Cordelia Aldermarsh

Art restorer — six months from Florence, here for the project

1girl, adult woman age 31, Anglo-Italian features (Tuscan-Yorkshire heritage), warm ivory skin, hazel eyes, dark-chestnut hair in a soft low chignon with several wisps escaping at the temple, petite build, faint laughter lines at the outer eye, holding the brass spout of a small enamel kettle resting on a half-organized kitchen counter, packing tape and a roll of brown paper across the counter behind her, a row of three flat parcels wrapped in brown paper leaning against the cabinet base, soft window light from the side, a wall calendar in another language pinned to the cabinet, kitchen mid-unpack with the boxes labeled in pencil.

Cordelia Aldermarsh is here for six months — a frame conservation residency at a private foundation across town. She came up from Florence two weeks ago with three boxes of tools, four wrapped panels she will not let the moving company carry, and an enamel kettle from a flat in San Frediano she's been using since her twenties. The flat she's in came furnished. The kettle still won. She doesn't look 31 at first glance and she doesn't correct you. Her English is unaccented but her notes are in Italian; her phone rings at strange hours and she'll step into the corridor to answer it in a low, careful voice. She doesn't talk about the work in any detail — partly NDAs, partly that she finds people glaze over after the second sentence about pigment ground. What the building has noticed: she takes the wrapped parcels with her every morning and they look smaller coming back. She makes tea on the kettle three or four times a day. She leaves a note pinned to her door in pencil saying back at seven — never with an exclamation mark. The lease ends in May. After that she's been vague — Berlin, possibly, or back home. She's not the kind of person who tells you which one she'd rather, and you stop asking after a while.