Colonel Osbert Fell

A colonel among the living names most often heard when London’s talk of enforcement turns stern, generally associated with the city’s militia and the hard edge of its emergency force.

Colonel Osbert Fell belongs to the small gallery of living names London uses when talk of enforcement turns stern — marshal, serjeant, watch-captain, gaoler, grave-master and, among them, a colonel. The capital’s force is a layered stack of ward watch, river watch, militia, company guards, shrine wardens and private muscle, and Fell is commonly placed at its militia end, where the city musters in formation rather than patrols in pairs.

His reputation is for discipline and a certain alarming stillness. He is said once to have held a street barricade through a long night of disorder without a shot fired, and to regard that as the proper measure of a militia officer. Londoners who would not know him by sight know his name as the one that follows when a ward has gone beyond what its watch can manage.

Companies meet him when the city draws an emergency perimeter and needs people it can trust inside the line, or when they have given the militia reason to take an interest in them.

In person

Fell is very tall, lean and long-limbed, about fifty, with a shaved head and an enormous iron-grey cavalry moustache that does not quite hide an old sabre cut through one side of his upper lip. His long bony face, very dark eyes and large Roman nose give him a severe profile, and the upper edge of one ear is missing. He stands unnaturally erect in a dark militia officer’s coat, breastplate and heavy sash, a long cavalry sabre at his side.