The Collectors

Gideon and Madeleine Ouvry  (Incense Burners)
Perfumers and Fumigators

Gideon Ouvry was born around 1765 into a Huguenot family that made its living from luxuries: gloves, scent, snuff and pastilles. Trained in London, he set up in Cambridge as a perfumer, with a shop selling pomanders and scented snuff to fellows, wives and undergraduates. The shop was the respectable front. The real trade was done in other people’s houses. When a sickroom needed clearing of “bad air”, or a death was close, Ouvry was sent for with his censer and vinegars, and he was let into the most private rooms in town at the worst possible hour. He was “Old Frank” from his early forties, for frankincense, and because everyone agreed he was the most candid man in Cambridge.

What Ouvry actually did was listen and collect... He heard the last words of the dying, the confessions of the pious and the charlatan alike, and the secrets a rogue might pass to his successor, and he remembered every word. His sister Madeleine kept the shop’s books and, it was said, a second set. Gideon told her what he had heard, and she recorded it in a ledger known only as The Book: a glossary of Cambridge’s families and individuals – detailing everything they’d rather forget. Neither of them ever used it. That was the source of their power. Families who couldn’t settle a will, a debt or an insult took the quarrel to the Ouvrys, because each knew their reputations or, indeed, freedom, depended on the contents of the book not being disclosed to – well, anyone! Half the town had a great deal resting on the sanctity of that tome, and rested easy only because the Ouvrys had never once been known to break that silence.

A copy of The Book was later spirited into the keeping of Wicken Frost and is said to lie, still, in the vault of his fen bank… Nobody has verified this, and nobody wants to be the one to try. Gideon is said to have used what he knew exactly once, for a reason he took with him. Now the two of them drift through Cambridge’s rooms at will, a scent on the air to remind you what’s at stake, even now.

Supplied with burning platform and 2 incense cones.