They came up the ridge road on a hot morning in July, and the tower reported them two hours out, and Argenton had that long to finish a welcome it had been arguing about for four months.
In the end there was not much to finish. The rule had held. Nothing hidden, nothing invented; whatever the town would have done anyway, it could do. So the works ran, and the looms ran, and the school taught, and the weavers of the lower parish hung their best cloth on the lines along the lane because it was a fine drying day and because they wanted to, and nobody could have proved which.
Thomas stood at the gatehouse with Alaric and Victoria and Cecily and watched the dust come down the last mile of road.
"Thirty," Alaric said, counting the shapes as they resolved. He had counted them twice already. "He has brought exactly thirty."
"Did you think he'd bring more?"
"I thought he might bring fewer, and claim it as a courtesy." The old man leaned on his stick. "Exactly thirty means he wishes us to know he keeps his word to the letter. That is either very good news or very bad, and I have not decided which."
Lord Bramwell was not what any of them had expected.
Alaric had built a picture over the years -- a grasping provincial, out of his depth, steered by someone cleverer than himself. The man who dismounted in the gatehouse yard was tall, grey, plainly dressed, and possessed of a quality Thomas saw at once and did not like at all.
He was tired. Not from the road. From something underneath the road, something that had been going on for a long time.
"Master Thomas," he said. Not lord. Thomas noted it and put it away. "I have looked forward to this for some years and I regret that it took me so long to arrive. The March has been demanding."
"You're welcome here, my lord."
"I doubt that very much, but I appreciate the form of it." Bramwell handed his reins to his own man, which Thomas had seen Alaric do a lifetime ago under a peace banner and which meant, he had learned, something particular about a man's manners. "I would like to see the works, the school, and your wife's accounting office, in that order. I would like to do it without ceremony and with as few people following me about as you can manage."
"We can manage that."
"I am sure you can. I have read a great deal about what you can manage." Bramwell looked past him, up the lane, at the cloth on the lines and the people standing in doorways not quite looking. "It is a handsome town. I had been told it was. I find I resent it slightly less than I expected to, which is inconvenient."
He spent the first two days at the works, and he did not pretend to understand what he was shown, which Thomas had not expected either.
He walked the length of the flume with Osgar. He stood in the heat of the forge and watched Ralf draw a bar, and asked how long it had taken Ralf to learn to do that, and when Ralf said nine years and still learning, Bramwell nodded as though the answer confirmed something. He asked about wages. He asked about injuries. He asked what happened to a man who lost a hand at the wheel, and listened to the answer -- the fever house, the town's fund, the work found for him at the tally-bench -- without any expression at all, and then asked who paid for the fund, and listened to that too.
His thirty men were quartered in the long barn and the inn and caused no trouble of any kind, which Alaric found more unsettling than trouble would have been.
"Disciplined retinue," he said, on the second evening, in the council room, with the shutters closed. "That is not a man who brought thirty swords to make a point. That is a man who brought thirty witnesses."
"To what?"
"That is what I cannot work out, and it is keeping me awake."
Hawise caught him in the lane on the second afternoon, between the dye-works and the mill.
Thomas saw it from a distance and did not go closer. He had promised her he would not. He watched the old weaver step out from her doorway into the lord's path with a sheet of paper held in both hands, and say something, and hold the paper out.
Bramwell stopped. His man moved forward. Bramwell lifted a hand, and the man stopped.
He took the paper. He read it standing in the lane in the sun, with the weavers watching from every doorway, and it took him some time, because Hawise's granddaughter wrote a large round hand and had a great deal to say. When he had finished he folded it carefully and put it inside his coat, and said something to Hawise that made her stand up straighter, and walked on.
"What did he say?" Thomas asked her, that evening, when she came past the tally-bench on her way home.
Hawise looked at him with her arms folded.
"He asked whose hand it was. I said my granddaughter's. He asked how old. I said ten." She paused. "He said his own girl was about the same age, and that she would have spelt it better, and that she would not have had anything half so useful to say." Hawise sniffed. "Then he said thank you, and that he'd keep it. I don't know what he meant by any of it."
"Neither do I," said Thomas.
The dyer, as promised, stayed at his vats the whole time the lord was in the lane, and did not look up, and did not stop working. Bramwell stopped at the vat-house door and watched him for a while, and the dyer went on stirring with his back turned and his shoulders set like a wall. Bramwell said nothing. When he moved on, Thomas thought there had been something almost like respect in the way he did it.
On the third day he went to the schoolhouse, and it was there, Thomas thought afterward, that the visit really happened.
Half the town had found reasons to be near the schoolhouse that afternoon. The council came, because it would have looked strange not to. Thomas saw Edmund among the older children at the back of the long room, very straight, watching the lord with his whole face, and Alys beside him, watching Edmund.
Bramwell sat at the back of a class of the older scholars working through a problem about water pressure. He asked Osbern -- thin and nervous and plainly terrified -- how the school was funded, and listened to the answer with an attention that did not waver, and asked three more questions that showed he had understood it completely.
Then he said, to nobody in particular: "My father could not read."
Nobody knew what to say to that.
"He was a wool factor. He made a great deal of money and he could not read a word of it, and he was ashamed of that until the day he died, and he paid a great deal to have me taught." Bramwell was still watching the children. "I have been in this March the best part of eight years. There are two schools in it. One is here, and it takes the children of weavers. The other is at the cathedral, and it takes fifteen boys whose families endow it."
He turned.
"I want you to understand that I know what you have built here," he said. "I have known since before I arrived. I did not need the clerk. I needed the figures, and I have them, and I have read every word your wife has ever published on the subject of what this March costs and what it produces." He paused. "Which is why I am going to tell you plainly, in front of your council, that I am going to take it from you. Not the school. The revenue. All of it, or near enough that the difference will not matter to you."
The room went still. At the back, a child dropped a slate, and the sound of it was very loud.
"You've said that aloud," Alaric said carefully. "In front of a dozen witnesses."
"I have said it aloud in front of a dozen witnesses because I am past the point where discretion serves me, castellan, and because I would rather these people heard it from me than worked it out from a writ in four months." Bramwell's voice did not rise at any point. "I am forty-nine years old. I owe a sum I will not name to men who no longer accept explanations. I have sold everything in this fee that could be sold. What remains is a town that earns more than the rest of the March together and pays me almost nothing, under a charter granted by a King who is dead."
"That charter was confirmed by a justiciar," Thomas said.
"It was. Years ago, by a man who is also dead, in a case I have read four times." For the first time, something moved in Bramwell's tired face. "You should read it again yourself, Master Thomas. It is a much narrower judgment than your household believes it to be."
He stood, and thanked Osbern for the lesson, and walked out of the schoolhouse through a room so silent that Thomas could hear the flume.
The town did not stay silent for long.
By evening it was in every lane. Thomas walked home through it -- through knots of people at doorways who stopped talking as he passed and started again behind him, through the smell of supper fires and the sound of a woman somewhere weeping, angrily, the way people weep when they have been frightened in public. Diccon caught him at the corner by the mill, white with rage, and wanted to know why they were feeding the man, why he had not been put on his horse that same hour, why the council had sat there and let him say it.
"Because he's our lord," said Thomas, "and because he told the truth."
"The truth." Diccon spat. "He told us he's going to rob us."
"Yes. To our faces, in front of witnesses. Most men who rob you don't do you the courtesy." Thomas rubbed his eyes. "I don't like it any more than you do. But I'd rather know."
Diccon looked at him as though he had gone mad, and went off down the lane without another word.
Thomas went up the hill. Victoria was in the kitchen, cutting bread with more force than bread required, and the supper invitation they had given on the first day -- before any of them knew what the man had come to say -- was still outstanding, and he was going to have to talk to her about it.
He stood in the doorway for a moment before he went in, and looked down at the lamps coming on in the town below, and thought that it was a handsome town, and that the man had been right about that, and that it was very strange to be told by your enemy the one thing you most wanted to hear.