Master Crispin Vey

Company captain and author of Notes on Hiring and Passage, who counts a company at six and reckons its costs twice. He has watched a great many companies come into the belt, and knows why so many come back with stories rather than work.

Master Crispin Vey is a company captain of the Cambridge retrieval trade and the author of Notes on Hiring and Passage, dated Cambridge, 4619. The notes are addressed to companies coming into the belt, and the books reach for them wherever the talk turns to retrieval, hiring and the doors by which outsiders find employment. His advice is plain, arithmetical and unsentimental. A company, he holds, wants six: a leader, two who can fight, one who knows the country, one who can keep the material and one who can write. Companies that leave out the last two, he observes, come back with stories.

Much of what he writes is a warning against thinking the belt an empty country. There are some thirty companies of reputation in it, every one of them holding ground, and a newcomer is entering somebody’s district and will be told so. He urges a company to do one kind of work well rather than claim marsh work, seam work, retrieval, escort and clearance all at once. He teaches it to read a contract’s verifier before its payer or its rate, since the verifier decides whether the money is ever seen, and to reckon its costs twice, the second time for the weeks spent waiting on a verifier who is at his own harvest. That second figure, he says, is the one that ends companies.

He is as exact about doors as about money. He advises arriving at the waystations rather than the gates: a carrier’s letter makes a man somebody at Wetherslade, while a duke’s letter at Oxford makes him merely a man with a letter. He separates Oxford, which pays for a thing to be settled, from Cambridge, which pays for a thing to be established, and warns that a company confusing the two will satisfy neither. Of the four bodies that will take an unvouched company, he notes, one pays properly and will not say what the work was for. The belt itself he finds steadier than the capital, harder to enter and impossible to leave behind.

Companies meet him when they first come to Cambridge looking for passage and employment. He is a working captain as well as an author, who assesses recruits, reads country on the ground and negotiates private Articles at the table, and his judgement of a newcomer is likely to be as brisk as his prose. A band that takes his counsel on composition, verifiers and ways in will be spared the commonest early mistakes, which are the ones his notes were written to prevent.

In person

Crispin Vey is fifty-six, of medium height and extremely lean, rope-muscled in the way of a man long in the field. His coarse steel-grey hair is cut unevenly, and he wears a short, sharply pointed grey beard with no moustache. His face is long and weather-darkened, with a nose broken sideways, pale hazel eyes and a drooping left eyelid; a triangular notch marks his left ear, his hands are scarred and his right middle finger is crooked. He wears a dark brown long field coat over a faded moss-green waistcoat and grey shirt, with high mud-marked boots and an adventuring hat. He carries a musket on his back and a brass compass, and keeps hiring papers, maps and private Articles about him.