29. Early Arrival
In which the Bluestocking is unprepared...
The Bluestocking was not ready for them.
Griffin, Gimbal and Graphic came through the door half an hour earlier than expected, and it was shift change. Half the chairs were still up. The bar held one cloth, folded, and no tray. Gasket looked at the three of them, looked at the clock, and went behind the bar without a word.
The patrons arrived in ones and twos as the word went round, each of them entering at their normal pace and then adjusting it. @AngleofRepose came in with her notebook already open. Hedgehog took a seat while @EdithStourton arrived with Brains, who sat, and Batshit, who did not.
Gasket brought a teapot. Not the good teapot. She hadn’t had time. “Don’t pour for four more minutes,” she said. “It needs time to brew.”
“You’re really early,” said Girdle. “What happened?”
Graphic went first. “I wasn’t given a tray,” she said. “No glass sorting. I drew instead. There’s a panel on the far bench with the old lead opened up, and inside the lead there are marks. Struck letters and numbers, down in the channel where the glass sits. Whoever does the conservation puts marks on the inside of it, and when Fenella restores a window, she puts every mark she finds back into the new lead and adds her own initials and a date after them. She stamps them in. She said that’s what a proper conservator does.”
“What did you draw them with?” asked Gantry, at volume.
“A 2B pencil. Under the magnifying glass, with a side light.”
“THE MAGNIFYING GLASS,” said Gantry, to the room, in case anyone had missed it.
“All of the marks are on the inside,” said Graphic. “Where nobody sees them once the glass is in.”
Angle wrote that down. She underlined something and went on writing.
Gimbal went next. She described the box, 200 compartments, every stamp in the wrong one, and the instruction to clean them and put them right. She described the first method, the row along the bench that grew until every new stamp meant moving most of the others, and the second method, following each displaced stamp to its own compartment and cleaning whatever came out. She reported that the stamps did not need cleaning and that she had cleaned all of them anyway. Nobody found this remarkable.
“One of them did have wax on it,” she said. “The metal bit on the bottom is a pair of pliers, and the wax was violet. I cleaned it off.”
“You’ve found Fenella Burnish’s seal,” said @ChristmasStars. “Violet wax. She seals her letters with it.”
Then it was Griffin’s turn.
She gave it in order. The crate at ten past four, large and flat and heavy from US Customs and RELEASED printed across it in red. The barcode that wouldn’t scan and the older barcode underneath. The dispatch tab, which she had seen before, with a dispatch date from six months ago, and a destination reading Talmere Logistics, Portland, Maine. The origin that was not a place but a code, FB0417, blue and underlined because it was a link. Halcyon clicking it. The grey sheet, the failed passwords, and on the third attempt Griffin watching the keys instead of the screen. Then Halcyon leaving the sheet open while she went to find Fenella at a run.
“The sheet was long,” said Griffin. “Some rows were highlighted in red, and they all had the same Dispatch Reference as the crate. I read the first one: Dates, Conservator, Stamp number, Origin was Norwich Cathedral. Status was Dispatched. Then Fenella came over and closed the laptop and sent us all home. It was only twenty-five past four.”
“That’s confirmation!” said @Hedgehogforshort, suddenly very excited. “Six months ago, a crate left Fenella Burnish’s workshop for Talmere Logistics in Portland, Maine. It never arrived because we boarded the Rustler and had its cargo seized by US Customs.” She took her spectacles off. “The case must have concluded. Customs has released the cargo back to the sender. That crate is the stained glass crate which contained the original Norwich window. The one that was removed from the cathedral, and a replica was installed instead.”
“We opened that crate,” said Graft.
“Greenhouse panes,” agreed Grind. “So the manifest said.”
“But it was stained glass windows instead,” said Graft.
“And now the manifest detailing what was actually in the crate is sitting in a password-protected spreadsheet,” said Hedgehog, “with a stamp number and a cathedral written out in full. If Norwich has a row, others will be in the rest of the rows. Maybe Durham. Ripon. Maybe the marks we found this weekend. That sheet is the register.”
“Then somebody needs to read the register,” said @MarieDeGournay.
Everyone looked at Griffin.
“I don’t know the password. There were ten characters,” said Griffin. “I only saw four of them. A capital F first. A 5 in the middle somewhere, then a b, and a t at the end.”
“Strong passwords generally have a capital, a number and a symbol,” said Angle. “So one of the six you didn’t see is probably a symbol.”
“The Oxford Dictionary of Computing, second edition,” said Grisaille, “states that a password must contain no more than eight letters.”
“Thank you, Grisaille,” said Hedgehog.
Then the guessing began.
“FENELLA5BEST,” said Gantry.
“That’s 12 characters,” said Griffin.
“FMargrave,” offered Garnet.
“That ends in e and is too short.”
“FMargaret,” said Gasket.
“That’s still too short and you haven’t included all the letters I gave you.”
“Brains5batshit,” said Girdle. Brains looked up. Batshit, hearing her name, walked into a table leg.
“Thirteen, and that doesn’t start with a capital F. None of the guesses so far has a symbol in them,” said Griffin.
“Fivebt,” said Gadget, and was asked to count it, and did, on her paws, and sat down again.
“Nobody is guessing anything,” said Hedgehog. “There’s no screen in this room and there will be no experimenting on the one at the workshop. We don’t know how many wrong attempts might lock Griffin out forever. We need to find a better way to work out the password.”
The teapot went round again. Angle was still writing.
It was Edith who asked Griffin the next question. “You said there was a stamp number for the Norwich Cathedral window, what was it?”
“23,” replied Griffin, “why?”
“Gimbal is partway through sorting out a box of stamps,” said Edith. “What if she looks for stamp 23, looks at the die, then comes back and tell us what’s on it.”
https://myrtlelion.substack.com/p/29-early-arrival