Deadlight-Hall(59)

I took the dray along the lanes and across Watery Toft, and delivered the eggs, milk and butter to the kitchen door of Breadspear’s private house. I dislike that house. I do know what happened there a couple of years ago – even as a relative newcomer to the area I have heard about it – but I take no notice of the tales spun by the credulous and the spiteful. It is simply an ugly, mean-looking house, in which a bad and tragic thing once happened.

It is nonsense for Breadspear to say I slunk into the manufactory and crept through the corridors like a homing tomcat. I unlatched the gate in that wall and walked openly across the courtyard, entering the manufactory through the main doors.

It was a little before eight o’clock, but even at that early hour there was a thrum of machinery and a clatter of steel and metal. I followed these sounds, opening several doors, but finding only store rooms or packing bays. Trays of glass ornaments were set out, ready for packing, and in Breadspear’s favour I will say he has a thriving manufactory and the trinkets and goblets and decanters he makes are of a beautiful quality. That, however, does not excuse his treatment of his workers.

In the end it was easy to identify the firing rooms; the heat from the kilns belches out into the corridors, and as you approach that part of the building the very stones glow with uncomfortable heat. In the height of summer it must be an unbearable place in which to work.

The instant I opened the door of those firing rooms I felt as if a burning fist had dealt me a massive blow. My eyes prickled and heat scoured my skin. I put up a hand instinctively to shield my eyes, and when I felt able to remove it, for a wild moment I believed I had stumbled into a living depiction of hell’s deepest caverns – that a painting by one of the dark masters had sprung into life around me. Bruegel perhaps, or Hieronymus Bosch, or Botticelli who mapped the diagram of Dante’s Nine Circles of Hell – Yes, I will spell those names for you, although you should think shame, George Buckle, that you do not know them.

At the centre of the firing room was a large six-sided structure, almost like a summer house or the kind of folly that rich men sometimes build. Thick stone pillars stretched from floor to ceiling, but between those pillars – inside the structure – the kiln itself blazed. It was fiercely, intensely hot, and impossible to look at directly, but from where I stood I could make out rudimentary shelves within the fire, with trays of objects I took to be the glass pieces.

The workers moved around this structure, carrying and fetching, some of them using hooked iron rods to pull out the trays or push them deeper into the roaring heat. Some wore makeshift eye protectors which had the appearance of having been fashioned from odds and ends by the workers themselves. But most simply kept their heads turned away from the intense heat as much as they could.

Those rooms are terrible places. They are filled with fire and yet they are somehow dark, as if the fire has severed day from night, and sucked the light from the forgotten sun—

No, those are not indelicate remarks, they are quotations from two of our greatest writers and poets, Shakespeare and Tennyson. Have you never read the great works of our men of genius, Sir George, or wandered amidst the groves of their imaginations? Well, I suppose I am not surprised to hear you have not, and yes, I do want that written down, if you please, for it is as much a part of what happened that morning as anything else.

One of the dreadful things I discovered about the kiln room inside Salamander House that morning was the extreme youth of most of the workers. They were little more than children – perhaps ten-and twelve-year-olds, most of them boys, but there were also one or two girls. They ran about, obediently doing the bidding of the four overseers, who directed and controlled everything. It was a terrible thing to see small children cowed into such docility.

Every few moments molten gobbets and splinters of glass flew outwards from the kiln, as if demons were spitting their anger and venom from within its depths and, as a particularly fierce shower of splinters cascaded out, an order was rapped out for one of the trays to be repositioned. One of the boys went towards the kiln, clutching a hooked iron pole – I now know him to be Douglas Wilger, but at the time I did not realize who he was. As he went forward, a worker from the far end of the room set off across the room, carrying a large iron tray, on which were a number of glinting shapes – ornaments and suchlike, intended for firing.

Douglas Wilger was intent on obeying the order given to move the firing trays. He was also clearly intent on trying to avoid the scorching heat. For that reason, he was not aware of the man with the iron tray, and the man was concentrating on balancing the heavy tray.