Chapter Five - Out in the Fens
In which Gosie finds a workshop…
The workshop was not signposted, which Gosie decided afterwards should have told her something.
She had the name from the Ripon conservation file and found the address in a business registry that listed Fenhurst and Rhys as a conservation partnership established in 1968 and continued by someone called Fenella Burnish. The building itself sat behind a row of poplars on a lane that seemed designed to discourage casual arrival, a long low former agricultural shed with skylights cut into the roof at intervals that suggested someone had thought carefully about north light and nothing else.
Gosie had not made an appointment. This had worked at Durham. It had worked at Ripon. She had begun, somewhere around Wells, to consider herself rather good at simply arriving and being received with the mild professional courtesy that conservation officers seemed to extend to anyone who asked an intelligent question.
The door was answered by a young, harried hamster apprentice holding a clipboard as though it had been issued to her specifically to be held rather than consulted.
“Do you have an appointment?”
“No,” said Gosie. “I was hoping to speak to Fenella Burnish about a restoration she may have worked on.”
“Fenella doesn’t see people without an appointment.”
“I understand. Would it be possible to check whether she has a few minutes.”
“She doesn’t have a few minutes without an appointment.”
There was, Gosie noted, a certain circularity to this that suggested it had been said before, possibly often, possibly to people considerably more insistent than herself.
Behind the apprentice, through a gap in a door that had not been fully closed, Gosie could see part of a long workbench, lead “came” coiled in neat grey loops, a scatter of glass offcuts catching the light in blues and ambers, and a panel clamped upright in a frame, half leaded, the pattern of it obscured by an angle she could not improve without being obviously rude about it.
“I’ve come rather a long way,” said Gosie, which was true, and which she suspected would not help.
It did not help.
“You could write,” said the apprentice, in the tone of someone offering a solution she did not expect to be taken up. “Fenella prefers written enquiries. She finds people at the door disruptive to the work.”
“Does she often get people at the door?”
The apprentice considered this question for slightly longer than the question warranted, which Gosie filed away without comment. “Not really,” she said, in the specific way people say not really when the honest answer is a great deal more complicated than that.
“I only wanted to confirm whether Fenella did some conservation work on a nave window at Ripon Cathedral and possibly a chapter house window at Durham.”
“I couldn’t tell you what Fenella has or hasn’t worked on. That’s confidential, client by client.”
“Even the fact of it?”
“Especially the fact of it.”
Gosie glanced again through the gap in the door. The panel in the frame had a section near the top that was unmistakably new glass, cut clean and bright against the older pieces surrounding it, the lead lines around it precise, recent, the whole business handled with the particular skill that made itself invisible to anyone not specifically looking. She was specifically looking. She had been specifically looking for some months now and had grown reasonably confident in her ability to recognise the signature of care that went into work meant never to be noticed.
She did not ask what the panel was for. She suspected she would not be told, and she suspected further that asking would end the conversation considerably faster than it was already ending on its own.
“Could I leave a card?”
“You can leave a card.”
Gosie left a card. She did not expect it to produce anything and said as much to herself on the way back down the lane, past the poplars, past a gate that had been left slightly open in a way that felt less like carelessness than like a building that had stopped expecting visitors of any kind years ago and had simply never bothered to fix the latch.
She had the name confirmed. Fenhurst and Rhys was Fenella Burnish, working alone or nearly alone, out in the Fens, on glass that arrived and left the workshop without anyone outside it being told what it was or where it was going.
It was not nothing. It was, once again, simply not the answer.
Gosie stood at the end of the lane for a moment, looking back at the low roofline and its careful north facing skylights, and thought that a workshop this quiet, this well hidden, this thoroughly organised around not being asked questions, was either entirely uninteresting or was the most interesting thing she had found since Ripon.
She rather thought it was not the first one.
She took out her notebook. Fenhurst and Rhys, she wrote. Fenella Burnish. Then, because the workbench and the half leaded panel and the offcuts in blues and ambers were still sitting quite clearly in her mind, she sketched what she had seen and wrote underneath: worth watching.
Gosie put the notebook away and walked back towards the car. It was as she began the drive back towards the main drove that she realised where she was.
@ChristmasStars was not far from here. Gosie had been to the old farmhouse before, out beyond a line of wind bent trees with fen water glinting black beyond the fields, and she was fairly sure the workshop lane joined the same road eventually if she went west rather than back the way she’d come.
It seemed, on reflection, worth a detour.
https://myrtlelion.substack.com/p/5-out-in-the-fens