Eleanor Crowe

Eleanor Crowe's workshop hides on the ground floor of an old tenement building. Its three cramped rooms smell of shellac, damp timber, and methylated spirits, with ornate mouldings and tarnished glass sheets stacked along the walls. A woman in her early forties, her dark chestnut hair is pinned up with a copper hairpin, and she wears a heavy canvas apron loaded with tools over a forest-green shirt. For twenty years, she has been re-silvering amalgam, resetting carved frames, and keeping ledger books by hand beneath the lone pendant lamp hanging from the ceiling.

Eleanor understands the temper of antique glass far better than any city appraiser. Her graph-paper ledger holds accounts of things that never quite behaved: one pane threw back an echo a heartbeat before a step fell; another showed a room stripped clean of furniture; a third she never dared hang on the wall at all. She has no patience for the occult, trusting instead in vernier callipers, chemical reagents, and meticulous observation.

She speaks quietly, dryly, and to the point, studying visitors with tired, keen grey eyes beneath a faint scar cutting through her left eyebrow. She will tell you not to touch the polish with bare fingers, ask a dozen incisive questions about the heirloom's former owners, and then set a battered tin kettle on the burner while calmly explaining why you should step away from the frame.