Da set four bins on the bench beside Gerald’s stool.
They were wooden boxes, shallow, each the size of a bread loaf, with low sides and no lids. Gerald knew them. Not from the demonstration bucket Tomis had used during the frit lesson, and not from the supply bins on the back shelf where Tomis pulled samples for the marver. These were the working supply — the frit that went into the crucible, that became the colour in the glass. Gerald could tell by the way Da positioned them on the bench. Not placed. Positioned. The same precision Da brought to a pipe in the bench arms — everything exactly where it needed to be.
“Sort these,” Da said. “Cobalt separate from copper-green. Manganese separate from both. Anything you are not sure of goes in the fourth bin.”
He went back to the furnace.
Gerald looked at the bins.
The first bin was mixed.
Gerald could see that immediately. The frit inside was fine-grained — smaller than the samples in Tomis’s bucket, smaller than the pieces he had sorted from the floor after the spill. These were granules, some no larger than grains of sand, others the size of a pea, the colours dense and concentrated at this scale. Blues and greens and the dark brownish-purple of manganese, all sitting together in a shallow heap that caught the furnace light and threw it back in small, cold points.
He started with cobalt. Even at this size, the blue was itself — deep, steady, the colour that did not shift depending on which direction Gerald turned it. He had learned this watching Tomis apply frit at the marver. Cobalt stayed cobalt.
Gerald picked up a pinch between his thumb and forefinger. Three grains. His fingers were small enough to isolate them without disturbing the others. He transferred them to the cobalt bin. He picked up another pinch. Another.
The work was slow. Gerald did not try to make it faster.
He worked through the morning.
The copper-green was harder.
Not because Gerald could not see green. He could see green. The difficulty was the border — the place where cobalt with a trace of copper met copper-green with a trace of cobalt, and the two colours came so close that Gerald’s eye had to hold them both at once to feel the difference.
He picked up a grain and carried it to the window.
The high windows in the Hot House let in morning sun on clear days, and the light that came through was cool and white against the furnace’s constant amber. In the window light, cobalt was blue. Copper-green was green. But in the mixed light between the bench and the window — where the furnace’s glow and the morning’s glow met — the grains became harder to read. The furnace pulled blues toward purple. The morning pulled greens toward grey. Gerald had to choose which light to trust.
He chose the window.
He carried doubtful grains to the east wall one or two at a time, held between his finger and thumb, and turned them in the clear light until the colour declared itself. Sometimes it declared quickly — a grain that had looked ambiguous at the bench turned unmistakably green in the window, the copper showing itself in a warmth the cobalt did not carry. Sometimes the grain sat in the light and gave him nothing he could use. He carried it back to the fourth bin, set it down, went back to the mixed supply.
Aaron passed him on one of these trips. He was carrying a punty rod to the rack, the metal still warm. He glanced at the grain between Gerald’s fingers. His eyes went from the grain to Gerald’s face and back to the rack — the brief, professional attention of a person who sees what another person is working on and registers it and continues. Aaron had sorted frit. Aaron knew what the walk to the window meant.
Gerald gave a small nod. Aaron returned it. He shifted the rod in his hands, resettled its weight, and then — not quite looking at Gerald, not quite looking away — tipped his chin toward the east wall.
“Morning light is better,” Aaron said. “Before the furnace heat bends the air near the glass.”
It was the most words Aaron had said to Gerald in a single breath. Gerald looked at the window. He looked at the shimmer above the furnace housing, visible now that Aaron had pointed at it — the heat distortion warping the light that came through the upper panes.
“Thank you,” Gerald said.
Aaron nodded and went to the rack. His boots were quiet on the stone. Gerald went back to the bench with the grain still between his fingers and something in his chest that was not a feeling he would have named. A door that had been closed was not closed. That was all.
The days accumulated.
Gerald sorted through the mornings after his chores and into the early afternoons. He sat on his stool with the bins beside him, the furnace heat against the left side of his face, his hands moving through the mixed supply grain by grain. His shoulders were close to the furnace housing. The stone radiated warmth into his arm, his ribs, the side of his neck. He did not shift away from it. The heat was the room. Gerald was in the room. Neither one pressed against the other.
His fingers learned.
Not the colours — the fingers already knew the colours, or were learning them. What the fingers learned was the grain itself. Each frit granule had a surface. Each surface had a texture that changed with the colourant inside it. Cobalt smooth, copper-green coarser, manganese rougher at the fractures — he had felt these differences when he sorted the spilled samples from the floor. But the working supply was finer, more varied, and the differences were smaller. A cobalt grain the size of a mustard seed felt different under his fingertip than a cobalt grain the size of a lentil, and both felt different from a copper-green grain of either size, and the manganese had its own signature — a faint roughness at the broken edges, as though the glass had resisted the grinding.
His hands were an advantage.
Adult hands took larger pinches. Adult fingers, broad and calloused from years at the pipe, could not isolate a single grain from a cluster without moving the grains around it. Gerald’s fingers could. His thumb and forefinger closed on the grain he wanted and nothing else. When a cobalt sat between two copper-greens, he could lift it free without the copper-greens shifting.
Tomis passed the stool on his circuit. He glanced at the bins. The sorted cobalt was a quarter full now, the grains uniform, no copper-green or manganese visible among them. Tomis’s glance lingered there for a moment — checking, confirming — and then he was past, his boots already carrying him toward the thermocouple on the far wall.
At the end of the second afternoon, Gerald’s hands ached. Not the ache of the woodbox or the watering can. A smaller ache — the tendons in his thumb, the pad of his forefinger, the joint where finger met palm. Hours of the same small motion, the same careful pressure. He opened and closed his hands. The ache spread and settled. He put the bins on the shelf where Da had shown him and went to his evening chores.
On the second evening, he sat at supper and his eyes kept finding colours.
The brown of the bread crust. The darker brown at the heel. The amber of the tea in Mam’s cup, lighter at the surface where the kitchen light caught it. The shade of Edric’s sunburn across the bridge of his nose — a red that was not the red of the furnace or the red of copper-green frit but the red of skin that had been in heat all day.
Sable was telling Mam about a beetle she had found in the greenhouse — iridescent, green-black, sitting on the basil leaf nearest the window. “It was the same green as the stem,” she said. “Nearly. Not quite.” She held her hands apart the width of a beetle’s wing. “This much different.”
Gerald looked at his sister. She was describing a colour gap. She did not know that was what she was doing.
He ate his supper. He carried his plate to the kitchen.
On the third day, he found it.
He was working through a section of the mixed bin that was predominantly blue. Cobalt, most of it — the deep, true blue he could now separate without carrying it to the window. His fingers moved at a steady pace, each grain picked and placed, each placement certain.
A grain stopped his hand.
It was blue. It was the right blue — cobalt blue, the depth and the steadiness both present. But the surface caught the furnace light at a fractional angle from the cobalt around it, a shift in how the grain gave back what it received. Gerald’s eye caught the difference. He had not been looking for it.
He picked the grain up. He carried it to the east wall, where the morning light was cleanest — before the furnace heat bent the air near the glass, the way Aaron had told him.
In the cool white light, the grain was blue. Almost. The difference was in the depth — a faint greyness at the core, a muddying. The blue did not reach the saturation it should have reached. Gerald had seen this colour. Tomis’s demonstration, the first morning on the stool — the contaminated sample in the window, the blue warmer and greyed at its edge. Manganese. A trace of manganese pulling the colour off true.
Gerald went back to the bench. He set the grain aside. He picked up the next grain from the same area of the bin. Blue. He turned it in the window’s clear light. The same faint greyness.
He worked through the section. Grain by grain. Seven grains, all from the same cluster, all carrying the same shifted blue — the trace contamination that would not show in the bin’s amber-lit jumble but declared itself in the window’s honesty.
Gerald set the seven grains in a line on the bench beside the fourth bin.
He looked at them.
They were blue. They looked like cobalt. In the bin, surrounded by true cobalt, they would pass. An adult’s hands, picking by the pinch, would put them in the cobalt bin. The cobalt bin would go to the crucible. The manganese trace would enter the melt. The blue that came out would carry a greyness that should not be there, and every piece made from that batch would hold the contamination in its walls.
Gerald looked at the seven grains. He did not move them.
Da came to the bench after the midday break.
He had been at the writing shelf reviewing a commission. Tomis was at the glory hole, reheating a piece. Edric was at the marver, rolling a gather — the hiss familiar now, the sound Gerald could place with his eyes closed.
Da looked at the bins. He looked at the line of grains on the bench.
“What are these?” he said.
Gerald pointed at the cobalt bin. “They were in with the cobalt. They look like cobalt. But the blue is not right.”
Da picked up one of the grains. He carried it to the window. He stood in the cool light. He turned the grain. Gerald watched from the stool.
Da came back. He picked up a second grain. Window. Light. Turn. Back. He did this with three of the seven, and each time his face carried the same expression it always carried, which was no expression.
He set the third grain down.
“Manganese trace,” he said.
Gerald nodded. He had not said manganese. He had said the blue was not right. Da had said what it was.
Da reached into the cobalt bin and took a pinch — four or five grains, the amount an adult hand would take — and raised them to the window light. The blue was clean. He set them back.
He looked at Gerald.
The nod came without preparation, without ceremony, without the pause that would have made it something other than what it was. Da’s chin dipped and rose. Confirmation. The same motion Da made when he checked the thermocouple, the commission papers, the annealing oven’s temperature.
Da went back to the writing shelf.
Gerald sat on his stool.
He picked up the seven grains, one at a time, and put them in the fourth bin. Then he pulled the mixed bin closer and found his place.
Outside, something banged in the yard — the greenhouse shutter, the one that stuck. Tom’s voice carried through the workshop wall, muffled, half a sentence aimed at whoever was nearest. A pause. Nessa’s laugh, brief and clear, the sound cutting through stone and heat and furnace hum the way Nessa’s laugh always did. The shutter banged again. A third voice — Pim, Gerald thought, though the wall made everyone sound the same — and then the yard was quiet.
The workshop moved around him. Tomis at the glory hole. Edric at the bench, a gather turning. Aaron carrying a finished piece to the annealing oven, both hands on the tongs, the walk measured. The afternoon light came through the high windows at the angle Gerald’s shoulders knew — lower, reaching past his stool, falling across the floor in pale shapes that kept moving.
He went back to the mixed bin. His hands found the work. Blues, greens, the dark manganese, the grains that sat between. His fingers knew what they knew.
The furnace held its note. The heat pressed against his side, steady, close, the temperature of the room and the temperature of Gerald’s skin meeting at the same number without Gerald noticing where one ended and the other began.
He picked up the next grain. He turned it in the light. Cobalt — clean, the blue arriving all the way to the edges.
Gerald put it in the cobalt bin and reached for the next.