The Second Colour

Cadhla Rhun lived another two years and four months and was, by every ordinary measure, entirely herself. She was rude to the levy inspector. She remembered the seven throat forms, the rota back to 1911, the name of every apprentice the workshop had taken since the war, and precisely how much she disliked the Ennis guild house.

What she did not have was August the ninth, and a good deal that had been attached to it. She did not know Rosaleen Fell. She knew that a commission had been completed in September for a merchant, because it was in the ledger in her own hand, and she read the entry once and said, "Hm. Well, that was expensive of me," and never mentioned it again.

She also did not know why she had stopped making. Oisín had been warned about this by the 1868 entry and had thought himself prepared, and was not. Twice a week for two years she would come into the workshop, look at the racks, and say, with mild puzzlement, "I ought to be doing something." And he would say, "You're teaching," and she would say, "Am I? Very well," and then teach him something worth more than the bottle.

He wrote it all down. Every session, the same evening, in a book he bought in Tullow for the purpose. It had occurred to him on the walk back from Fell's carriage that the entire disaster of Ard Rhun was four hundred years of people knowing things and then dying with them, and that the ledgers recorded, in exhaustive and beautiful detail, what had been sold and to whom and for how much — and nowhere at all what any of it had taught the person who made it.

The book ran to three hundred pages. He called it nothing at all and kept it in the chest with the others, and the guild has it still, and it is the only document in the vault that anybody reads for pleasure.

She died in March, in the chair by the window, which Oisín had known she would because she had told him at six years old her great-grandmother had done the same and had said it in the tone of a woman making an appointment. The whole village came. Nobody made a ceremony of it. Everybody attended.

The furnace did not go out. It was the rota, and he was on it, and he banked it that night at the correct hour with his eyes streaming, and in the morning it was still going, and that is the guild's one boast and it is an honest one.

The letter came four years after that, in a hand Oisín did not know, on paper better than anything that had ever come up the causeway.

It was from a solicitor in Tullow and it concerned the estate of Ardan Fell, deceased, and it was extremely long and extremely careful, and the substance of it was in the fourth paragraph: Fell had left the workshop the bottle back, together with a sum of money that made Oisín sit down on the step, and a condition.

The condition was that the bottle was not to go in the vault. It was to stand on the bench, in the workshop, unstoppered whenever anyone in the village wanted it, for as long as the furnace was lit, and any person who asked was to be told exactly what was in it and exactly who had given it and exactly what it had cost her.

There was a note in Fell's own hand at the end, one line, no greeting: I opened it once, at fifty-eight, and I did not need a second. Give it to people who are still in the worst month. Tell them the truth first — that is the whole of what I am paying for.

Oisín read it three times on the step, and then went in and put the bottle on the bench, and stood back and looked at it there among the punties and the shears and the ordinary working mess of a Tuesday. It has been there since. It is the wrong colour for saltglass — orange going through to a red so deep it reads as brown at the edges — and it is the first thing anyone sees on coming through the door. Every apprentice for sixty years has asked about it in their first week and been told the entire thing on their first Monday: the vault, the eight hundred and sixty-one, the First Hour, and the four names in the right-hand ledger.

That was the change. It was not a large one and it did not close the vault and it did not stop the guild casting from the First Hour, because the buyers' column still says what it says and Oisín was never able to argue with a document four centuries deep. But nobody has bought a memory bottle from Ard Rhun since without being told first, and the telling happens at the bench, with the wrong-coloured bottle sitting there, which makes the telling difficult to do carelessly.

Eleven people have refused after hearing it and walked back down the causeway with their money. The guild records those too, in the same hand, with the same weight, in a column Oisín ruled himself and headed told, and declined. He has never been able to decide whether it is the most or the least important page in the vault, and has stopped expecting to.

He solved the third aisle in his forty-first year, which was later than he had hoped and earlier than Cadhla had predicted, and the solution turned out to be so simple that he spent a fortnight looking for the flaw in it and never found one.

The eleven fading bottles were not fading. They were the oldest castings in the vault, and they were losing colour because a casting is a copy of a copy of a copy, and the guild had been casting from castings for two hundred years out of a reluctance to disturb the original that had hardened into a rule that nobody could remember making.

Oisín took the First Hour off its shelf for the first time since 1602 and cast from it directly, and the colour came up full, and he did it eleven times in a fortnight and reseated all eleven, and then wrote nine pages about it in the book with no name.

He also, once, alone, on a Tuesday, unstoppered the original and sat down on the bottom step with it. He had been putting it off for twenty years and had eventually run out of respectable reasons, having used up in order: youth, workload, deference, the levy inspection, and a genuine and creditable fear of finding it disappointing.

It was a morning. There was bread and there was an argument about a shoe and there was a child of about six being unreasonable about the shoe with tremendous conviction, and there was a woman being patient in a way that was audibly costing her something, and none of it was remarkable in any respect whatsoever, and it lasted an hour, and Oisín sat on the step in the cold under the workshop and wept like a boy.

Afterwards he understood the thing that four hundred years of masters had been circling and never once written down, which is that Sile Rhun had not made a vessel that copies grief. She had made a vessel that holds an hour in which nothing happens, and given it to a world that mostly remembers the hours in which something did, and the reason every buyer finds their own in it is that everybody's is in there — because everybody's is the same, and it is the shoe, and it is the bread, and it is being patient at some cost, and nobody thinks to keep it.

He wrote that down. It is on page two hundred and six, and it is the passage that visiting makers ask to see, and Oisín was faintly embarrassed about it for the remaining thirty years of his life.

The tide at Ard Rhun goes out further than anywhere else on the coast, and the glassmakers still walk out after it with buckets. The apprentice that year was called Maire and she was sixteen and had come down from Ennis with a chip on her shoulder about coastal workshops that lasted eleven days.

She drew six buckets on a morning in her third week and carried them up two at a time and had them on the bench before Master Oisín came down. He checked them the way it is checked: a finger in each, a taste, a long look at nothing.

"Fourth one's wrong," he said. "It's not." "It is from four feet to the left of the same place as the third, which is the same place." He tipped it into the runnel. "Go back. There is twenty minutes in the tide and you have spent four of them telling me I am mistaken."

She went back, furious, and found a new channel, and came up with it, and he put a finger in and tasted and said nothing at all, and she stood there for a second working out that this meant she could start. He watched her work it out. It is the best moment in the trade and no master has ever told an apprentice that it exists.

Later, at the bench, she asked about the orange bottle, because they all ask in the first week and she had held out three, which he privately thought was promising. So he stopped what he was doing and sat down and told her the whole thing, in order, the way it is told: Sile Rhun and the shoe, the vault and the eight hundred and sixty-one, the four names in the right-hand ledger and what each of them lost, and a small furious person on a carriage step in August who had worked out more of the arrangement than anyone else in it.

Maire listened without interrupting, which he noted. At the end she was quiet for a while, and then she asked the question they all ask second, which is why the guild does not simply stop.

"Go and read the returns column," said Oisín. "Take a lamp. It will spoil your afternoon and you will be a better maker on Thursday." She went, and took the lamp, and did not come up for three hours. He banked the furnace, and checked the seals on the third aisle out of habit, and put the orange bottle back exactly where it lives, an inch from the edge where anybody can reach it. Then he stood a while at the top of the steps, listening to a furious sixteen-year-old two hundred years down in the dark turning pages — which is, he had decided long ago, the only honest kind of ceremony there is, and the only one the trade has ever needed.