The Children's Book

He began to walk into the pottery, which had been the dairy. He knew enough about the evil-tempered to know that you had to walk away from them, or they couldn’t give up their wrath, even if they needed to.

The pottery was in chaos. There was a small kiln, at one end, its doors hanging open, revealing slumped shelves, and a mess of ash and shards of exploded vessels. There were pots drying on shelves along one wall, and floating ash and grit was settling on them in an undesirable way. There were bins of water, and bins of slurry, not properly covered. There were all sorts of dishes of glaze and brushes, not neatly ranged, but dangerously slopping into each other. In the middle of the floor was a heap of broken biscuitware that looked as though someone had been jumping on it. Philip thought carefully. Don’t touch a man’s tools, unless you have permission. Don’t empty his kiln, he needs to note what went wrong where. Inside the door he found a broom, with which he began to clear the surface of the tiled floor. He saw a tin bath in which some of the broken pieces had been put to make grog, and added a few, as he worked, the clean ones. Benedict Fludd followed him in. He stood gloomily in the doorway, and watched him sweep. Finally he said

“You can help me get all this stuff out of the kiln. It’s got to be done. I need to find my test pieces.”

It had been a glost firing, with a load of glazed vessels in what Philip could see to be mostly greens and honey colours, all scorched, blistered, scarred and shattered. He helped Benedict Fludd in total silence, putting the pieces in a clothes basket, sweeping up the debris. Everything had collapsed in towards the centre. Right at the top, Philip found an intact small saucer, and then another. They were still warm, about blood-heat. He blew on them softly, to move the ash. One was the same gold and turquoise colour as the Todefright pot, and one was a very striking brilliant red that he thought he’d never seen before, a kind of rich cochineal crimson. Both had been painted with a swirling cloudy grey, a smoky web through which a tiny creature peered up through the veiling. The creatures were little demons, with nasty, snarling expressions, full of life. Philip broke the silence.

“There’s some little’uns here as aren’t smashed. Glaze has held pretty well.”

He handed them to their maker, who turned them over, humming tunelessly. Philip ventured to say that he’d never seen that kind of red.

“We all try to rediscover the sang de boeuf. This was meant to aim at the Iznik red, but it’s nearer sang de boeuf. I hadn’t a lot of hope of it.”

Philip said that the other glaze—the blue-green-gold one—was like the Todefright pot.

“That’s another hit-and-miss. More miss than hit. Have you done glazing work?”

“I worked in th’ kilns. Packing the saggars at the top of the bottles. But me mother is a paintress. She’s sick, with the lead and the dust. They all are. But she knows colours, and I’ve watched her.”

“Hmm,” said Benedict Fludd. “Hmm.”

They continued to clear up, in a now reasonably companionable silence.

Pomona came timidly to the doorway, and said that there was supper, if they wanted it. Fludd said, amiably enough, that he was ravenous, and Philip noted the loosening of Pomona’s muscles, in face and shoulders, where she had braced herself for rage. He noticed the same thing in the rest of the family—even Geraint—who were sitting round the kitchen table, on which were soup bowls, honey-glazed, with burnt umber snakes coiled inside them, a large platter of cheeses, a loaf of bread, and a dish of apples. Fludd sat at the head of the table, and patted the seat next to him for Philip. He bowed his head, and began to say Grace, rapidly, in Latin. “Gratias tibi agimus, omnipotens Deus, pro his et omnis donis tuis …” The family bowed their heads, and Philip copied them. Then Imogen served steaming vegetable soup from an iron pot, and they ate. Nobody said anything. Everyone watched Philip, who had a confused sense that much depended on him, and that he was perhaps not equal to his task.

When they had finished, Fludd said he was considering employing Philip in the workshop. Dobbin said “Oh, good” and attracted another series of snarling remarks about his own uselessness. Dobbin said bravely that if only Mr. Fludd had reliable assistance in the workshop, it would be possible to rebuild the big kiln, and…

“And save ourselves from starvation,” said Fludd. “It’s a long prospect, with little hope.”

He seemed almost pleased with this prognostic.

Imogen said her father should see Philip’s drawings, which he had made in the South Kensington Museum. These were fetched out again, with his pad of paper, and everyone admired the lithe dragons and helmeted gnome-men from the Gloucester Candlestick. Philip kept the pad, and his pencil, and began to draw. Fludd watched him. He drew from memory, the underwater forms on the Todefright pot, the way the tadpole creatures floated between the rising strands of weed. He found he remembered remarkably accurately. He knew that for the first time in his life, maybe, he was deliberately showing off his talent. Fludd should know he could see, and keep proportions, and remember. His hand skated over the paper. The fish-forms, the swimming embryos, flickered into life. Benedict Fludd laughed. He said he had forgotten how good that pot was. He was surprised he had parted with it, that charming lady had cajoled it out of him. Dobbin wondered if he had been paid at all for his work, but this niggle— anyway pointless—about past insouciance was swallowed in his relief and delight that the potter was smiling. He had been at Purchase House long enough to know that Fludd’s mood moved in repeated—though unpredictable— cycles, from rage to geniality, from grim, inactive despair to superhuman efforts of work and invention. Between the extremes, things got done, pots got made, even, with luck, sold to keep off starvation. The family sat round in the lamplight, looking like a family, the laughing father, the graciously attentive mother, the two lovely daughters handing out apples, even Geraint admiring the drawings. Geraint was thinking that Philip could be really useful and would be worth cultivating. He needed help, to make it possible for him to get out of this house. He had given up any idea that the ineffective Dobbin might be help. But Philip—possibly—might be.

Purchase House had many rooms. More of them were empty, and in a state of decay, than were inhabited. There was an uncarpeted stone staircase, with a metal banister, leading to the first floor: it must once have been imposing, but now wound gloomily up into the dark. Imogen led Philip up with a candle, and showed him into a bare little room, with a bed, and a washstand, a small chest of drawers and a high window, too high to look out of. It was a little like a monastic cell. There were sheets and a woven bedcover, embroidered with a bunch of lilies. Imogen seemed undisposed to talk to Philip, and almost embarrassed by finding herself alone with him. She showed him the water-closet at the other end of the landing, past several closed doors. Then she left him, with a matchbox, and his little flame.

He lay down, composedly enough. His incoherent plan had brought him to a potter, and possible work. He thought about the Fludds as he lay on the edge of exhausted sleep. He had not much to compare them with—the family at Todefright, perhaps. Violet had packed him a nightshirt, and the borrowed clothing, now a gift. That family was running, and laughter, and hugging and reciting nonsense, and he did not know how to behave with it, but felt a kind of grief that he was not part of the charmed circle. Here everyone was unnaturally still and watchful, apart from the potter himself, who had moods, a state Philip recognised from the temperamental master-craftsmen he had seen from a distance. He thought he didn’t like Geraint, but was not sure. Geraint had a nice face, as though he would have talked, if he had had anyone to talk to. Arthur Dobbin meant well, but Philip had unthinkingly accepted Benedict Fludd’s and Geraint’s assessment of his uselessness. Dobbin, too, had a bedroom somewhere in the