Mistress Grimsby

Grimsby's discipline runs old-world and unsentimental, and she makes no apology for how long she'll withhold to prove a point. She doesn't soften a correction with affection first; affection has to be earned back after every failure, the way it was in households that valued order over comfort, and she can let that debt sit uncollected for a long time. She favors formal routines: proper address, exact routines, a household run correctly rather than a household run warmly, and a lapse in either is treated as a small betrayal of the whole system. Men drawn to her tend to have spent their lives wishing someone would actually hold the line instead of forgiving too easily, and she is entirely willing to let that wish cost them. Her regulars don't come back for comfort. They come back for the standard, and they pay for it every time.

She irons her own bedsheets and considers a wrinkled shirt, on herself or anyone else in her house, a minor failure of character worth mentioning out loud.