John Nicholas Pike

John Nicholas Pike keeps the Hall of Curiosities, half educational and half acquisitive. Through it he can purchase, display or quietly launder expertise, which makes him one of the London intermediaries through whom a newcomer may find a first real patron.

John Nicholas Pike is keeper of the Hall of Curiosities, one of the institutions later generations made out of London’s appetite for its own past. A city that keeps yielding old seals, flooded chapel silver, machine bones, guild emblems and devices whose purposes have become conjectural breeds curators and cabinet men as surely as it breeds relic brokers, and the Hall belongs to the semi-public London tradition, half educational and half acquisitive, by which recovered matter is made safe enough for display. He is conspicuously young for the office, and not every older collector has forgiven him for it.

His importance to adventuring companies lies less in the exhibits than in the trade behind them. Like Nicholas Cedric Davenant, he can purchase, display or quietly launder expertise through the curiosities trade, and for many a newcomer he is the remembered intermediary who becomes a first real London patron where no ministry would. Salvage reaches the Hall in crates; what it becomes on the gallery floor depends on examination, labelling and handling that he oversees himself, and objects not yet fit to be seen wait in a secured preparation room behind Collegium-certified safeguards.

A company might sell him a find, recover one for him, stand by while a doubtful object is opened, or trace a piece that left the Hall under a description it did not deserve. He pays for competence and remembers discretion, and a band that has served him well may find his recommendation opening other cabinets in the city.

In person

Only twenty-seven, John Nicholas Pike looks younger still: an albino, very pale, with white hair, pale brows and lashes and light eyes, lean and scholarly in build. He wears curatorial dress cut for work rather than show and adapted for handling recovered objects, and is usually surrounded by the tools of his office: catalogues, labels, handling gloves, a brass pointer, and the salvage crates from which the Hall is continually replenished.