Duke Osbert Crowhurst

Head of House Crowhurst, the Winter Stones, whose competence is endurance: winter roads, upland stores, hard construction and quarry rights. Austere and personally frugal, he appears to enjoy being called mean.

House Crowhurst, the Winter Stones, has built its standing on endurance: winter roads, upland stores, hard construction, quarry rights and the habit of preparing before other houses will admit that a season may turn difficult. In the Northern Marches its hand is seen in stores, quarrying and winter road practice. Crowhurst contracts stand behind store sheds, wall stone and the occasional blockhouse repair, the house buys upland stone when carriage permits, and where a reclaimed manor needs hard construction it is often Crowhurst capital that pays for it.

Duke Osbert Crowhurst is austere, personally frugal and politically difficult to embarrass, since he appears to enjoy accusations of meanness. His house frequently sides with Treasury restraint in the Lords until some northern road or storehouse needs money, at which point it discovers a more expansive theory of the state. His own household is said to light its winter fires a week later than its neighbours and to keep its stores a month longer, and the duke regards both as matters of principle rather than economy.

What Crowhurst money cannot buy is a route across ground the graziers will not take. A quarry right on paper is useless if the drove will not carry carts to it after Michaelmas, and the March has taught more than one Crowhurst agent that endurance is local before it is financial. The duke is understood to know this; his agents learn it one winter at a time.

Companies meet the Winter Stones through their factors and agents in the uplands: guarding a store before the snow, seeing quarry carts through before the droves close, surveying a blockhouse for repair, or standing watch on a reclaim that Crowhurst capital has paid for and would like to see survive its first winter.

In person

Osbert Crowhurst is lean to the point of asceticism, with very dark hair gone mostly iron-grey and cut short and severe. His face is gaunt, angular and clean-shaven, pale, with narrow grey eyes, and a pronounced old scar runs from his temple towards one cheek. He dresses in heavy winter tailoring that is austere rather than decorative, and gives the impression of a man who has already counted the stores and found them adequate, and does not intend to be thanked for it.