A Blue for Rainy Days

Nell could always tell which raindrop would fall next. Nobody pays wages for that, but she could do it, and on the wettest day of the autumn she had a whole roof to practise on.

Brindle’s glasshouse had a long glass roof, with the rain sitting on every pane in rows. Nell swept underneath and looked up between strokes. The third pane from the door, she would think, the fat drop on the left. And it went.

She did not tell anybody. Nell did not tell anybody much. She was eleven, she had worked in the glasshouse since the spring, and in all that time she had said perhaps a hundred words. Forty of them were “yes.” One, back in June, had been “hot,” about a piece Brindle was just going to pick up, and Nell had been right about that too.

Brindle had been at the furnace all week with her sleeves pushed up. She blew a bowl on Monday, and again on Tuesday, and on Wednesday, and on Thursday. Each time she changed something: the sand, the pinch of blue, the heat, her temper. Each time it came out a dull, flat blue, the colour of a puddle on a step. Three stood on the left-hand rack, and the fourth was still cooling.

The blue she wanted was out of the window. Across the Glowmarket the Hollow’s lamps were lit, blue and gold the way they are even by day. Through the wet glass they had gone soft at the edges and deep in the middle. Brindle pointed at them with her pipe.

“That blue,” she said. “I want a bowl that blue. I want people to cross the town in their good shoes to look at it.”

Nell looked at the lamps, and at the rain running down the window.

“It’s the rain,” she said.

“The lamps in the rain,” said Brindle. “That’s what I said.”

It was not quite what Nell had said. But Brindle had turned back to the furnace, so Nell turned back to the broom.

Nell wanted that bowl nearly as much as Brindle did. She would have blown a hundred bowls for her, if anybody had let her near a pipe. Nobody had.

* * *

Nobody came in all morning. The rain came straight down on the Glowmarket and bounced. Every quarter of an hour Linnet pushed the puddle off the teal awning with a broom handle, and every quarter of an hour it came back.

At eleven Brindle laid down the pipe.

“Nobody is coming in,” she said. “So you may as well learn to look at glass. Come to the window.”

She took a plain lamp chimney off the right-hand rack and held it up to the grey.

“It will hold,” she said. “That’s all a lamp glass has to do. What do you see?”

“Bubble,” said Nell.

There was one, small as a seed, near the top. Brindle looked at it for some time. “It will hold,” she said again, more firmly, and put it back.

Then Monday’s bowl, from the left-hand rack.

“It will hold,” she said. “And it’s green at the foot. A bottle would be proud of it. Nothing else would.”

Tuesday’s. “It will hold. It’s grey. I put more blue in and the fire took it back out.”

Wednesday’s she did not even lift all the way. “Flat. A tray has more to say for itself.”

After each one she took the cloth from her apron pocket and polished off her fingerprints. The blue glass on the left-hand rack keeps a fingerprint for weeks, and Brindle did not sell glass with people on it.

“Here is the thing to learn,” she said. “If a piece needs a candle behind it, or a cloth under it, or somebody standing beside it explaining, it isn’t finished. It’s excused. I don’t make excused glass. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” said Nell.

“The fourth comes out when you’re back. Go and get coal first. The bin’s low.”

* * *

Nell went twice to the coal shed behind the Last Cup, because the bin was lower than Brindle thought, and the second time she ran. She came back with her hair flat to her head and both sleeves wet through to the elbow. Under the teal awning, Linnet watched her go by.

Brindle had the fourth bowl up at the window.

“It will hold,” she said, and nothing else. Then she held it out behind her without looking round. “Put it with the others.”

She went back to the furnace and picked up the pipe, because Brindle’s answer to a bad bowl had always been another bowl.

Nell carried it to the left-hand rack in both hands. As she leaned over to set it down, her wet sleeve dripped into it. Three drops and a little run.

Where the water went, the glass went blue.

Not puddle blue. It was the blue of the lamps across the square seen through the rain, soft at the edges and deep in the middle, as if a lamp were lit somewhere a long way down inside the bowl.

Nell stood very still. She watched the drops, and knew which one would go first, and it went. Where it had been, the bowl was dull again.

“Brindle,” she said.

“If it’s the coal, it goes in the bin.”

“Brindle. Look.”

By the time Brindle turned round, the heat of the glasshouse had dried the last drop, and the bowl was a puddle on a step again.

“It’s the same bowl,” said Brindle.

Nell did not argue. She dipped the tin cup in the rain barrel by the door and poured a little into the bowl. Then she held the bowl in both hands and swirled it round, slowly, until the water had been everywhere.

The bowl went blue, and it stayed blue. It stayed blue as long as it was wet, right up to the rim, and the furnace light came through it and laid a blue patch on the floor Nell had swept.

Brindle put the pipe down.

* * *

It is a hard thing for a proud person to be shown something by the one who is meant to be holding the broom, and Brindle was very proud. She stood over the bowl with her mouth gone thin. Nell held the tin cup against her apron and waited.

“It needs help,” Brindle said at last. “A candle behind it, a cloth under it, water in it. It’s the same thing.”

She took out her cloth, as if she might just wipe the bowl dry and be done with it.

Nell poured in a little more rainwater.

Brindle looked at the cloth in her hand for a long moment. Then she put it back in her pocket.

“It’s excused,” she said. “It’s the best excuse I ever saw.” She shook her head at herself. “I’ve made a bowl that’s only right in the rain, and I couldn’t see it. You saw it first.”

“My sleeve did,” said Nell.

“Your sleeve doesn’t work here. You do.” Brindle wiped her hands on her apron, though they were perfectly dry. “Bring the short pipe. It’s time your hands did something besides sweep.”

Nobody but Brindle had ever put a pipe in Brindle’s furnace.

“Warm the end first. Not in. Near. Now in, and turn. Don’t stop turning. If you stop, it runs off onto my floor and you’re the one who sweeps it.”

The glass came up on the end of the pipe, orange and slow, like honey on a spoon. Nell turned it. Her arms shook. She turned it anyway.

“Like winding wool,” said Brindle. “Steady.”

“Who’s winding wool?” said Linnet, from the doorway.

Linnet was dripping on the mat with a parcel under a coat. “I saw you go past twice with the coal,” Linnet said to Nell, “and the second time you were wetter. So.” Inside the parcel were thick grey mittens, with a label on one thumb that said for a wet helper.

“I knitted those in August,” said Linnet. “Everybody told me it was far too hot for mittens. It was. But somebody is always a wet helper sooner or later.”

Nell looked at the mittens, and the glass on her pipe began to sag.

“Turn,” said Brindle, and Nell turned. “She’ll have them after,” Brindle said to Linnet. “Not by the furnace.”

“After, then,” said Linnet, perfectly content, and went back across the square to see about the puddle.

Brindle showed Nell how to roll the gather on the flat steel and put it back in the heat when it stiffened. It came out lopsided the first time, as Brindle said it would, and the second time too. Brindle took the pipe and looked at the lump of glass by the light of the furnace, not the window.

“It will hold,” she said.

She did not add a single thing that was wrong with it, which was more than any of her own bowls had got all week.

* * *

In the afternoon Brindle lifted the fourth bowl off the rack, and this time she did not take it to the window. She set it outside on an upturned crate by the rain barrel, where the gutter did not reach and the rain did.

The rain filled it, and the bowl went blue.

Nell put on Linnet’s mittens and went and stood beside it. She was wet again at once, except for her hands.

Linnet was first. Linnet came straight through the biggest puddle, and stopped, and looked.

“Oh, Brindle,” said Linnet.

Brindle stood in the doorway with her arms folded. “It only works in the rain,” she said.

“It’s raining,” said Nell.

Linnet laughed. Brindle did not, quite, but her arms came unfolded.

Tavi came second, with a sack for a hat. “I’ll tell people I saw it first,” said Tavi.

“Nell saw it first,” said Brindle.

“Then I saw it early,” said Tavi. “I was going to say I helped, but you were all standing right there.”

The third was Juniper Bellrunner, who came round the corner of the Last Cup at a run, because she was between bell rounds. She saw the bowl and stopped dead.

“I have nine minutes,” said Juniper. She looked at the bowl for three of them, with the rain running off her nose. Then she ran, and rang her next round a little late, and for once she did not mind.

Linnet counted the square, which was a thing Linnet did: nine hats of Linnet’s making out in the weather, and now one pair of mittens beside a bowl.

“Three,” said Brindle, who had been counting something else: the people who had come to look.

Three people and one wet square are a long way short of a whole town in its good shoes. Still, Brindle said it as if she meant to go on counting.

* * *

When the sky over the Glowmarket had gone deep blue and the windows were lit, Brindle brought the bowl in. By the furnace it dried and went back to a puddle on a step.

“I’m glad it rained,” said Brindle.

Nell finished sweeping. When she looked up, Brindle was standing under the long glass roof, looking at the rain in its rows.

“Which one?” said Brindle.

Nell pointed. The third pane from the door, the fat drop on the left.

It went.

“Hm,” said Brindle, which was the shortest thing she had said all week. “Same time tomorrow. Bring your sleeves.”

Nell walked home in Linnet’s mittens, under the Hollow’s lamps, which were exactly the right blue. She had said thirteen words that day. For Nell that was a great many, and the first three of them, “It’s the rain,” had been right all along.

After she had gone, Brindle took out her cloth and polished the bowl until she came to the rim. There was a thumbprint on it, small and clear, from where Nell had held it to swirl the rain round.

Brindle looked at it. Then she put the cloth back in her pocket, for the second time that day. She set the bowl on the rack with the thumbprint turned to the front, and beside it she stood a jug of rainwater from the barrel, in case tomorrow was dry.

Card-makers put their mark under the last stroke, so everybody knows whose work it is. Glass has no last stroke. But that bowl had Nell’s thumbprint on the rim, where anybody who came to look would see it, and Brindle meant them to.