The wagon was already moving when Gerald got his second boot on the step.
He grabbed the side rail and pulled himself up onto the bench. Tom did not slow down and did not look over. The reins sat loose in his left hand, his right holding a folded list against his thigh, and Barrel leaned into the breast collar with the steady, unhurried pull of a horse who knew the road and did not need to be told which way to turn at the gate.
Gerald settled. The bench was hard wood worn smooth by years of use, and the smell of it was sand and old canvas and the faint mineral sharpness that never fully left anything the estate used for hauling. He tucked his hands under his legs against the morning chill and watched the yard shrink behind them as the wagon rolled through the gate and onto the road.
The road into Strathcove was one Gerald had walked before, but the wagon changed it. From the bench he could see over the hedgerows that bordered the first stretch, and then a gap between properties opened on the left and the harbour was there — close, right there, the water dark grey-green and the masts of fishing boats tilted at angles that meant low tide. Gerald had not known you could see the harbour from this road. He had walked it twice and never seen it. The gap closed as the next wall started and then the houses were pressing in and the road became a street and the cobblestones changed the sound of everything. Barrel’s hooves went from the soft packed-earth rhythm Gerald could feel through the bench to a hard, even knock that rang off the stone buildings on either side.
Tom pulled the list from his pocket and read it once, his finger tracing the lines, then folded it and put it back.
More carts now. More voices. A woman crossing with a basket looked up at the wagon and stepped back to let them pass, and a dog that had been lying in a doorway stood and moved into the street and stood there, watching Barrel with an expression Gerald could not read. Tom guided the wagon around it without comment. The dog did not move.
Something fell off a cart ahead of them — a crate that hit the cobblestones and split along one corner, and the man driving the cart did not notice. Turnips rolled into the street. Gerald watched them scatter under the wheels of a second cart coming from a side lane, and nobody stopped, and the turnips that were not crushed ended up against the gutter stones, and by the time Tom’s wagon passed the spot there was nothing left but a dark smear and the broken crate pushed to one side.
The market square opened ahead of them. Gerald had been here with Mam for cloth and with Sable for thread, but those visits had come from the other direction, on foot, through the narrow lanes south of the square. From the wagon the square arrived all at once: the stone fountain at the centre with water running from its iron spout, the market stalls along the east wall still being set up, and the guild hall at the far end with its heavy roof and leaded windows catching the morning sun in coloured shapes Gerald could see from here.
Tom guided Barrel to the side of the square near a stone trough where another horse stood drinking. He set the brake and wrapped the reins once around the rail.
“Jars are for the chandler,” Tom said. He consulted the list again. “Frit order from the guild stores. Letter for the guild hall.” He folded the list. “Your grandfather’s store is across the square. Go in and tell him I am at the guild hall and will collect you after.”
Gerald looked where Tom pointed. A narrow storefront on the south side, between a cooper’s shop and something with a green-painted door. He had been inside it once, carried on Mam’s hip. He remembered nothing except the light — coloured light falling across a floor.
He climbed down. The step was high and the cobblestones were uneven underneath, and he landed harder than he meant to, the jolt going through his knees.
Tom was already lifting the crate of empty jars from the wagon bed, his hands steady under the weight, the glass clinking dully inside the straw packing. Gerald crossed the square.
The store was smaller than he expected.
He was not sure what he had expected — something the size of the workshop, perhaps, scaled to the weight of the name above the door — but the room was narrow and deep, with shelves lining both walls and a wooden counter running along the left side. Glass was everywhere. Not the raw glass of the workshop or the functional glass of the greenhouse panes. Finished work: bowls and drinking vessels on the lower shelves, coloured panels leaning against the walls, a set of bottles in graduated sizes arranged from smallest to largest along the counter. A draught came from somewhere he could not find — not the door, not the window — and one of the hanging pieces near the ceiling knocked gently against its neighbour, a small bright sound that nobody seemed to notice.
The light from the front window came through a piece of deep red glass hanging on a thin wire, and the colour it cast across the counter and the floor was warm and strange — not like anything Gerald had seen through coloured glass before. Deeper. Richer. The red moved when the glass turned on its wire, slow, and the patch of colour on the floor shifted with it.
A girl was behind the counter, older than Sable, sorting something into a ledger with a pen in her right hand and a piece of chalk in her left. She had chalk dust on the side of her wrist and a smudge of it on her jaw where she had rested her chin. She looked up when the door closed behind him.
“Hello,” she said. “Can I help you?”
“I’m Gerald. Gerald Glass. Tom is at the guild hall.”
Something in her expression settled, the way a question settles when it finds its answer. “He’s in the back,” she said, and tipped her chin toward a doorway behind the counter. “Go through.”
The back room was half the width of the front and twice as cluttered. Shelves of glass pieces ran along both walls — offcuts, coloured fragments, strips of lead in flat bundles, tools Gerald did not recognise hanging from hooks above the workbench. The bench itself took up most of the room.
His grandfather was at the bench with his back to the door, and he was not doing what Gerald expected him to be doing. He was holding a strip of lead came in both hands and bending it, slowly, against the edge of the bench. The lead was not cooperating. Gerald could see the angle was wrong — the came wanted to fold where Grandfather was not folding it, and twice it slipped in his grip and he pulled it back and started the bend again. His shoulders were set in the particular way shoulders set when a person’s hands are arguing with a material. On the bench beside him, a flat wooden frame held a pattern of coloured glass pieces fitted into channels of dark grey lead. The panel was perhaps two feet across, and the unfinished section — bare wood and waiting lead — took up the lower right corner.
Gerald stopped in the doorway.
Grandfather did not turn around. He finished the bend — the lead giving in, finally, with a faint creak — and set the shaped piece against the panel’s edge to check the fit. It did not fit. The curve was too wide by a finger’s width. He picked it up and looked at it and set it aside on a pile of similar rejects, three or four strips of lead that had lost their argument with the shape he wanted.
Then he turned his head. He did not look surprised.
“Tom’s at the guild hall,” Gerald said.
“I know,” Grandfather said. “He sent word yesterday.” He looked at Gerald for a moment, the lamp light catching the deep lines around his eyes, and then he turned back to the bench and picked up a new strip of lead. “Come and look, if you like.”
Gerald came closer. The panel’s pattern was a design he could not read from this angle — shapes that were colours more than they were pictures, reds and blues and greens and a clear yellow that seemed to carry its own light. The lead lines between the pieces were dark and even, every channel the same width, every joint flat where the lead strips crossed.
Grandfather’s hands were thick at the knuckles, the joints swollen and scarred. They should not have been able to do what Gerald was watching them do. The new strip of lead came went into the channel with a steadiness that made the work look unhurried when it was not unhurried — it was precise, and the precision took the time it took, and his hands gave it that time without rushing.
Gerald watched him seat three more pieces. Blue. Green. A pale amber that caught the workbench lamp and sent a faint warm reflection onto the back of Grandfather’s hands. Between each piece, Grandfather reached for the soldering tool — the Flameless Pen, shaped like a thick stylus, producing a point of focused heat without flame or smoke — and touched the joint where two lead channels crossed. A thin rod of metal against the seam, the Pen’s tip turning the metal liquid for a moment, the solder running into the joint and hardening smooth. Grandfather moved from joint to joint without pausing, and the metal was bright for a moment before it dulled.
He set the Pen in its stand and leaned back on his stool. His neck cracked when he rolled it. He rubbed the heel of his left hand across his right knuckles — pressing into the swollen joints, working something loose — and then he reached to the tray beside the panel and lifted out a piece of glass.
Deep red. The same red Gerald had seen from the front window.
“Here,” Grandfather said, and held it out.
Gerald took it. The piece was thin at the edges, thicker at the centre, surprisingly light. It was warm — from the tray or the lamp or the air in the room — and the red of it was deeper in his hand than it had looked in Grandfather’s. His own skin showed through the thinnest edge, pink beneath the red.
“Take it to the window,” Grandfather said.
The back room’s window was small, set high in the wall, letting in a shaft of morning light that fell across the upper shelves and the dust moving in it. Gerald crossed the room and raised the piece into the light.
The colour changed.
Not red the way paint was red or berries were red. Red the way embers were red when the fire had burned past flame and into the thing beneath flame — something still alive in the glass. The light fell across Gerald’s hand and wrist and the front of his shirt, and when he turned the piece, the red shifted and deepened, and at one point — the glass tilted just past level — the colour on the wall became so rich it looked wet.
“Your great-grandmother made that piece,” Grandfather said.
Gerald turned. Grandfather had not moved from the bench, but his hands were resting on the edge of the frame, the work paused. He was watching Gerald.
“Older than anyone now living,” Grandfather said. “It has been in the window for decades. The colour has not faded.”
Gerald looked at the piece in his hand. His great-grandmother. He knew what the word meant — Grandfather’s mother — but the size of it was hard to hold. Someone had made this glass before anyone Gerald knew was born. Before Da was a child. Before Da was anything. The glass had been in the window and the red had not changed and the person who made it was gone.
“Good glass outlasts the people who make it,” Grandfather said. “That is either a comfort or a sadness, depending on the day.”
His voice carried the words flat, neither heavy nor light. A thing that was true, said because it was true.
Gerald stood with the red glass in the window light. The colour moved on the wall behind him, slow and warm.
He wanted to ask about the glass. How was the red made. What was the colour called. Whether Grandfather could still make glass like this. The questions were there, lined up, the kind of questions that had answers.
He did not ask them.
“What was she like?” Gerald said.
Grandfather did not answer right away. He looked at Gerald — looked at him for longer than Gerald was used to being looked at, which was a specific amount of time, the length of a glance or the span of an instruction, not this — and something moved in his face that Gerald did not have a name for. Not surprise. Something closer to the expression Mam made when she found a seedling that had taken when she had not expected it to.
Then he leaned back on his stool. His hands settled in his lap, scarred and thick-knuckled and still.
“She had a habit,” he said, “of singing to the furnace while she gathered.”
Gerald waited.
“Wordless singing. No melody anyone could follow.” Grandfather’s gaze was on the panel in front of him, but he was not looking at the glass. “The kind of sound a person makes when they have forgotten anyone else is in the room. Except the whole workshop could hear her.” His thumb moved across the knuckle of his other hand, pressing the joint in slow circles. “She said the glass came out better when she sang to it.”
“Did it?” Gerald said. “Come out better?”
The corner of Grandfather’s mouth moved. Something small.
“No one ever found out,” he said. “She never stopped doing it.”
The room was quiet. The lamplight moved on the glass pieces in their tray. From the front room came the faint scratch of the girl’s pen on the ledger, and from somewhere outside, the sound of a cart on cobblestones.
“What did she sing?” Gerald said.
Grandfather shook his head. The movement was slow.
“I was a child when she died,” he said. “I remembered the sound more than the melody.” He paused. His hands were still in his lap, still pressing the swollen knuckle. “I could tell you what it sounded like. I could not hum it for you.”
Gerald crossed back to the bench and offered the piece.
Grandfather took it. His fingers closed around it with a gentleness that did not match the size of his hands — the same care Gerald had watched in the lead channels.
“Thank you for showing me,” Gerald said.
Grandfather set the piece on the tray. He looked at Gerald once more, and then he turned back to the bench and picked up the next strip of lead.
“Tom will be a while at the guild hall,” he said. “You can watch, if you want.”
Gerald wanted.
He stood beside the bench and watched his grandfather work. Grandfather did not explain what he was doing. He did not name the tools or the techniques or the colours. He worked, and Gerald watched, and the work was its own language — each piece of glass lifted, examined against the lamp, fitted into the lead came with the flat sound of glass meeting metal, pressed into place with those scarred, steady thumbs.
Not every piece fit the first time. Twice Grandfather lifted a piece back out of its channel and turned it a quarter-rotation and tried again. Once he rejected a piece entirely — a triangle of green that did not match the green beside it, too blue at the edge — and set it back in the tray and chose another, and another, holding each to the lamp beside the panel until the third was right. Gerald could see that it was right without being able to say why.
The quiet between them was not empty. It was the tap of glass on lead and the faint hiss of the Pen and the smell of clean heat and old wood and the dust moving in the light from the high window.
When the front door opened and Tom’s boots sounded on the shop floor, Gerald’s feet ached from standing on the stone. He did not know how long he had been there. His hand was resting on the edge of the bench, near the tray of coloured pieces, his fingers close enough to feel the warmth coming off them.
“Ready,” Tom called from the front room.
Grandfather set the Pen in its stand. He looked at the panel — more than half filled now, the pattern beginning to emerge from the scattered colours the way a picture emerges from pieces that do not look like anything until they are next to each other — and then he looked at Gerald.
“Good,” he said.
Gerald went through the front room. The girl behind the counter was wrapping a small glass piece in cloth for a woman counting coins from a purse. Gerald pushed open the front door and the street noise hit him — carts and voices and a hammer ringing somewhere nearby, loud after the quiet of the back room. Tom was at the wagon. Gerald climbed up onto the bench and Tom unwrapped the reins and clicked his tongue, and Barrel leaned forward, and the square fell behind them as the wagon turned onto the street.
The cobblestones knocked up through the wheels and through the bench and into Gerald’s legs. His hands were in his lap. The mineral stain in his creases caught the afternoon light.
Behind them, in a store window on the south side of the square, a piece of red glass turned slowly on its wire. Gerald did not look back.
The wagon carried him home.