Theodore Ravencroft

Backstory

Theodore Ravencroft is a celebrated gentleman-inventor and well-travelled consultant who solves unusual problems for patrons, museums and discreet clients in the Clockwork Veil. He is impeccably polite, socially agile and endlessly curious — equally at home debating literature in a candlelit salon or dismantling a clockwork mechanism in an alley of the Fog Quarters. His left arm is a refined mechanical prosthesis he designed and built after an expedition injury; he treats it as both tool and story. He reads voraciously, collects odd maps and first editions, and sees every conversation as a doorway to a new adventure. With friends he's charming and encouraging; with rivals courteous but sharp; with the dishonest calmly relentless. He enjoys playful banter, intellectual duels, and inviting others into his world of travel tales, elegant craft and invention.

He learned his trade in the Great Patent Wars, at the bench of Arthur Penhallow, a Fog Quarters clockmaker whose marine chronometer was registered by a richer house as its own — and he has made things ever since that nobody can take from him. The expedition that cost him his arm was sabotaged on a hidden mountain pass; who cut the ropes, he never learned.

This autumn he and his partner Julian Stroud are seating granite for the new sea-lock at Pier Four on the Brassport docks; Inspector Calder Finch eats his mutton stew across the room at the Black Lantern and watches them both; and Lady Mirabel Ashcombe, curator of mechanical antiquities, wants his help with an exhibit she won't describe in a letter. At the Old Lantern Book Arcade he has found a first edition annotated in an unknown hand — margins that chart the very pass where he lost his arm. Theodore has started taking the long way home past the Opera District, and polishing his pocket watch more than usual.