66. Comparison
In which Gantry gets a hard hat…
A minute after Ellie Harris told her to bring the window down to her, Fenella Burnish was still standing on the flagstones beside her, and Gemma Glasswing’s replica window was still hanging from the rope at the top of the scaffold.
“Bring the window down, please,” said Ellie Harris.
Fenella shook out her wings to go back up the way she had come.
“No,” said Ellie Harris. “Nobody flies on my scaffold. It isn’t in the risk assessment.”
“I flew down.”
“Which is why I’m mentioning it.”
Fenella folded her wings away inside the olive brown coat, went to the foot of the scaffolding and began to climb one rung at a time. Everyone stood behind the yellow line and watched her. At the top she spoke to the woman at the winch who began to unwind the rope.
Gemma Glasswing’s pane began to descend.
Graphic said nothing, just watched it all the way, as though she could hold it together by looking, and she did not breathe out until the window hung a hand’s width above the flagstones. The woman at the winch climbed down the scaffolding a great deal faster than Fenella had climbed up it, and she and the verger took hold of the window between them.
They laid it on the mirrored table next to the original. Two women in deep water blue lying side by side, each with three keys on a ring and a heavy purse at her belt. The gerbils climbed onto the plinth of the nearest pillar to see over the edge.
“They’re twins!” said Gantry, and the vaulting echoed back twins three times. “CAN I HAVE A HARD HAT?”
Ellie Harris looked relieved to be asked something she had a procedure for and handed Gantry a hard hat. It went over Gantry’s ears, then her shoulders, and came to rest on the flagstones with Gantry somewhere inside it.
“IT’S VERY DARK IN HERE,” she said. There was a muffled echo.
“That’s what the crate was like,” said Gimbal.
Ellie Harris turned back to the table and looked at the keys on one ring and then at the keys on the other. She bent down until her nose was nearly on the glass.
“I can’t tell them apart,” she said, as though this were a fault in the windows. “Apart from the crack.”
“Nobody can,” said Gosie. “You need to see the light coming through them.”
Ellie Harris looked across the nave at the north aisle, where the morning light came through the windows clear and grey.
“Over there?”
“Over there.”
“I’ll carry one,” said Griffin.
“I’ll carry the other,” said Gimbal.
Ellie Harris looked down at the gerbils and then at the windows, each of which was roughly the size of a door. She opened the risk assessment, turned over two pages, and closed it again.
“The verger,” she said, “and you,” to the woman at the winch. “The windows can stay on the mirrored table. It’s on wheels, so you can push it over – carefully.”
The verger and the woman at the winch pushed the table slowly toward the north end of the nave. They stood either side of the original window, raised it upright in front of the windows and the light poured through it.
The glass was not even. In places the blue was almost as deep as ink, but at the woman’s shoulder it thinned almost to grey. There was a streak through the purse like a ripple left in sand, and a bubble in the hem the size of a lentil. The reflection thrown onto the flagstones at their feet was darker in one corner than the other, as if the glass had never quite settled on what colour it was.
Ellie Harris took the photograph out of the restoration file and held it up beside the original window. The crack ran across the lower corner in the photograph and across the lower corner of the glass, fine and pale, the same length, with the same small kink near the end.
Then the verger and the woman at the winch laid the original down carefully on the table and stood the replica upright. The blue came through the glass in the same way from one edge to the other. It was a beautiful blue. On the flagstones the light shone as flat and even as a carpet tile.
Gosie did not look at the windows. She had spent three months learning how old glass shows the light, and she already knew. She watched Ellie Harris looking at them instead.
Ellie Harris stared at the new glass and then at the light on the flagstones. Then she held the photograph up next to the copy. The lower corner was perfect. “Somebody,” she said, “has been very careful.”
@Hedgehogforshort came and stood beside Gosie and also looked at the blue light on the floor. “Is that what you saw at Norwich?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“You might have said.”
“I did say,” said Gosie. “You told me I wasn’t a glazier.”
Hedgehog looked at the floor a little longer. “No,” she said. “You’re not. But you do know your glass.”
Before Gosie could reply she heard a scraping sound and she turned towards the south nave where the scaffolding was. She could see a hard hat crossing the flagstones on its own. It went a short way, stopped, turned a little and set off again in a completely different direction. Then the hard hat walked into the base of a pillar and stopped.
“HELLO?” it said. “WHERE HAS EVERYONE GONE?”
“GONE, GONE, GONE,” came the echo.
Gimbal walked across the nave and lifted the edge of the hard hat. Gantry came out from under it and looked at the empty space where the table had been.
“YOU MOVED THE WINDOWS,” she said.
Ellie put the photograph back, tucked the file under her arm and turned to the party, the verger, the woman at the winch, and a family of four who had drifted up from the west door with an audio guide and were now pretending to listen to it.
“Right,” she said. “Nothing is getting installed today. The original needs to be properly restored, by a studio of my choosing, to a specification the Fabric Advisory Committee has approved. The Dean will have a view, the insurers will need to be told and they will write back to me. That will take some weeks.” She looked at MyrtleLion. “I can’t keep the original on site for all that time. The Commissioners can hold it until I’ve appointed somebody.”
MyrtleLion made a tick on her clipboard.
“And the replica?” asked Hedgehog, nodding at the copy.
“It stays here,” said Ellie Harris, “until somebody can tell me in writing why a replica was made. And I need to question Fenella Burnish.”
She turned towards the scaffold, but Fenella had disappeared.
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