Jonas Crowhurst

The black story every furnace knows. He bought what the gallows left, and fed it to his fire to learn whether human ash would change the temper of iron.

Jonas Crowhurst was a founder of House Crowhurst, the Winter Stones, a lean cold man of the house’s own cast who kept his own furnace when his kinsmen kept counting rooms. A founder needs a steadier temper than his rivals, and he wanted it more than most. The furnace men say he went looking where nobody else would.

He went among the condemned, after the rope and before the burial. The tellings are exact in the way such stories are. He paid the hangman for what the gallows left, and paid him well; the bodies came to his yard by night in a covered cart and went into the fire in the small hours, when only his own men were by; and he stood at the furnace mouth with his watch in his hand and his test bars laid out on the bench, and wrote down the colour of the flame. His apprentices did the carrying, and two of them ran. One was brought back. The other was found in the slag pond in the spring. The story never says what he learned about the iron. It says only that the bodies went in.

No proof survives, and no date is attached. The house has never answered the story, and the volumes keep it as a black story, not a haunt: it concerns a named man of a recorded house, it is argued about, and it is kept as a check on what masters may be capable of when a better temper is worth money.

The story is told in Sarrum more than anywhere, because Sarrum has furnaces. A smith who hears the name spits over his left shoulder before he answers, and nobody can tell you why the habit began. Bars of iron of uncertain making are still called Crowhurst iron in the belt, and nobody will put one into a church.

In person

About fifty, lean to gauntness, with iron-grey hair cut short and severe, an angular pale clean-shaven face and narrow grey eyes; heavily burn-scarred forearms. A dark gentleman’s coat and waistcoat with the sleeves turned back, before the open furnace with a measuring tool in hand.