The Oak Hearth

The forge in the lower tower was a granite cavern blackened by two hundred years of soot. Two bellows the size of a cow blew on the hearth, driven by a wheel the thaw torrent turned day and night, and the heat made you leave your cloak at the threshold. Brianda went in the first day in her velvet gown and came out in one of Bruno's linen shirts with the sleeves rolled to the elbow and a leather apron that reached her ankles.

By the third day she had turned the oak benches into a map. The fragments rescued from the hall were sorted by color into heaps only she understood: ruby from colloidal gold, copper green, iron amber, the little cobalt that remained. Bruno watched her work as he stoked the lead crucible. She handled the cutting wheel and the diamond point with a speed he had never seen in any northern stonemason; the northern masons knew chisel and maul. She knew light.

"The lead's ready," said Bruno, lifting the ladle with the long tongs. "Three degrees less and it cools before it fills the channel. Three more and it burns the edge and cracks the glass."

"Then don't stop to think about it." Brianda set three pieces on the mold with tweezers and pointed to the joint. "Lead and glass are two stubborn things. If you hesitate, they push each other away."

The metal ran into the grooves with a short hiss and a thread of blue vapor that smelled of tin. When it set into a bright grey line without a single bubble, she let out her breath and laughed. It was the first time Bruno had heard her laugh.

The problem came on the fifth day, and it had nothing to do with lead.

"There's no cobalt," said Brianda, standing before the heaps. "For the chapel windows and the eastern rose we need blue, a great deal of blue, and what we have isn't enough for a third. In Toledo we bought it from the Venetians. No Venetian ship is going to reach here in forty days."

"And if we melt what there is?"

"If we melt the pieces, the color goes muddy. But if we melt them with river sand and fern ash and blow them again into sheet, it comes out a paler blue." She thought about it. "Ugly. But blue."

"Ugly but blue is more than there was this morning."

Blowing glass needed a furnace hotter than the forge and four more hands. Bruno called the apprentices. Three came. Ciro didn't.

He found him in the courtyard, splitting wood with more rage than the wood required.

"I need you at the furnace."

"You need the southern woman." Ciro drove the axe into the stump. "My mother hasn't left the house in two weeks. My brother was nineteen, master. He was in the gallery holding a bucket of water. And now you want me to work the bellows for one of theirs so she can mend the windows for the people who let him die?"

"She didn't shoot any arrow."

"She came with the ones who did."

Bruno had no answer to that. There wasn't one. He stood watching the boy wrench the axe free and go back to splitting wood, and went back to the forge alone.

That night, when the other apprentices had gone, Brianda stayed behind wiping glass dust off the benches. Bruno brought her a bowl of water and vinegar for her hands and, as he gave it to her, saw her fingers were full of new cuts, fine as hairs.

"I heard about the boy," she said without looking up. "He's right."

"He isn't right. He has a dead brother. It's not the same."

"At the duke's court nobody stops to think who rebuilds what their cannon break in an afternoon." Brianda plunged her hands into the vinegar and clenched her teeth at the sting. "I didn't stop to think about it either. I ate at their tables."

"Now you think about it."

"Now I sweep it up."

Bruno took one of her hands to look at the cuts in the light of the embers. He held it a second longer than he needed to, and she didn't pull it away. They shared the jug of cider and the bread and goat cheese without saying much more, while the bellows fell still and the torrent wheel kept turning in the dark.

When she had gone to her cot, Bruno stayed a while alone looking at the first finished panel, propped against the wall: three pieces, one line of lead. Thirty-five days. Two hundred and eighty-nine openings. A rose window three varas across that weighed as much as an ox and had to be raised up the outside of the wall, hanging over the gorge.