Serjeant Matthew Blake

A serjeant of the London enforcement world and author of the Memoranda on Urban Burden, whose dry observations on credit, Crown force, courts and movement are quoted wherever the capital’s machinery is discussed.

Of the living officers Londoners name when they speak sternly of the city’s many layers of enforcement, Serjeant Matthew Blake is one; yet he is known at least as well by what he has written. His Memoranda on Urban Burden, dated from Westminster in 4608, are quoted on credit, on Crown force and the courts, on movement through the city, on tolerated illegality, and on the employment of office, and their tone is exact and wholly unimpressed. Credit, he wrote, is memory with a price set upon it. The sentence, he wrote again, is but the small part of a punishment. The rest is the waiting, the fees, and the walk home through a ward in which everybody is watching.

Of authority he takes a practical view, not a grand one. Crown force, he holds, is seldom used and continually implied, which is the cheaper course and answers better, until the day somebody calls the bluff. Authority, he holds besides, is proved by the number of journeys it is able to interrupt, for the power to stop a traveller, a cart or a cargo is its true measure. Clerks and junior officers copy the memoranda out, finding in them a description of the city in which they in fact work.

He is said to handle the matters that are politically awkward rather than merely dangerous, such as prisoner transfers that must not be seen and incidents that must not become stories. Companies meet him when their work has brushed against Crown enforcement in London and someone must decide how much of it was lawful. He is not unfriendly. He simply assumes that everyone’s account is incomplete, his own included.

In person

Matthew Blake is about forty-six, though his close-cropped hair and thin moustache are already white. He is of middle height with a very thick torso and short legs, a broad forehead narrowing to the jaw, deep brown eyes, a bulbous nose and ruddy, weathered skin; his left eyelid droops and his knuckles are thick and scarred. He wears a dark enforcement coat with worn red piping, a reinforced leather gorget and heavy boots, and carries a truncheon, a short sword, a single old pistol, a warrant case and folding spectacles. His expression is permanently unimpressed.