Baron Alured Greyfen

Present head of the Greyfen line and lord of Lantern Fort. His title carries the fort, its manor, the old road dues and the duty to provision the place when the Crown calls readiness — but not the keys to its gate.

Baron Alured Greyfen belongs to the older baronial kind. He holds no great stretch of country and is not counted among the magnates, but his title carries Lantern Fort, the adjoining manor, the road dues on the old approach, and the obligation to keep the place provisioned whenever the Crown calls the district into readiness. The Greyfens have been richer and poorer by turns; the fort has mattered through both conditions.

Lantern Fort is the countryside’s familiar example of the difference between owning a fortified place and commanding it. Greyfen may grant timber, settle a tenancy or answer for the estate; the gates, magazine, signal mast, well, stores and permanent guard are in the keeping of Sir Martin Fell, the Constable, who may close the gate or put the guard on the wall without waiting for the baron to finish dinner. Greyfen is said to bear the arrangement with the composure of a man who knows the fort is his whether or not the gate is.

Locally he is the first court of appeal. A petitioner goes to Greyfen for land, rent, timber, tenancy and household protection, and to the Crown only after discovering that Greyfen cannot or will not answer. He is an old-fashioned lord who still receives in armour, and the trophies above his hall fireplace suggest that his family’s readiness has not always been a matter of paperwork.

Companies meet him as patron and host, and learn at Lantern Fort a lesson worth carrying elsewhere: an invitation from Greyfen will open the manor, but it will not move the Constable where powder, prisoners or the night gate are concerned.

In person

Greyfen is a tall, lean, hard man in his early sixties, with long steel-grey hair, a full grey moustache and short beard, a narrow weathered face and pale blue eyes. He wears plate armour as other lords wear a good coat, with gauntlets, a dark cloak, his sword and the Greyfen insignia. Above the fireplace of his hall hang the mounted heads of things the district prefers not to name, and he stands beneath them with the unhurried composure of long ownership.