Quarry-Master Alditha Rowe

Quarry-Master of Stonecourt, who ordered the eastern cutting stopped at the deepest known bed and wrote only that it was different. She will explain herself if the Collegium asks in writing, which it has not.

Alditha Rowe is Quarry-Master of Stonecourt, the cutting from which Cambridge takes its machine-stone. Everyone writes about the machine-stone bed. Beneath it lie others: a soft grey bed nobody has found a use for, a hard dark bed that has never repaid working, and beneath that the bed at which she personally ordered the eastern cutting stopped. In the workings book she recorded the depth and called it different, and she has not described it further.

She has also dealt with the cavities the cutting opened, three of them in forty years. The first was filled; the second was walled; the third was walled and then walled again eleven years later, when the first wall did not answer. She is not asked what she is walling in, and has never offered it, and the men who were with her have not spoken of it either. Her silence is practical rather than superstitious. She has said she will explain herself if the Collegium asks in writing. It has not.

The quarrymen trust her judgement of stone above any instrument’s, and say she can tell a bed by the sound it gives under the pick. She keeps the workings book in her own hand.

For companies, Stonecourt’s eastern face is the most plainly available unexamined ground in the belt, available because nobody wants it examined. An employer offering survey work on the certified bed is offering ordinary work. An employer offering work at the eastern face is offering something else, and should be asked, before anything is agreed, whether Alditha Rowe knows.

In person

Alditha Rowe is powerful and broad-shouldered, in her middle fifties, plainly a woman who has worked quarries all her life. Her thick dark hair, heavily streaked with iron-grey, is twisted into a rough knot; her face is broad, strong-boned and weathered, with deep-set brown-grey eyes, a slightly flattened nose and a long old cut running across the left side of her forehead into the brow. Her large, scarred hands are ingrained with pale quarry dust. She wears a heavy brown quarry coat with leather-reinforced shoulders, gloves at her belt, and carries a measuring chain, a chalk marker and a brass depth gauge.