I'd have called ginger biscuit if I'd been hungry, and I was. Bryony spat at the plate. The spit ran across it in a ball and was gone with a noise like a cat.
"Hello, you," she said. "Don't be clever."
Then, to me, not turning her head: "Stand where you can hear. And keep your face to yourself."
"I'm sworn to hear," I said. "I'm not sworn to enjoy it."
She put her hand on it.
The plate hissed. Like a rasher into a pan, exactly. She never made a sound, but her knees did, they went out sideways and came back, and then her mouth started, flat and quick.
"A box," she said. "Strongbox of his, off the shelf by the door, five levers. He's put it on my stool and not on the bench, so I've to stand on the rung. I'm ten. Nearly. I've a sail-needle bent in my teeth and one of Mam's hairpins. He's gone out to the yard. He said for coal. He's not got any coal, I can hear him not getting it." The plate hissed again. "The third lever's lazy. It wants lifting last. I've been leaning on it and I stop leaning. And it goes. The whole lid, like a yawn. I don't say anything. I'm not even pleased, I'm just looking at it. And the workshop door goes, and he's stood in it, and he's not looking at the box. He's looking at me. And he puts his hands together. Once. Twice. He's black to the wrists, off the coal he hasn't got. And he says, well, don't stand there like a gate—"
She stopped.
I'd seen it twice now and it was no easier. Her face went smooth, like a cloth somebody had passed a hand over.
The door went in on its pins in one great gust that took the hair off the back of my hand. The smith had the wedge under it before it had finished moving. He swore. The wedge was hot enough to sing.
The clerk went in with his cloth slipping and came out with four bottles. "Four," he said, reading them off like hymn numbers. "Three old. One new. Amber." He held it up. It was the colour of a boiled sweet. "The, ah. The first lock she opened. By herself."
"Yes," I said.
"Did he. Truly. Clap?"
"Yes."
He wrote it down with the cloth in his eyes.
She came out with her right hand held away from her body. The palm had a white square on it with the plate's corner printed in, and a blister coming up beside it like a mussel shell. She was winding a wet rag round it and she wasn't looking at anybody.
The yard was full when we came out. The furnace was down to a mutter, and Ruddock's men had come in from the cone to stand about in the light with their poles, the way men do outside a house where there's been a birth or a funeral and they've not been told which. The old gaffer was at the front. A boy beside him with burn-scars up both arms to the shoulder, the one I'd given my breakfast to at the gate, because his stomach had gone off like a dog and I'd not been able to bear it.
"What did it take?" said Ruddock.
I'd have kept it short if I'd been let. I'd have said a lock, and her master pleased, and let them make what they liked. But he'd asked, and I'm what I am. It comes up out of me like water out of a pump when someone's got hold of the handle.
So I said it all. The box. The stool and the rung. The sail-needle in her teeth, and the hairpin, and the lazy lever. The coal he hadn't got. The hands going together, once, twice, and the black to the wrists. Well, don't stand there like a gate.
There was a pause. Then the old gaffer said, "Hollin Vane? Clapped?" in the voice of a man hearing a cat had sung.
"I knew him thirty years," said somebody. "He never clapped."
"He did for her," I said.
And the boy with the burns put his two hands together, once, twice, laughing, doing Hollin, doing the black to the wrists, and the gaffer clipped him across the ear, and a couple of the others laughed too, not meanly. It was a warm laugh, as if the thing I'd told them was nice. I stood in the middle of them with my mouth still open and the boy's ear ringing.
Bryony had gone. Her back was going across the yard through the glass heaps with her hand held out in front of her like something she was carrying for someone else.
She was by the water butt at the yard's far wall, with the rag off and the hand in. I'd followed her without being asked. There's a stack of firebricks there against the wall, drawn out of the cone's lining that morning and put to cool, and I stood by them.
"You had to say the clapping?"
"They asked."
"Everybody asks." She said it to the butt. "You'd tell a dog what I had for breakfast. Town crier with a badge."
I sat down on the nearest thing. It was the firebricks. They'd not cooled the way I'd supposed. I went down onto them like a bun onto a griddle and I came near to going up again, and I didn't, because I'd sat, and that's the rule: you stay sat. I cooked gently through my trousers.
I told myself I was cross with her. It lasted till about the second minute. After that it was the boy's two hands going together.
She'd turned round. She was looking at me sat on the bricks with my face the colour of a boiled ham, and she didn't ask what I was doing. Her hand was dripping on the cobbles.
"You'll burn your arse."
"I know."
"Then get up."
"I'll not just yet."
She looked at me a while. Then she said, quieter, as if it'd been waiting at the bottom of her pocket: "What's the thing you'd never tell anybody?"
I thought about it. I did honestly. I went down through the whole cellar of myself with a candle, past my mam, past the pie, past the three years in the corner, and I couldn't find a door with a lock on.
"There isn't one," I said. "There's things I'd sooner not. That's not the same. Ask me. Go on. I'll tell you."
She stood and looked at me, with the water coming off her fingers. Something went across her face and was put away.
"No," she said. "I'll not use you like everyone else does."
She picked up the rag. She went off across the yard with her hand held out, and she didn't look round, and at the gate she stopped and put her good hand against the post as if it was a long way to the other side.
Then she went on.
The clerk had gone back to the yard, and the smith to his dinner. I got up off the bricks in stages. I'd a stripe across the back of both legs, hot as a brick, and I walked with my knees apart as far as the cart.
I got the book out, the black one, with the Steps' damp still in the cover. I sat on the cart's shaft and put it across my knee.
Door three. The glass-works. Paid by Bryony Pask.
The pen waited. I had the box in me, whole. The stool, the rung, the sail-needle, the third lever, the coal, the hands. I could have written the page.
A lock, and her master glad of her.
I wrote that, and I kept my tongue between my teeth a good while after the pen had stopped.