The Glass Painter's Daughter Read online

  ‘Hello,’ I said, trying to sound friendly. ‘Can I help?’

  ‘You’re not, like, sellin’ it, are you? Oh, please don’t let someone else have it.’ Her voice was shaking and her black-lashed eyes great pools of pleading.

  ‘I’m only cleaning it,’ I said gently.

  ‘Oh, I thought…That’s OK then.’ She smiled and it was impossible not to smile back, there was something so sweet and fragile about her. If I’d had to guess her age, I’d have said seventeen or eighteen, but it was hard to tell. Aware of her watching, I laid the angel on the counter and began to work away at the layer of greasy grime.

  Now she was in the shop the girl seemed unsure whether to stay or go. I said, ‘You like her, do you? Well, she certainly is lovely. My dad made her. Come and have a proper look.’

  Shy again, she stepped inside, glancing about at the mirrors and the lampshades and the shelves of glass like Alice entering Wonderland, her mouth slightly open in amazement. Then she tiptoed, as much as one can tiptoe in trainers, over to the counter. I carefully raised the arched window, tilting it until the light brought it to life, and we studied the angel together.

  Clothed in white and pink and gold, the tips of her wings pink also, she stood in a field of flowers, her caramel hair blowing around her heart-shaped face. Dad had made her shortly before I left home, from a design of his own that had a kind of 1970s style, something about the way the hair waved across the face.

  ‘Do you know anything about how stained-glass windows are made?’ I asked the girl.

  She shook her head. ‘No. I…I just like angels. And the glass–it’s so pretty. I really wish I could buy her. Is she a lot of money?’

  ‘She’s not for sale, I’m afraid,’ I said, and watched disappointment and relief struggle in her countenance. Eventually relief won.

  ‘At least I can always come and look at her, then.’

  ‘That’s right. She’ll be here.’

  ‘You see, she’s my angel.’

  Now it was my turn to be confused.

  ‘Everybody has a guardian angel, didn’t you know? And she’s mine.’

  ‘I’m sure we could all do with a little extra help in life,’ I said, wanting neither to encourage this unusual line nor to upset the girl.

  ‘That’s right.’ Her smile transformed her face. All her wariness was gone now. ‘Our angels watch over us wherever we go. So we’re not hurt, see. Or…’ she paused and looked away. ‘They help us if we are hurt.’

  She seemed so unhappy suddenly, that I knew she was talking about herself. Oh heck, now she would come out with some terrible story that I wouldn’t know whether to believe and then I wouldn’t know what to do about it.

  ‘What’s your name?’ I asked, and told her mine.

  ‘Amber,’ she answered. ‘I live at St Martin’s–you know, the hostel?’

  I nodded slowly. ‘My friend works there. Do you know Jo Pryde?’

  ‘Oh yes, she’s nice.’ This response didn’t surprise me one bit. I couldn’t imagine anyone not liking Jo. ‘I’m just there till I get myself sorted out. Find a job and that.’

  ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Well, Amber, I ought to get on. It’s lovely meeting you.’

  ‘Thanks for showing me the angel.’ And she was gone, slipping out in a little sparkling cloud of dust. A trick of the light, of course.

  I considered the question of guardian angels as I finished cleaning this one, which I must now think of as Amber’s. It was a sentimental idea, something out of a Victorian children’s book. Yet what about all those children who fell in the fire, or under horses’ hooves, or who died of scarlet fever? Were their angels looking the other way at the time? Dad used to talk about angels as a source of inspiration. Sometimes when he’d had a good idea for a design he would say, ‘An angel must have passed overhead.’

  Really, I told myself as I hung our angel back in the window, they were beautiful, but the world had moved on. Angels belonged to pictures and stories–and dreams–but surely that was all.

  It wasn’t until late afternoon that I heard Zac’s van in the yard. I opened the back door to see him edging a box out of the boot, and ran out to help. I’d forgotten he had collected the bombed-out window. The box bulged dangerously and I grabbed one splitting side. Together we brought it in and rested it on a table.

  We stood and looked at it for a moment, then Zac opened the flaps, pushed aside the newspaper and drew out the long twisted section from the top. A piece of glass immediately started to fall away, so he hastily laid the whole thing back into the box.

  ‘Haven’t got time to look at it now anyway,’ he said, reaching for Dad’s Day Book, but he couldn’t stop himself glancing back at the box with a look of longing.

  I shut up shop at five, intending to go straight away to see Dad. When I went to say goodbye to Zac though, I found him lifting strips of glass and lead out of the box and laying them out on a length of creamy lining paper that he’d taped onto the table.

  Why couldn’t he have waited? I put down my bag, deciding to see Dad later.

  ‘Shall I help?’ I asked tentatively and was pleased when Zac smiled.

  ‘Good at puzzles, are you?’ he said, moving pieces around on the paper with his long strong fingers.

  In silence we contemplated the elements he’d assembled. There were a number of gold fragments clearly representing drapery. One cluster of white and red was recognisable as a hand curled round a stick. A tinted white piece painted with wavy gold lines must be hair. Zac shifted these around into likely places on the paper, then we tried to build on them using smaller pieces.

  ‘This drapery’s like doing bits of sky in a jigsaw,’ I moaned. ‘There’s a bit with an eye here, look, and this must be the nose. Can you hunt for more face?’

  Zac lifted out all the larger sections from the box and started carefully sifting through pieces at the bottom.

  Eventually we assembled a large part of the face, but this area of the window had suffered the greatest damage. Although it must once have been a single piece of glass, half the features had fragmented. It was like viewing a face beneath a heavily patterned lace veil, impossible to grasp it as a whole. We stared at it glumly for a while. Then Zac unfolded the soft lead around a large section of painted gold that so obviously represented feathers that we both grinned at one another and said together, ‘An angel.’

  Angels, it seemed, were gathering all around me.

  We worked on for another half hour, until there came a point where we ran out of pieces and the picture was only three-quarters complete. Some of the large areas of patterned background and the robes we hadn’t made much sense of, and we couldn’t tell exactly where hands and feet or head should be, though Zac clipped back some of the worst-twisted lead to enable us to try.

  ‘Most of the glass is not in bad condition, really,’ he noted. ‘I reckon the window must have caved in from the force of a nearby explosion rather than receiving a direct hit. What do you think? There’s no blackening, is there?’

  ‘Whatever, we can only go so far without an illustration,’ I said with a sigh.

  Zac looked utterly fed up. ‘Let’s hope the vicar finds an old guidebook then or we’ll have to start searching libraries. Is there anything upstairs here? Didn’t you say your dad had got out all the papers?’

  ‘The original cartoon, you mean? There might be. I’ll look when I get back later. Not now though. I must go to the hospital.’

  When I returned from seeing Dad, it was nearly nine and the phone was ringing in the flat. I snatched up the receiver, anxious that it might be about Dad. But it was Jo.

  ‘It was so lovely to see you last night,’ she said. ‘I’ve got the evening off tomorrow. Would you like to meet up?’

  ‘That would be great,’ I said happily.

  After I’d put the phone down, I tried some scales and arpeggios on my tuba for a while. Tonight the sound was overwhelming in this limited space. Goodness knows what anyone next door must thi
nk. I returned the instrument to its case.

  Remembering the broken angel, I climbed up to the attic, sat down at Dad’s desk and, with a sense of foreboding at the immensity of the task, began sorting through the stacks of ancient files there. Some were dated in a faded copperplate, others bore Dad’s pencilled scribbles–mostly bills or St Ethelberga’s or just a date. Some were merely fragments of paper tied together with rotting ribbon. There were scrolls of all sizes jumbled on the floor by the desk, some of which I unrolled. Designs for windows, none of which I was looking for. In a huge cupboard at the far end of the attic I knew there were hundreds of others like these. And big pattern-books. The phrase ‘needle in a haystack’ was certainly apt in this case.

  What information did I have so far? The entry in the Day Book indicated that the Lady Chapel windows of St Martin’s were made during 1880 and that there had been two of them. There were no further details given, so I picked up several files that bore 1880 dates and started to go through them methodically.

  As I feared, it wasn’t a straightforward job. Minster Glass had, it seemed, conserved every scrap of paper relating to its commissions. Much of the material was uninviting–accounts from suppliers, estimates–I had only to cast my eye over it and move on, but then came something more interesting: a letter from the then vicar of St Martin’s, the Reverend Brownlow previously mentioned in Dad’s history. It was dated April 1880.

  Dear Sirs,

  Further to our recent discussions I am at last in a position to request that you commission Mr Philip Russell to draft drawings for two windows in the Lady Chapel of St Martin’s Church, one over its altar to depict the Virgin and Child in Glory, the other being for the south light to represent an angel.

  I look forward to hearing from you soonest on this matter.

  Yours sincerely,

  JAMES BROWNLOW (REVD.)

  An angel. Our broken window was definitely an angel. At last I had found a thread leading into the past. A thread which, if I pulled, might begin to unravel a story.

  As I laid the letter carefully in its place in the unwieldy file, the whole thing slipped from my grasp. I caught it before it fell and shuffled the contents safely back inside, but a sheet of cartridge paper escaped and sailed down onto the floorboards.

  I lifted it delicately with the tips of my fingers. Turning it over, I saw at once it was probably cut from a small sketchbook. It featured a rough pencil drawing for an arched window. A speculative study, I imagined, for it was covered with scribbled notes and figures that could only have meant something to the artist.

  There were other sketches on the page. A young woman’s face in one corner, a sort of pattern in another. The pattern reminded me of something–Dad’s Celtic knot–and then I realised that was exactly what it was, a Celtic knot. The Minster Glass signature. As I savoured this find, my attention drifted to the thumbnail sketch of the girl. She was deftly drawn, vitality in the tilt of her strong square face, intelligence and humour in her direct gaze. Thick hair sprang back from her forehead. She wasn’t conventionally beautiful, but the bloom of youth was still upon her and there was something arresting about her expression. The artist had scrawled something underneath in his odd spindly writing. Lana it might have been, or Laura, then another word, something beginning with B. A note in Dad’s handwriting teased my memory. What was it he’d written in the margins of his notebook? Who was Laura something…? Of course, the name in the letter I’d just read. Brownlow, that was it. Who was Laura Brownlow? Dad had written. He must have seen this sketch, too, and wondered. So who was she? James Brownlow’s wife, perhaps? Or his daughter. And why had this Minster Glass artist drawn her?

  I studied her portrait once more and her eyes seemed to stare into mine. As though she would speak, could tell me her story.

  I replaced the sheet of paper in the folder and laid the folder on the heap of others. Where I should search now, I wasn’t sure. I was tired, anyway. Perhaps it would be helpful to return some of these files to their drawer?

  I stood, stretching, stiff from hunching over the desk for so long, then went over to the lines of tall metal filing cabinets. The drawer labelled 1879–81 opened easily, felt light, and when I peeped over the top I saw why. Only the hanging files at the back of the drawer contained any folders.

  I returned to the desk and arranged the folders there into date order, then took them over one by one to slip into their hanging files. But when I came to the one dated 1880, in which I’d found the Reverend Brownlow’s letter and the sketchbook page, it wouldn’t go. I laid it on the top of the cabinet and investigated the hanging file.

  My fingers scraped on something hard–a book of some sort. I gripped it and pulled it out. It was the size of a slim hardback novel, and when I turned the pages I saw immediately that it was a diary or journal, completely filled with neat feminine handwriting. There was a name inside the front cover–and for a moment I couldn’t take it in.

  It was the name I’d read before, the name under the sketch of the young woman, the name that had excited Dad’s curiosity. Laura Brownlow. Who was Laura Brownlow? At last it seemed I would find out.

  The entries began in June 1879, but the first page had faded a bit and was hard to read. I sat down at the desk once more, and in the light of Dad’s lamp, began to decipher the even, sepia italics.

  Sunday, 18 May 1879

  Happy Birthday, dear sister Caroline! To think that you would be eighteen! We celebrated a special service in the church for you today, Mama and Papa, Harriet and George and me. And Tom journeyed home from Oxford. Did you see us and hear us? I believe you did. You felt so close, as though you were there, ‘betwixt air and angels’, just beyond our reach.

  I still think about you all the time. When I rise, I have to tell myself that the bedroom next door is empty, that you will not need me to go to you today, to read or play games. I wake in the night, sure that you have called my name, and the truth weighs on me like the darkness.

  So many little things remind me of you. A snatch of a song that you used to sing, the precise shade of a girl’s hair. Last week Mrs Jorkins found a pair of your old boots and asked Mama if she should give them away, but I would not let her and cried over them. Three months you’ve been gone and now the numbness I felt after your passing has lifted. Instead there is the constant ache of missing you, the awareness that our time together is past, left far behind in life’s rushing stream. When I saw those boots, for one moment I was sure I could catch hold of you once more. I was wrong.

  I turned the pages slowly, moved by the rawness of the writer’s grief. So Laura Brownlow must be the daughter of the Reverend James Brownlow, the man who commissioned the windows of St Martin’s. But she addressed her diary entries to Caroline, the dead sister in whose memory the angel window was made. Laura was writing to Caroline as though she still lived–or as though she believed she could reach her beyond the grave. How deeply she must have mourned.

  I read on. The entries were sporadic as though Laura only wrote when she felt she needed to or when there was some notable event to communicate to Caroline. In June 1879, Laura was excited about their brother Tom’s academic success. In August she reported the placing of a memorial stone on the dead girl’s grave. In November came the thrilling news that their married sister Harriet was to give birth the following April.

  But in the New Year of 1880, Laura began to write more regularly and at greater length, and soon I became completely absorbed in her story…

  Chapter 7

  The angel in the house

  Coventry Patmore

  LAURA’S STORY

  That chilly February morning, Laura hoped they would see the lion cub again. The walk to Westminster Hospital took them up Victoria Street towards the Abbey, and when they had passed this way yesterday, she and Mama had viewed a reedy youth with a broken nose and a mutinous expression dragging the poor beast around the perimeter of the Royal Aquarium. The cub, though only a little past babyhood, had looked confused r
ather than frightened. It dodged about on its rope, tripping over its too-large paws. The youth hauled it back while scowling and cursing at a handful of urchins who alternately made cajoling noises and shied pebbles at the animal from a safe distance.

  ‘Oh, the poor thing.’ Laura had made Mama stop to watch for a moment, touched to the quick to see this beast trapped in a life it wasn’t made for, no doubt forced to parade with the other lions in front of a howling crowd. Not, of course, that she had experienced the crowd. She’d never set foot in the Aquarium to see the circus or the freakshows, to skate on the ice-rink or gawp at the fish. ‘Third-rate entertainment for third-rate people,’ was how her pompous brother-in-law George settled the matter when she’d raised the subject at dinner yesterday evening–but she could imagine it all from the lurid headlines on the posters.

  Disappointingly, the cub wasn’t there today. Perhaps an airing in today’s freezing fog was considered a step beyond the cruelties it commonly endured. If that was the reason, Laura was glad. Or maybe the lion troupe had simply moved on, taking the cub with them. She paused to accept a flyer from a shivering young boy: tonight’s entertainment seemed to be ‘Two Astonishing Aerial Acts’. No mention of lions.

  ‘Don’t dawdle, Laura, dear,’ Mama called, her voice dead-sounding in the icy air. ‘Here, let me take the bag.’ Laura gratefully passed over the heavy canvas grip and followed in her mother’s neat footsteps towards the next building which, with its ramparts and flags, always looked to her more like a castle than a hospital.

  Visiting the women in the Incurables Ward of Westminster Hospital turned out to take twice as long as Mama had planned today, for after the usual Bible readings and prayers, one distressed young mother poured out her heart to Mama about her anxieties for her family, and another dictated to Laura a rambling letter of farewell for a sailor son she’d not seen in years.

  Mother and daughter finally emerged just as Big Ben, wreathed in mist, struck a muffled eleven. Laura asked hopefully, ‘Will we still have time for shopping, Mama?’ Her mother had promised her material for a new serge dress to replace one four years old and worn almost to holes, but with most of the morning gone she already guessed the answer.