Jonah Whitcombe

Grave-Master of London and one of the living names most often heard in stern conversation: keeper of the offices that route, assign, authorise and guard the city’s dead.

London’s burial offices are part of its stern custodial layer. They coordinate the routes by which the dead are carried, assign graves, issue authorisations, work with the churches, prevent theft and see that every body is correctly processed. Jonah Whitcombe is the living Grave-Master, counted among the names of London’s enforcement stack that are heard most often in stern conversation.

His reputation is for exactness. It is said in the burial offices that he wants every body to have a paper and every paper a body, and that a grave in his charge is seldom disturbed twice. He is patient, unhurried and hard to move, and he is not known to raise his voice.

Companies meet him when the city’s dead are not where they should be: a vault found disturbed, a body gone missing between parish and ground, a corpse route that needs watching through a bad night. He pays for watchers and for the recovery of what has been taken, and he expects his paperwork completed as carefully as the work itself.

In person

Whitcombe is exceptionally tall and thin but strong, with long arms and a slight stoop, and is about forty-two. His long black hair, heavily streaked with grey, is tied low above a narrow goatee of the same colours and a sallow, almost triangular face with very light grey eyes, a long, slightly crooked nose, and a deep scar running from his left eyebrow into the hairline; his long fingers are stained with earth and ink. He wears a long black burial coat, a dark leather apron at work, high boots and the silver badge of the grave office, and carries keys, a grave ledger, a measuring staff, a lantern, a short hanger and an old pistol.