Goblin Moon (7 page)

Sera watched him lead Elsie through the crowd and out
the door, with a mixture of gratitude, relief, and
resentment—though she had little time to contemplate either his
convenient intervention or his cowardice in leaving the more
unpleasant task to her. Cousin Clothilde was soon upon her,
red-faced and indignant, demanding an explanation.

Before Sera could offer that explanation, Mistress
Vorder launched into a long lecture on the impertinence of young
women in general and the ingratitude of orphans in particular. Sera
listened as patiently as she could, replied as temperately as her
pride would allow, and left the room at the first opportunity.

Chapter
6

Which is largely Concerned with the Manufacture of
Glass.

By following Antimony Lane, Jedidiah eventually
returned to the river, at a spot where the meandering Lunn all but
doubled back on herself in a wide, shining loop. Master Ule’s
Bottle Factory was located at the end of the street, where the lane
ran downhill to the river and ended in a set of broad stone steps.
It was a large red brick building of uncertain age—not very dirty,
considering the clouds of grey smoke issuing through a number of
stacks on the roof and its proximity to the damps of the river.

As a prospective employee, Jed went around to the
rear of the building. It had, as he had suspected, a wharf of its
own at the back, a weathered but sturdy-looking pier. On the wharf,
two broad-shouldered dwarves were loading crates onto a barge,
while a third dwarf, in a rough brown coat and a waistcoat of
robin’s-egg blue, supervised and made notations in a little book.
Jed’s spirits dimmed. Most wichtel (as the dwarves were called)
were gregarious and seemed to enjoy the society of Men and gnomes,
yet one did hear of the rare dwarf who refused to employ any but
his own kind.

But in response to Jed’s inquiry, the dwarf in charge
readily put aside his book and offered to take him to Master
Ule.

Jed obediently followed the dwarf into the factory.
He had never seen the inside of a glassworks before, and the bustle
of activity immediately impressed him. He was relieved to note that
at least half of Master Ule’s workers were full-sized men. An
immense brick furnace, circular with a domed roof, dominated the
center of the factory. Two large fellows were busy stoking it with
mighty logs of pine and oak. All around the furnace, at glowing
arch-shaped apertures, the glassblowers and their assistants
worked: Men and gnomes and dwarves, shaping the molten glass into
bottles.

Jed had only a moment to observe all this. His escort
whisked him through the factory and through a series of passages
and storerooms. At last they arrived in a bright, high-ceilinged
chamber with windows facing on the street, which apparently served
both as storeroom and counting-house. There, the dwarf took leave
of him.

Two young dwarves sat busily writing at two small
desks near the door. A larger desk in one corner of the room was
piled high with ledgers and accounting books and papers, all
tumbled together in what appeared (at least to Jedidiah’s untrained
eye) to be an entirely random fashion. Sitting behind that desk was
an elderly dwarf in a grey tie-wig, a plain suit of clothes, and a
leather apron, sorting through the books and papers, muttering to
himself, and tugging at his wig with an air of great
distraction.

“Blast young Polydore! Scorch and blister him! He can
make sense of it all; he can put his hand on the very paper
immediately. But when he is away, I cannot find a thing, not a
blessed thing!”

This, Jed surmised, must be Master Ule. As neither of
the younger dwarves looked up to acknowledge his presence, he made
bold to approach their master. “Begging your pardon, sir,” he said,
removing his cap, “I’ve come about the job.”

The dwarf glanced up. Abandoning his accounts, he
looked Jed over with a pair of piercingly bright eyes. “I fear you
have come to the wrong place, young man—I advertised for an errand
boy. And in any case, that position has already been filled.”

Jed’s face fell. Seeing his disappointment, the dwarf
said kindly, “I can assure you that the position would not have
suited you. The boy I hired was half your age. I feel certain you
can find something better.”

“No, sir, I don’t reckon I will, saving your
worship.” Jed could not help sounding a little bitter. “And as for
not being suited, any honest work I could find would suit me
proper.”

He turned and started back toward the door, wondering
how he was going to find his own way through the maze of rooms and
passageways. But the dwarf called him back. “See here, my lad, I
take it you’ve been out of work for some considerable period of
time?” Jed nodded. “Well, I may be able to find something for you,
after all. What can you do—what skills have you learned?”

Jed blushed and shook his head, “No skills to speak
of. But I’m powerful strong, I ain’t afraid of hard work, and I
learn real quick.”

The dwarf continued to stare at him with those
disconcerting dark eyes. “I can see you are strong, and I must
confess that I like your face. You look to be a bright lad, and an
honest one. All this being so: how is it that you were never
apprenticed to any trade?”

Jedidiah shuffled his feet uneasily. He knew that
most folks looked on river scavengers as little better than
thieves; for all that, he did not like to tell a lie. “I used to
work with my granduncle off the river, but he . . . well, he
retired in a manner of speaking, and I never did care for that line
of work.”

Master Ule nodded sagely. “I quite understand. A
somewhat uncertain livelihood, I take it?”

“Yes, sir. It was, sir.” Jed was amazed to hear the
dwarf take the matter so lightly. He wondered if Master Ule had
misunderstood, taking him for a fisherman or a bargeman. “But it
weren’t the money, sir. I’m willing to work cheap.”

The dwarf made an airy gesture. “Well, well, we
needn’t worry about that. I do not pay my workers starvation
wages—and I pay at the quarter moon as well as the full.” By which
Jedidiah understood that the dwarf had
not
misinterpreted him. “Now then . . . let me see what I can find for
you to do—“

It did not take long for the dwarf to find something.
For the next several hours, Jed worked hard, moving crates of
glass, restacking firewood, and at a variety of other tasks. But as
the day wore on he began to wonder whether he was actually doing
valuable work, or Master Ule was inventing things for him to
do.

That thought troubled Jed. He did not like to accept
charity, no matter how discreetly offered. But when he tried to
broach the subject to Master Ule, the dwarf waved him off with a
good-humored grin. “Nonsense, my lad, nonsense. We are a little
slow in getting out the orders this week, with Polydore absent, but
when he returns there will be plenty for you to do.”

Polydore was Polydore Figg, Master Ule’s nephew (as
Jed had gathered by now), and he was normally in charge of the
warehouses and the counting-house; he had been out seven days with
a chill in his lungs, and his lengthy absence had created
considerable confusion within his domain.

But in the factory Master Ule reigned supreme, and
there the making of glass bottles proceeded with great energy and
efficiency, for Master Ule was everywhere, overseeing his workers,
lending a hand or a piece of advice wherever it was needed, as well
as attending to those special tasks which were specifically his as
Master of the Glasshouse, like preparing the batch: the mixture of
sand, ash, and other materials of which the glass was made. This
last called for considerable skill, Jed learned, for the quality of
materials varied, measurements could not be exact, and the proper
mixture was only achieved by that combination of experience and
intuition which distinguished a master glassmaker.

Moreover, several different varieties of glass were
manufactured at Master Ule’s, and each kind required a different
sort of sand, a different sort of ash: hard sand and oak ash, high
in salt and soda, for the dark green bottles used to store wine,
ale, oils, scents, and medicines; fine white sand, crushed from
pebbles, combined with the ash of barilla or glass-wort for the
clear glass bottles that would later be painted with bright enamels
or etched with acids, and eventually grace sideboards and supper
tables in the homes of the wealthy. There were also blue, pink, and
pale yellow bottles destined for ladies’ dressing tables.

Catching Jed watching him, in an idle moment, Master
Ule set him to work pulverizing cullet, which was the broken glass
the journeymen used to top off the huge pots of red clay in which
they fused the batch.

But he was back in the room at the front an hour
later restacking a pile of crates—the arrangement of which had not
entirely satisfied Master Ule earlier—when the glassmaker rushed
into the room and began searching among the ledgers and papers on
the large desk.

“Here now,” the Master said to one of the clerks, a
stout young dwarf with ruddy cheeks and a moleskin waistcoat, “do
you know where the bill of lading for the alehouse consignment
might be?”

The younger dwarf declared that he had no idea.

“Begging your pardon . . .” said Jed, glad of an
opportunity to be of real use, “ain’t that the paper you’re looking
for over there on that box?”

Master Ule crossed the room and picked up the sheet
that Jed indicated. “It is, thank the Powers.” But then he gave a
little start and examined Jed all over again with those
disconcerting dark eyes. “Did you see me put this down here
earlier?”

“No, sir,” said Jed.

“Did anyone tell you what this paper contained?”

“No, sir,” said Jed, growing more puzzled by the
moment.

“Then how on earth did you know what it was?”

“Don’t it say so right at the top . . . ‘The Moon and
Seven Stars, Tavern and Brewery’?”

“It does indeed, “ said Master Ule. “But tell me
this, my lad . . . do you actually mean to tell me that you know
how to
read
?”

It was then that Jed realized his mistake. In the
country districts, literacy was comparatively high, for there was
no end of parish schools and energetic parsons to take the children
of laborers and farmworkers in hand, but in towns like Thornburg
there were few charitable institutions, and many, many more poor
boys and girls in want of an education, so that only the children
of the
genteel
poor were ever chosen. The
result was almost universal illiteracy among men of Jed’s class.
That Jed himself was an exception to this rule, his associates on
the river treated as something of a joke—his betters, when they
learned of it, regarded his abilities as a mark of presumption.

Jed blushed and hung his head, wishing he’d had the
sense to keep quiet. “I ain’t no scholar,” he protested.

“But you can read?” Master Ule persisted. “In the
name of the Father and the Seven Fates, it is nothing for you to be
ashamed of! But where on earth did you happen to acquire that
skill?”

“From Gottfried Jenk the bookseller.” Jed made the
admission reluctantly. “I used to take lessons along of his
granddaughter, Miss Sera Vorder, but she always got on better than
me, coming to it naturally, as you might say.”

Master Ule handed him a ledger bound in green
leather. “Read something to me; choose any page you like,” he
demanded.

Somewhat hesitantly, Jed read off a page of names and
figures.

“And I suppose . . . but naturally, this schoolmaster
of yours—what did you say his name was?—taught you to write as
well?”

As Master Ule already knew the worst of him, Jed saw
no reason to conceal the truth. “He taught me to write and to . . .
well, there was history, and geography, and just about every sort
of lessons in them books he taught me to read, and I couldn’t very
well help learning them things along of my letters, now could
I?”

“Show me,” said Master Ule, and provided him with
pen, ink, and paper. This, however, was rather more difficult. Even
without books, Jed had plenty of opportunities for reading things:
street signs, and shop signs, and handbills pasted up on walls. But
since abandoning his studies with Gottfried Jenk he had never had
occasion to set pen to paper.

Using a crate for a writing desk, Jed laboriously
wrote out his name and the day of the year.

“You are somewhat rusty, I perceive,” said the dwarf,
examining this effort. “But with a little practice I believe you
might write a very fair hand. I suppose you can add up a column of
figures?”

Jed replied that he could, and proceeded to
demonstrate. “But my dear good lad, did it never occur to you to
seek employment as a clerk?”

Jed shook his head. It certainly had not. Young men
who dressed and spoke as he did were not employed in
counting-houses and offices.

“Well, perhaps not. Your appearance is somewhat
rough, and your speech leaves much to be desired. But with a little
polishing . . . with a little polishing we might put you in the way
of a very good position.”

“Yes, sir,” said Jed, rather stunned by this
proposition, though by now he began to perceive that he had fallen
into the hands of a sort of dwarf philanthropist.

For the rest of that day, Master Ule set him to
copying accounts from one ledger into another. When he had a moment
to think, Jed wondered how the absent Polydore Figg would react on
learning that Master Ule had hired such an unprepossessing new
clerk. Much to his surprise, the other clerks did not seem to mind
at all, and continued on with their work, ink-stained and cheerful,
as though it were nothing out of the ordinary for them to work,
virtually side by side, with a ragged boy from the river who filled
the room (Jed knew he was no garland of meadowflowers) with a fishy
odor of brine and riverwater.