Odile
Twelve days to the winter ship. Evening.
You can taste a glass-works from the end of the quay. Sand first, flat and clean as a pebble on the tongue. Then soda ash, bitter and a little soapy. Under both, a sweetness like a kettle left to boil dry, which is the iron, and then the heat itself, which has a flavour of its own, a dry brass edge to the back of the throat that I have never been able to name. By the time we reached Ruddock's arch my mouth was so full of it that I could have been licking a stove.
Tobin had stopped three yards short.
"I'm not coming in," he said.
"You came at noon as far as the gate."
"I minded the clerk's boat."
"Tin." I counted it for him. "One. There was no boat, Tobin Vane. The clerk walked."
He looked at the black arch with the red moving in it, and he put his hand in his pocket, and the lid of the tinderbox clicked open and clicked shut. I had learned by now that he did that when his mouth had run out of things to say, and I had begun to dislike the sound.
I'll be honest about why I'd brought him. At noon, Ruddock had roared at me from the far end of his yard and sent me off with a clerk's cold in my ear and a refusal I'd tasted nothing wrong in. I wanted him without a clerk. And I had stood in that yard at noon with a man stopped dead at the gate behind me, and I'd wondered what Ruddock would do if the boy walked in.
It was not a kindness. I said so to him there and then.
"I want to see what he does when you're in the room."
"That's not fair."
"No," I said. "It isn't."
He stood a while longer. Then he took the hand out of his pocket and walked in under the arch ahead of me, with his shoulders squared, the way a man goes up the steps to be sentenced, and I followed, and I touched the spoon on its cord, which is a thing I do when I've done something I'll have to answer for.
The yard was a long black shed open at the sea end, with the cone of the main furnace standing in the middle like a bad-tempered tower and a ring of smaller ovens round it, every mouth of them open and glowing. Sparks went up the cone. Half a dozen men in leather aprons were working at the pipes, turning, blowing, rolling the glowing gathers on iron tables, and nobody was talking. Out at the sea end, against the cullet heap, lay a great rusted chain in a coil, each link as long as my forearm: the old harbour boom, which nobody had ever had the heart or the furnace to melt. The heat took hold of me at the door. It wasn't like weather. It was like being leaned on.
"Master Ruddock," said Tobin, and I had to admire him, because it came out almost level.
He didn't hear. Nobody could have. A big man was standing at the mouth of the main furnace with his back to us, in a scorched apron, with a long iron pipe in his hands and a bulb of orange glass on the end of it, and he was turning the pipe on his knee and talking steadily to the glass in a roar, like a man calming a horse. I'd put him at sixty. He was broad as a door and burned along both forearms, and the left side of his head was to the fire, and the left ear, by the look of it, was the one the furnace had had. A grey young man who must be his gaffer was shouting something at him that had to do with the quay and sparks.
"I'll not damp my fire for a ship," Ruddock roared back, not looking round. "Let her wait."
I walked round to his right side, the good one, and stood where he'd have to see me. It took him a moment to finish the turn. Then he put the gather down into the glory hole, and wiped his hands on the apron, and looked at me with a small, red-rimmed, tired eye.
"Guild," he said.
"Odile Strake."
"I know who you are. You were here at noon. I said no." His voice filled the yard. He didn't seem to know it. "I'll say it again. Not in my own yard."
"I didn't come about that." I held up the saucer in the light of the oven. The wax had gone dull in it, but the ring was still sharp as a coin. "I came about this. It's the seal on a letter. Pressed with the neck of one of your bottles, snapped off at the shoulder."
He took it. His thumb was the size of my wrist and he laid it on the wax so gently you'd have thought it might hurt. Then he held it out to the fire.
"Black glass," he said. "Reserve."
"You blow it?"
"Every bottle in the port. The Bank pays for nobody else's." He gave me back the saucer. "Any neck of mine could do that, ma'am. Any boy with a pair of nippers and a cullet heap. The heap's open to the quay, and I've been robbed of worse things than a neck."
It went down plain. A clean taste, hot and ashy, with a grain of true in it like sand. No tin. I tried him on the other one.
"Who does your quay load for?"
"Whoever pays the wharfage."
Clean again. "Have you ever sold a drop of anyone's? A day, an hour. Anything out of a person's head."
He took a long time to answer, as large men do, with his eyes on the glory hole. "I've never sold a drop of anyone's," said Master Ruddock.
It was true. I'd have been happier with tin. A man who says a sentence that plain and that flat has either nothing to hide or has made very sure of the shape of it, and I'd had that shape from Mayhew. I tasted again for what was left, a little burnt crust at the edge of it, and found it was only the furnace.
Tobin hadn't come up. He'd stopped on the far side of the iron table with a roll of glass between him and the oven, and he was looking at the floor.
"Master Ruddock," he said again.
The big man's head turned. It was all that moved. His eye went over the table, and the tools, and along the wall of the shed behind Tobin's shoulder, and came to rest on a rack of blowpipes. It didn't touch the boy. It passed round him, as a man's foot goes round a hole in the road.
"Boy," said Ruddock. He said it to the blowpipes.
"Evening."
That was all. Nothing else was said between them for as long as I stood there. What Ruddock did was nothing at all, with a great deal of effort.
I turned and went at it from the other side.
"The lot I'm after," I said, "has a day in it on the sea wall. By the fourth lamp. The Bank kept it back as a sample and sent it to the island, and the rest of the summer's in a casket in the winter ship's hold. Do you know the wall?"
"Warm as a loaf at four o'clock, that wall, they say."
It was nothing. It's what the port says, and you could say it to a stranger in a tavern and he'd say it back. It came out clean. But he said it quietly for him, at a quarter of the volume, not to me and not to Tobin but down at the dark of the floor, like a man reading a label off a bottle.
"They say," I said.
"They do."
"Do you?"
"I'm a glassman, ma'am. I blow it. I don't drink it, and I don't fill it." He took up the pipe again, and the gather on the end had gone dull, and he put it to the fire. "You've had your answers. I've forty necks to blow before the tide."
I'd have pressed him. I had my mouth ready. And the gaffer shouted that the glory hole was going cold, and Ruddock swore at the iron and bent to it with his big scorched back to us both, and the audience was over. He'd simply gone somewhere I couldn't follow.
I took Tobin round the back of the main oven, to where the annealing ovens stood in a row with their little doors shut. The heat there was a steady, dry thing, not a blast. I had sweated through my collar. My hair had come down on one side, and I took my cap out of my pocket and put it on, and it fell off at once.
"He couldn't look at you," I said.
"Not for years."
"You told me you never found out why."
"I never asked." He was a long way back in his own coat. He had both hands in his pockets now, and nothing clicked. "Stop it. Please. I'll not be tried."
"I'm not trying you."
"You brought me here to see what he'd do."
"Yes."
"And you've seen."
"I've seen a man go round a hole in the road." My own voice surprised me. It had gone smaller. "And I've seen that a man who can't look at you, Tobin Vane, knows something about that wall that he wouldn't say to a Guild officer's face. I'd stake the spoon. I want to know what."
"You don't know it's the wall."
"I know it's something."
"Then find it out some other way."
He looked at me. In the light off the ovens his mouth had stopped trying to be anything. I hadn't seen him like that. It was a bare face, a boy's, with soot in the creases and the eyebrows growing back in pale hairs like a sparrow's.
"I'll find it out some other way," I said. I meant it. I didn't taste a thing.
"Thank you."
"You've soot on your cheek."
"Have I."
"There," I said, and put up my hand.
I hadn't meant to. I'd the heel of my hand against the line of his jaw before I'd decided anything, and my thumb at the corner of his cheekbone, wiping, and the soot didn't come, it only smeared. His skin was hot, and slick. He had stopped talking. I was close enough that I could taste him, which I don't do; it's a rule. Salt, woad, and the iron of the room, and under them a thing like rain on a roof that I had no name for.
That isn't wanting, I told myself. It's the furnace. It's what the heat does.
He put his hand over mine. His palm was rough as a file and his burn scars lay across my wrist like seams. He was deciding. I knew it as exactly as I know when a sentence is about to go over to tin. A hand's breadth. A breath. I thought: I am going to be very stupid in a moment, and I'd have paid money for somebody to stop me.
"Hot!" shouted a boy.
We came apart like two people caught stealing. He'd come round the end of the oven at a run, a lad of twelve in an apron to his ankles, with a rod out in front of him and on the end of it a gather of glass as big as a plum, orange as a coal, spitting. He went between us at an arm's length, with his face screwed shut against the heat of what he carried, bawling "Hot, hot, mind your backs!" and he left a wind behind him that took my cap clean off and put it in the dust.
"Sorry, miss," he said over his shoulder, and was gone.
Tobin picked up the cap. He knocked the dust off against his knee. He held it out to me without a word, and I took it, and it was warm.
"Salt and ashes," I said.
"Yes."
"I'll be needing a drink of water."
"There's a pump in the yard," said Tobin, and his voice cracked in the middle of the sentence, and I let that go by like the rest.
We went out under the arch into the cold, and the cold was a great relief and a great disappointment. The harbour lay in the dark with its lamps on, and the winter ship sat at the quay beyond Ruddock's wall, black and quiet under her two lanterns. Twelve days. I stood on the cobbles and let the wind get at my face.
"Well," I said. "You'll tell me nothing. And he'll tell me nothing. That makes two of you."
"I could tell you the price of black glass."
"Tell me something I need."
"I've nothing," said Tobin, and it was true, and he looked at me as though he wished it weren't.
Tobin said nothing all the way up the hill.
At the Guild stair I took my cap off and looked at it. There was soot on the brim. There was soot, I found, at the corner of my thumb, from his cheek, and I stood a moment under the lamp with my thumb in the light, and I put it to my mouth before I thought, and I tasted nothing but the furnace.
I did not wash it off before I slept.