The letter to Bruges took more than a year to do anything at all, and by the time it did, most of the town had forgotten it had ever been sent.
Thomas had not forgotten. He had stopped expecting, which was different. Through the whole of that year he had caught himself, every few weeks, listening for a rider on the ridge road, the way he had once listened for the small sound of the glass in his pocket. Nothing came. The crossings stayed dear. The Whitcombe orders stayed thin. Victoria kept her wall of figures up at the tally-bench and added to it every month, and every month the line she had drawn for the March's trade bent a little further down, and nobody wrote from Florence, or from Bruges, or from anywhere.
"It may simply not have worked," Alaric said once, in the spring, at the end of a council about something else. "Bankers are not obliged to act on what they read. They are not obliged to read it."
"Corradino thought they would."
"Corradino is a merchant. Merchants believe in consequences. Lawyers have seen too many letters vanish." He gathered his papers with hands that were slower than they had been. "I would not stop watching. I would stop waiting."
So Thomas stopped waiting. And it was in the autumn of the following year, on an ordinary morning when he was teaching a class of Cecily's older scholars how to read a surveyor's level, that Gib came up the lane from the Millbrook crossing at a pace he had not managed in twenty years.
Gib had kept the Millbrook crossing for Bramwell's fee since before Bramwell, and for de Vesci before that, and he had spent the last seven years charging Argenton's carters a toll that he privately described, in the tavern, as daylight robbery with a ledger. He was not a man who ran. He arrived at the schoolhouse door red in the face and blowing, and the scholars turned in their seats to stare, and he said, without any greeting at all:
"They've sold it."
Thomas put down the level.
"Sold what?"
"The crossing. My crossing. Men came yesterday with a paper and a seal, London men, and told me I'm to keep the gate for them now, and they've taken down his lordship's board and put up their own." Gib leaned on the doorpost. "And the toll's half. Less than half. They had me cry it at the gate this morning. Half the old toll for a cart, a quarter for a man on foot. I said, are you sure, masters, and the one in the good coat said yes, he was quite sure, and could I please stop asking."
Thomas stood very still in the schoolroom with twenty children watching him.
"Is it just the Millbrook?"
"I don't know. They said the ford bridge too. And something about Ashfield." Gib wiped his face. "I came straight here. I thought somebody'd want to know."
"Somebody does," said Thomas. He turned to the scholars. "The level will still be here tomorrow. Go and tell Mistress Cecily I've gone to the tally-bench, and that she's wanted there."
Victoria had it by noon. Thomas never learned exactly how. She had a copy of the conveyance on the council table by the time the others arrived -- the crossing, the eastern ford bridge, and the Ashfield staple, all three, in a single transaction, to a consortium out of London -- and the only thing she would say about where it had come from was that it had cost her a favour she had been saving for something better.
"About four years of their income," she said. "That's the price. I've checked it three ways."
"That's a fire sale," said Thomas.
"That is just a fire sale, and it means the houses squeezed him a good deal harder than any of us expected." Alaric was reading over her shoulder, very slowly, his finger moving under the lines. "He has raised a large sum quickly by selling the very assets he was using to bleed us. That is not a strategy. That is a man meeting an instalment."
Diccon, at the end of the table, let out a breath that was almost a laugh.
"Then it worked."
"Something worked," said Alaric.
Cecily, carefully: "Is it good? For us?"
"In the short term it is excellent. The consortium will keep the tolls low, because men who have just paid four years' income for a crossing need traffic through it more than they need any one cart's coin." Alaric set the paper down. "In the longer term it is the worst news we have had since he arrived, and I would like everyone at this table to understand why before anyone goes down to the tavern and buys a round."
He looked around.
"Lord Bramwell has turned a slow, lawful, sustainable squeeze into a single lump of money, which he has already spent. His income from this day is permanently lower. His debt is not much reduced. And he has one asset of any size left in his whole fee." Alaric paused. "It is us. And he no longer has a slow way of getting at it."
Nobody said anything.
"You're saying we made it worse," Cecily said.
"I am saying we did the correct thing and it has produced a dangerous outcome, and both of those are true at once, and I would ask this council to resist the temptation to decide it was a mistake." Alaric's voice was firm. "Had we done nothing, we would grow smaller every year for a decade with no recourse. We now have a lord who is desperate, whose lawful instruments are spent, and whose creditors are watching him. That is a far more dangerous position. It is also, for the first time, a position that can end."
"How does it end?"
"Badly for him, in most versions. The question is what he does on the way."
Thomas had not spoken for some minutes. He was thinking about a step outside this building, worn into a dip, and an old man in a blanket at midnight telling him about a ship that had gone down off Corsica with twenty men aboard. He was thinking about a sentence he had made Victoria write into the minute book, so that nobody could tell themselves afterward that they had merely sent a letter.
"I want it minuted," he said.
Alaric looked up.
"That Corradino told us this would happen. Not the specifics. He told us we would get a cornered man rather than a chastened one, and we chose it anyway, and I was the one who said we should be clear-eyed about using a weapon."
"Thomas--" Cecily began.
"I'm not punishing myself. I'm establishing the record." He did not look away from the old castellan. "In twenty years somebody is going to write about this. I'd rather it said we knew than that we were surprised."
Alaric held his gaze for a moment. Then he drew the minute book toward him, and dipped the pen, and wrote it in his own shaking hand, slowly, every word, and read it back without being asked.
Diccon did not go down to the tavern and buy a round. Nobody did.
That winter was the most prosperous Argenton had had in seven years. The carts went out over the Millbrook at half toll and came back full. The Whitcombe orders recovered by Candlemas. Hawise came to the tally-bench in January with a new standing order from a merchant who had dropped her two years before, and laid it on the bench in front of Victoria without a word, and went away again, and Victoria sat and looked at it for some time.
Thomas walked through the busy lanes and could not enjoy any of it. He felt like a man in a warm house listening to wind.
The first sign came in the spring -- a letter, courteous as always, in the same clerk's hand as every letter Bramwell had ever sent. His Lordship intended to conduct a personal review of Argenton's charter obligations. He would arrive with a retinue in the summer. He requested accommodation for himself and thirty men.
"Thirty," Victoria said.
"Thirty is not an escort. Thirty is not an entourage." Alaric's face was grim. "Thirty is the number of men you bring when you wish it to be clear that you could have brought more."
"Can we refuse them?"
"He is your lord. He is entitled to visit his own fee and to be housed at your cost while doing it." Alaric folded the letter along its old creases. "And he has waited seven years to do it, having never once set foot here, at the very moment he has nothing left to sell."
Thomas looked out of the council-room window. Down in the yard, his eldest son -- nine now -- was attempting to teach his three-year-old brother something involving a bucket and a length of rope, and was plainly regretting it. Hugh had the rope. Hugh was delighted. Edmund was explaining, at length and with gestures, how the thing was supposed to go.
He watched them for a while. He thought about Bramwell's son, who would be about fourteen now, and whom he had never seen.
"Then we'd better have the finest, most cooperative, most thoroughly documented visit in the history of this March," he said. "And Alaric -- I want that case you've been building for seven years finished before he arrives. Not started. Finished, copied, and in three places."
"It has been finished for four years," said Alaric. "It is in five."