Magister Corvin Ashfell

The man Cambridge believes ran the White Vault, and could never prove it. Three clerks were convicted; he resigned his chair, left the town, and the stone that went out of the vaults has never been found.

The White Vault scandals are the more recent of Cambridge's black stories and the less clear. Lots the books called condemned had not been ground; material awaiting proving had left the town; and the vault books had been kept to hide both for at least eleven years. Fourteen sittings and a hundred and nine witnesses established that much and no more. Three clerks were convicted who could not plausibly have acted alone, and the finding said so in terms.

The older notes give the name the town gives when the finding runs out: Magister Corvin Ashfell, who held a chair in the proving of the higher grades through the years the books were falsified, and who signed off the condemned lots that were never ground. Nothing was proved against him. He gave evidence at three sittings, answered every question, and resigned his chair the week after the finding. He left Cambridge that winter, and the record has no more of him than a lodging at Dover and a passage taken.

The worked machine-stone that left the town has never been accounted for. Cambridge guesses at a foreign power, a great house, the Crown or a collector, and cannot choose; the older notes add the name of a Lyonnais prince-admiral and stop there. What the scandal left is the vault procedure the Collegium calls its greatest achievement: double witness, independent weighing, the numbering of every piece from the quarry face. Cambridge students are told his name in their first week, as the reason for all of it.

In person

About fifty-five, tall and narrow-shouldered, clean-shaven, with thin dark hair brushed forward, a high forehead and pale, patient eyes. A black tailcoat of the 1820s with a high collar and white cravat under a black Collegium gown, a ring of vault keys at his waist; he stands in a vaulted stone strongroom lined with numbered iron-bound chests, a vault book open on a lectern before him.