Stewards of Trusted Affairs

Across the High Road in Pleasant Meadows, facing the tidy white facade of the Honeywell Chapel, stands a building that looks almost too neat for its surroundings. Its black-and-white frontage gleams like polished ink and parchment, and through its tall windows one can glimpse sharp silhouettes of women in crisp collars and narrow skirts, moving like a well-oiled clockwork. This is SOTA - the Stewards of Trusted Affairs, Bridgeport's most discreet yet powerful private management firm.   In less than fifteen years, SOTA has risen from a single woman's desperate experiment into an established institution talked about in courts, merchant halls, and the dim backrooms of taverns where contracts are signed over brandy. They manage wealth, estates, lawsuits, and - when gold is plentiful and paperwork immaculate - problems of a more unorthodox nature.  

History

SOTA was founded fifteen years ago by Margery Aulden, then a penniless legal clerk recently dismissed from her employer's service after exposing his embezzlement. Her first independent client was Lord Tarven Hollmere, an ailing noble whose estate was in chaos after his steward's mysterious death. Margery reorganised his finances, uncovered a theft ring, and within a month had the household running smoother than any magistrate's office. When Hollmere died two years later, his will left her not a fortune, but something more useful - his address book.   Within a year, Margery's name became a byword for competence. She trained other women, mostly from merchant families who had been educated but barred from the higher offices of law or trade. They worked in dark waistcoats at first, proper and invisible. Only later did the distinctive SOTA uniform appear – a calculated subversion of expectation, designed to disarm with beauty where others would rely on authority.   Now eight women form the core of SOTA, managing assets for nobles, guilds, and criminal enterprises, each with her own network of clerks, accountants, and hired contractors. Few contracts in Bridgeport larger than a bakery's rent fail to pass across their desks.  

Office

SOTA's offices occupy a two-storey townhouse of bright limestone and large windows with dark wooden shutters, marked only by a discreet silver plaque: Stewards of Trusted Affairs. Inside, the décor is austere - polished desks, ledgers locked in cabinets, the faint perfume of ink and lavender oil. The women's black dresses, white collars, and cuffs mirror the firm's aesthetic: disciplined, alluring, and impossible to ignore. The building is guarded at night by two contracted Titanforged and watched during the day by children from the Honeywell Chapel orphanage - a charitable arrangement that conveniently doubles as additional surveillance.  

"SOTA doesn't lie. They just find the version of truth that pays best." -- Master Wren of the Dockworkers' Association

 

Notable Clients

SOTA currently manages the Hunting Ridge Cooperative, the estates of Lady Brindle, and several warehouses of the Gill and Glamour Shipping Company. They have represent the Gnome Workshop in patent disputes as well as finding lost test subjects for them, and once defended a smuggler who later became Bridgeport's Harbourmaster - a coincidence, surely.