Master Symon Rook

Master Symon Rook keeps a broker’s room off London’s lower ways and has outlasted a generation of fences by telling the truth about what a thing is. His Broker’s Notes on the Lower Ways are quoted by the crews who go down, and borrowed by men who would rather not admit they know him.

Master Symon Rook keeps a broker’s room off the lower ways and will price anything brought to him, honestly, including the things he then declines to touch. His value to both sides of London’s trade is that he tells the truth about what an object is. A fence who lies about provenance is useless within a season; Rook has lasted thirty years. He stands at one end of the city’s black market, with Mr. Cyprian Ardle of the Blue Ledger Company at the other, and neither man would call himself a criminal.

His reputation is broader than a fence’s. Rook can find a licensed house, a questionable carrier, a discreet purchaser, a witness, or a person willing to explain why an apparently legal object will become troublesome at the next inspection. Newcomers on the lower ways are told to find him when the matter is salvage and false provenance, and even men who despise him borrow his language when they need a doubtful object to sound merely misfiled. He remains useful to men who would gladly testify against him once their own business is safely concluded, and when his name is mentioned after dark, the room generally understands that money has entered the evening.

His Broker’s Notes on the Lower Ways (4619 A.C.) are valued for their lack of heroics. They describe the unheroic truth of undercity work, who carried the lantern, who held the key and who was left to explain the smell when everyone came back up, and they are still consulted when questions of missing recovery arise. Rook brokers for the men who go down, and he is plain that he has never yet brokered for a man who goes down alone.

Companies working below London are routinely told to find him. He can price salvage before a company risks selling it elsewhere, explain what paper an object will need to survive a court, and find the carrier, buyer or witness a job requires. He will not lie for a client, which makes him useless for passing off doubtful goods and invaluable for learning in advance what trouble they carry. His Notes put the lesson plainly: the object is only half of what is being bought, and the other half is the paper.

In person

Master Rook is in his early sixties, compact, heavy and barrel-chested, bald on the crown with dark-grey hair at the sides and grey mutton-chop whiskers. His is a heavy, experienced tradesman’s face with appraising eyes, practical rather than theatrical, and his hands and gaze carry decades of handling questionable objects. He dresses as a working tradesman, in a dark practical coat, a waistcoat and an apron or work layers, with no pretence to polish. His cramped broker’s room holds a loupe, scales and measuring tools, provenance notes, a broker’s ledger and whatever doubtful recovered objects are waiting on his judgement, along with restrained object-testing and provenance apparatus.