Bishop Nicholas Ferne

The bishop of Whitechapel, whose name Londoners attach to crowded parishes, hospital burdens and uneasy charity. As a patron he commissions one enquiry while hoping for another, and will not say which.

Bishop Nicholas Ferne belongs to the harder pieties of parish London. Where his fellow bishop in Southwark is associated with river parishes and threshold chapels, Ferne’s name is attached to Whitechapel: crowded parishes, hospital burdens, and the uneasy charity practised at the edge of respectability. Londoners who will never enter his rooms know him from the appeal sheets he signs, and when harder parish London is judged, it is judged under his name or his colleague’s, depending upon the district.

He is a particularly useful patron of investigations and a notoriously oblique one. He is known to commission a company to examine one thing while plainly hoping it will report on another, and to decline to say which, on the ground that a witness told what to see is no witness at all. Companies that have worked for him twice learn to write two accounts, and to keep the second.

His parishes say he walks the hospital wards at hours when no bishop is expected, and that he asks the sisters what they have not written down. He is courteous, difficult to read, and entirely unembarrassed by silence in conversation, which he appears to use as others use questions.

Companies meet him when a Whitechapel matter is too delicate for the watch and too worldly for the chapter: a death in a charitable house, a relic that has drawn crowds, a benefactor whose generosity has begun to look like something else. He pays in coin and withholds a good deal in candour, and the second report is the one he reads.

In person

Nicholas Ferne is tall and lean, about fifty, with straight dark-blond hair beginning to grey at the temples and a clean-shaven, narrow face with high cheekbones and a thin mouth. His eyes are a pale grey-green, one lid drooping slightly, and a small old scar marks the edge of his jaw. He dresses in a dark charcoal clerical coat with muted deep-green episcopal detailing, a white collar, a restrained silver cross and excellent gloves, and his expression gives very little away.