Wat Gilbey

The Red Bend's powder man, who handles the company's mines, petards and charges. He has blown in more doors than any man in the trade, and has all his fingers.

Gilbey was a quarryman's son who learned powder blasting chalk. He joined a garrison as a sapper and left it when he saw how much the companies paid.

He is careful, cheerful and slightly deaf. He has opened sealed vaults, collapsed tunnels on things that needed to stay down, and once blew a ruined bridge with the company on the right side of it by eleven seconds.

This year he is training an apprentice, which makes him nervous. He also wants the company to buy a better class of powder from Cambridge, which makes the captain nervous.

In person

38. Stocky and red-faced, with a cheerful broad grin, sandy whiskers and scorched eyebrows. He wears a leather apron over a padded jack, a powder horn, a satchel of charges, and a slow-match coiled at his belt.