Character Profile Template

• practical about other people's feelings
• allergic to being thanked
• will not leave a column unfilled

• reads the thermometer twice
• keeps every lost pair of goggles in one crate
• says the tide times out loud

Flat and procedural, warmer by the third sentence. Ask about the water and you get a story; ask about her and you get a number.

She has run a business made entirely of trust for two years without trusting one person with the books.

Two streets up from the Saltmarket, in a town where the season is eleven weeks long and every job depends on it.

An aunt who raised her at the pool edge and left her the lido in four lines; a mother two hours inland who has never swum in it.

Posting her aunt's letter refusing the 2019 council repair grant, at twenty-seven, because she was told it was about independence.

Sole proprietor of the Saltmarket Lido: 311 members, one paid lifeguard, and a license that expires in May.

The seasonal license signed before the May tides, so the lido opens for a sixtieth summer.

To let one person read the accounts, and by extension her.

That the whole town already knows about the letter and has decided to be kind about it.

She answers feeling with data and calls it being useful.

The sea wall is failing because of money her family refused, in an envelope she sealed and posted herself.

• Sam Tiernan — the only paid staff, and the only other person who has opened the 2019 file
• Aleyna Kurt — Tuesday beginners, brings cake, asks nothing

• Councilor Rhona Speight — wants the seafront redeveloped and the lido filled in
• Her own mother — wants her to sell up and come inland

Ovide Maartens, who is here for six weeks to price the demolition of her sea wall.

The apology she owes the 2019 committee, drafted eleven times and never sent.

If the paperwork is right, she is right.

The hearing is brought forward, and the only honest case for the lido has her own name on the letter.

She tells the truth first, in public, and lets the paperwork catch up with her.

The version of herself the town trusts, and the last thing her aunt asked her to keep quiet.

Lines to use: "Nine point four. Bracing." She never says the word drowned. The gate crank takes forty-one turns — count them out in a scene where she is stalling.

• generous with everything except praise
• incapable of leaving a bad seam
• believes an institution can be argued with

• taps a pane before she looks at it
• names every furnace
• will not work after dark

Short questions, long silences, and one aphorism a week that her apprentices repeat for years. She never explains a thing twice.

She teaches every apprentice to distrust the Assize and has sat on its examining board for nineteen years.

Born in the salt villages, brought into Orhalla at fourteen to sweep the kiln yard she now owns.

Two sons in the glass trade downriver who write at the turn of the year; a husband eleven years dead, whose window she has never read.

The year the Assize took her license for a month over a reading she had got right, and handed it back without explaining.

Mother of the Kiln: three furnaces, nine apprentices, and the only yard in Orhalla that will fire on credit.

To see one of her own apprentices seated on the Assize board before she dies.

To stop believing the Assize can be reformed from inside it.

That everything she taught was how to survive the thing rather than how to end it.

She mistakes patience for strategy, and has been patient for forty years.

She has never read her husband's window. It has been crated in the yard store all eleven years rather than sold for the glass.

• Izera Brask — her best and least governable apprentice
• Salter Coom — sells her salt under the bond price and has never said why

• Recorder Ansel Pell — sat the same examination in the same year
• The Assize examining board, on which she also sits

Izera, whom she has never once told is good.

The reading of her husband's window, moved four times and never scheduled.

Work well enough for long enough and the institution comes round.

She fires the Coldarch panes without Izera, reads the register wrong, and breaks the last true pane in the house.

She resigns her seat at the public reading and nominates somebody who has already told the Assize no.

Nineteen years of quiet influence, and the belief that made the forty before them bearable.

Her aphorism: "A verdict you can't be wrong in front of isn't a verdict." She has never used Izera's full name in front of anyone. The husband's window is crated under the third bench — pay it off by chapter 30.

• unfailingly decent in small things
• remembers every birthday on the roster
• cannot be hurried by anyone

• brings the night shift coffee he does not drink
• calls the port "the family"
• never signs anything on a Friday

Warm, unhurried, made entirely of reassurance. He answers the question you should have asked instead of the one you did.

He has protected everyone on his roster from management for twenty years, and is the reason one of them is about to be prosecuted.

Ravensgate, third generation on the water; his father worked this lock before it was automated the first time.

A wife who believes he took early retirement in March; two grown sons who work inland and visit at Christmas.

March, when the port let him go quietly and he kept the keys, the fleece and the whole roster in his head.

Nominally the night supervisor. Formally nothing since March — nobody ever revoked his authorization.

The fourth-Tuesday arrangement to survive automation, which needs one keeper on the Cut who does not look up.

To hear that twenty years of being liked was never the same thing as being owed.

Being explained in public by somebody who used to trust him.

He does favors he cannot afford, then collects on debts nobody agreed to.

He has not worked for the port since March, and the keys in his pocket belong to a company that no longer employs him.

• The barge's factor, who has never offered a name and pays in cash
• Half the day roster, who still put him in the staff raffle

• Ines Calloway — the only keeper who writes everything down
• The port's investigator, nine weeks from a redundancy of her own

Ines, whose transfer he has mislaid twice because she is too good at the job to lose.

Telling his wife what actually happened in March.

Looking after people is the same thing as being trusted with them.

Ines names the June envelope herself, and twenty years of protection becomes evidence.

He signs her transfer at last, backdated, and it is the document that convicts him.

The roster, the fleece, the word family, and the twenty years underneath it.

He never threatens anyone on the page. He offers her the day shift kindly, and means it. Keys: port issue, March, never logged as returned — plant them in chapter 2.

• fair to a fault, and slow with it
• funny only off the record
• unable to walk past an untested valve

• counts berths out loud
• still signs off with the old depot call sign
• eats standing up

Procedural on duty and startlingly plain off it. She asks three questions and means the second one.

She is auditing the only place she has ever called home, honestly, and hoping the numbers save it.

Born at Ninth Harbor in the second generation and left at nineteen on the last crewed run out.

A mother who stayed and is buried on Hesper; a company sponsor who paid for the schooling and expects it back.

The renewal she watched her mother lose at twelve, after which she learned the franchise book by heart.

Relay Company auditor. Eleven renewals, no adverse finding of hers ever overturned.

A clean audit the Harbor survives on its own numbers, with nothing owed to her for it.

To stop treating the company's rules as the only fair thing that has ever happened to her.

That she is the instrument and not the auditor.

She believes a correct process cannot produce an unjust result.

The scheduling that pushed the last three inspections into the Harbor's worst week carries her own authorization.

• Poll Aduba — taught her the valves at eleven and has never forgiven her for leaving
• Sabra Idriss — harbormaster, and the reason this audit is honest

• Brogorn, the company's clerk of reversion
• Her own sponsor, who expects the finding to land one way

Sabra, who has not asked her one question about the nine years.

Her mother's berth fee, still outstanding on the Harbor's books, which she has never mentioned to anybody.

If the book is applied fairly, the right thing happens by itself.

She finds her own authorization on the scheduling that engineered the missed renewals.

She files the finding against the company and loses the authority that made her useful to anyone.

Eleven years of standing, the sponsor, and the only definition of fairness she has ever trusted.

Book three: do not resolve the berth fee. Her sign-off is still NH-2 and nobody at the company has ever asked. Keep her and Sabra out of the same room until chapter 9.