Cassius Brown And The Green Chapel

‘They’ve put fourteenth century on the label,’ Harriet said. ‘I thought you ought to see it before someone makes the label out of brass.’ Cassius Brown set his bag beneath the worktable and studied the carved stone on its padded supports. It was about the size of a substantial loaf, although considerably less appetising: a weathered limestone head, the nose broken away, with deep grooves representing hair on either side of a solemn face. A paper tag attached to the crate proclaimed it the head of a medieval saint, recovered from the ruins of a priory. Underneath, in smaller type, someone had written probably St John. ‘He’s had a hard morning,’ Cassius said. ‘His morning has lasted six hundred years. I’d like to see how you look.’ Cassius bent closer. The stone belonged to a local charitable collection temporarily stored in university rooms while its gallery was refurbished. Nobody doubted that the head was old. The disagreement concerned how old it was, and whether it had come from the demolished priory named in a nineteenth-century catalogue. A volunteer had promoted that possibility into a certainty on the display label, and a trustee had spotted the change just before the printing deadline. Cassius had been called in on less interesting disputes, generally for better money. ‘Where’s the catalogue?’ he asked. Harriet indicated a folder positioned beyond the reach of the stone dust. She had arranged the accompanying material in the order he would need it, which was generous of her, although she would have denied the generosity if asked. Her expertise was manuscript conservation and codicology, and the carved object would ordinarily have gone to one of his colleagues. The awkward part was a folded list of possessions found among the collection’s papers, supposedly documenting the priory’s dispersal. Harriet had been asked whether the list was contemporary. It was not, or at least not in the way the trustees hoped. ‘Tell me what they think they have,’ Cassius said. ‘A saint from St Oswin’s Priory, rescued when the buildings came down. Their catalogue from 1886 says it was “understood to derive” from there. By 1923 it was “formerly belonging”. In the new display it has become “removed from the priory on its dissolution”. We’ll have it personally rescued by Henry VIII by Christmas.’ Cassius opened the folder and worked his way through the accompanying photographs. ‘I take it there’s no useful bill of sale.’ ‘A receipt for three pounds ten shillings, paid to a builder in 1879. It says “stone head and other fragments”, without identifying which is which. The papers were donated by the builder’s grandson, so they’ve been through at least two rounds of somebody deciding what was worth keeping.’ Harriet pushed the catalogue photograph towards him. ‘The builder’s yard might have been photographed, if we’re lucky.’ He examined the back of the carving. The original bedding surface had been cut away at a shallow angle, and a rectangular notch ran across one shoulder. Someone had adapted it to fit a later setting, probably outdoors; small flecks of hard grey mortar remained in the notch. He measured the surviving width, then looked again at the photograph of the head in the 1886 catalogue. It had been posed on an ornamental column in a garden, with a climbing rose behind it. ‘That might help. Look at this.’ Cassius turned the carving a fraction on its support so Harriet could see the rectangular notch. ‘It could have been part of a doorway, but I wouldn’t put money on the saint. Those grooves might be hair, or they might be a hood. And the expression is fairly standard for someone being made to hold up a roof.’ Harriet came around the table to see the notch. Her dark hair was pinned up without much concern for whether it stayed that way, and the pencil behind her ear had left a grey mark at her temple. Cassius had known her long enough to recognise the stages of a difficult working day from the state of that pencil. Today she was barely past lunch. ‘So you’re going to tell them they’ve got a gargoyle,’ Harriet said, peering at the cut surface. ‘A corbel head, possibly. Gargoyle would require a water spout, and this gentleman has quite enough problems without acquiring plumbing.’ Cassius took another measurement and set the rule beside the folder. ‘May I see the disputed list?’ She drew a protective sheet away from a photograph. The original document, housed at the conservation studio where Harriet worked, was too fragile for repeated handling. The photograph showed cramped nineteenth-century handwriting, neatly ruled columns and a heading that appeared, at first glance, to place its contents in the reign of Henry VIII. A later signature had been added at the bottom. ‘The date in the heading is an antiquarian’s reconstruction,’ Harriet said. ‘Same hand as the transcription underneath. There are two genuine sixteenth-century phrases copied into the middle, probably from a document that no longer survives, but nothing here says this particular carving came from the priory. They’ve persuaded themselves the list and the head arrived together.’ Cassius read the transcription through, then checked the photographed signature. ‘You could have told me all this over the telephone.’ ‘I did, on Tuesday. You said you’d rather see the stone for yourself.’ Harriet gathered the loose photographs before they could slide under his notes. ‘And you told them you wouldn’t charge your full consultancy rate, so I’m afraid they’ve taken you at your word.’ ‘I was hoping nobody would remember that last part.’ He had been assisting the collection on and off for years, and he liked the people who ran it. He rather liked the head, too, whatever its origins: the damage had given its solemn expression an almost conversational quality. He took photographs and noted the surviving mortar before they returned it to its protective covering. The meeting with the gallery manager lasted less than half an hour. Cassius explained that the stone was likely medieval, although its exact date and original architectural function remained uncertain. The priory attribution was plausible enough to include as a possibility, but it had not been established. He suggested wording that would let the public enjoy the object without presenting the trustees’ favourite story as fact. The gallery manager, who had a reopening to arrange and too few volunteers, stared at the revised label on her laptop while a printer rang unanswered on the desk beside her. ‘“Traditionally associated with St Oswin’s Priory”,’ she read. ‘Could we say “believed to have come from”? It’s a little warmer, isn’t it?’ ‘You can, but it implies more evidence than we’ve got.’ Cassius showed her the line in the 1886 catalogue. ‘Their own wording was cautious. We’ve lost that somewhere along the way.’ ‘Visitors won’t notice. Well, most won’t.’ She glanced at the phone. ‘Our chairman certainly will, and he’s the one who wanted “on its dissolution” in the first place.’ ‘He can still tell people the traditional story. Nobody is taking that away from him.’ She laughed reluctantly and asked whether she could have his photographs for the display notes. He agreed, subject to the collection retaining their original captions. When he and Harriet stepped back into the corridor, the stone was back in its crate and the manager was arguing with a printer on the phone. ‘You enjoy being a nuisance,’ Harriet said when they were back in the corridor, waiting for a technician to wheel the crate into storage. ‘I spent half an hour looking at the thing. The trustees seem to have spent considerably longer writing what they’d like it to be.’ ‘The manager’s going to have to explain that to the chairman.’ Harriet retrieved a folder from the studio office and slipped it beneath her arm. ‘Are you still going down to Staffordshire?’ ‘Tomorrow. There’s a former dye works outside Leek, two phases of rebuilding and an internal wall the owners would like to remove. The consultant wants a second opinion on the mapping before somebody starts taking bricks out.’ ‘How glamorous. Couldn’t one of your postgrads do it?’ ‘The glamour comes with the mileage allowance. They asked for me, and I owe the consultant a favour. Besides, it’ll be pleasant to get over that way again.’ He had travelled through the Moorlands a few times during his service, although the Army’s interest in landscapes had generally been directed towards crossing them without becoming stuck. Later he had gone back on his own account to walk and visit sites. It was a part of England he liked, with towns that carried their industrial past in buildings still being used and hills that rose quickly enough to change the weather before lunch. They crossed the campus towards the café, which was crowded with students taking long lunches and members of staff attempting to take short ones. Cassius queued for two coffees while Harriet secured a table beneath an enormous notice advertising a graduate careers event. When he arrived, she was replying to a message from the owner of a parish register she was helping to conserve. ‘Is that the parish register kept above the radiator?’ Cassius asked as he put her coffee beside the phone. He’d heard about the register twice already; the owner was remarkably reluctant to accept that heat was bad for old paper. ‘It is. He says the radiator is hardly ever on, which apparently settles the matter.’ Harriet put her phone facedown and unwrapped her sandwich. ‘I’m trying a drawing of what happens to the binding before I write a third email.’ Cassius opened the sandwich he had bought. The afternoon’s teaching still lay ahead of him: a small seminar on material culture and documentary attribution, followed by an unpromising meeting about next year’s modules. While they ate, Harriet asked whether he’d agreed to supervise another doctoral student, and he admitted that he had. She already knew; a colleague had mentioned the application that morning. ‘One day you’ll learn to say no to interesting work,’ she said. ‘Then the rest of us will know something terrible has happened.’ ‘You’re hardly the person to lecture me. You once worked an entire bank holiday because a seventeenth-century account book had been mended with part of a medieval sermon.’ ‘The writing was excellent. The sermon wasn’t, particularly, but I wouldn’t have known that if I’d spent the holiday in the garden.’ Cassius laughed, reaching for the napkins before his sandwich could make a mess of the papers between them. With Harriet there was little need to soften an opinion or feign interest; if one of them had found something peculiar, the other usually wanted to hear about it. They had also spent enough time together to know when a discussion was finished. Harriet moved on to an awkward student query without waiting for him to defend his latest commitment. When the coffees were finished, Harriet checked the time. ‘How long are you in Leek? There’s a bookseller there I’ve been meaning to visit, though please don’t come back with another box of damp histories just because they’re cheap.’ ‘One night if the site visit behaves itself, possibly two. And those books were only damp when I bought them.’ ‘There were thirty-two volumes, Cassius.’ ‘Thirty-one. One turned out to be a parish magazine.’ He put the empty cup on the tray and gathered his things. ‘I’ll have a look for your bookseller if I’ve time.’ They talked briefly about the gallery reopening and a mutual colleague’s retirement before separating outside the teaching building. Harriet took the conservation folder back towards her studio; Cassius continued to the afternoon seminar, already thinking about the dates on the dye works plans and whether the consultant would have the original drawings ready for him. Cassius spent the remainder of the afternoon listening to students argue about whether an object’s physical history could ever be separated from the history people attached to it. He had set them a collection of ordinary cases: repaired pottery, a misidentified coin hoard, an architectural fragment whose ownership had been disputed for decades. The debate was pleasingly untidy. One student produced an answer he hadn’t considered, another had misread a source, and the most outspoken member of the group eventually conceded that photographs taken before an excavation could be at least as useful as the artefacts recovered afterwards. He left the building at half past five, called his mother while walking back towards his office, and promised he would be home in time for the family lunch on Sunday. She asked whether Staffordshire was near Stoke, whether he would be driving and whether he had eaten anything other than sandwiches. He answered the first two questions accurately and the third diplomatically. Back in his office, he found the old gallery photograph Harriet had forwarded to him. The stone head sat among its roses in an extravagant Victorian garden, apparently just as comfortable there as it had been in a medieval wall. He drafted a short note suggesting the trustees check the builder’s papers before adopting even the qualified priory attribution, then packed the plans and printed maps he would need for Leek. The site consultant had sent him the address of the dye works and directions to his accommodation. There was also an apology about parking and a recommendation for somewhere to eat. Cassius checked the route, confirmed the appointment and put the documents in a canvas folder beside his car keys. Before leaving he copied the consultant’s directions onto his phone, found a pair of work boots in the car and carried the plans home with him. The missing information on the dye works’ nineteenth-century extensions could be dealt with on site; for tonight, all he needed was to be on the road at a reasonable hour.