Warden Abel Crowe

Warden of the Blue Kiln Fellowship, which speaks for Cambridge’s kilnwrights, furnace hands and the most dangerous fired-material trades, and carries as much weight as the senior guild whenever work rather than prestige is at issue.

The Blue Kiln Fellowship speaks for the kilnwrights, furnace hands and the most dangerous of Cambridge’s fired-material trades. Blue Kiln handles refractory and treated materials, and its furnaces are banked rather than allowed to go cold. With Stonecourt and Glassmere it is one of the organised blocs that carry equal weight with the Guild of Artificers when work is at issue, and the metal societies of White Furnace Row usually follow whichever of Stonecourt or Blue Kiln has the stronger technical case. Abel Crowe is its Warden. The Fellowship has leverage enough to stop work when safety and custom are breached, and it is the Yard Interest, strongest in Blue Kiln, that presses hardest on wages, death payments, hours in dangerous heat and masters who shift risk downward.

Crowe is a furnace man himself and argues from the firing record rather than from grievance, which makes him harder to answer. He carries a small notebook of firings and is said to be able to quote from it the temperature at which a given man was burned.

Companies meet him when Blue Kiln material must be moved or accounted for, or when a dispute at the kilns threatens to stop work across the yards.

In person

Crowe is a man of short stature with dwarfism, powerful, compact, barrel-chested and thick-set, in his early fifties. His very short black hair is heavily peppered with iron grey, and he wears a heavy black-and-grey moustache with a short square beard. His broad face, heavy brow and dark-brown eyes are permanently ruddy from furnace heat; an old burn runs across the left side of his neck and jaw and smaller scars mark his forearms. He dresses in heavy blackened wool and a leather apron with reinforced cuffs and protective gloves, a brass Fellowship badge and a small firing notebook.