Mother Margaret

Type
Person: NPC.

Profession: Chemist (Medical); Nun (Religious).

Founder of the Sanctuarist Order.

Physical Description
Species: Human

Gender: Female

Age: 50s

Heritage: Indian

Appearance: dark skin, black hair starting to gray, dark eyes. Wears a simple black habit and a rosary; over the habit she wears a white lab coat and, when in her laboratory, safety goggles.

Political Description
Faction: Saint Paul's Sanctuary; Sanctuarist Order.

Personal Description
Head of the Sanctuary's Infirmary; doesn't work outside that area but within the infirmary she has total control. Mother Margaret is an incredibly skilled chemist and Father Luke's mentor; she doesn't speak often but when she does, her orders are obeyed without question.

History
Mother Margaret grew up in a wealthy Gentry family of doctors going back as far as the Great War and received an excellent education. As a young woman she fell in love with chemistry and studied it with an almost unnerving zeal. However, her life in her father's private practice for wealthy Gentry elite left her dissatisfied, and, feeling there must be something more to life, she began venturing outside the Gentry walls to provide care for London's less fortunate. She soon came into contact with Bishop Whaler and began working several times a week at the Sanctuary in secret (her parents were blissfully convinced that she was pursuing a romantic attachment and, hoping it would turn into a profitable marriage, turned a blind eye to their daughter's odd disappearances).

Her double-life came crashing down when her work at the Sanctuary was discovered—and with it, the fact that she'd been sharing her father's secret pharmaceutical compounds to help the Sanctuary cure the ill and dying. Enraged, her father sought to bring his daughter to court, but Margaret fled to St. Paul's, where she was given sanctuary behind the walls—and guns—of the cathedral. Although her father wanted to storm the cathedral, the higher-ups among the Gentry didn't want to engage in a military action with the Sanctuary over as piddling a matter as a patent violation. Margaret was warned, however, that as soon as she stepped foot off the Sanctuary's grounds she would be arrested and brought before a Gentry court, so she has effectively never left the cathedral during the last thirty years.

In time, Margaret converted to Roman Catholicism and became a nun, establishing a fledgling religious order, the Sanctuarists, under Bishop Whaler's jurisdiction. The Sanctuarists now have several other members, including Father Dunn, Father Luke Caldwell, and Sister O'Flannery. Today, Mother Margaret no longer has to rely on her father's patented cures, having created better compounds herself with less resources in her laboratory. Her research has been carefully recorded and stored in the Cathedral Library, where it can be studied and copied by anyone.