Captain Miriam Alverstone

A Thames packet captain of long experience, spoken of by packet folk as though she were part of the tide-table itself. Her judgement of tide, delay and foul weather is trusted on the lower river above most official notices.

Captain Miriam Alverstone commands a packet on the lower Thames, and the river speaks of her as though she were part of the tide-table. Her reputation rests on the unglamorous virtues of the trade: knowing the tide, knowing when a delay is honest and when it is an excuse, and knowing what a quay looks like in foul weather and short light after the first excuse has failed. Her Packet Notes on Arrival and Delay, copied at Southwark, circulate among the river folk who have learned to trust them.

She is known for discretion of a firm and principled kind. She could, she says, tell who has crossed and when for any name one cared to give, and will not; the reason, she says, is not delicacy but that an office which answers that question once will be asked it every day by people she would rather not assist. She is equally clear about how the river actually works, having carried both warrants and letters of introduction and observed which of the two recovered a cargo.

Passengers who complain of a delay are told that the fare includes arrival. She will hold a packet at a quay rather than attempt a doubtful passage, and the watermen say no one has lost money by waiting on her word.

Companies meet her when they need to move people or goods down the river without fuss, or need someone who knows the lower quays better than their clerks do. She takes passengers on her own terms, answers questions about the river readily and questions about other passengers not at all.

In person

In person, Miriam Alverstone is tall, lean and athletic, a woman of forty-three standing some five foot ten, with thick, tightly curled, shoulder-length hair of a brown so dark it is almost black. Her face is long and narrow, with a strong jaw, high cheekbones, weathered skin and green-grey eyes; a diagonal white scar runs across the left of her forehead into her hairline, and her crooked smile shows a chipped tooth. Her signature is a weather-beaten burgundy-red captain’s coat, worn over a charcoal waistcoat, cream shirt, heavy trousers, boots and gloves. She carries a compass, folding telescope, tide watch, chart case, whistle and marlinspike, and goes armed with a sea pistol and a short cutlass. Around her are the navigation instruments, tide and route apparatus and restrained river signalling of the packet trade.