Sir Henry Wattleman

Sir Henry Wattleman is a senior leader of the Checquy Group whose public authority rests on formidable experience, but whose conduct also reveals flashes of sympathy and practical judgment. His career joins the institution’s coercive power to its claim to protect Britain: he helps oversee the recruitment of Myfanwy Thomas as a child, guides Court deliberations during later threats, and ultimately takes command when a long-awaited project ends in disaster.

Identity and Position

Wattleman is one of the heads of the Checquy Group, sharing the organization’s highest leadership with Lady Linda Farrier. A Court roster identifies him by name among its senior figures, and colleagues defer to him as Lord Wattleman. The Court answers to the highest individuals in the land, though the account of its structure makes clear that it does not always answer to them; Wattleman therefore represents a secret institution with considerable independence as well as formal connections to government.

The organization claims citizens with unusual powers and binds members through ancient oaths, modern contracts, and secrecy obligations. Its authority to take children from their families gives Wattleman’s leadership a personal dimension in Myfanwy’s story: he is present when the institution’s abstract powers become the terms of a child’s separation from home. Myfanwy later describes the Checquy as an essential defense against threats ordinary people cannot be told about, and says she is proud of her work. Yet the means by which the group acquires and retains its members complicate that protective self-image.

Myfanwy’s Recruitment

Three months after Myfanwy’s hospital visit, her father received a letter from an obscure government branch. He and Myfanwy were driven to an old stone building in the City, where Wattleman and Farrier explained that she could legally be taken from her family and placed in the Checquy’s care. The nine-and-a-half-year-old paid little attention to the explanation, transfixed instead by Farrier, whom she recognized from recurring dreams.

Myfanwy remembers her father objecting, but only halfheartedly, as if he already expected to lose. Farrier repeated the relevant law without offering mercy, while Wattleman showed more pity and tried to console the father, even patting him on the shoulder. The contrast is striking: the man Myfanwy later learned was among the country’s most dangerous figures, responsible for many assassinations and having carried out most of them himself, seemed at that moment more human than his colleague. His sympathy did not alter the outcome. Her father left with Wattleman, and Myfanwy remained with Farrier, sobbing while the adults waited for her distress to pass.

The scene also exposes a limit to Wattleman’s compassion. Although he had responded to the grown man’s grief, he did not comfort the weeping child. Years later, Steffi Blümen recalled that Myfanwy arrived at the Estate clutching the driver’s hand, with chocolate on her face and tears in her eyes. Steffi believed that the leaders’ intervention had overwhelmed a child, and that Myfanwy never fully recovered from the trauma. In this account, Wattleman’s kindness toward the father coexists with his participation in a system that removed the daughter.

Authority and Working Style

Wattleman’s status is visible in the formal routines surrounding the Court. Before an emergency meeting at Apex House, his secretary relayed the Rooks’ summons while he was at a private club, where a waiter brought him a cordless telephone because the bylaws prohibited members from carrying mobile phones. His secretary was allowed only as far as the lobby, a small example of the ceremonial privileges and rigid hierarchies around him. He answered that he would attend, though his apparent regret at leaving the club was not sincere.

At a later Court gathering, Farrier arrived on the arm of a tall, gruff-looking Wattleman, and those present bowed their heads. Myfanwy’s greeting earned an approving look from him and a flat stare from Farrier, who noticed her amusement. In another discussion, Wattleman readily endorsed a proposal to put a new procedure before the Home Secretary, whom he expected to see at the club. His confidence in navigating official channels sits alongside the Checquy’s secret and often unofficial methods: he can move between private government influence and the organization’s internal decision-making without treating them as separate worlds.

During a crisis over a possible Grafter invasion, Wattleman praised Myfanwy’s insistence that the Court needed more information before choosing its next move. He directed the Rooks and Chevaliers to work together and report their conclusions to the Bishops the following evening, with an exception if the country were invaded overnight. The joke he added about being woken drew no laughter, but the instruction itself was clear and operational. His authority is not limited to ceremony; he sets responsibilities, deadlines, and escalation conditions.

Finances and Institutional Scrutiny

Myfanwy’s review of the Checquy’s extensive financial records raised questions about Wattleman’s accounts as well as Gestalt’s. She found that Wattleman had lived for an unusually long time and operated under more than one name and identity, circumstances that could explain some money being lost in complicated records. The figures were irregular enough to justify investigation, but Myfanwy stressed that she had no proof of fraud and lacked time to establish whether wrongdoing had occurred.

She incorporated the possible financial impropriety into a contingency plan for blackmail, while doubting that it alone explained why someone might betray her. The distinction matters: the records make Wattleman’s finances a legitimate subject for scrutiny, not evidence that he committed a crime or planned harm. His long life and successive identities also connect his private financial trail to the broader difficulty of auditing a secret organization whose operations and assets are vast.

Crisis, Ceremony, and Command

Wattleman’s public manner is often benevolent and ceremonious, but his authority becomes most evident when events threaten to overtake the Court. At the winter preparations for a dragon’s hatching, he arrived through the snow in a heavy coat and hurried into the heated viewing area. He praised the operation and singled out Noel Bittner as the young man who had uncovered the egg’s history and found it. Myfanwy discreetly corrected him: Pawn Cahill had overseen the excavation. Wattleman immediately acknowledged the correction, clasped Cahill’s hand, and praised her work. The moment shows both the risk of credit being assigned inaccurately and his willingness to recognize the person responsible once corrected.

At a formal reception, the Lord and Lady arrived to be honored; Wattleman wore a military uniform with so many medals that they nearly served as armor. The polished ceremony was shattered by an attack that killed more than twenty-five people at an official Checquy function. In the receiving room afterward, only ten members of the original dinner party remained, four doctors attended the survivors, and only three loyal Retainers had survived. Wattleman, who had survived a bullet to the head, was furious that so many had died and struggled to remember the last comparable slaughter on Checquy soil.

His response to catastrophe is not only anger. At another formal event, he had presented a long-awaited achievement as the result of years of effort, research, and fieldwork, and welcomed Rupert Henderson for his prophetic knowledge. When Henderson was killed through a grave mistake, Wattleman stopped the discussion from turning immediately to further violence. He insisted that the group accept the changed circumstances and adapt, speaking not as a man mourning a project but as a general and a leader. The moment crystallizes his role: he can preside over ceremony and institutional ambition, but when that ambition collapses, he tries to restore command and redirect the people around him.

Character and Narrative Significance

Wattleman is defined by a persistent tension between humane gestures and the machinery of power he serves. He consoles Myfanwy’s father but does not prevent the child’s removal; he is remembered as a practiced assassin, yet responds more sympathetically than Farrier in that first encounter. He can be an imposing figure at Court gatherings and a practical administrator in emergencies, praising Myfanwy’s caution, assigning joint work, and correcting an error of credit once it is pointed out.

His exceptional longevity and use of different identities complicate both his personal history and the institution’s capacity to account for its own finances. More broadly, his presence links the Checquy’s official authority to its secret operations: the group presents itself as a national instrument for confronting hidden threats, while its recruitment practices and internal secrecy place real costs on individuals. Wattleman is not simply a benevolent patron or a villainous official. The narrative makes both readings incomplete, using his mixture of compassion, privilege, and command to show how personal decency can coexist with participation in an institution that exercises coercive power.