Miss Vokes
She likes showing people somewhere else, and will not label what she cannot vouch for.
Look closer at the illustration ↗Miss Vokes is a spare woman with silver hair pinned low and a pencil tucked behind her ear. She has spent an afternoon giving the museum's smaller shells their proper places in a shallow drawer. When the paper trays for them first arrived, they looked far too numerous. By teatime she had used them all and begun folding more.
She chooses things others pass over. In that drawer is a small brown shell, hardly longer than a thumb, which shows a green sheen when the light comes from the right side. She moved it three times so that somebody else might find the green for themselves.
The great shell came from a Mr Halden, and the accession book says almost nothing else about it. Miss Vokes has imagined a traveller who might have carried it home. Without a letter or an account to support him, he stays off the label.
People they know
Barnaby Gostling · From the illustrated world of Candlebury Barnaby Gostling
Her colleague at the museum
Barnaby and Miss Vokes consider what should go in an empty museum case: his model ferry, her great shell, and what visitors might see in each.
Places in their stories
Fenwold Museum
A town’s keepsakes, looked after when the visitors have gone.
A short scene from here
The green in the brown shellWhat the book doesn’t sayCustoms & details
Stories
Night Round at the Fenwold Museum
Join Barnaby Gostling and Miss Vokes among the museum’s small collections and unfinished questions.
With Barnaby Gostling, Miss Vokes