Hester Quill

Spokesman of the Ninefields association in Sarrum these nine years. She holds no office any authority in Britannia recognises, yet she negotiates for some eight thousand people and is received at the Halls, the council and Marlfield.

Sarrum’s poorer streets elect speakers who are admitted to the Mayoral Manor as mediators and as nothing more. They may petition, bargain, warn of a stoppage and carry an answer home; they have no vote on rates, appointments, charters or company concessions. Hester Quill of Ninefields is the best known of them, precisely because she can put several thousand people into the street while holding no formal say over a penny spent on them. She has been spokesman for nine years, and after Prudence Kerrow and Grace Ashdown there is nobody in Sarrum more worth knowing.

Her reputation rests on saying plainly what others leave unsaid: she is one of perhaps a dozen people in the county who will explain why work at the bottom of the market is easy to get, badly paid and instantly replaceable. She has raised the discharge from the Scour Lane dye works at council four times; the minutes record the question each time, and no motion. Her remarks travel: a burial fund that buys no burial is, she says, the most honest thing in her book, since it states what it is for and not what it does. When the associations paid to rebuild two bakers’ shops burned out when the bread price reached a shilling in 4611, her recorded objection was that the fund exists for accidents, and that a crowd is an accident.

She works through the subscription book, the fund and the street. Ninefields keeps some four hundred subscribers and an audited fund; eleven gangs of what she calls only lads walk its watch and carry its word, kept firmly below the association, which will not recognise a gang. She has three times refused an Ash Dog collector entry to the Ninefields room, yet holds that an association which will not take a person cannot complain when somebody else does. She has refused eleven false names to the fund in nine years, and has set down what is done instead for those who die unnamed as the one dishonest thing the association does, and the one she will not stop.

Companies meet her when their business touches Ninefields: a stoppage in the making, a quarrel between a hall and a street, or a person who has vanished into Sarrum. She can describe exactly how that is done in four days, by bed-space, work and a name, and she is the likeliest person in the county to know which of the three has been taken.

In person

A lean, wiry woman of about forty, Hester Quill has dark hair roughly tied back, a strong nose over a narrow jaw, and tired brown eyes in a pale face that the works smoke never quite leaves clean. A small scar marks her mouth and her hands are scarred from work. She dresses in patched dark working layers, a practical coat or shawl and sturdy boots, with nothing of the Halls’ display about her, and carries a battered satchel of petitions, district notices, relief papers and local maps.