6. The Correspondence
In which communication is attempted…
@ChristmasStars made tea while Gosie tried the telephone number on the card she had not been given. She had instead copied the number from a delivery van parked outside the workshop, a piece of initiative she had not mentioned to anyone and did not intend to.
It rang eleven times. Just as Gosie was about to end the call, a voice that was not the apprentice’s said conservation studio, and then said Fenella does not take calls without an appointment. Before Gosie could clarify that this was in fact why she was calling, the call ended with the particular finality of someone who had said this sentence a great many times and had long ago stopped finding it interesting.
“Well,” said ChristmasStars, setting down two cups, “that’s phones dealt with.”
Gosie looked at the details she had copied down from the van. There was an email address as well as the number.
“I could try email,” she said.
“You should try email.”
Gosie tried email. This took longer, partly because she wanted to get the tone right, professional but not officious, informed but not alarming, and partly because ChristmasStars kept looking over her shoulder and suggesting adjustments. This made the email progressively less like something Fenella Burnish would answer and more like something ChristmasStars would enjoy receiving.
“Take out warmest regards,” said ChristmasStars. “Too warm. She’ll think you want something.”
“I do want something.”
“Yes, but she mustn’t know you know that.”
The email went out some forty minutes later, considerably shorter than its first draft and considerably colder. A reply arrived almost at once, instant enough to make Gosie wonder whether it had been read at all.
It was an automatic reply. Fenella Burnish does not respond to emails without a prior appointment. Please write instead.
“Well,” said ChristmasStars, reading it over her shoulder, “that settles email.”
Gosie closed the laptop.
“Now a letter,” said ChristmasStars.
“It just told me to write instead,” said Gosie.
“Well then,” said ChristmasStars. “It’s practically an invitation.”
ChristmasStars was already rummaging in a drawer that appeared to contain nothing but stationery, most of it a shade of cream that suggested it had been purchased with some ceremony. She produced a sheet of Bluestocking notepaper, the small blue crest at the top slightly crooked in a way that indicated it had been printed by Galley and Gutter rather than by a professional printer.
She set it in front of Gosie with the confidence of someone who considered the matter substantially resolved.
“She’s a glass conservator in the Fens,” said Gosie. “I don’t think Bluestocking notepaper will mean anything to her.”
“It means something to everyone eventually,” said ChristmasStars, in the tone of a cat who had watched this exact scepticism fail before and expected to watch it fail again.
Gosie wrote the letter. It said, in substantially more words than the email, that she hoped Ms Burnish would forgive an unannounced enquiry, that she had visited the workshop recently and understood entirely that appointments were required, and that she would be glad of a little of her time when it was convenient, regarding a small matter of shared interest in cathedral glass. She did not mention Durham. She did not mention Ripon. She did not mention the symbol. She signed it, addressed an envelope, put the letter inside, sealed it, and ChristmasStars drove them both to the nearest postbox with the solemnity of someone attending a small funeral. She hoped that was enough.
“Now we wait,” said ChristmasStars.
“For how long?”
“Days. Weeks, possibly, given what you’ve told me about her.” She said this without concern, the way one might discuss weather rather than a plan.
Gosie considered this. Days of waiting, however good the tea, was not a plan so much as an absence of one.
“In the meantime,” said ChristmasStars, already reaching for the car keys, “Cambridge.”
“Cambridge doesn’t have a chapter house.”
“Cambridge has King’s, Trinity, Great St Mary’s and roughly a dozen other places with more stained glass per square foot than anywhere else in the country, and you’ve spent three months looking exclusively at chapter houses. It seems worth broadening your education while we wait for the post.”
There was, Gosie had to admit, a logic to this that did not entirely rest on ChristmasStars simply wanting a day out.
King’s College Chapel was, whatever else could be said about the search, extraordinary. The great east window rose the full height of the building in a way that made conversation feel briefly unnecessary. Gosie stood beneath it for a considerable time, notebook open, camera ready, finding nothing, and finding it very beautiful while she found nothing.
Trinity was similar, if smaller, if quieter, if equally free of anything resembling a circle crossed by three diagonal lines.
Great St Mary’s had a verger who talked for twenty minutes about a restoration in the nineties that had nothing whatsoever to do with Talmere, funded instead by a local trust with a name so resolutely unglamorous that Gosie wrote it down anyway, out of a completeness she suspected was becoming a personality trait.
By the time they reached the fourth chapel, a smaller one ChristmasStars insisted was underrated and everyone else insisted was closed for a private function, Gosie had photographed a great many beautiful windows and confirmed that Cambridge, whatever it was, was not where the Margrave’s money had gone.
“Nothing,” she said, on the walk back to the car.
“Nothing today,” said ChristmasStars, entirely unbothered, as though today and eventually were simply different words for the same certainty. “The letter’s still in the post.”
https://myrtlelion.substack.com/p/6-the-correspondence