Ripon
In which one visit turns out not to have been enough…
The symbol was in the nave.
Not hidden, exactly. Worked into the leading of a window she had walked straight past on her first visit, three diagonal lines crossing a circle, sitting quietly above a scene of some minor saint doing something charitable with loaves.
Gosie looked at it for a long moment.
Ripon had been chapter house number thirty-seven. She had spent two hours in it and found nothing, because the fragment said Chapter House Window Preservation Fund, and Gosie was, if nothing else, a gerbil who read instructions carefully. It had not occurred to her that the Margrave, moving money through Talmere, might be funding glass anywhere a cathedral had glass worth having — not only in chapter houses, which just happened to be where the trail had started.
“Idiot,” she said, without much feeling, the way one might note a spelling error.
She got out her notebook and crossed through Ripon — No with a single decisive line, and wrote beneath it: Ripon — nave, west end, restoration date unclear, ask.
Then she went to find whoever was in charge of asking.
Ripon Cathedral’s conservation officer was called Rosalind, and unlike Judith, she did not have a filing cabinet so much as an entire room, floor to ceiling, with box files labelled in a hand that had clearly given up on being read by anyone but herself.
“The nave glass,” Rosalind said, “went through in stages. Bit of a Frankenstein’s monster, if I’m honest. Different funders, different decades. What are you after specifically?”
“The most recent restoration. Within the last five years, possibly less.”
Rosalind didn’t need to check anything. “That’ll be the Talmere panel. Nice bit of work, very sympathetic to the original glazing. Glazier who did it barely touched the surrounding lead, you’d never know unless you were looking.”
“Was that through their own charitable foundation?”
“No.” Rosalind was already pulling a box down. “That one came through a private foundation, same as their usual arrangement. Don’t ask me the name, it’s never on anything. Just ‘on behalf of’.” She found the sheet and turned it round for Gosie to read.
Gosie read it twice. Same wording as Durham. Same structure entirely: Talmere as the visible hand, a private foundation as the invisible one, no name attached to either the glass or the money.
She sat with the notebook open for some time after Rosalind had gone back to her boxes.
The pattern she had built the whole search around, chapter houses only, because the fragment said chapter house, had just collapsed. If the Margrave’s money went wherever the glass was worth having, then thirty-six other chapter-house dead ends might not be dead ends at all. They might simply be the wrong room.
She thought of Wells. She thought of Canterbury, Lichfield, Salisbury, the locked one in Lincolnshire that had never answered its phone. She thought, with a small and specific unhappiness, of Worcester.
So many cathedrals, and she had only ever looked in one room of each.
“This,” she said to no one, “is going to take longer than I thought.”
Rosalind, who had apparently not gone as far back to her boxes as Gosie assumed, said, “Longer than what?”
Gosie considered how much of this was explicable to a conservation officer with no reason to care, and then she wondered if there was another connection to the restoration at Durham Cathedral.
Rosalind looked faintly surprised to be asked, in the way of someone who assumed nobody else found this interesting. She pulled the file back down and flipped through it. “Conservator of record was a workshop, not an individual. Fenhurst and Rhys. Cambridgeshire, I think, though they travel for work like this.”
“Would they have done Durham as well?”
“Couldn’t tell you. But if you’re after very good, very accurate stained glass conservation, there aren’t many workshops in the country capable of it.” Rosalind closed the file. “These are the best.”
Gosie wrote the name down and underlined it, which she did not often do.
Thirty-six cathedrals had seemed, a moment ago, like thirty-six more weeks. A workshop was one address, one register of past commissions, one considerably shorter list.
https://myrtlelion.substack.com/p/3-ripon