Chapter Four - The Bluestocking
In which Gosie is welcomed back…
Gosie had been aiming for a quiet cup of tea. She had planned this on the train, somewhere between York and the point where the trolley ran out of everything except the crisps nobody wanted. A quiet cup of tea, possibly a sandwich that did not disappoint her, and an evening of not thinking about symbols.
The Bluestocking had other ideas.
The moment she came through the door Gossamer spotted her from the bar and made a sound that brought Gasket out of the kitchen still holding a teapot. Within ten seconds there were gerbils on every available surface, and within twenty the surfaces themselves had begun to feel insufficient. Someone had already started a banner. It was not finished. It said WELCOME HO and trailed off in a way that suggested the letter-cutter had simply run out of confidence.
@AngleofRepose had been at her usual table with a stack of journals and looked up at the noise like someone recalculating whether the library was really a quieter option after all.
“We thought you’d been arrested,” said Gravel.
“By cathedral librarians,” added Girdle, with the particular relish of someone who had spent two days developing this theory and did not intend to let it go to waste now that the facts had arrived to disappoint her.
“Or canonised,” said Glissando. “There was a scenario involving a shrine.”
“There was no scenario involving a shrine,” said Angle.
“There absolutely was a scenario involving a shrine.”
Gosie was steered to the good armchair, provided with tea she had not ordered, but was grateful to receive, and a plate of something involving cheese that she had also not ordered, and allowed approximately four minutes to exist before Gantry produced a notebook and said, “Right. From the beginning.”
So Gosie told them.
She told them about Durham, and Judith, and the filing cabinet that had produced four projects instead of one. She told them about the textiles, the manuscripts and the archaeology, all meticulous, all correct, all wrong. She told them about the private foundation that funded the windows and nothing else, and about Ripon, which had required two visits and which nobody had asked about yet, which did not stop three gerbils asking about it immediately.
Then she took out the fragment.
“Kitty found this,” Gosie said. “On the yacht, in Portland. Octavia Briefcase and Hedgehog were sorting through everything on the saloon table, papers going into piles, and Kitty was doing what Kitty does with paper, which is sit on it. Everyone assumed it was just interference. It wasn’t.”
@Hedgehogforshort, hearing her own name from across the room, arrived in time to hear the last of it. “Kitty was working,” she said, with the particular reverence of someone recalculating a cat’s entire character in real time.
“By the time everyone else had gone ashore it was still under her paw,” Gosie went on. “I don’t think she meant to hold onto it. I don’t think she meant not to, either. I just took it before anyone tidied it away.”
She smoothed it flat on the table where everyone could see the words. Donation for Chapter House Window Preservation Fund. Paid on behalf of Margrave. The symbol sat in the margin, the circle crossed by three diagonal lines.
“That’s the symbol,” said Hedgehog, before Gosie had even turned it round. “That’s the one that was on everything. Every crate, every manifest.”
“The circle,” said Angle. “With the three lines.”
“We all saw it a hundred times on that boat,” said Hedgehog. “Nobody could tell us what it meant then either.”
“I still can’t,” said Gosie. “But I know where else it’s turned up since.”
“So the Margrave is definitely real,” said Griffin.
“The Margrave was always definitely real,” said Gosie.
“Talmere’s definitely the connection,” said Hedgehog. “The fragment said Margrave, but it came from Talmere’s own paperwork on that boat. Most of what they were shipping was just ordinary cargo, ordinary manifests. Now we know the symbol was on the part that’s actually the Margrave’s, moving under Talmere’s name so nobody looks twice.”
“And at Durham it’s the same split,” Gosie said. “Talmere’s name is on all four projects. Three of them are just Talmere, straightforward funding, nothing behind it. But the windows were paid for on behalf of someone. That’s the one the Margrave actually wanted.”
Graft and Grind had already commandeered a section of the wall and were pinning up photographs with the same surgical calm they had once applied to a crate of contraband stained glass. Durham went up first, then the donor panel, then a close photograph of the symbol.
It was at this point that Angle disappeared into the back room and returned five minutes later dragging an atlas the approximate size and weight of a paving slab. Where it had come from was unclear. She had found it, she explained, behind the spare barrels, beneath a box of Christmas decorations that nobody remembered acquiring, inside a crate labelled FRAGILE that had turned out to contain a single deflated inflatable flamingo and, underneath the flamingo, the atlas.
“Cathedral Architecture of the British Isles,” she read from the spine, with the tone of someone unveiling a relic. “Nineteen seventy something. The cover’s gone.” She opened the atlas flat on the table, directly beneath the wall of photographs, where it stayed for the rest of the evening.
“Why was it back there?” asked Girdle.
“Because you put it there,” said Angle.
“Oh,” said Girdle.
Angle ran a finger down the index. “There are forty three cathedrals with a chapter house of any note. You’ve visited thirty eight.”
“Thirty eight and a half,” said Gosie. “Ripon was visited twice. First time I only checked the chapter house, because that’s what the fragment said. On the second visit I found the symbol on a window in the nave.”
Angle closed the atlas as though this settled the matter, which in her experience it generally did. “So you’ll have to visit them all again. Properly this time. Every window, not just the ones in the Chapter House.”
“Not just cathedrals, either,” said Hedgehog. “Plenty of abbeys and priories never had a chapter house at all, doesn’t mean they didn’t get windows. There’s forty two Anglican cathedrals in England alone. Add the Catholic ones, the abbeys, the priories, and you’re past a hundred before you’ve started. It’s impossible.”
“I already know where I’m going,” said Gosie.
Every gerbil in the room turned to look at her at once.
Fenhurst and Rhys did the Ripon glazing, Rosalind confirmed it, same private foundation arrangement as Durham. But there’s a second name in the Durham conservation file. Brennard and Vye. Different firm, no mention of it at Ripon at all.
“You’ve known this since walking in,” said Glissando, in the tone of someone doing arithmetic she did not enjoy the answer to. “And you didn’t say anything.”
“You’d got very excited about the shrine theory. I didn’t want to interrupt it.”
Glissando, to her credit, did not deny this.
The plan didn’t need much more than that. Gosie would go and find the glazier. The Bluestocking would work the rest, the atlas, the archives, whatever anyone could dig up about the symbol itself. Everything else could wait for one conversation with someone who had actually held the glass in her hands.
https://myrtlelion.substack.com/p/4-the-bluestocking