Never have I experienced a night of such confusion and blind stumbling in the dark. My evening’s work began in my study at the church, where I pushed aside all my normal cases, set a couple of volumes on estate law and procedure near to hand, and sought some scheme by which I could prise the possession of the factory out of the hands of the men who held it and return it to the widow. This process involved tracing out a few intuitions about the state of the law which I had formed in the carriage, and it was not helped along at all by My Dear, who hovered officiously at my shoulder with theories of her own.
"Withrow made himself a party to the glass-sellers’ contracts by accepting their debts as payment of the widow’s tithe," My Dear insisted. "And then he intentionally frustrated the contract by inciting the glass-sellers not to pay! All you have to do is hold him to account for the widow’s lost profits and make him acknowledge her tithe as paid. If she was not properly ejected from the church, then she was not properly dispossessed of the factory, and everything is undone!"
"My Dear, I assure you, I cannot. To hold the curate liable for a sermon he gave in his capacity as a church officer would violate the basic principle of separation of church and state. Sir Dodge wrote on this very point only the session before last. If I seem to misunderstand such a basic doctrine he will think me an imbecile, and that is an injury that no mere gift of flowers for his wife will undo!" After this outburst she left me alone, and although I regretted having to rebuke her, I was glad she understood that this was one realm in which she could be of no help to me. It would have been the work of a few minutes to rule against the widow, but it took several hours of study and composition to produce an adequate opinion in her favor. Its reasoning was attenuated, garbled, and in all probability applicable only to the specific facts of the widow’s case. I thought it might be studied in the academies for generations.
I was unable to justify returning the ownership of the factory to the widow outright. I accepted the validity of Riley’s transfer of a leasehold estate in the glassworks to Kale, but I ruled that the central furnace and other instruments were never annexed to the building, and they therefore could only have been leased to Kale by means of a separate contract. Finding no such document in existence, I ruled that Riley had created an implied covenant to operate the furnace to facilitate Kale’s use of the glassworks. This meant that Riley was obligated to provide an experienced manager for the glassworks at his own expense, and also to indemnify Kale against any expenses arising from failure or misuse of the glassmaking equipment. I anticipated that Kale would be willing to let the widow run the factory if it meant that her brother-in-law would take on the risk of any further catastrophe. My ruling would deal a ruinous financial blow to Riley, but that was acceptable.
I sketched out as authoritative an outline of my opinion as possible. The hour was already quite late, but My Dear and I agreed that I should return to the Riley estate that very night to make our proposal to the widow, since her family might spirit her away at any time, and there would most likely be no reaching her for a private conversation in the daytime in any case. During her visit, My Dear had subtly asked the widow where she slept: a bottom-floor room at the back of the house. My plan was to ride out on horseback, tap on her window and hope that no one would raise the alarm. If caught, I would simply claim than an informant had accused the widow of performing Satanic rites out in the swamp at midnight, and as Inquisitor in her case I had been obligated to investigate. I bribed the stable boy to let me take a horse out in secrecy, and I made the long journey back to Riley’s plantation with no more light than came from the half-full moon and a weak lantern that I often had to clutch to my chest as I grabbed at the reins to keep from falling from the starting creature. Twice my mount stumbled and I thought I would be thrown off the road into some ditch or bog, and when it began to rain I feared she would refuse to go on. Finally I arrived near the plantation and tied off the horse’s reins to a sapling away from the road. I removed my brown riding cloak to reveal my black robes beneath, which I believed would better hide me in the darkness. Silently praying that the occupants would not spy me and shoot me on sight, I crept behind the house to the window that My Dear had described, which was illuminated by the dim light of a guttering candle. I could distinguish movement in the shadows but nothing more, so instead of tapping I peered harder at the scene inside. To my shock I recognized the widow’s body, unclothed, and the larger arms of a man who embraced her, sharing her bed. I tried to see his face, but then I was gripped by terror as I heard footsteps racing toward me through the grass along the side of the house, very close. I could not even move before I was dealt a blow on the side of my face and knocked down into the muck. A hand covered my mouth and forced my cheek to the ground so I could not scream or even look up and see my assailant. I heard three taps at the widow’s window, and the shadows on the ground grew shorter. The widow, or her lover, was looking out at us.
More footsteps came around the house toward us and my captor allowed me to turn my face upward so that I could see the widow’s lover, still buttoning his shirt. It was the foreman from the glassworks. The one who had knocked me down was a large woman who I had not seen before, and the maid who had admitted me to the house that afternoon was standing a little apart, watching. The foreman, from whose belt hung a sheathed hunting knife, pointed out across the bog, and then the three of them bore me up against my struggles and began to carry me out into the darkness, the women’s arms looped under my shoulders and the man holding my legs at his side like a bundle of firewood. Soon I could hear the sucking sound of their boots being dragged through the mud, and save for the grizzled foreman they panted with exhaustion. There were also others walking alongside us, but I was unable to turn my head to see them.
The widow was the first to speak. "How far do you think voices will carry tonight?"
"Screaming carries for miles," the foreman said.
"Then we cover his mouth."
"I wouldn’t reckon on no screaming. Not to save us a short walk."
I tensed up to hear this exchange, but then they were silent for a while and the foreman made no threatening movement that I could distinguish, so I relaxed. I waited until the fat servant whose hand was clapped over my mouth was off-balance straddling some obstacle on the ground, tottering a little, and I lurched my whole body away from her arms using the foreman’s firm grip on my legs to give me leverage, striking at her so she stumbled away from me and dropped me on my back in the mud, leaving the terrified maid with only a grip on my left arm.
"You need me!" I whispered harshly. "I’m here to help! Don’t try to silence me or I’ll wake the Rileys to screams and a house empty of servants." The fat servant hesitated and looked to the foreman for help.
"I have a message for you," I said. "It’s a proposal. I can return the management of the glassworks to Ms. Riley. If you let me go I can return to the church and file my ruling. I have it right here in my coat."
"No light to read by, Judge," the foreman said, holding my legs up at an angle that seemed to make movement in any direction impossible.
"I ruled that her brother-in-law must indemnify Kale against any future accidents such as the one that happened yesterday, and provide a commercially acceptable, experienced manager for the glassworks. Naturally, Ms. Riley is the only option, and that means that Mr. Riley will have to pay for her readmission to the church so the townspeople will allow her to perform her duties. In exchange I ask only that my wife and I hold the exclusive commission to import the first shipments of glass objects to the capital, for a period of some months, open to discussion."
The widow now stood over me to speak. Her flashing eyes were like tapers in a skull. "Your ruling, whatever it is, is nothing but words. No words will protect us from men with the will to steal my factory and the power to hold it. We’ll sabotage the furnace until no one else dares to work it. Then I resume control, and manage it with people I trust. The rest of the village can work for me or starve. If it had been my choice alone, we never would have waited to hear your response to my petition before we acted." She moved to clap her own hand over my mouth, and the foreman pulled his knife from its sheath. For the first time, I entertained the thought of meeting my death under such circumstances, at the hands of a disgraced woman and her secret paramour. Absurd.
"My wife’s testimony will hang you all!" I said, not raising my voice in the slightest, not setting off the blind panic of the final mortal struggle. I pushed the widow’s hands away with a gesture. "Do you think she needs evidence? She was in the pigment room when the blasting powder was planted. No matter that she doesn’t know who did it; she’ll say that it was the widow herself! She will recall a figure in uniform who walked strangely like a woman and lurked in the room where we were, watching us. Do you think anyone would doubt a woman like my wife, bereaved, respectable? What about Kale, who sent me to interrogate you about the sabotage this very day? What about the curate who will hear your case, who accused you of witchcraft and was poisoned by your factory’s accursed glass?"
The maid who still held my arm was quaking with fear, but the fat woman, the one who had knocked me down, calmly looked to the foreman for direction. I addressed her. "And you! You’re the cook who made the widow eat, aren’t you? My wife knows your story. She knows she can avenge the widow’s crimes on you. She will begin to destroy you on the very first day. She will come with a group of villagers who she trusts and say that I went missing here--she will have a fine innocent explanation for my visit--and pointedly she’ll observe how filthy is the rose glassware, and she will have Riley’s wife make you scour it clean in front of her, and drink from it--" The widow slapped me across the face, but there was perfect silence until I recovered and began again.
"And when the Reverend Withrow has seized his excuse to convict you, My Dear will befriend the next circuit-rider who will come to Lemoine in another three years, and warn him about you. But that will do you no harm, because witchcraft is a capital crime and no judge takes appeals from a pile of ashes."
I let my words echo in their ears and propped myself up on my elbows. I became aware that two other servants, who had followed us but never laid a hand on me, had withdrawn into the darkness, fearful, I think, that I would see their faces. They carried spades. The nervous maid released my arm and spoke first. She begged the widow to accept my terms, and swore that she never cared whether she stayed in the Rileys’ service for the rest of her life, so long as she escaped the weight of the guilt and fear that their crime had laid on her.
We reached an arrangement, advantageous to my wife and me and with adequate provision for us to take some of the glass flowers from our shipments and dispose of them as we like. The widow Riley relit her candle and read my judgment, found it acceptable, and knee-deep in the swamp we shook leech-covered hands. I began to plot how to be absolutely certain to avoid the widow in public for the rest of my stay in Lemoine, and indeed forever. I have heard that it becomes necessary to make many such bargains, and develop a long register of such contraindicated people, as one’s political career blooms.
Given what had passed between us, none of my hosts offered to accompany me back to my horse, and I spent a long time wandering around in search of her. The journey back was difficult as well, as clouds rolled in across the moon and fatigue compounded upon confusion to slow our progress. Finally I returned my horse to the carriage team, which I hoped would not be taken out too early the next day lest someone notice that one horse was not fresh, and snuck into the guest house by a window that My Dear had promised to leave unbolted. I crept up to her room and tapped on the door, twice high and once low. She admitted me and I gave her my filthy robe to hide. I reassured her that I was alright, and explained to her about the foreman and our bargain.
"That’s wonderful. It will be all right if Lemoine glass is coming in to the capital when we arrive, so long as for Lady Dodge we have the widow create something unique. And very large."
"It wasn’t in the agreement I made with the widow."
"Don’t feel sorry for her. She understands that she has to pay a price." She smiled merrily. "You’ve done it!"
She kissed me. I embraced her and kissed her again, but she held me back.
"You have to go," she said. She explained to me that every time that Withrow had come to the door searching for me, she had made sounds of passion and refused to acknowledge him. This had infuriated Withrow, who promised not to sleep until I was in my own bed, and threatened to have the door unscrewed from its hinges.
"Try to be seen," My Dear said as she sent me out the door. To this end I took a long route back to my cell, passing not only through the courtyard but also the much-trafficked servants’ area downstairs. I spied a dim light in the kitchen and I looked inside to see a couple of Imps, both drunk, and watched them make merry by the embers of a fire in the brick oven for a short time before they noticed me. One of them was a gaunt girl with dark eyes and withered legs. She propped herself up against the table as she drank. The other could have been a young grandmother, sly-looking and toughened by hard living, though she seemed greatly loosened up by drink at the moment.
The girl affected a high, falsely aristocratic voice as she swung her rose goblet, which still refracted the light in vibrant vermilion despite its filthiness. "Oh yes. Pardon me. Marvelous. And if I may say so, mankind could learn a _lot_ from the common apple maggot, my dear Lady...Loathesimia."
The old woman drained her glass and smirked mischievously. "Is that so? How charming, Lady _Pigs__t_."
The girl doubled over with laughter and clutched at the table. "You know...you know, this is such a special occasion, Lady Loathesimia, that we’re drinking the communion wine, which is the only magical wine in the whole valley. If this was Sunday I could change it into Godsblood. But because you’re such a noble lady, I’ll change it into the Holy Mother’s Piss. This is very special. All you have to do is say a prayer over it...and pour some on the floor as an offering..."
"Oh, no, Lady Pigs__t, I believe you must _not_ pour some on the floor as an offering."
"You’re right. Next we don’t pour any wine on the floor as an offering. And look! It’s piss!"
Lady Pigs__t emptied the rest of the bottle into their glasses and gave it to Lady Loathsimia, who concealed it at the back of a high cabinet full of empty bottles. Then the two Imps drained their goblets, hurled them at the back of the brick oven, and stirred the embers to hide the shards.
Monday, April 23, 2007
June 14, Afternoon
The road to Riley’s house was a sort of shored-up dirt path, ready to collapse at any moment into the acres of moss-covered slough that crowded it in on both sides for miles. I began to fancy that I was on my way to some fairy-castle hidden away at the heart of this noisome labyrinth, but no: Riley’s bogs were his kingdom. I discerned a few men scattered in the distance, dredging their way along half-submerged in the muck, planting or tending some crop in anticipation of the far-off harvest. The Rileys’ homestead itself was a fairly substantial two-storey structure in the German half-timbered style, with several outbuildings to house the laborers at a decent distance. The maid met me on the front porch, I introduced myself, and she immediately asked if I was here to see the widow. I answered with some surprise that I was, and she led me through the kitchen toward a tiny sitting room with carpentry tools hanging from the walls and no two chairs the same, though there were several cabinets full of rose glassware of the old kind: ornate plates and goblets in many discordant styles, organized only by size. I could see the back of a seated grey-haired woman by the doorway, and on the other side of the room, sanguinely standing to greet and introduce me, was my wife.
"You were able to pull yourself away!" she said to me. "Darling, I’m so pleased."
"You honor me, Judge Cushing," the widow said. Her clothing was even worse than it had been when I saw her the day before: having been interrupted at work, she wore a plain white garment of little more than rags stained all over, evidently designed so that she could be set to filthy tasks without any fear of ruining good fabric. Given what I knew about her now, I could not but think of this garb as a strange costume into which she had been forced by happenstance, while her true guise laid waiting for her in some nearby wardrobe.
"The honor is mine," I said graciously, though I could say no more because I had no idea what pretense had excused my wife’s visit, and was supposed to have brought me as well. Though she had plainly meant to conceal her presence here from me, she seemed to have no concern that I would ruin her charade.
"I gave the quilt to Mrs. Riley," My Dear said to me, pointing to a table where lay the blanket that the glass-broker had given to us the night before, now bound by a silk ribbon tied in a bow, no doubt torn from some precious garment from our luggage. To the widow she said, "When my husband heard your sad story he promised that we would not let our stay in Lemoine pass without giving you a bereavement gift."
The widow bowed her head and said, "You are very kind, your honor."
"You were saying that after your poor husband passed away, you maintained his legacy by operating his factory for some time," My Dear said.
"I did. For eleven months. And then they took the glassworks from me and brought me out here."
"We had the pleasure of meeting your brother-in-law and his wife at our welcoming dinner last night," My Dear said. "But I can’t help but wonder whether, even though they are your family, you might not have been a little happier before you were with them?"
"A little happier." The widow laughed ironically. "Have you wondered why the servants’ quarters are filled with Lemoine glass? In the old days, rose glass was kept under lock and key. But when it began to kill its users, we received crates of glass every day in the mail from customers who cursed us and wholesalers demanding refunds. The respectable people of Lemoine could not bear for the glass to go to waste, so they gave it to their servants, who they believed had neither knowledge nor any concern about threats to their constitution. To drink from rose glass is now expected of every member of the subservient class. Anything else would be considered presumptuous."
"That’s terrible," My Dear said.
"I want to show you one of them." The widow went to one of the cabinets and brought out a heavy, long-stemmed wineglass. "During my servitude, I’ve learned to recognize the way that small marks memorialize long and painful struggles between bodies animate and inanimate. Can you see the way that the glass is much thinner on the bottom of this glass than it is by the rim? Its owner must have made his servant scrape it clean with a scouring-pad, hard, every time he drank from it. Imagine the number of hours that women must have spent polishing to wear down the insides of every glass in this cabinet, grain by grain. And when she was done cleaning, the glass-dust and poisonous pigment that she had scraped off remained in the bottom of the goblet. It mixed with the next glassful of wine or mead and the master drank it down until his body was petrified and his mind destroyed." She let us look into the glass to see the servants’ own way of avoiding this fate. The glass was filthy, its inside encrusted with old, hardened mead.
"Even so, I must drink from the rose glass like everyone else, because it is my place. I have no happiness here. Only a place."
"And if you were ever to return to the management of the glassworks," My Dear said to her, "no doubt new complications arising from suspicion of your product abroad would require you to retain...an agent..." The sound of Reuben Riley’s wife stomping her way to the servants’ quarters, unfortunately, forced My Dear to lapse into silence.
Riley’s wife stood in the doorway with an expression of theatrical surprise, pleased or displeased, I could not tell. The moment seemed suspended between us, gathering weight and import upon the fulcrum of her arched eyebrow. She had seemed a small, unassuming woman on her husband’s arm at dinner the night before, but now her face went sour.
"Are you the one receiving guests, now?" she asked of the widow. "This must be our new parlor."
"No, ma’am, I..."
"I suppose I needn’t even be told when company comes to my home. Was your plan to bring them down to your dirty rat’s nest and send them off again with me none the wiser?"
"No, m..."
"Do you want me to cut you loose, Pearl? If you can’t take living in my house then you can say the word. I bet that’s why you’re acting up. You want to end up at the church, don’t you?"
"No, ma’am." The widow looked straight forward and spoke flatly, her eyes focused on nothing.
"That’s good, because I’ll never send you there. I’m not going to let you bring more shame upon this family. I’ll have you off to the farm at Cudworth as soon as I can spare so much as a mule." Only once her tirade was done did Mrs. Riley seem to notice us.
"I should apologize," My Dear said. "I came uninvited, to offer my condolences. I beg you to blame me for the intrusion."
Mrs. Riley curtsied. "No, ma’am. It’s her. She causes trouble. I’m sorry I can’t receive you today; I have another engagement and Mr. Riley is not at home."
"There is one more thing," I said. "It is incumbent upon me to question Pearl Riley about the recent accident at the glassworks." Mrs. Riley assented, but then she simply sank down into one of the chairs and watched the widow like a hungry owl.
"Did you have anything to do with the explosion in the furnace yesterday afternoon?" I asked the widow.
"No. I returned here from my errand to the post office yesterday morning, and have been here ever since," the widow said. "I know nothing about any explosion. These days news of the glassworks comes to me late, if at all."
I sat thinking about her response, stymied. I could do nothing to advance our cause with Mrs. Riley present.
"Fine," I said. "That will be all." Then My Dear and I retired to the carriage.
"She meant to make a bargain with us," My Dear said once we were well down the road, in low tones so the driver would not overhear. "She would give anything to have the factory again. She is desperate. Is that not what her mistress was hinting at, her willingness even to live in Withrow’s cloister to be nearer the glassworks?"
I agreed, and we decided between the two of us that we would make the widow an offer as soon as possible, though I can hardly imagine what ruling of mine could restore to her what she has lost. To do that, I would have to reverse the depredations of her husband’s family, and the cruelty of the church and the opinions of all the townspeople. I would have to nullify the concept of property and ban the village of Lemoine from the face of the Earth, and perhaps reach back to the beginning of time to overrule God’s original act of Predestination, which made the weak and unfortunate subject to the powerful and righteous. If I can help the widow Riley, it will be by cruder and less honest means.
Next
"You were able to pull yourself away!" she said to me. "Darling, I’m so pleased."
"You honor me, Judge Cushing," the widow said. Her clothing was even worse than it had been when I saw her the day before: having been interrupted at work, she wore a plain white garment of little more than rags stained all over, evidently designed so that she could be set to filthy tasks without any fear of ruining good fabric. Given what I knew about her now, I could not but think of this garb as a strange costume into which she had been forced by happenstance, while her true guise laid waiting for her in some nearby wardrobe.
"The honor is mine," I said graciously, though I could say no more because I had no idea what pretense had excused my wife’s visit, and was supposed to have brought me as well. Though she had plainly meant to conceal her presence here from me, she seemed to have no concern that I would ruin her charade.
"I gave the quilt to Mrs. Riley," My Dear said to me, pointing to a table where lay the blanket that the glass-broker had given to us the night before, now bound by a silk ribbon tied in a bow, no doubt torn from some precious garment from our luggage. To the widow she said, "When my husband heard your sad story he promised that we would not let our stay in Lemoine pass without giving you a bereavement gift."
The widow bowed her head and said, "You are very kind, your honor."
"You were saying that after your poor husband passed away, you maintained his legacy by operating his factory for some time," My Dear said.
"I did. For eleven months. And then they took the glassworks from me and brought me out here."
"We had the pleasure of meeting your brother-in-law and his wife at our welcoming dinner last night," My Dear said. "But I can’t help but wonder whether, even though they are your family, you might not have been a little happier before you were with them?"
"A little happier." The widow laughed ironically. "Have you wondered why the servants’ quarters are filled with Lemoine glass? In the old days, rose glass was kept under lock and key. But when it began to kill its users, we received crates of glass every day in the mail from customers who cursed us and wholesalers demanding refunds. The respectable people of Lemoine could not bear for the glass to go to waste, so they gave it to their servants, who they believed had neither knowledge nor any concern about threats to their constitution. To drink from rose glass is now expected of every member of the subservient class. Anything else would be considered presumptuous."
"That’s terrible," My Dear said.
"I want to show you one of them." The widow went to one of the cabinets and brought out a heavy, long-stemmed wineglass. "During my servitude, I’ve learned to recognize the way that small marks memorialize long and painful struggles between bodies animate and inanimate. Can you see the way that the glass is much thinner on the bottom of this glass than it is by the rim? Its owner must have made his servant scrape it clean with a scouring-pad, hard, every time he drank from it. Imagine the number of hours that women must have spent polishing to wear down the insides of every glass in this cabinet, grain by grain. And when she was done cleaning, the glass-dust and poisonous pigment that she had scraped off remained in the bottom of the goblet. It mixed with the next glassful of wine or mead and the master drank it down until his body was petrified and his mind destroyed." She let us look into the glass to see the servants’ own way of avoiding this fate. The glass was filthy, its inside encrusted with old, hardened mead.
"Even so, I must drink from the rose glass like everyone else, because it is my place. I have no happiness here. Only a place."
"And if you were ever to return to the management of the glassworks," My Dear said to her, "no doubt new complications arising from suspicion of your product abroad would require you to retain...an agent..." The sound of Reuben Riley’s wife stomping her way to the servants’ quarters, unfortunately, forced My Dear to lapse into silence.
Riley’s wife stood in the doorway with an expression of theatrical surprise, pleased or displeased, I could not tell. The moment seemed suspended between us, gathering weight and import upon the fulcrum of her arched eyebrow. She had seemed a small, unassuming woman on her husband’s arm at dinner the night before, but now her face went sour.
"Are you the one receiving guests, now?" she asked of the widow. "This must be our new parlor."
"No, ma’am, I..."
"I suppose I needn’t even be told when company comes to my home. Was your plan to bring them down to your dirty rat’s nest and send them off again with me none the wiser?"
"No, m..."
"Do you want me to cut you loose, Pearl? If you can’t take living in my house then you can say the word. I bet that’s why you’re acting up. You want to end up at the church, don’t you?"
"No, ma’am." The widow looked straight forward and spoke flatly, her eyes focused on nothing.
"That’s good, because I’ll never send you there. I’m not going to let you bring more shame upon this family. I’ll have you off to the farm at Cudworth as soon as I can spare so much as a mule." Only once her tirade was done did Mrs. Riley seem to notice us.
"I should apologize," My Dear said. "I came uninvited, to offer my condolences. I beg you to blame me for the intrusion."
Mrs. Riley curtsied. "No, ma’am. It’s her. She causes trouble. I’m sorry I can’t receive you today; I have another engagement and Mr. Riley is not at home."
"There is one more thing," I said. "It is incumbent upon me to question Pearl Riley about the recent accident at the glassworks." Mrs. Riley assented, but then she simply sank down into one of the chairs and watched the widow like a hungry owl.
"Did you have anything to do with the explosion in the furnace yesterday afternoon?" I asked the widow.
"No. I returned here from my errand to the post office yesterday morning, and have been here ever since," the widow said. "I know nothing about any explosion. These days news of the glassworks comes to me late, if at all."
I sat thinking about her response, stymied. I could do nothing to advance our cause with Mrs. Riley present.
"Fine," I said. "That will be all." Then My Dear and I retired to the carriage.
"She meant to make a bargain with us," My Dear said once we were well down the road, in low tones so the driver would not overhear. "She would give anything to have the factory again. She is desperate. Is that not what her mistress was hinting at, her willingness even to live in Withrow’s cloister to be nearer the glassworks?"
I agreed, and we decided between the two of us that we would make the widow an offer as soon as possible, though I can hardly imagine what ruling of mine could restore to her what she has lost. To do that, I would have to reverse the depredations of her husband’s family, and the cruelty of the church and the opinions of all the townspeople. I would have to nullify the concept of property and ban the village of Lemoine from the face of the Earth, and perhaps reach back to the beginning of time to overrule God’s original act of Predestination, which made the weak and unfortunate subject to the powerful and righteous. If I can help the widow Riley, it will be by cruder and less honest means.
Next
June 14, Morning
Awoke refreshed. Unpleasantness of last night seemed to have been forgotten. The Reverend Withrow was nowhere to be seen, but his Imps had set out an excellent breakfast for My Dear and me. I agreed that she could take our carriage to go visiting in town, as I planned to spend all day in the parsonage reviewing cases. But I had hardly begun the day’s work when a courier came in with a strange message from Kale. It read: "I am sorry if I have given you any offense during our brief acquaintance, but if I have I beg you to set it aside and assist us for the sake of the peace of our small town. Inspection of our furnace reveals signs of sabotage. As you have graciously offered to act as inquisitor in this matter I beg you to come to the glassworks and take our evidence. Yr. Srvt., Vincent Kale." It seemed that my efforts to simplify matters had only succeeded in entangling me more deeply in local controversy, but given what had passed between Withrow and me the night before it was too late for me to relent and let him have the reins of the investigation. I accepted transport to the factory from Kale’s courier. Upon my arrival I assured Kale that I had no dislike for him and any antipathy on my wife’s part, if antipathy it really be, was no more than a woman’s flight of emotion, illogical, influenced far more by the discomfort of travel and certain disturbing news from home than by Kale’s own behavior, and probably already forgotten.
The warped furnace was far from ready to be lit again, but most of the glass had been chipped away, and a couple of engineers crouched inside the crucible, pounding away at its inside. We joined the foreman who had been on duty at the time of the explosion and Benediction Dalton, the elder owner of the mine, who stood gazing at the furnace and speculating tersely to one another. The work floor was otherwise deserted, the finished glass gone. Kale pointed out a little bolus of white powdery residue which had been left on the floor. Apparently one of the glassworkers, being a former employee of the mines, had recognized the lumps of matter left behind when they scraped up the glass as the same as were left behind by detonations of the blasting powder that was used to blow up the sides of mountains in pursuit of copper.
"There couldn’t have been more than a gallon of powder in your furnace or your whole operation would have gone the way of Barkley Peak’s east face," the old miner said. "We’d hardly miss a barrel of it up on the mines. The men take great handfuls of it and pack it in mortars. Stack ‘em at the base of the cliff like bricks. We don’t frisk ‘em on their way home, neither; we’re not a gold mine."
"What about on our end, then?" Kale asked his foreman.
"It’s only works gangs that strike the kegs and grind up the stones," the foreman said. "Ain’t no gang of men could agree in secret to set a hazard like to kill or maim their fellows. But I known stones to come in blasted d__n near to powder already. Could be some miner spied some ore he thought precious, he swapped it out for a kegful of blast powder left unguarded, and our men never saw no difference."
"You and me both know every stone we sell ye for pigment, and I know the blast powder. Ain’t no fool could mistake one for the other," Dalton snapped.
The foreman thought about this, unhurriedly. "Then somebody poured that powder down the pipe and run off fast. It would a heated to burn in a couple three minutes."
"One of the men poured it in while we were touring the pigment room, knowing he wouldn’t be recognized behind his mask," I said.
"This is your fault," Kale said to the foreman. "You said the men wouldn’t work the pigments without full facemasks."
"And so they wouldn’t," the foreman said.
"If we can’t identify the person behind the mask, perhaps we ought to consider who had a motive for the crime," I said. Kale and the foreman had been staring at one another in a contest of wills, but now all eyes turned on me.
"I will speak with the widow," I said. Kale was kind enough to grant me the use of his carriage once again for the journey to Riley’s plantation.
Next
The warped furnace was far from ready to be lit again, but most of the glass had been chipped away, and a couple of engineers crouched inside the crucible, pounding away at its inside. We joined the foreman who had been on duty at the time of the explosion and Benediction Dalton, the elder owner of the mine, who stood gazing at the furnace and speculating tersely to one another. The work floor was otherwise deserted, the finished glass gone. Kale pointed out a little bolus of white powdery residue which had been left on the floor. Apparently one of the glassworkers, being a former employee of the mines, had recognized the lumps of matter left behind when they scraped up the glass as the same as were left behind by detonations of the blasting powder that was used to blow up the sides of mountains in pursuit of copper.
"There couldn’t have been more than a gallon of powder in your furnace or your whole operation would have gone the way of Barkley Peak’s east face," the old miner said. "We’d hardly miss a barrel of it up on the mines. The men take great handfuls of it and pack it in mortars. Stack ‘em at the base of the cliff like bricks. We don’t frisk ‘em on their way home, neither; we’re not a gold mine."
"What about on our end, then?" Kale asked his foreman.
"It’s only works gangs that strike the kegs and grind up the stones," the foreman said. "Ain’t no gang of men could agree in secret to set a hazard like to kill or maim their fellows. But I known stones to come in blasted d__n near to powder already. Could be some miner spied some ore he thought precious, he swapped it out for a kegful of blast powder left unguarded, and our men never saw no difference."
"You and me both know every stone we sell ye for pigment, and I know the blast powder. Ain’t no fool could mistake one for the other," Dalton snapped.
The foreman thought about this, unhurriedly. "Then somebody poured that powder down the pipe and run off fast. It would a heated to burn in a couple three minutes."
"One of the men poured it in while we were touring the pigment room, knowing he wouldn’t be recognized behind his mask," I said.
"This is your fault," Kale said to the foreman. "You said the men wouldn’t work the pigments without full facemasks."
"And so they wouldn’t," the foreman said.
"If we can’t identify the person behind the mask, perhaps we ought to consider who had a motive for the crime," I said. Kale and the foreman had been staring at one another in a contest of wills, but now all eyes turned on me.
"I will speak with the widow," I said. Kale was kind enough to grant me the use of his carriage once again for the journey to Riley’s plantation.
Next
June 13, Night
Our hosts will no longer think they shocked us with the explosion we witnessed this afternoon. My Dear has demonstrated a more spectacular one at supper! Before we went down, she had a devil of a time enlisting one of the Imps to help cinch her into her second-best dress, reassuring her that it was quite alright for her to leave her milk pail and come into our quarters unaccompanied, making her help My Dear pin her hair up, &c. So many instructions were issued on helping a lady into proper formal wear that I nearly learned to do it myself, though of course the whole time I was occupied with my own work: adding together a set of figures to fix the payment term of a contract that the half-literate Withrow had voided for indefiniteness, and composing a new opinion in the matter.
I put on my wig and formal robes and we went down arm in arm to the banquet hall at seven, scandalously late by the standards of the country folk. The welcoming committee all stood drinking from mead-glasses which, to my relief, were clear. The wizened burgomaster was already at his seat at one of those charming long tables made from a tree split in half down the middle, polished a bit and propped up on pegs. His beard brushed the bottom of his soup bowl as he nodded off. A cheerful man who combined the energy of youth with the appearance of middle age approached me and introduced himself as Reuben Riley, the owner and lessor of the glassworks. After a pretense of discussing the weather, he talked to me for a long time about his pastime of alpine hiking, and bragged that his friends often tried to restrain him from going up a mountain after a new snow, but always to no avail. The unblemished beauty of the vista from atop a mountain peak at such a time, he said, was like a presentiment of the peace of Heaven.
"The lynx could teach mankind a thing or two. Or it could teach me something, anyhow," he said at one point. Eventually he told me that he had heard I’d received a petition from the widow.
"Yes. She lives in your home, now?"
"She does. I hope you’ll forgive our poor Pearl if she troubles you. The death of my brother was a blow she never overcame. After she lost the glassworks she wanted to take a room in town to be near it still and I said to her, Pearl, you’ve got to think about your future. There’s no place in town for a woman alone. That’s what _this_ place is for. And it wasn’t only moving in; she wouldn’t eat. Our cook would sit her down with a bowl of soup in front of her and say, I want to see you drink that soup up, Pearl. I’m not going to let you starve yourself. Pearl wants to go on living, but strike me if anytime I looked in the kitchen those first few weeks the cook wasn’t making her eat or looking after her. The two of them became fast friends."
"She joined your household as a servant?" I asked.
"In a way. She’s certainly below stairs, but she remains a part of the family. When she came to the plantation there was the question of what place, exactly, she would occupy. I am a married man...and my household was already established." Riley reddened a little, I think, to recall that I might not share the attitude toward such matters common in the countryside.
Soon the Reverend Withrow invited us all to take our seats around the dozing mayor. As the owners of the two large plantations to the north, Messrs. Riley and Plympton sat next to him with their wives. Then came the aged mine owner Benediction Dalton and his son who is the manager of the mine, the rector at one end of the log-table, the glass-broker, Wheeley, who keeps his office in town, a preoccupied Vincent Kale and his pearlike wife. Last, the Imp maid led my wife and me to our seats at the opposite end of the table from Withrow. I will elide my account of our meal (Plain. Heavy.) and come directly to the end of the evening, when the village luminaries were to honor us with gifts.
According to tradition, the burgomaster gave us the gift of the town seal--a crudely minted coin with a mountain on. He unceremoniously pulled this prize out of his pocket, stood and placed it in my palm, and then muttered "Thank you for coming," as he shuffled his way back to his seat. From the two farmers, the Imps brought in mossberry compote from the Rileys and sweetened mossberry wine from the Plymptons. This seemed an elegant way to squeeze two gifts out of their one crop whose renown extended beyond the valley where it was grown, and it showed that there had been a little coordination between the two in advance of our coming. The miners gave us a fine pair of gilded bronze candlesticks, and Wheeley supplied us with a stitched quilt depicting an apple tree in full bloom with nesting birds. We accepted the quilt with grace, though it seemed to me that there was a little too much of the bedroom about it for perfect decency on such an occasion. Finally all that remained was to receive tribute from the glassworks, and My Dear could not quite contain her eagerness to accept the gift which she had speculated about daily for the last leg of our tour at least. I could see in her rapt posture that it was all she could do to make polite conversation with Dalton the younger while she eyed Kale for some hint as to what was coming. And then a maid emerged from the kitchen bearing a single glass rose, and placed it in her hands. My Dear sat perfectly still, but she could not conceal the flush in her face at this shock! The rose was intricate enough, but it was not even life size. And the green pigment of the stem spilled over into the petals quite imperfectly. How tiny it looked, cupped in a pair of hands that had been ready to embrace bouquets, bushels of glass roses! I nearly coughed up my mead when I discerned the warring passions beneath her cold expression.
"It’s a lovely little thing," she said in an even voice.
"Yes, it’s every bit the match of your factory’s noble reputation," I added hastily. "You honor us. Here, let me hold it."
I took the rose from my wife and made a show of admiring it. It really was quite beautiful. It was translucent, but even in that dim banquet hall it seemed to glow with inner light. Each of its multifarious petals had its own pattern of blended oranges and reds, like crystallized fire. But it was the self-satisfied smile with which Kale watched me admire his gift, I believe, that finally called down the furies upon him.
"We shall have to find some kind of special vase for it, won’t we, darling?" she said. "I suppose any of our ordinary ones would swallow it up like a crocodile."
There was an uncomfortable silence, through which my wife positively beamed. There was no logic to my wife’s transports of vengeance, but I knew that it was useless to try to stop them. Her outburst was visibly very satisfying to her.
"An economical sort of gift," she went on with the merest veneer of innocence in her voice. "I’m sure it’s very practical to be conservative with your glass given the state the factory is in. Who knows if you’ll be able to repair the damage, or work the furnace reliably ever again?"
Wheeley the glass-broker pricked up his ears and said "Trouble at the factory? I’ve heard nothing." Riley looked disconcerted as well.
Kale waved down Wheeley’s concern. "It’s hardly anything. The furnace will fire tomorrow, or, in the worst case, the men will work double shifts the day after. The factory’s obligations are well in hand."
"You undertook to notify me of any more trouble," said Wheeley. The formal setting and his many uncomfortable observers had plainly receded from his awareness, leaving only him and Kale alone.
"And I will tell you everything, but in private," Kale begged. Then our entire company sat for the count of ten in complete silence.
"Fine, then, why don’t we adjourn?" Withrow said. He beckoned to the Imps to clear our dishes.
"I’ll just take my pretty little flower," My Dear said, and mock-admonished a mortified Imp, "Don’t go mistaking it for a caviar spoon!"
At that, Kale and the rector jumped to their feet and left without a word, with Wheeley in their wake. I remained to send off the others as graciously as possible. When I was on my way back to our quarters, Withrow buttonholed me in the corridor and told me that a new chamber had been made ready for me, because it would not be suitable for "a man and woman of passionate disposition" to lie together in the Lord’s house. Naturally I recognized this new rule as nonsense concocted for petty revenge, but I could not remain long in my station in life if I failed to observe the Lord’s more whimsical commands at least as diligently as the rest. And so I find myself this evening in a musty, windowless cell, separated from my wife by locked doors and the courtyard where the watchman prowls, with only my Diary for company.
But I observed one other thing. As Withrow lighted our way down the narrow hallway, the fingers of his right hand, which he liked to keep in the folds of his cloak by his side, remained fixed in the same position I had seen them in when he fled from the overflowing molten glass. The bones of his hand were fused in place. I do believe that even the ascetic Reverend Withrow has drunk too deeply from the luxurious goblets of Lemoine. How must it have appeared to his eyes when the substance of his hidden shame erupted from the widow’s furnace? The glowing hand of his old vice, belched forth to drag him down to Hell!
Next
I put on my wig and formal robes and we went down arm in arm to the banquet hall at seven, scandalously late by the standards of the country folk. The welcoming committee all stood drinking from mead-glasses which, to my relief, were clear. The wizened burgomaster was already at his seat at one of those charming long tables made from a tree split in half down the middle, polished a bit and propped up on pegs. His beard brushed the bottom of his soup bowl as he nodded off. A cheerful man who combined the energy of youth with the appearance of middle age approached me and introduced himself as Reuben Riley, the owner and lessor of the glassworks. After a pretense of discussing the weather, he talked to me for a long time about his pastime of alpine hiking, and bragged that his friends often tried to restrain him from going up a mountain after a new snow, but always to no avail. The unblemished beauty of the vista from atop a mountain peak at such a time, he said, was like a presentiment of the peace of Heaven.
"The lynx could teach mankind a thing or two. Or it could teach me something, anyhow," he said at one point. Eventually he told me that he had heard I’d received a petition from the widow.
"Yes. She lives in your home, now?"
"She does. I hope you’ll forgive our poor Pearl if she troubles you. The death of my brother was a blow she never overcame. After she lost the glassworks she wanted to take a room in town to be near it still and I said to her, Pearl, you’ve got to think about your future. There’s no place in town for a woman alone. That’s what _this_ place is for. And it wasn’t only moving in; she wouldn’t eat. Our cook would sit her down with a bowl of soup in front of her and say, I want to see you drink that soup up, Pearl. I’m not going to let you starve yourself. Pearl wants to go on living, but strike me if anytime I looked in the kitchen those first few weeks the cook wasn’t making her eat or looking after her. The two of them became fast friends."
"She joined your household as a servant?" I asked.
"In a way. She’s certainly below stairs, but she remains a part of the family. When she came to the plantation there was the question of what place, exactly, she would occupy. I am a married man...and my household was already established." Riley reddened a little, I think, to recall that I might not share the attitude toward such matters common in the countryside.
Soon the Reverend Withrow invited us all to take our seats around the dozing mayor. As the owners of the two large plantations to the north, Messrs. Riley and Plympton sat next to him with their wives. Then came the aged mine owner Benediction Dalton and his son who is the manager of the mine, the rector at one end of the log-table, the glass-broker, Wheeley, who keeps his office in town, a preoccupied Vincent Kale and his pearlike wife. Last, the Imp maid led my wife and me to our seats at the opposite end of the table from Withrow. I will elide my account of our meal (Plain. Heavy.) and come directly to the end of the evening, when the village luminaries were to honor us with gifts.
According to tradition, the burgomaster gave us the gift of the town seal--a crudely minted coin with a mountain on. He unceremoniously pulled this prize out of his pocket, stood and placed it in my palm, and then muttered "Thank you for coming," as he shuffled his way back to his seat. From the two farmers, the Imps brought in mossberry compote from the Rileys and sweetened mossberry wine from the Plymptons. This seemed an elegant way to squeeze two gifts out of their one crop whose renown extended beyond the valley where it was grown, and it showed that there had been a little coordination between the two in advance of our coming. The miners gave us a fine pair of gilded bronze candlesticks, and Wheeley supplied us with a stitched quilt depicting an apple tree in full bloom with nesting birds. We accepted the quilt with grace, though it seemed to me that there was a little too much of the bedroom about it for perfect decency on such an occasion. Finally all that remained was to receive tribute from the glassworks, and My Dear could not quite contain her eagerness to accept the gift which she had speculated about daily for the last leg of our tour at least. I could see in her rapt posture that it was all she could do to make polite conversation with Dalton the younger while she eyed Kale for some hint as to what was coming. And then a maid emerged from the kitchen bearing a single glass rose, and placed it in her hands. My Dear sat perfectly still, but she could not conceal the flush in her face at this shock! The rose was intricate enough, but it was not even life size. And the green pigment of the stem spilled over into the petals quite imperfectly. How tiny it looked, cupped in a pair of hands that had been ready to embrace bouquets, bushels of glass roses! I nearly coughed up my mead when I discerned the warring passions beneath her cold expression.
"It’s a lovely little thing," she said in an even voice.
"Yes, it’s every bit the match of your factory’s noble reputation," I added hastily. "You honor us. Here, let me hold it."
I took the rose from my wife and made a show of admiring it. It really was quite beautiful. It was translucent, but even in that dim banquet hall it seemed to glow with inner light. Each of its multifarious petals had its own pattern of blended oranges and reds, like crystallized fire. But it was the self-satisfied smile with which Kale watched me admire his gift, I believe, that finally called down the furies upon him.
"We shall have to find some kind of special vase for it, won’t we, darling?" she said. "I suppose any of our ordinary ones would swallow it up like a crocodile."
There was an uncomfortable silence, through which my wife positively beamed. There was no logic to my wife’s transports of vengeance, but I knew that it was useless to try to stop them. Her outburst was visibly very satisfying to her.
"An economical sort of gift," she went on with the merest veneer of innocence in her voice. "I’m sure it’s very practical to be conservative with your glass given the state the factory is in. Who knows if you’ll be able to repair the damage, or work the furnace reliably ever again?"
Wheeley the glass-broker pricked up his ears and said "Trouble at the factory? I’ve heard nothing." Riley looked disconcerted as well.
Kale waved down Wheeley’s concern. "It’s hardly anything. The furnace will fire tomorrow, or, in the worst case, the men will work double shifts the day after. The factory’s obligations are well in hand."
"You undertook to notify me of any more trouble," said Wheeley. The formal setting and his many uncomfortable observers had plainly receded from his awareness, leaving only him and Kale alone.
"And I will tell you everything, but in private," Kale begged. Then our entire company sat for the count of ten in complete silence.
"Fine, then, why don’t we adjourn?" Withrow said. He beckoned to the Imps to clear our dishes.
"I’ll just take my pretty little flower," My Dear said, and mock-admonished a mortified Imp, "Don’t go mistaking it for a caviar spoon!"
At that, Kale and the rector jumped to their feet and left without a word, with Wheeley in their wake. I remained to send off the others as graciously as possible. When I was on my way back to our quarters, Withrow buttonholed me in the corridor and told me that a new chamber had been made ready for me, because it would not be suitable for "a man and woman of passionate disposition" to lie together in the Lord’s house. Naturally I recognized this new rule as nonsense concocted for petty revenge, but I could not remain long in my station in life if I failed to observe the Lord’s more whimsical commands at least as diligently as the rest. And so I find myself this evening in a musty, windowless cell, separated from my wife by locked doors and the courtyard where the watchman prowls, with only my Diary for company.
But I observed one other thing. As Withrow lighted our way down the narrow hallway, the fingers of his right hand, which he liked to keep in the folds of his cloak by his side, remained fixed in the same position I had seen them in when he fled from the overflowing molten glass. The bones of his hand were fused in place. I do believe that even the ascetic Reverend Withrow has drunk too deeply from the luxurious goblets of Lemoine. How must it have appeared to his eyes when the substance of his hidden shame erupted from the widow’s furnace? The glowing hand of his old vice, belched forth to drag him down to Hell!
Next
June 13, Afternoon
While I reviewed the petition handed to me by the strange old woman (whom I now take to be the widow Pearl Riley, the former Mrs. Levi Riley), My Dear set about convincing the Reverend Withrow and me that because the glassworks was at the center of one of my appeals, we had best go and tour it immediately. The Reverend kindly acquiesced and arranged it, insisting on accompanying us. Because the factory was the stage of Mrs. Riley’s downfall, I shall describe her account, and the place as it was when we toured it, side by side.
Mrs. Riley’s husband, owner and proprietor of the Lemoine glassworks, died two years ago of a pulmonary complaint. The widow Riley, having no family of her own to speak of and being (I infer, from certain details of the factory’s stock ownership and administration) out of the good graces of her husband’s family, was encouraged to sell the glassworks: to the Rileys if they made her a fair offer, or otherwise to some third party. The widow does not dispute that the offer made by her brother-in-law was a fair one, but nonetheless she refused to sell, and even invested in certain improvements to the facility, such as a set of four pipes in the great central furnace, each of which emitted what I can only describe as jets of fire, some wider and some narrower, some with their blue flames tinged by red or white indicating their varying temperatures and the compositions of the fuel they burned.
Men in leather protective suits gathered around each of the openings in the oven, their eyes fixed on flower-shaped glass works-in-progress that they held in front of these flames with long-armed tools that rested in notches like oarlocks: scoops and sticks with which they gathered up the white-hot liquid glass like honey from the crucibles at the bottom of the furnace, pincers to suspend their work in space, paddles and scrapers they used to flatten and carve, and scissors that cut away unneeded, dripping protrusions. Sometimes they returned the object to a hotter inner furnace to keep it pliable enough to work the entire surface, but more often they created its details by melting the unneeded glass away with the more precise blowlamp flame-jets. One man constantly regulated the precise angle of the flame emitted by one of the jets by blowing on it through a narrow glass tube and then, when the flower bulb’s shape was almost complete, he inserted his tube through the back of the blossom and blew into it gently to create a tiny, delicate pistil and rounded stigma. At first I thought they were making roses, but they delighted us by producing something more like a luxuriant, long-petaled orchid. As the tint of the glass cooled it revealed that in places a hint of purple and of other colors had been added to the vivid red the factory was known for. The foreman, the one who used the pincers and called out the orders to the rest in his high-pitched yeoman’s voice, pulled the orchid out of the heat so that another artisan could etch in the finest details by hand. In the far end of the furnace we could see that the next new flower had already been suspended in the flames by another team working a set of tools on the opposite side.
"You are very kind to let us witness the glassmaking," My Dear said to Vincent Kale, a Northeastern man who now leased and operated the factory. "I imagine such a legendary technique must normally be shrouded in secrecy."
"An object of exceptional fineness," said the Reverend Withrow.
"Actually, my lady, secrecy is almost unnecessary so long as we keep a close watch on our protective spectacles," Kale said. "Our glassmaking process produces temperatures so extreme that any man who watched it closely enough to reproduce its operation would be struck blind on the spot." This struck me as a tale to gull children, given that since our arrival a few of the older glassworkers had gazed into the crucible bare-eyed with no ill effect. All the others wore safety goggles with tinted lenses--the proverbial rose-colored glasses, perhaps. In the moment of silence that followed Kale’s warning, the Reverend Withrow mentioned that I had read Mrs. Riley’s appeal, and Kale asked me whether there was anything in it that could affect his interest as the operator of the glassworks. To be honest, I had to tell him that if Mrs. Riley prevailed, he would be at her mercy. But then I told him that he needn’t worry, as I had already considered the widow’s claim and there was no merit in it at all.
While the new, mechanical central furnace was still under construction, reports of a new plague among the users of Lemoine glassware had become impossible to ignore. Over the objections of her distributors and the working men of the town (so she claims), the widow Riley shut down all of the old, traditional glassblowing ovens until such time as the complex furnace was finished and the factory was converted to the production of detailed decorative objects. She promised that with the added capacity she would still be able to meet that year’s quota of glass objects in each of her contracts with the glass resellers who operated out of Lemoine. During the period of the factory’s closure, as a result of her several misfortunes and expenses, the widow found herself unable to pay her annual tithe to the parish church. Expulsion from the congregation for nonpayment, of course, would place her in a position hardly better than that of the Imps who mucked out the church’s stables, incapable of doing business or moving in the normal social circles of the town, and indeed if she had no household that would take her in at that juncture, then wardship might be her only hope. The widow forestalled that fate by persuading the Reverend Withrow to accept the accounts due on the factory’s contracts with the resellers as payment of her tithe in lieu of cash.
When the widow finally reopened the factory, the village had suffered a long period of hardship, and the people blamed her personally. The Reverend Withrow seized the spirit of the moment by preaching a sermon named _A Trumpet-Blast Against the Capricious Tyranny of Women_, which called on Mrs. Riley to relinquish her ownership of the glassworks. The distributors (who, the widow speculates, saw an opportunity to renegotiate the wholesale price of rose glass) responded to the sermon by repudiating their obligations under the contract, saying that they would buy no more glass until the factory was owned and operated by men. This meant that their accounts with the glassworks were worthless, and the widow was in default of her debt to the church. Withrow ejected her from the congregation on the very next Sunday after he had sermonized against her, in the presence of the entire flock. To consider the shock that she must have withstood, while on the verge of financial ruin to have returned to the place where such obloquy had been heaped on her the week before, and then (if the order of worship were observed) after she had joined in a single hymn, during the period reserved for church business, the black-coated curate would have towered over her in the pulpit (as her social standing would certainly have afforded her a seat neat the front) to cruelly cast her out--leaving her to walk past the rows of her former peers, head bowed, or perhaps held high in dignified resolution--helps me guess at the origin of her nobly tenacious pride, which so struck me upon our encounter at the post office. After all this, Reuben Riley, the brother of the widow’s deceased husband, accepted ownership of the factory encumbered by its debts and took the widow into his household. A landowner and farmer who lived with his family in the nearby countryside, he salvaged the value of the glassworks by leasing it to Vincent Kale. Pearl Riley brought a lawsuit against the glass-resellers on the theory that they had broken their contract with her and they were the ones obligated to pay her debt to the church, and furthermore prayed for a declaration that because her exclusion from the church was improper, ownership of the glassworks had never validly passed from her to her brother-in-law, which would also void the lease to Kale. The Reverend Withrow decided the suit against her nearly a year ago.
"The widow accuses the court of denying her the right to enforce her contract because of her sex," I told Kale. "She has the right to enforce contracts, and her sex does not diminish it. But her argument proves too much, because she must grant that the factory’s customers have the same right. The right to contract includes the right not to have one’s agreement altered in any material respect after the signing, and clearly for any businessman the gender of one’s business partner is a material consideration. The freedoms guaranteed under our laws apply to each person equally; they do not strain to favor parties that find themselves, for one reason or another, disadvantaged."
"I agree entirely," Kale said, though not without discomfort at having discussed such a matter, and in the presence of a lady. "I could show you our pigment room. Do you see the smaller pipes from the furnace to the floor above, around the chimney? Those are the chutes that supply the raw materials, both the sand and the rare minerals that give our glass its color." We followed him up a stairwell to a room on the second floor, though it was at ground level on the uphill side of the building. The room was a sort of stable, with wide doors thrown open, as Kale said, to admit the carts full of minerals that arrived at all hours from the copper mine up the mountain. In truth, the workers must have kept them open out of fear of the accumulation of dust: in this room they wore not only protective goggles but masks and leather hoods that covered their whole heads, and still they looked away furtively when they beat lumps of metal with pestles or ground them down with cranklike machines, and then poured the resulting powder into the chutes that led below. Beneath their heavy clothes, some of the workers were stiff and hunchbacked, or seemed to lack the full use of their limbs. My Dear, Withrow and I all discreetly covered our faces with our hands and inclined toward the exit, though Kale seemed oblivious to anything but My Dear’s praise of the factory’s clockwork organization. Perhaps he thought that terror of the Lemoine Rheuma was but another of his ingenious safeguards against spies. From the cart-path outside one could see up the slope to the strip-mined mountain peak far in the distance, where the strata of sediment lay cross-sectioned and exposed to the sunlight. I could begin to make out a complex wooden scaffolding built among the shored-up earth around the base of the man-made cliff which would allow miners to dig anywhere on the cliff face for its rich veins of copper, or for the more mysterious substances that they sold to the glassworks. As we were leaving, the call came up from the furnace room for more sand, and the workers began to dump sack after sack of it down the chutes. I overheard My Dear asking Kale whether any of the town’s glass-brokers would resell the rose glass as far away as the capital. Kale assured her that they would. The factory’s many woes were finally over, he said, and he had already arranged for shops across the country to be stocked with Lemoine glass by the end of the summer. My Dear seemed to take it in stride that she was not the first to understand the commercial potential of the new, reinvented Lemoine glassworks.
Finally we returned to the main room to see the annealing furnaces, which must have been used for glassblowing before the new furnace was constructed for that purpose. The annealing furnaces keep the finished objects at a high temperature which gradually decreases until the furnace has entirely cooled and the finished glass is packed away in straw. The works we saw there, illuminated by the fires beneath them, were an incredible array. To my dazzled eyes it seemed as if no two of them were the same. There were even complex blossoms like carnations, sunflowers and wisteria. The range of color and taxonomy was astounding, and most of the flowers were grouped in brilliant, riotous arrangements in rose glass vases each with its own subtle, often intricate design.
"Some of these common flowers must have taken far more work than the rare ones," My Dear said aside to me. "They are not exotic, nor do they represent wealth or love. Who do they expect will pay for them?"
"It is as if they were made for the pure aesthetic joy of their creation," I said.
"Or they may be a challenge to the buyer’s taste," My Dear said. "A discriminating collector will know that a representation of a common object need not be common. It may be rarer than all the gods and paste jewels of a governor’s parlor."
My Dear had only just begun to express her appreciation of the glasswork to Mr. Kale when we heard an awful popping and a cry went up among the workers at the central furnace. Men recoiled from their stations in pain and bits of glass skittered across the floor, some of them glowing and fluid. The white light of the crucibles brightened and rose--I could not see its source, but the shadows around the furnace changed shape--and I took my wife’s arm and shielded her body with mine while Withrow lurched away from the danger. There was nowhere for us to take shelter, and the barred front door was too far. Streams of fire soared from the furnace like flares from the sun, and the bubbling liquid glass overflowed the furnace rising like yeasted bread. The wiry, grey-haired foreman called out "Stawp the gas!" in a tone that betrayed no fear, and his subordinates attended to it by closing all the valves bolted to the furnace. Then the half-liquid glass, which had bled out onto the floor, slowed in its expansion. It was like a creature that reached out to consume us without the encumbrance of solid form. In the main it was a vibrant red, but it contained whorls and shapes of other colors hidden beneath its surface like unknown organs, and the crucible fire shone up from beneath it like a malignant animating spirit. The glass efflux hardened as it expanded and its fire died, having cast its arms out only a few feet from its place of birth, the glassmakers’ tools encased in its solid form like pikes in the flesh of some skinned beast. Once calm prevailed again, we were able to see how badly the furnace was damaged. The pipes that emitted the jets of fire were warped and filled with hardened glass, as was the pipe through which sand was delivered from above. The inside of the furnace was scorched, and though the level of the glass had fallen, it still fully encased the heating mechanism beneath the floor. A medic attended to the men pierced by shards of flying glass, while Withrow and I interviewed My Dear for signs of shock. She was unhurt, and strove to overhear the discussion between Kale and his engineers.
Kale was plainly astonished, and the glassmakers were perhaps even more so. From their baffled arguments I inferred that the eruption we had witnessed was not among the ordinary mishaps known to occur during glassmaking.
"Witchcraft," bellowed the Reverend Withrow, surprising even himself, I think. I told him I found his theory unlikely, but I do not think he quite followed my reasoning. There are several quite compelling arguments against any accusation of witchcraft, but courtesy demands of a gentleman that he not explain those reasons too clearly to a clergyman. I almost hoped that one of the glass-blowers (whose profession, after all, seems a rather satyric one) would come to my aid, but no. In any case, Withrow demanded an investigation, as was his privilege, so to satisfy him I agreed to act as inquisitor. Withrow made it clear that he wanted to investigate the matter himself--I am sure he relished the thought of empanelling a jury of captious church elders to hunt down the traces of evil as far as their fevered imaginations could spin them out--but I reminded him that witchcraft is a civil crime, and the church only borrows the authority to prosecute such crimes in the absence of state authority, and only when the representatives of state authority are actually absent. I had an idea of who he intended to blame for today’s act of ostensible witchery, and I was not about to let him complicate the widow’s lawsuit beyond my ability to bring it to a final resolution in the next few days. I gave Kale a perfunctory invitation to notify me if he found any sign of criminal mischief, and considered the case inactive. My Dear and I shared a carriage back to the parish church with a very irate clergyman.
Next
Mrs. Riley’s husband, owner and proprietor of the Lemoine glassworks, died two years ago of a pulmonary complaint. The widow Riley, having no family of her own to speak of and being (I infer, from certain details of the factory’s stock ownership and administration) out of the good graces of her husband’s family, was encouraged to sell the glassworks: to the Rileys if they made her a fair offer, or otherwise to some third party. The widow does not dispute that the offer made by her brother-in-law was a fair one, but nonetheless she refused to sell, and even invested in certain improvements to the facility, such as a set of four pipes in the great central furnace, each of which emitted what I can only describe as jets of fire, some wider and some narrower, some with their blue flames tinged by red or white indicating their varying temperatures and the compositions of the fuel they burned.
Men in leather protective suits gathered around each of the openings in the oven, their eyes fixed on flower-shaped glass works-in-progress that they held in front of these flames with long-armed tools that rested in notches like oarlocks: scoops and sticks with which they gathered up the white-hot liquid glass like honey from the crucibles at the bottom of the furnace, pincers to suspend their work in space, paddles and scrapers they used to flatten and carve, and scissors that cut away unneeded, dripping protrusions. Sometimes they returned the object to a hotter inner furnace to keep it pliable enough to work the entire surface, but more often they created its details by melting the unneeded glass away with the more precise blowlamp flame-jets. One man constantly regulated the precise angle of the flame emitted by one of the jets by blowing on it through a narrow glass tube and then, when the flower bulb’s shape was almost complete, he inserted his tube through the back of the blossom and blew into it gently to create a tiny, delicate pistil and rounded stigma. At first I thought they were making roses, but they delighted us by producing something more like a luxuriant, long-petaled orchid. As the tint of the glass cooled it revealed that in places a hint of purple and of other colors had been added to the vivid red the factory was known for. The foreman, the one who used the pincers and called out the orders to the rest in his high-pitched yeoman’s voice, pulled the orchid out of the heat so that another artisan could etch in the finest details by hand. In the far end of the furnace we could see that the next new flower had already been suspended in the flames by another team working a set of tools on the opposite side.
"You are very kind to let us witness the glassmaking," My Dear said to Vincent Kale, a Northeastern man who now leased and operated the factory. "I imagine such a legendary technique must normally be shrouded in secrecy."
"An object of exceptional fineness," said the Reverend Withrow.
"Actually, my lady, secrecy is almost unnecessary so long as we keep a close watch on our protective spectacles," Kale said. "Our glassmaking process produces temperatures so extreme that any man who watched it closely enough to reproduce its operation would be struck blind on the spot." This struck me as a tale to gull children, given that since our arrival a few of the older glassworkers had gazed into the crucible bare-eyed with no ill effect. All the others wore safety goggles with tinted lenses--the proverbial rose-colored glasses, perhaps. In the moment of silence that followed Kale’s warning, the Reverend Withrow mentioned that I had read Mrs. Riley’s appeal, and Kale asked me whether there was anything in it that could affect his interest as the operator of the glassworks. To be honest, I had to tell him that if Mrs. Riley prevailed, he would be at her mercy. But then I told him that he needn’t worry, as I had already considered the widow’s claim and there was no merit in it at all.
While the new, mechanical central furnace was still under construction, reports of a new plague among the users of Lemoine glassware had become impossible to ignore. Over the objections of her distributors and the working men of the town (so she claims), the widow Riley shut down all of the old, traditional glassblowing ovens until such time as the complex furnace was finished and the factory was converted to the production of detailed decorative objects. She promised that with the added capacity she would still be able to meet that year’s quota of glass objects in each of her contracts with the glass resellers who operated out of Lemoine. During the period of the factory’s closure, as a result of her several misfortunes and expenses, the widow found herself unable to pay her annual tithe to the parish church. Expulsion from the congregation for nonpayment, of course, would place her in a position hardly better than that of the Imps who mucked out the church’s stables, incapable of doing business or moving in the normal social circles of the town, and indeed if she had no household that would take her in at that juncture, then wardship might be her only hope. The widow forestalled that fate by persuading the Reverend Withrow to accept the accounts due on the factory’s contracts with the resellers as payment of her tithe in lieu of cash.
When the widow finally reopened the factory, the village had suffered a long period of hardship, and the people blamed her personally. The Reverend Withrow seized the spirit of the moment by preaching a sermon named _A Trumpet-Blast Against the Capricious Tyranny of Women_, which called on Mrs. Riley to relinquish her ownership of the glassworks. The distributors (who, the widow speculates, saw an opportunity to renegotiate the wholesale price of rose glass) responded to the sermon by repudiating their obligations under the contract, saying that they would buy no more glass until the factory was owned and operated by men. This meant that their accounts with the glassworks were worthless, and the widow was in default of her debt to the church. Withrow ejected her from the congregation on the very next Sunday after he had sermonized against her, in the presence of the entire flock. To consider the shock that she must have withstood, while on the verge of financial ruin to have returned to the place where such obloquy had been heaped on her the week before, and then (if the order of worship were observed) after she had joined in a single hymn, during the period reserved for church business, the black-coated curate would have towered over her in the pulpit (as her social standing would certainly have afforded her a seat neat the front) to cruelly cast her out--leaving her to walk past the rows of her former peers, head bowed, or perhaps held high in dignified resolution--helps me guess at the origin of her nobly tenacious pride, which so struck me upon our encounter at the post office. After all this, Reuben Riley, the brother of the widow’s deceased husband, accepted ownership of the factory encumbered by its debts and took the widow into his household. A landowner and farmer who lived with his family in the nearby countryside, he salvaged the value of the glassworks by leasing it to Vincent Kale. Pearl Riley brought a lawsuit against the glass-resellers on the theory that they had broken their contract with her and they were the ones obligated to pay her debt to the church, and furthermore prayed for a declaration that because her exclusion from the church was improper, ownership of the glassworks had never validly passed from her to her brother-in-law, which would also void the lease to Kale. The Reverend Withrow decided the suit against her nearly a year ago.
"The widow accuses the court of denying her the right to enforce her contract because of her sex," I told Kale. "She has the right to enforce contracts, and her sex does not diminish it. But her argument proves too much, because she must grant that the factory’s customers have the same right. The right to contract includes the right not to have one’s agreement altered in any material respect after the signing, and clearly for any businessman the gender of one’s business partner is a material consideration. The freedoms guaranteed under our laws apply to each person equally; they do not strain to favor parties that find themselves, for one reason or another, disadvantaged."
"I agree entirely," Kale said, though not without discomfort at having discussed such a matter, and in the presence of a lady. "I could show you our pigment room. Do you see the smaller pipes from the furnace to the floor above, around the chimney? Those are the chutes that supply the raw materials, both the sand and the rare minerals that give our glass its color." We followed him up a stairwell to a room on the second floor, though it was at ground level on the uphill side of the building. The room was a sort of stable, with wide doors thrown open, as Kale said, to admit the carts full of minerals that arrived at all hours from the copper mine up the mountain. In truth, the workers must have kept them open out of fear of the accumulation of dust: in this room they wore not only protective goggles but masks and leather hoods that covered their whole heads, and still they looked away furtively when they beat lumps of metal with pestles or ground them down with cranklike machines, and then poured the resulting powder into the chutes that led below. Beneath their heavy clothes, some of the workers were stiff and hunchbacked, or seemed to lack the full use of their limbs. My Dear, Withrow and I all discreetly covered our faces with our hands and inclined toward the exit, though Kale seemed oblivious to anything but My Dear’s praise of the factory’s clockwork organization. Perhaps he thought that terror of the Lemoine Rheuma was but another of his ingenious safeguards against spies. From the cart-path outside one could see up the slope to the strip-mined mountain peak far in the distance, where the strata of sediment lay cross-sectioned and exposed to the sunlight. I could begin to make out a complex wooden scaffolding built among the shored-up earth around the base of the man-made cliff which would allow miners to dig anywhere on the cliff face for its rich veins of copper, or for the more mysterious substances that they sold to the glassworks. As we were leaving, the call came up from the furnace room for more sand, and the workers began to dump sack after sack of it down the chutes. I overheard My Dear asking Kale whether any of the town’s glass-brokers would resell the rose glass as far away as the capital. Kale assured her that they would. The factory’s many woes were finally over, he said, and he had already arranged for shops across the country to be stocked with Lemoine glass by the end of the summer. My Dear seemed to take it in stride that she was not the first to understand the commercial potential of the new, reinvented Lemoine glassworks.
Finally we returned to the main room to see the annealing furnaces, which must have been used for glassblowing before the new furnace was constructed for that purpose. The annealing furnaces keep the finished objects at a high temperature which gradually decreases until the furnace has entirely cooled and the finished glass is packed away in straw. The works we saw there, illuminated by the fires beneath them, were an incredible array. To my dazzled eyes it seemed as if no two of them were the same. There were even complex blossoms like carnations, sunflowers and wisteria. The range of color and taxonomy was astounding, and most of the flowers were grouped in brilliant, riotous arrangements in rose glass vases each with its own subtle, often intricate design.
"Some of these common flowers must have taken far more work than the rare ones," My Dear said aside to me. "They are not exotic, nor do they represent wealth or love. Who do they expect will pay for them?"
"It is as if they were made for the pure aesthetic joy of their creation," I said.
"Or they may be a challenge to the buyer’s taste," My Dear said. "A discriminating collector will know that a representation of a common object need not be common. It may be rarer than all the gods and paste jewels of a governor’s parlor."
My Dear had only just begun to express her appreciation of the glasswork to Mr. Kale when we heard an awful popping and a cry went up among the workers at the central furnace. Men recoiled from their stations in pain and bits of glass skittered across the floor, some of them glowing and fluid. The white light of the crucibles brightened and rose--I could not see its source, but the shadows around the furnace changed shape--and I took my wife’s arm and shielded her body with mine while Withrow lurched away from the danger. There was nowhere for us to take shelter, and the barred front door was too far. Streams of fire soared from the furnace like flares from the sun, and the bubbling liquid glass overflowed the furnace rising like yeasted bread. The wiry, grey-haired foreman called out "Stawp the gas!" in a tone that betrayed no fear, and his subordinates attended to it by closing all the valves bolted to the furnace. Then the half-liquid glass, which had bled out onto the floor, slowed in its expansion. It was like a creature that reached out to consume us without the encumbrance of solid form. In the main it was a vibrant red, but it contained whorls and shapes of other colors hidden beneath its surface like unknown organs, and the crucible fire shone up from beneath it like a malignant animating spirit. The glass efflux hardened as it expanded and its fire died, having cast its arms out only a few feet from its place of birth, the glassmakers’ tools encased in its solid form like pikes in the flesh of some skinned beast. Once calm prevailed again, we were able to see how badly the furnace was damaged. The pipes that emitted the jets of fire were warped and filled with hardened glass, as was the pipe through which sand was delivered from above. The inside of the furnace was scorched, and though the level of the glass had fallen, it still fully encased the heating mechanism beneath the floor. A medic attended to the men pierced by shards of flying glass, while Withrow and I interviewed My Dear for signs of shock. She was unhurt, and strove to overhear the discussion between Kale and his engineers.
Kale was plainly astonished, and the glassmakers were perhaps even more so. From their baffled arguments I inferred that the eruption we had witnessed was not among the ordinary mishaps known to occur during glassmaking.
"Witchcraft," bellowed the Reverend Withrow, surprising even himself, I think. I told him I found his theory unlikely, but I do not think he quite followed my reasoning. There are several quite compelling arguments against any accusation of witchcraft, but courtesy demands of a gentleman that he not explain those reasons too clearly to a clergyman. I almost hoped that one of the glass-blowers (whose profession, after all, seems a rather satyric one) would come to my aid, but no. In any case, Withrow demanded an investigation, as was his privilege, so to satisfy him I agreed to act as inquisitor. Withrow made it clear that he wanted to investigate the matter himself--I am sure he relished the thought of empanelling a jury of captious church elders to hunt down the traces of evil as far as their fevered imaginations could spin them out--but I reminded him that witchcraft is a civil crime, and the church only borrows the authority to prosecute such crimes in the absence of state authority, and only when the representatives of state authority are actually absent. I had an idea of who he intended to blame for today’s act of ostensible witchery, and I was not about to let him complicate the widow’s lawsuit beyond my ability to bring it to a final resolution in the next few days. I gave Kale a perfunctory invitation to notify me if he found any sign of criminal mischief, and considered the case inactive. My Dear and I shared a carriage back to the parish church with a very irate clergyman.
Next
June 13, Morning
Is there any invention more cruel than the doctrine of Divine Predestination? If we believe it, we cannot pity the unfortunate, because their misfortunes are God-given. Stigmata for some concealed sin, perhaps, or the proof of an inherently corrupt nature. To be sure, it is an efficient method for bleeding out the malcontents whose inclusion might disrupt the harmony of the brotherhood of faith. But it demands its price according to a terrible ledger-book. It makes God like the banker who lends only to the stable, and calls in the debts of the insolvent.
Such thoughts color my recollection of my wife’s scheming in the carriage this morning. After all, we two are outcasts of a sort, exiled to the provinces to ride circuit among the country folk rather than taking our place among the tumult and glory of the capital, where the nation’s bright lights make their careers. We approach the end of this year’s tour, and My Dear is desperate to find some way for us to curry favor with the Lady Dodge (and thereby with her husband the great jurist Sir Dodge) before the end of the season. I myself am no great socialite, but I have promised to devote my utmost attention to this year’s engagements. No doubt our very state of grace may depend on the most casual remark, on the slightest gesture.
Our best hope is to obtain some trinkets from the glassworks in the valley where I’ll next hold court, which was greatly celebrated until recently, when symptoms of idiocy and bone-melt arose in the noble families that drank most often from its famous "rose glass" goblets. After the panic, the glassworks reopened to produce decorative objects such as sculpted glass flowers, but its wares have been scarcely seen in the capital lately. My Dear predicts a resurgence and believes that with a timely gift of rose glass, we can set the Lady Dodge so far ahead of the fashion that the fashion will seem to have followed her. She expounded all this to me while eating smoked jujubes out of a sack that we were given in the last town, handing me the pits to toss out the window (she always sits in the exact center of a carriage-bench, to minimize jostling).
Not so long ago I hoped that My Dear would not join me on this year’s circuit, but would remain in the Old Retrocession to make a home for us and bear our first child. Then the time came for me to leave and she was still not expecting, so along she came once again. The journey would have been very different without her. It would not have been ethical for me to accept the gift of a racing foal from the murderer’s wife in Addis, had my wife not been there to do so for me. Nor would I have even dreamed of buying the land on the Duck River to develop irrigation canals, had My Dear not pointed it out to me and set me about it. We both continue to wish for the blessing of a child, but with the chaos of travel and the dust of the road, lately we’ve found it hard to arrange a quiet moment together.
The country here is pine forest, and the weather is still brisk even at this time of year. We rode alongside soil-clogged creeks that flow down from hills which are strip-mined above the tree line, often with squared-off segments carved out of them as if their natural shapes had been invaded and displaced by geometric solids from the Platonic world of forms. The glassworks, and the town that supports it, are nestled into the base of one of these hills. As usual, My Dear and I are to reside in guest rooms within the parish church of the rector whose rulings are appealable to me. It has been nearly three years since I last held court in Lemoine Valley. My Dear has made me promise to work quickly.
We came to an agreement with the driver that he could stop at the post office and carry in the mail, so long as he inquired whether any message was waiting there for us from another direction. That was how my wife and I came to be sitting unattended in a tethered carriage on a close, shadowy street so muddy that escape on foot, for a decent person, was impossible. A servant woman with an upturned, rooting sort of nose and grey-streaked hair like straw pulled back in a bonnet walked right up to the window of our carriage and accosted us. She asked if I was Judge Cushing, and I admitted that I was.
"I have a petition for an appeal," she said, and waved at me a few wrinkled scraps of paper.
"That," I answered, "can only come to me through official channels."
"It has been, and its duplicate awaits you now in the church house, only my brother-in-law and the Reverend Withrow will have agreed between themselves that you needn’t be bothered by it and removed it from the docket. Nonetheless, it’s a valid claim brought on my own account, not theirs."
"You witnessed these two tampering with the motions?"
"They will have," she repeated. "It’s in the matter of the glassworks. As to whether I own it."
"Is that why the glass shipments stopped?" My Dear asked avidly. "The factory was in a lawsuit?"
The canny old crow simply held out the petition for me to read. Under the will of both women, I had to take it. At that moment our driver returned and shouldered the old servant aside to give us a letter with news from one of My Dear’s young allies in the capital: Lady Dodge had taken up croquet.
My Dear is an excellent person with whom to witness the spectacular. I do not mean only that she has a sense of awe. Awe is nothing but sensations overwhelming the senses, like wine overflowing a bowl. I mean also to say that My Dear is a very deep bowl: observant, discerning, appreciative. But resultantly, when we are together in some ordinary situation, I sometimes feel that certain faculties of her mind go unused, and in my greed to experience the pleasure of her company as fully as possible, I often wish that I could sequester her from the mundane.
The Reverend Withrow’s church is a rambling arc of rotted, shambling brick and lumber with chapel, parsonage, meeting house, guest house, dormitories, a few rugged fenced-in vegetable gardens and pens for pigs, chickens and goats, all of it tended by a troop of ragged, skittish women who were the legal Wards of the church and the town. Having no other cloister or avenue of retreat available to them, these women were committed for some combination of poverty, age, ill-repute, prostitution, adultery, bastardy, widowhood, spinsterhood, asociality, criminality and lunacy. Their faces, for the most part, are ill-favored and undernourished. Some have loathsome diseases. Yet they are needed here: in their way, they serve as the Imps and demons that complete their church’s rustic cosmology. It is an image without grandeur, maintained for the edification of the simple. My Dear and I aspire to a higher vision. A great jewel, one might say, of which a gaudy old woman swatting at croquet-balls is but a single, gleaming aspect.
Upon alighting I introduced My Dear and the Reverend Withrow, although I must admit that I recalled him but vaguely from my last visit, as a man with unusually poor conversational timing (in joining discussions, making interjections, laughing at jokes, et cetera). Soon enough the driver carried up our trunks and My Dear and I retired to our quarters. Among the papers reserved for my perusal, the petition regarding ownership of the glassworks was, as forewarned, missing, and the records referring to its existence amateurishly altered.
Next
Such thoughts color my recollection of my wife’s scheming in the carriage this morning. After all, we two are outcasts of a sort, exiled to the provinces to ride circuit among the country folk rather than taking our place among the tumult and glory of the capital, where the nation’s bright lights make their careers. We approach the end of this year’s tour, and My Dear is desperate to find some way for us to curry favor with the Lady Dodge (and thereby with her husband the great jurist Sir Dodge) before the end of the season. I myself am no great socialite, but I have promised to devote my utmost attention to this year’s engagements. No doubt our very state of grace may depend on the most casual remark, on the slightest gesture.
Our best hope is to obtain some trinkets from the glassworks in the valley where I’ll next hold court, which was greatly celebrated until recently, when symptoms of idiocy and bone-melt arose in the noble families that drank most often from its famous "rose glass" goblets. After the panic, the glassworks reopened to produce decorative objects such as sculpted glass flowers, but its wares have been scarcely seen in the capital lately. My Dear predicts a resurgence and believes that with a timely gift of rose glass, we can set the Lady Dodge so far ahead of the fashion that the fashion will seem to have followed her. She expounded all this to me while eating smoked jujubes out of a sack that we were given in the last town, handing me the pits to toss out the window (she always sits in the exact center of a carriage-bench, to minimize jostling).
Not so long ago I hoped that My Dear would not join me on this year’s circuit, but would remain in the Old Retrocession to make a home for us and bear our first child. Then the time came for me to leave and she was still not expecting, so along she came once again. The journey would have been very different without her. It would not have been ethical for me to accept the gift of a racing foal from the murderer’s wife in Addis, had my wife not been there to do so for me. Nor would I have even dreamed of buying the land on the Duck River to develop irrigation canals, had My Dear not pointed it out to me and set me about it. We both continue to wish for the blessing of a child, but with the chaos of travel and the dust of the road, lately we’ve found it hard to arrange a quiet moment together.
The country here is pine forest, and the weather is still brisk even at this time of year. We rode alongside soil-clogged creeks that flow down from hills which are strip-mined above the tree line, often with squared-off segments carved out of them as if their natural shapes had been invaded and displaced by geometric solids from the Platonic world of forms. The glassworks, and the town that supports it, are nestled into the base of one of these hills. As usual, My Dear and I are to reside in guest rooms within the parish church of the rector whose rulings are appealable to me. It has been nearly three years since I last held court in Lemoine Valley. My Dear has made me promise to work quickly.
We came to an agreement with the driver that he could stop at the post office and carry in the mail, so long as he inquired whether any message was waiting there for us from another direction. That was how my wife and I came to be sitting unattended in a tethered carriage on a close, shadowy street so muddy that escape on foot, for a decent person, was impossible. A servant woman with an upturned, rooting sort of nose and grey-streaked hair like straw pulled back in a bonnet walked right up to the window of our carriage and accosted us. She asked if I was Judge Cushing, and I admitted that I was.
"I have a petition for an appeal," she said, and waved at me a few wrinkled scraps of paper.
"That," I answered, "can only come to me through official channels."
"It has been, and its duplicate awaits you now in the church house, only my brother-in-law and the Reverend Withrow will have agreed between themselves that you needn’t be bothered by it and removed it from the docket. Nonetheless, it’s a valid claim brought on my own account, not theirs."
"You witnessed these two tampering with the motions?"
"They will have," she repeated. "It’s in the matter of the glassworks. As to whether I own it."
"Is that why the glass shipments stopped?" My Dear asked avidly. "The factory was in a lawsuit?"
The canny old crow simply held out the petition for me to read. Under the will of both women, I had to take it. At that moment our driver returned and shouldered the old servant aside to give us a letter with news from one of My Dear’s young allies in the capital: Lady Dodge had taken up croquet.
My Dear is an excellent person with whom to witness the spectacular. I do not mean only that she has a sense of awe. Awe is nothing but sensations overwhelming the senses, like wine overflowing a bowl. I mean also to say that My Dear is a very deep bowl: observant, discerning, appreciative. But resultantly, when we are together in some ordinary situation, I sometimes feel that certain faculties of her mind go unused, and in my greed to experience the pleasure of her company as fully as possible, I often wish that I could sequester her from the mundane.
The Reverend Withrow’s church is a rambling arc of rotted, shambling brick and lumber with chapel, parsonage, meeting house, guest house, dormitories, a few rugged fenced-in vegetable gardens and pens for pigs, chickens and goats, all of it tended by a troop of ragged, skittish women who were the legal Wards of the church and the town. Having no other cloister or avenue of retreat available to them, these women were committed for some combination of poverty, age, ill-repute, prostitution, adultery, bastardy, widowhood, spinsterhood, asociality, criminality and lunacy. Their faces, for the most part, are ill-favored and undernourished. Some have loathsome diseases. Yet they are needed here: in their way, they serve as the Imps and demons that complete their church’s rustic cosmology. It is an image without grandeur, maintained for the edification of the simple. My Dear and I aspire to a higher vision. A great jewel, one might say, of which a gaudy old woman swatting at croquet-balls is but a single, gleaming aspect.
Upon alighting I introduced My Dear and the Reverend Withrow, although I must admit that I recalled him but vaguely from my last visit, as a man with unusually poor conversational timing (in joining discussions, making interjections, laughing at jokes, et cetera). Soon enough the driver carried up our trunks and My Dear and I retired to our quarters. Among the papers reserved for my perusal, the petition regarding ownership of the glassworks was, as forewarned, missing, and the records referring to its existence amateurishly altered.
Next
The Circuit-Riders
Posted in honor of International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day...a story in six diary entries, which I wrote last summer. Either read the next six blog posts in chronological order (bottom to top) or just click here to start at the beginning.
The Circuit-Riders
by Matthew Carey
The Circuit-Riders
by Matthew Carey
Sunday, April 01, 2007
Literary Vocab Quiz
This was an April Fool's Day vocab quiz for some 8th graders (using their real vocab words). Apparently they didn't find it much more upsetting than their regular quizzes.
Vocabulary Quiz: Lesson 13
a) swindle b) culprit c) felony d) incriminate
2. France produces the finest flower of ____________ in Mallarme but the desirable life is revealed only to the poor of heart, the life of Homer's Phaeacians. (Ulysses, James Joyce)
a) arson b) corruption c) felony d) jurisdiction
3. And others __________, in this wise: / The king commands his constable, anon, / On pain of hanging by the high justice, / That he shall suffer not, in any guise, / Constance within the kingdom to abide / Beyond three days and quarter of a tide. (The Canterbury Tales: Modern English Translation, Geoffrey Chaucer)
a) counterfeited b) acquitted c) incarcerated d) incriminated
4. And here is implyed another maxime of the law, that where the common or statute law giveth remedy in foro seculari, (whether the matter be temporall or spiritual) the conusans of that cause belongeth to the king's temporall courts onely; unlesse the ___________of the ecclesiasticall court be saved or allowed by the same statute to proceed according to the ecclesiasticall lawes. (The First Part of the Institutes of the Laws of England, Sir Edward Coke)
a) felony b) jurisdiction c) arson d) culprit
5. __________ yow as now of youre biheeste, Thanne have ye do youre devoir atte leeste. (The Canterbury Tales: Original Version, Geoffrey Chaucer)
a) Corrupteth b) Swindleth c) Counterfeiteth d) Acquitteth
Answer key: B, B, B, A, D
(Har har har! These questions are too hard for eighth graders!)
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