13. Fenella Burnish
In which the wait is finally over…
“You’re spectacular!” said Griffin, before she could stop herself, and she was not the only one looking. Every eye in the room had moved the same way, Gosie, Hedgehog, Gimbal and Graphic all seeing the same blaze of orange and scarlet and gold, the colours of Fenella Burnish’s plumage catching the light from every skylight at once.
“I thought only the males could be this gorgeous,” said Hedgehog.
“That’s what we want you to think.” Fenella tipped her head toward the door. They could see a hatstand, a coat of feathers hanging from it, drab olive brown, a thin band of gold worked through the plumage below. Nobody said anything, but every one of them understood.
“I have your letters. All three,” said Fenella and turned to the workbench where a folder already sat waiting, its edge just visible with violet ink along one side.
She opened it the way another glazier might open an invoice, a fact rather than an announcement, and laid the first sheet flat, Gosie’s own hand, plain, unadorned, folded and refolded enough times that the creases had gone soft.
She touched the crest at the top corner rather than the paper itself. “That’s hand printed,” she said. “Not a plate, not anything bought in. Somebody set that by hand, carefully, and it sits very slightly off centre, the way these things do when a hand does them rather than a machine.” She said it plainly, without any suggestion it wanted correcting. “I liked it for that. It’s the kind of thing nobody would think to fake.”
She set it aside and drew out the second, the ivy worked along its margin in deep green, the compass rose in the corner still catching the light where the gold sat.
“This is the one I couldn’t put down,” she said, and touched the low corner of the ivy where a single stroke had been corrected, twice, the second correction finer than the first. “I told you as much already. What I didn’t tell you is what the gold is doing here.” She tilted the letter toward the skylight, the way she might have tilted a pane to check the lead. “That’s leaf, not paint. Real leaf laid and burnished. Most workshops I know can’t get it to sit on paper without cracking it, paper being considerably less forgiving than glass, which wants to hold a thing rather than simply carry it. Whoever did this either learned the technique somewhere I’d like to know about, or worked it out alone, which I’d like to know about rather more.”
Nobody answered. Graphic’s ears had gone deep pink.
“She practised on the backs of the delivery notes first,” said Gimbal, who had been watching Graphic rather than the letters. “There’s a stack of them behind the bar. Nobody’s allowed to bin them.”
“Naturally,” said Fenella, and did not look away from Graphic until Graphic, with visible effort, met her eye and said nothing at all, which seemed to satisfy her as much as an answer would have.
She drew out the third letter last, the one that had arrived, as she put it, considerably thicker than the previous two and laid its enclosures out one at a time as though setting a small table. Griffin’s diagram first, unfolded to its full and improbable size, room after room after room of the Bluestocking rendered in a hand so exact it bordered on the forensic.
“The mapmaker,” Fenella said, and Griffin straightened so fast she nearly caught the edge of the bench. “I’ve had architects hand me less careful work, and charge for it. I counted the rooms twice, out of curiosity, and gave up both times, which either means your pub is considerably larger than any pub has a right to be, or that whoever drew it understands something about the place I don’t.”
“It has what it needs, when it needs it,” said Griffin, which was true.
“That’s rather what I suspected,” said Fenella. “And yet here it all is, drawn as though it holds still long enough to be measured.”
“I extrapolate,” said Griffin, with the air of someone who had been waiting a very long time to use that word aloud.
Fenella moved on before this could be examined further, to the small fan of colour swatches, shade laid against shade with a discipline that suggested considerable judgment behind it. “Whoever chose these understood that restraint is harder than range,” she said, without asking whose work it was, already reaching for the last piece.
The flower came out from the corner of the envelope where it had been pressed flat and dry, small, pale, unremarkable to anyone who hadn’t spent a working life with their hands in leaded glass and marshland both.
“I said this was a lovely touch,” Fenella said. “I meant it, and I also meant rather more than that.” She held it up to the light, the same way she’d held the gold. “This is marsh pea. It grows along the ditches here, and in perhaps three other places in England that I know of, none of them anywhere near where you’d have been standing when you picked it.”
“I didn’t pick it near anywhere,” said Gimbal, faintly. “It was just in with the other pressed things. In the tin.”
“Then someone else picked it first,” said Fenella, “and it found its way into your tin without either of you knowing what you had.” She set it down with more care than the small, dried thing seemed to warrant. “I’d be curious to know where the tin came from, when you have a moment to think about it.”
Gimbal, who had spent the better part of the last week certain she already knew exactly what she’d contributed, looked, for the first time since arriving, considerably less certain of anything at all.
Fenella collected the letters and enclosures from across the bench, and returned them to the folder. She looked round at the five of them properly for the first time since they’d arrived. “Come through,” said Fenella. “You should see the rest of it.” And she was already moving before anyone had answered.
https://myrtlelion.substack.com/p/13-fenella-burnish