Captain Hugh Deane

Constable of Stone Oast, who holds the keys to a hall the baron owns. After dark, a letter from Quire is an argument, not an open gate.

Captain Hugh Deane is constable of Stone Oast, the fortified hall of Baron Matthew Quire. He keeps the keys, the powder room, the four swivel pieces over the gate and the household watch, and he keeps the list of who may sleep within the wall. The books are careful to separate ownership of Stone Oast from command of it: the hall is the baron’s, but its gate and its defence are Deane’s. Such a division of one authority among lord, steward, bailiff and constable is common enough in the larger country houses, and Stone Oast is a plain example of it.

Companies meet him at the gate. A company seeking employment asks Quire; a company seeking entry after dark asks Deane, and a letter from the baron is an argument rather than an open gate if Deane believes the hall is under threat. A band that has done good business with the lord should not assume the constable is bound by it. One that learns which piece of Stone Oast’s authority it needs, and which man holds it, is already halfway to getting it.

In person

Hugh Deane is fifty-eight, short at about five foot six and extraordinarily broad and compact. His head is completely shaved, and he wears a tremendous dark-grey horseshoe moustache. His broad, battered face has a broken nose, a dark-brown right eye and a clouded white left eye beneath a deep scar across the brow, and he is missing the little and ring fingers of his right hand. He wears a blackened steel cuirass over a dark-red military coat, with gauntlet, sword belt and a burgonet crested in dark-red horsehair, and carries a large iron key ring with the powder-room key upon it.