The Fillet

The fillet was a wheel of brass set upon a wooden handle, and along the rim of the wheel ran a single raised line. Nyra warmed the wheel over the lamp and judged the heat by the way a bead of water would hiss and skip across the brass. A book lay open on the bench between the two of them, the leather of the cover the colour of a chestnut.

To roll a line was not the same as to press one. The wheel had to travel, and it had to travel at an even pace, or the line would run thin where the hand hurried and thick where the hand faltered. Nyra set the wheel at the edge of the board and leaned a little weight upon the handle and let the wheel carry that weight forward, the way a cart carries a load once the horse has it moving.

The girl watched the brass lay down a thread of shine across the leather, bright and unbroken, a border for the whole of the panel. She saw that the beauty of the border was not in any single part of it but in the fact that it did not stop. A line pressed by hand began and ended. A line rolled by the wheel seemed to have been there always, a ring without a seam.

Here is a thing a book can hold and a thing a book cannot. A book gathers what can be set down in a line and counted, and leaves the rest to the one who was there. The border would be counted among the things set down, a ring of warmed brass on chestnut leather. The steadiness of the wrist that carried the wheel, the held breath while the wheel ran the long side of the panel, these would not be in the book at all.

Nyra lifted the wheel at the corner and let it cool, and the border lay complete, four warm lines meeting at four clean corners. A good border, she would have said, is a promise that the thing inside is worth the ring drawn round it. The book keeps the border, and you keep the rolling of it.