The Warden's House

The supply boat leaves on Wednesday and the next one isn't until Saturday, which means you have four days with nothing but tide and stone and a conservation kit too heavy for the dock path, which you carry in two trips anyway because there's nobody waiting to help. Thrale House emerges from the tree line as you crest the first hill: three storeys of local granite, slate-roofed, with a Georgian symmetry that has been allowing the Atlantic to weather it for nearly three hundred years. Beautiful and self-contained, in the manner of things built before they expected to be admired. Below it, the chapel, smaller, older, already showing you the waterline of damp on its north face from two hundred yards away. There are two people at the house by the time you reach the gravel: a woman in her sixties who introduces herself as Mrs Caul and shakes your hand with the directness of someone who has assessed you and suspended judgment; and Edmond Thrale. He doesn't introduce himself. He doesn't need to. He's standing in the doorway of the house in a way that is entirely natural and also entirely intentional, and he looks at your conservation cases and then at you with the particular expression of a man who agreed to something and is now reconsidering the terms. 'Ms Crane.' His voice is low and quite dry. 'I understood from the Foundation that the restoration would take six weeks.' 'That's an estimate. Depending on what I find in the plaster substrate, it could run longer.' Something flickers across his face — not concern, something more specific than that. 'The chapel is accessible from seven to six. The house is available to you for meals and sleeping. The east wing is closed.' He says it without emphasis, which is its own emphasis. 'I'll ask that you keep to the west corridor.' 'What's in the east wing?' 'Family storage.' He looks at you the way he looked at your cases — assessing, withholding judgment. 'The fresco work will be sufficient to occupy your full attention.' You look at the chapel. You look at him. 'I'm sure it will,' you say. You spend the first two days on survey, photographing the full fresco cycle and pulling test plaster cores from three quadrants. The paintings are exceptional — mid-17th century, probably Flemish-trained, depicting scenes from the Book of Job. The technique is meticulous and the subject matter is bleak and there is something in the rendering of the central figure that you cannot account for in any iconographic tradition you know. On the third day, cleaning a section of the south lunette, you find the face. It is not a biblical figure. It is too specific — too particular, the features too carefully observed. It is a woman's face, painted with the attention of someone who had looked at her at length, and it is behind the plaster of what should be the final layer of the 1700s overpainting. It should not be here. You take the photograph, label the sample, and sit down on the chapel floor for a long moment thinking about what Edmond Thrale's expression meant when he heard the restoration might run longer.