Thomas Alderwick

The surveyor a foreman suddenly discovers he respects when damp, current or roof strain begins to matter.

Surveyor Thomas Alderwick belongs to the more practical pantheon that London’s metropolitan industry keeps beside its polite lectures. His is the sort of authority a foreman suddenly discovers he respects when damp, current or roof strain begins to matter, and his name enters the same talk as Weather-Reader Agnes Whitlow, Helen Strickland of the load-bearing frames and Edmund Chislehurst of the licensing papers. He is not a lecture-room celebrity. His reading of a structure becomes important precisely when something in it has begun to give.

He also works in the upper world of licensed arcane practice, where examiners, Crown artificers, metropolitan assayers and chosen contractors do work that enters official, military or aristocratic use. Those rooms depend on quieter men and women who prepare compounds, file housings and carry current-safe fittings, and they take their orders from surveyors such as Alderwick long before the famous names enter the report. A company hired into that kind of work, or caught in a building whose roof, damp or current has turned doubtful, is likely to find him the one giving the orders.

In person

Thomas Alderwick is tall, about six foot two, broad-shouldered and lean, in his early forties. His dark chestnut hair is wavy and greying at the temples, and he wears a short boxed beard. His face is weathered, with dark-green eyes, a crooked nose and a scar running from his right temple to his cheekbone. He dresses in practical clothing of good quality, as a surveyor of standing, and goes about with survey instruments, maps, field books and measuring equipment.