43. Musings on Sweden
In which a number means a place…
@Hedgehogforshort had the courier’s words written on a beer mat in front of her, receipt required, same as the last one. She turned to Griffin. “When you read the register, did you see Sweden? Umeå? Anything Scandinavian at all?”
“No,” said Griffin. “Places I had heard of, one after another, and then a number and not a place.”
“Gimbal?”
“The same,” said Gimbal. “It had a number. Every other row had a place.”
“So the courier has sent a crate to this woman before,” said Hedgehog, “and either it is on the register under a cathedral’s name, or it is not on the register at all.” She put the pen down on the mat. “I had three questions. One was what is on the spreadsheet. We have that now, or as much of it as Griffin could reach. Two was whether Fenella marks her windows, which we don’t know yet, and the third was where the restored windows go when they leave the workshop. I assumed the answer would be a cathedral or smuggled to a secret location for the Reconstructionists.”
“Maybe Pernilla Ågren in Umeå is the secret location,” said Gosie.
“I doubt it,” said @AngleofRepose and she turned her laptop towards Gosie so she could see Pernilla Ågren’s website. “Pernilla Ågren is an artist. In glass. From Street View her address looks like a studio.” Gosie looked at the images of beautiful glass on the website for some time. The artwork looked as though glass had been poured rather than cut, and with no explanatory text the artist was clearly letting the photographs speak for themselves.
“Then I have to go and talk to Pernilla Ågren,” said Gosie.
“Not on your own,” said Hedgehog.
“I will go with you,” said @EmpressaurusKitty, who had just arrived with Kitty. “I’ve been in Norway for two weeks. There were fjords. I approved of them. It is practically the same journey.”
“Norway is a different country,” said Girdle.
“Scandinavia is Scandinavia,” said Empressaurus, as if that settled the matter. “And there is Kitty,” she continued. “You want to know what is arriving in crates at the studio of a woman none of you has ever met. A party of gerbils in northern Sweden will be noticed. A cat will not. A cat walks into a studio, sits down in the best light, and the artist is pleased, and works round her, and says things over her head. Nobody in the history of the world has ever asked a cat its business.”
Kitty came the length of the bar, sat down on Angle’s open notebook, directly on the entry about Umeå, and stayed there. And so, it was decided that Gosie and Empressaurus would head to Sweden with Kitty as soon as refreshments and packing could be completed, which meant imminently.
@ChristmasStars heard the post van arriving in the yard and went out to see what was being delivered. She returned very quickly with a fat envelope of brown paper, tied round with string, addressed in the looping hand they all knew, with a hard cylindrical weight in one corner.
“@fuzzypuffling,” she said. “Again.”
Glossy’s door opened before anyone had knocked on it. She cut the string, slid the canister out into her paw, and wrote a number on it. “There is no queue at present,” she said, and closed the door.
Christmas Stars drew out the folded sheets of handcrafted paper, sat down properly, and began to read aloud.
Dear all,
I have been to see King Arthur.
“The Wonders of the West Country,” said Grisaille, from something written down, “records that King Arthur is not dead but sleeping under a hill in Cornwall, and will wake when England has need of him.”
“That is indeed what the legend says. Thank you, Grisaille,” said Christmas Stars and went on.
After Truro I stayed in Cornwall, and went north to Tintagel, where everybody goes for the castle on the headland, which is a ruin, and romantic, and full of people. I originally wanted to see the castle too. But I also saw King Arthur’s Great Halls in the village, on Fore Street.
It was built in the 1930s by a man called Frederick Thomas Glasscock, who made a fortune in custard powder and spent it on chivalry. He raised a great hall of Cornish granite, with a round table and a throne, as the home of a fellowship devoted to the knightly virtues, and then he filled it with windows. Seventy two of them, they will tell you at the door, every one of them made by Veronica Whall, daughter of Christopher Whall, and a glazier greater than her father, which you can tell when you see the windows themselves.
In the Great Exhibition Hall there are six great windows telling the Arthurian legends, three at each end, and I stood longest in front of Lancelot and Guinevere where Lancelot leans down towards her before the Knights depart on the Quest for the Holy Grail. It was astonishing. I stood there long enough that a man with a lanyard came over and asked whether I was quite well.
“Is Guinevere a gerbil?” asked Gateau.
The gerbils considered this.
“Her name does begin with a G,” said Glacé.
The gerbils nodded. Christmas Stars turned the notepaper over and went on reading.
Now you will have guessed what is coming, because I am writing at this length. Low in the border leading of that window I saw a circle with three lines crossing it diagonally. I photographed it in every light the afternoon offered, and the film is in this envelope.
There is a mark at Tintagel, and King Arthur’s Great Halls is not a cathedral.
Very best wishes, Fuzzypuffling.
https://myrtlelion.substack.com/p/43-musings-on-sweden