22. The Curator
In which fragile glass is discussed…
Before Gosie could glance at the symbol, they were interrupted.
“Can I help you?” said a woman who had crossed the gallery very quickly to join them. “I’m Simone. I’m the curator. I see you’ve found The Visitation.”
“It’s beautiful,” said Gosie, which was true.
“It’s part of a set of six main lights and tracery,” said Simone, warming immediately. “Scenes From the Life of the Virgin, from the St John the Baptist parish church at Hadzor, in Hereford and Worcester. Four of the lights are on display. These two, and The Annunciation you’ll have passed by the entrance.” She glanced back up the gallery towards two similar panels of stained-glass depicting Gabriel on the left telling Mary on the right that God had blessed her with a child who would become the Son of God. “One of our earliest acquisitions,” continued Simone. “They came to us in 1976, a gift from the Diocese of Worcester when the church was permanently closed.”
“And their placement?” asked @AngleofRepose.
“It’s a matter of space and ceiling height. They are over two metres tall and when the display cases were built in the 1990s, the only way to show them was at an angle,” said Simone. “Eventually we want to relocate. The access via the staircase is too steep for many visitors, and we don’t have enough space to show as much of the collection as we want. When we do move, they will be rehung side by side.”
“How do all the windows come to be here?” asked Gosie.
“Every way you can think of,” said Simone. “Bequests. Deconsecrated churches, glass taken out before the developers move in. Auction, when a manor house is broken up. Genuinely some of it is rescued from skips.”
“And glass from a cathedral? Too fragile ever to go back in? Would that come here too?”
“It depends what comes out,” said Simone. “During a restoration most of the glass gets conserved and goes back in, but there will be small pieces, fills, odd fragments, edge bits that have failed and are replaced, and mostly that’s the end of them. Nobody offers a museum a corner of a border. It’s only when a larger section comes out whole and genuinely can’t be reinstalled that anyone thinks of us. And not always then. Chapter clerks have long memories and longer basements.”
“How large is larger?” asked Angle.
“A scene,” said Simone. “A figure, a roundel. You’ll find some pieces here that were part of a larger window. Something a visitor would stand in front of. Anything under that size never reaches us. That’s why most of what we have is from deconsecrated churches.”
Gosie thought about a workshop that smelled of hot metal, and glass in every colour imaginable stacked in racks along one wall, and cut and painted pieces of glass leaving flat, laid loose in a frame built to the original’s size and packed with straw where the lead would join them. Whole scenes, whole figures, well over the size where the glass would be thrown away.
“If a cathedral withdrew a whole scene,” she said. “Something too fragile ever to go back in the window, it would come to you?”
“It would be very unlikely for a whole scene not to be reinstalled, because any pieces too fragile are replaced during restoration,” said Simone. “As the only stained-glass museum in the country, we would expect a phone call at least, as we are the obvious home.”
“Anything recently? Durham, say. Or Ripon?”
“No,” said Simone, and she did not even need to think about it, which was somehow the most convincing part. “Nothing of that kind has come in since I started here, and that’s twenty-three years. I would remember.”
“Where would it go, then?” asked Gosie. “If not here?”
“Whole pieces that can be reinstalled would go to the Stained Glass Repository. That’s run by the Worshipful Company of Glaziers. They rescue stained glass from churches that are being closed or repurposed and hold them in its repository until they can be relocated to a new space. Otherwise, a cathedral might store its own pieces in a triforium or crypt.” Simone heard her own answer and visibly declined to believe it. “But in reality, unless a church is being closed, it is extremely rare for whole pieces to be removed. Do go and see The Annunciation properly on your way out. It is frequently displayed in medieval exhibitions as one of the finest examples of medieval glass in the world,” and with that she walked back to her office.
Angle had the torch out again before Simone had taken more than three steps, and this time nothing stood between Gosie and the mark. Her eye did what it had been doing for weeks without being askedf. It left the raking light and Angle’s hands and dropped, properly, for the first time, to the lead.
The symbol was stamped into the lead frame. But it wasn’t a circle. It was a curve that rose and rounded over like a headland seen from the sea, land shouldering up out of water. At the bottom right it gave up the curve altogether and ran off in a short trailing tail, the way a coastline extends into the sea. Three evenly-spaced diagonal lines crossed the top of the loop at an angle from bottom left to top right.
Gosie looked at it and went very still.
fan
She had seen this symbol before, not something like it. This exact symbol, the curve like a headland. Not in a catalogue. On a screen, in Android’s lab, a lifetime ago, ghosted out of the under-drawing of a painting that @ifIwerenotanandroid had said was an identical copy. A tiny cartographic flourish tucked where no one would look.
“I’ve seen this before,” she said, under her breath, to the lead.
“So have I,” said Angle, “but never all of it at once.”
She laid the torch flat along the lead frame so the impression stood up out of the metal, then went through the prints without hurrying, past Durham, past Ripon, until she came to the enlargement of the symbol in Norwich Cathedral. The familiar Mark of the Margrave, a closed circle, three lines struck straight across the middle, with a pale sliver of crescent showing at its north-west edge, where the stamp had sat off true.
Angle held the picture of the sliver against the frame, beside the symbol, and moved it until the curve of the crescent lay exactly along the curve in the lead.
“It fits,” she said. “It’s not a variant and it’s not a coincidence. The sliver at Norwich is a piece of this.” She sat back on her heels and looked at the symbol in the frame for a long moment. “This is what is underneath the Mark of the Margrave.”
https://myrtlelion.substack.com/p/22-the-curator