Mistress Vorder eyed the Nordic nobleman with surprise and a little resentment. "You told me nothing of this, sir," she said coldly. "I had no idea you were one of the doctor's magnetizers."
"But dear lady, I had no notion of deceiving you," replied Skogsrå. "Indeed, I believed my connection with this establishment well known. It is the very reason why I insisted on accompanying you. The Duchess knew of it, certainly." He limped over to Elsie and raised one of her hands to his lips. "I hope, in the future, to play some small part in effecting your cure."
As they spoke, more people came crowding into the room through the same door. The atmosphere was growing close. Sera knew that Elsie had difficulty breathing in hot, confined spaces, so taking the younger girl with her, she maneuvered a path through the crowd, heading for the nearest window. After a futile struggle with the casement, she concluded that it was sealed in place. But at least the air was a little cooler near the glass.
"It is time for the demonstration to begin," the doctor announced. A number of men and women, including the matron's three gaunt daughters, seated themselves around the vat. Several others, including Jarl Skogsrå, produced iron rods similar to the doctor's and positioned themselves between the chairs, with the rods extended horizontally in front of them.
"You understand," said the doctor, speaking for the benefit of the Duchess and Mistress Vorder, "that my assistants have a marked affinity for the magnetic waters, which they have helped me to magnetize, as well as possessing a natural empathetic sympathy. For this reason, they are able to direct the healing influences into and through the rods, and thus effect a cure."
As he spoke, those in the chairs reached out, each one grasping the iron rods to either side. The effect was almost instantaneous. Some closed their eyes and began to breathe harshly; others threw back their heads and fastened their gaze on the ceiling, moaning as if in pain. Most stared straight ahead, as if into some imaginary distance, their faces etched with expressions of the most sublime ecstasy.
"This is the most appalling nonsense I ever saw or heard of in my life," said Sera, reaching instinctively for Elsie's hand. Several people turned to glare at her, but Sera continued on boldly,"Magnetic influences, indeed! I daresay in most of these cases the cure just as much as the complaint is entirely imaginary."
"I feel certain you must be right," Elsie whispered. But then she felt the blood rush out of her head, and she was barely able to force out the words: "Oh, Sera, do look!"
Two of the girls had begun to twitch spasmodically, and a white foam had appeared on the lips of one of the ecstatics. As Sera and Elsie watched in horror, three women went into violent convulsions.
"Sera," said Elsie, "I think I am going to faint. Please take me out of here."
Sera tore her gaze away from the twitching figure in the nearest chair. Elsie trembled as though stricken by a palsy, and her eyes were wide and dark. This is monstrous . . . they have made her really ill. Why, oh why, had I not the wit to remove her earlier?
She offered her cousin the support of an arm and led her toward the door.
Elsie clutched Sera's arm convulsively. "Here comes Mama—I know she is going to insist that we stay." Mistress Vorder was bearing down on them, as if determined to cut off their escape.
Sera hardly knew which way to turn. While it was essential that she remove Elsie from the hysterical atmosphere present in the room, a bitter public argument between Sera and Clothilde was calculated to do almost equal harm.
"I think," said a pleasantly accented voice in Sera's ear, "that I may really be of some use here." And Sera discovered Francis Skelbrooke at her elbow, with an expression of grave concern on his sensitive face. "Allow me to escort Miss Vorder from the room while you deal with her mother's objections."
Before Sera had time either to accept or reject his offer, he took Elsie by the arm and whisked her away. This ploy had the desired effect, for Mistress Vorder, taken by surprise and momentarily confused as to her objective, hesitated just long enough for her daughter and Lord Skelbrooke to make good their escape.
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 y
ou. 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.
"See here," he finally gathered the courage to ask the others, "am I of any use here at all?"
The stout young dwarf put down his pen, tipped back his chair and appeared to consider. "You've given Master Ule the opportunity to do a good and generous deed—which there's nothing he likes better. That's useful, anyway. And if you work hard and learn all that you can, why then, he'll find you another position just as he promised, and there you may be of use, as well as affording considerable satisfaction to the kindest heart in Thornburg."
Jed thought that over. "I take it, I ain't the first piece of river trash Master Ule's taken up and tried to make into something better."
"You're the first in the counting-house," said the other dwarf, looking up from his work. "But half the fellows in the glasshouse were once `trash' (as you are pleased to call yourself) and now they are all worthy and useful members of the community . . . thanks to Master Ule. Oh, I don't say he hasn't taken a scoundrel or two in by mistake, but he's a very good judge of character and most of his charity cases turn out well.
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