Rowan Peverel

Wharfmaster on the Lower Thames, whose loading order the dock men curse one day and come back to the next. His quay is one of those places where respectable river business meets the influence of the shadow trade, and meets it oftener than respectable men will admit.

Rowan Peverel is a wharfmaster of the Lower Thames, one of the officers who set the loading order on the working quays and keep cargo and labour moving through the lower river. Among the names a stranger learns before he knows the full chart — harbourmaster, packet captain, ferry-mistress — Peverel is the one known by the men who curse his loading order and return to it the next day, because in the end it works.

In less comfortable company his name travels too. Along the lower ways it is spoken together with those of brokers in salvage, in vice and in grievance. The stories stop short of calling him one of them; what they say is that respectable river business and the leverage of the shadow trade meet at the same quay too often for comfort. Whether he profits by the meeting, or suffers it, or merely stands where it takes place, the river debates. It has not decided.

He is a cheerful, stocky man with a broad smile that dock labour has learned to read carefully, since he wears it both when a ship is loading well and when he is refusing someone. He keeps his own ledger, posts the order at first light, and is said never to change it for a bribe offered in public.

Companies meet him when cargo must move on the lower river, when goods go astray between hold and quay, or when a commission requires knowing who really decides what leaves first. He is easy to talk to and hard to read.

In person

Peverel is a stocky man of middle years with red hair, a broad red beard and a broad, open, weathered face usually split by a wide smile. He dresses for the wharf in a heavy working coat, practical waistcoat, gloves and boots. Keys, a ledger, a tally whistle and a rope knife hang about him, and he directs a loading board with the ease of long habit.