11. The Same Pane
In which Hedgehog asks some questions…
@Hedgehogforshort came down to breakfast with a notebook, a second pen in case the first one failed her, and the particular set to her shoulders that meant she had already decided how this was going to go before anyone else had sat down.
“Graft,” she said. “I want to go through the crate again. From the beginning.”
Graft, halfway through buttering toast, put the knife down. “I told you last night. Twice.”
“Tell me again. In order.”
“It was dark. There were dozens of panes in it, packed edge to edge in straw.”
“Dozens,” Hedgehog repeated, writing it down as though the number itself might later be disputed. “Not one pane set apart from the others. Not wrapped separately.”
“No. Why would there be?”
“I’m establishing what you saw, not what I expect you to have seen.” Hedgehog underlined the word dozens twice. “Go on. You said Gosie’s photograph was the same as one of the panes. Which one?”
Graft said, “The one with the woman holding pointy things. She is standing at a table, with the two pointy things in one hand, and her other hand is flat on a table. There’s a lovely blue background.”
“She wasn’t praying?” said Hedgehog.
“No.”
“Or sewing?”
“No. Nothing like that. I don’t know what she was doing. She had two pointy things in her hand. Lovely blue background.”
“That’s precisely why I’m asking,” said Hedgehog, and wrote something down that took considerably longer than the sentence had.
Griffin, who had been listening from two seats along with the studied innocence of someone who intended to speak the moment an opening presented itself, seized this one. “I saw the background as well. It was very blue. The pointy things were very pointy. I said so at the time.”
“Nobody asked you.”
“I’m corroborating.”
“I don’t need corroboration from someone who wasn’t asked a direct question,” said Hedgehog, not looking up. “What I need is what you personally observed, not what you personally agreed with.”
Griffin considered the distinction, decided she disliked it, and described the pointy things anyway, at length, while Hedgehog’s pen remained motionless over the page.
“It was a clothworker,” said Grisaille.
The pen moved. Grisaille described the image. A woman standing at a table with shears in her right hand, a bolt of cloth unrolled in front of her, a small dog at her feet, and behind her a window with the shutter open onto a town. The border was oak. There was a merchant’s mark in the bottom left corner, which was how you knew who had paid for it.
Graft looked at Grind. Grind looked at Graft.
“Are you completely sure?” said Graft.
“I don’t remember you being on the yacht,” said Grind.
“Yes,” said Grisaille.
Gimbal turned round and looked at the photograph of the stained glass window in Norwich Cathedral. A woman at a table, alone, with a sheet held flat under one hand and the two pointy things open in the other, and blue behind her going all the way up with nothing in it. “There’s no dog,” she said.
“And no town,” said Gasket.
“And there’s nothing in the corner,” said Ganges.
Hedgehog put a line through Grisaille’s description in her notebook.
Girdle, further down the table, announced that she remembered thinking the blue was lovely, too, and she’d said so at the time.
“How many times,” said Gimbal, “would you say you said the blue was lovely?”
“I don’t know. A few.”
“It was at least three,” said Gimbal, and began counting on her fingers to prove it, got to two, lost the thread entirely, and started again from the beginning with undiminished enthusiasm, as though arriving at the number were less interesting than the counting itself.
Hedgehog turned a fresh page. “Girdle. When you say the blue was lovely, do you mean the glass was the same colour blue as in the photograph?”
Girdle opened her mouth, then closed it, then opened it again with rather less certainty than before. “I don’t know. I just thought it was lovely. The blue colour was lovely. Is that wrong?”
“I haven’t said anything is wrong.”
“You’re writing it down like it’s wrong.” Girdle’s chin had begun, very slightly, to tremble. “What if I got it wrong? What if it wasn’t the same blue at all and I’ve just been saying it because Graft said it first and everyone was agreeing and I didn’t want to be the one who hadn’t noticed anything.” Her voice had gone thin and her lower lip would not quite hold still. “What if none of it’s true and it’s just because of me?”
It was @MarieDeGournay, two seats along, who set her cup down and reached across to still Girdle’s paw before Hedgehog could get a word out.
“Nobody’s on trial here,” she said, gently, and not particularly to Hedgehog, though it landed there all the same. “You saw a pretty colour, and you said so. That’s not evidence of anything except that you were paying attention.” She looked at Hedgehog then, without unkindness, but without any give in it either. “You are not a solicitor in this room. They’re only telling you what they remember.”
Hedgehog looked at the notebook, then at Girdle, whose lip was still unsteady, then closed the notebook without writing anything further.
“I only meant to be thorough,” she said.
“I know,” said Marie. “Have some tea.”
Hedgehog had some tea. Then she looked over at Girdle, whose lip had only just steadied. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I wasn’t trying to catch you out. You saw a blue you liked.”
Girdle said, “So it was the right blue?”
“I’m sure it is exactly the right blue,” said Hedgehog, and meant it plainly enough that Girdle managed a small nod, and went back to her toast looking rather more like herself.
Hedgehog eventually looked up at Gosie, who had been watching the whole exchange from across the table without saying anything.
“I need to see that window myself,” Hedgehog said. “Not photographs. Not Graft’s memory of it. The actual glass.” She paused. “Can we go? Today, if possible.”
Gosie considered this for exactly as long as it took to finish her tea. “We can go,” she said.
They went.
The window in Norwich Cathedral was exactly as Graft had described it, and the blue was the exact same blue. Hedgehog saw it the minute she stood in front of it. The pointy things were dividers, held at an angle. The hand, flat against the table.
“That’s it,” said Hedgehog. “That’s exactly the same pane. The exact same blue. Which means the one Graft found in the crate is a copy. A convincing one, since nobody has raised so much as a question about this window since it was restored.”
Gosie had spent three months standing in front of glass of one kind or another, long enough that colour had stopped being the first thing she noticed. What she noticed instead, close to the surface of this particular pane, was the way the light came through it, level and even from edge to edge, without the small unevenness she’d learned to expect elsewhere, the places where old glass thickened and thinned across its own surface and let the light through unevenly with it.
“No,” she said. “This is the copy.”
“You can’t tell that just standing here.”
“I can.”
“You’re not a glazier.”
“No,” said Gosie, and left it there, because there wasn’t a way of putting it that would have meant to Hedgehog what it meant to her, and she had stopped trying to find one.
“So how did the original glass end up in a crate in US Customs with a replica installed in its place, without anyone noticing?” asked Hedgehog.
“Gemma Glasswing,” said Gosie. “Her firm restored this window.”
At that point Gosie’s phone rang.
“It’s @ChristmasStars,” said the voice on the other end, without preamble. “We’ve had a letter. Fenella Burnish wants to see you at her workshop. In ninety minutes.”
https://myrtlelion.substack.com/p/11-the-same-pane