Serjeant Matthew Blake

A serjeant of the London enforcement world and author of the Memoranda on Urban Burden, whose dry observations on credit, Crown force, courts and movement are quoted wherever the capital’s machinery is discussed.

Serjeant Matthew Blake stands among the living names most often heard in stern conversation about London’s layered enforcement, but he is known at least as well for what he has written. His Memoranda on Urban Burden, dated from Westminster in 4608, are quoted on credit, Crown force, the courts, movement through the city, tolerated illegality and the employment of office. Their tone is unimpressed and exact. Credit, he wrote, is memory with a price upon it; a sentence is the small part of a punishment, the waiting, the fees and the walk home through a watching ward the rest of it.

His view of authority is practical rather than grand. He holds that Crown force is seldom used and constantly implied, which is cheaper and works better until somebody calls the bluff, and that authority is proved by how many journeys it may interrupt. The memoranda are copied by clerks and junior officers who find in them a description of the city they actually work in.

He is said to handle the matters that are politically awkward rather than merely dangerous, such as prisoner transfers that must not be seen and incidents that must not become stories. Companies meet him when their work has brushed against Crown enforcement in London and someone must decide how much of it was lawful. He is not unfriendly. He simply assumes that everyone’s account is incomplete, his own included.

In person

Matthew Blake is about forty-six, though his close-cropped hair and thin moustache are already white. He is of middle height with a very thick torso and short legs, a broad forehead narrowing to the jaw, deep brown eyes, a bulbous nose and ruddy, weathered skin; his left eyelid droops and his knuckles are thick and scarred. He wears a dark enforcement coat with worn red piping, a reinforced leather gorget and heavy boots, and carries a truncheon, a short sword, a single old pistol, a warrant case and folding spectacles. His expression is permanently unimpressed.