23. The First Day
In which the gerbils are put to work…
They were told to arrive at nine and arrived at twenty past eight, which meant standing in the yard for half an hour while the light came up over the fen and Griffin saying twice that she had told everyone half past would do.
The door was opened by the hamster apprentice, who looked at them without the clipboard.
“You’re early.”
“We are,” said Griffin.
“Nobody’s ever early.” She stood aside. “Coats on the hooks. No, not that hook.”
Inside, the north light was already flat across the benches. Fenella Burnish was at the far end with her back to them, doing something to a panel with a brush no wider than a whisker, and did not turn round for four minutes. Gimbal counted them.
“Good,” said Fenella, when she did turn. “Halcyon, show them where things are and then bring Graphic to me.”
The apprentice showed them where things were at considerable speed. The glass store, the lead store, the kiln, the sink that was for hands and the sink that was emphatically not for hands, the cupboard with the flux in it, the shelf above the cupboard with the flux that was not to be confused with the flux in the cupboard, and a broom, which she pointed out with the particular emphasis of somebody who expected it to matter later.
Graphic was taken to Fenella’s bench and given a tray of blue glass fragments and a colour chart, and told to put them in order, palest to deepest.
Griffin was taken to a laptop on a stand at the end of the bench, already open on a spreadsheet, and Halcyon talked her through it at some length. There was a tab for glass by colour, a tab for glass by size, a tab for lead came, a tab for paint, a tab for brushes, a tab for kiln bookings, a tab for clients, and several more whose purposes Halcyon explained fully, and Griffin absorbed without asking questions. The monotony was broken by the arrival of a parcel at 11.30. Halcyon scanned its barcode, and a blank row in the spreadsheet filled itself in without either of them touching the keyboard again.
“Is that it?” said Griffin.
“That’s it,” said Halcyon. “I just have to add my name, to show I’ve checked it.”
Gimbal was given a bowl of warm water and a soft brush and a tray of glass fragments to clean. Once she looked properly, she could see the fragments did not need cleaning at all. She cleaned them anyway, one at a time, out of the tray and into the water and up to the light and back into the tray, and by 12.30, she had cleaned 61 bits of glass and had stopped being able to feel two of her fingers. Every one of the 61 pieces had looked exactly the same going back into the tray as it had coming out.
Graphic worked along her tray piece by piece, holding two fragments together at the same angle to the same patch of sky whenever the difference was close. Fenella came by once, early on, and adjusted Graphic’s hold on the tweezers, moving her paw a few millimetres along the shaft without comment, and did not correct it again, because it did not need correcting again.
Graphic continued checking each placement twice before she trusted it, and one fragment near the middle she checked four times before she left it where it was. She was setting down the last piece when Fenella returned to the bench, which was not, Graphic understood at once, a coincidence.
Fenella looked at the row for a long moment. “Talent,” she said, “exactly where I hoped it would be,” and there was nothing withheld in the way she said it, no reservation of any kind, only the particular pleasure of a flame bowerbird watching something she had already privately decided would happen.
Then she swept the row off the bench and back into the tray with one motion of her wing, the morning’s work returned to a heap of glass. “Time for lunch,” she said, and left it at that.
Lunch was 25 minutes in a small room off the workshop with a kettle, three chairs, and a note on the wall in Fenella’s hand asking that mugs be rinsed. Grub and Gastronome had made each of them a packed lunch.
“What did you do this morning?” said Gimbal.
“I sorted a tray of glass,” said Graphic, “and then Fenella swept it back into a heap.”
“I cleaned glass that wasn’t dirty,” said Gimbal.
“I watched a spreadsheet fill itself in,” said Griffin.
After lunch Graphic returned to the bench and the heap of glass fragments. Fenella came over and held a piece of glass up to the light. “There’s blue with red under it,” she told her, “and blue with green under it, and once you’ve an eye for the difference you’ll never lose it, and it’s worth having, because that difference is what a window does to a room at four in the afternoon, and pale to deep is only what it does sitting on a bench in the daylight.” She set the tray down. “Any competent copyist can sort depth, let’s see if you can sort by warmth.”
Graphic began again, holding each fragment against its neighbour, weighing it, setting it down, moving to the next, the whole tray to be rebuilt from nothing before it could be checked at all.
At quarter to four a parcel came in without a barcode, and Halcyon entered it by hand, field by field, down to the bottom of the form, where she typed her own name without pausing, and clicked done.
Gimbal was handed the broom and asked to sweep the floors of the workshop and the break-room and to make sure the front step was clean. The floors did not need sweeping. The step was already clean. She swept all three anyway.
It was close to five before Graphic placed the last piece down, warmest to coolest, without a single one needing to be moved twice. At that moment, Fenella arrived at the bench and picked up the last piece, turned it once in the light, and set it back exactly where Graphic had put it. “Rare,” she said, “twice in one workshop,” considerably pleased with herself. Then she said, “It’s five o’clock, I’ll see you all tomorrow.”
By the time they arrived at the Bluestocking, nobody had said a word. Griffin took a moment longer than usual working her arm free of her sleeve before she hung the coat up at all.
Gasket put mugs of tea down in front of all three before anyone had asked for anything.
“How was it?” said Girdle.
“Long,” said Gimbal, and didn’t say anything else for a while. “I cleaned glass that wasn’t dirty,” she said eventually. “Then swept a floor that didn’t need it.”
“I sorted the same tray twice,” said Graphic. “Once by depth. Once by warmth.”
“I watched a spreadsheet fill itself automatically,” said Griffin, some time after that, not looking up from her tea. “And all Halcyon had to do was type her name, Halcyon Hessell.”
“Say that again,” said @Hedgehogforshort.
“Halcyon Hessell.”
“How’s it spelled?”
“Hessell,” said Griffin. “Two S’s, two L’s.”
“That’s the name on the delivery label,” said Hedgehog. “Under the Winchester photograph. H. Hes, and Wicken. You’ve just confirmed that Gemma Glasswing’s replicas go to Fenella Burnish’s workshop.”
https://myrtlelion.substack.com/p/23-the-first-day