Matron Joan Larke

Matron of the Cambridge Guarantor Rooms, who refused two dukes a changed classification without appearing to notice they were dukes. She does not require that a guarantor love you, only that they can be found.

Matron Joan Larke has kept the Cambridge Guarantor Rooms for two decades, and is therefore the person most Afflicted arrivals in the belt eventually meet. The rooms deal in permits, classification and the guarantors who answer for those admitted, and examination there is medical, thorough and cold, conducted without cruelty and without kindness alike. Her own definition of the institution is characteristically exact: a guarantor is a person who will answer for you, and the rooms do not require that they love you, only that they can be found.

Her reputation is as exact as her definitions. She has never been known to be unfair, nor ever known to be warm, and she refused two dukes’ requests to alter a classification without appearing to notice that they were dukes. She understands both the protective and the predatory sides of Cambridge classification, and keeps sponsors honest where she can while serving a system bound in paper. She draws the distinctions others would rather blur. Within the wall a man is permitted; without it he is only tolerated, which is a colder word, and there are more of the tolerated than the permitted.

Her market memoranda, dated Cambridge, 4614, carry the same temper into trade. Material should come whole if possible, cold if not, and papered in every case, and she has turned away better material than most will ever carry for want of a signature. Companies meet her when their business needs papering at Cambridge: material to be accepted, a bill to be taken or a guarantor to be named. She admits there are four companies in the town whose bills she will take unread, and will not say which, since the moment it were known the bills would be worth forging. No rank of patron and no quality of goods will move her counter.

In person

Joan Larke is forty-nine, very tall at about six foot one and remarkably thin, with long arms and long fingers. Her very dark red hair is worn in an exceptionally long single braid, with a white streak at the left temple. Her face is long and narrow, with high cheekbones, pale grey eyes and a strong, slightly hooked nose, and she wears small rectangular pince-nez. She dresses in black and dark-teal institutional clothing, high-collared, with a fitted long coat and narrow skirt, and wears a heavy silver chain of keys and seals. Her counter holds ledgers, sealed bills, guarantor stamps, wax, bond certificates and a mechanical calculator.