Bramwell's letter came in the spring, and for the next four months the whole town argued about its own face.
It began at the first council after the letter, and it began with Diccon, who had spent the night awake and arrived with a list.
"A proper welcome," he said. "That's the first thing. Banners on the gatehouse. The school out in the yard to sing when he comes in. A feast the first night -- not a vulgar one, a decent one, the kind a lord gets at a cathedral town. We show him what we are."
"No," said Thomas.
Diccon's face went red. "You haven't heard the rest."
"I don't need to. If we put on a show, his thirty men will go home and tell everyone in the March that Argenton put on a show. And the next question anyone asks is what we were covering." Thomas kept his voice level. "The works run as they always run. The school teaches what it always teaches. He eats what we eat."
"He eats what we eat," Diccon repeated. "A lord of the March. Pottage and small beer."
"If that's what we're eating."
It was Cecily who cut across them, and it was not to agree.
"You're both wrong," she said. "Diccon wants to put on a mask. You want to pretend we haven't got a face." She leaned forward. "Nothing staged isn't the same as nothing shown. This town is proud of itself. It has a right to be. If the school children want to stand in the yard when he comes in, they can stand in the yard, because they'd do it for any visitor and they did it for the bishop's man two years ago. If the weavers want to hang their best cloth on the line, it's their line. What we don't do is make anything up."
Thomas opened his mouth, and shut it again, and looked at Alaric.
"She is right," the old man said. "It is an annoying habit, and she has had it since she was twenty."
So that was the rule, in the end. Nothing hidden. Nothing invented. Whatever the town would have done anyway, it could do.
It turned out that nobody agreed about what the town would have done anyway.
Hawise came to the tally-bench in the second week, with three other weavers behind her and a sheet of paper she held in both hands as if it might go off.
"A petition," she said. "To his lordship. From the lower parish. Saying what the town's done for us. The school for our girls. The fever house. The orders." She set it down on the bench in front of Thomas. "We want it given to him. In front of everyone."
Thomas read it. It was badly spelt and fiercely meant and it made his throat tight.
"Who wrote this?"
"My granddaughter. She's at the school." Hawise lifted her chin. "Is something wrong with it?"
"Nothing's wrong with it." He set it down carefully. "Hawise -- if this goes to him in front of everyone, it looks like we put you up to it."
"You didn't."
"I know I didn't. He doesn't."
Hawise looked at him for a while, and her face did something he did not like.
"At the meeting," she said. "Two years back. You stood up and said you didn't have a clever answer, and I thought, there, that's a man telling the truth for once. And now you're telling me the truth isn't allowed to be said if it sounds too much like something you'd want." She picked up the paper. "I'll give it to him myself, then. In the lane. Without you there. And he can make of it what he likes."
She went. Thomas sat at the tally-bench and did not know whether he had been right, and suspected that he had not, and found when he told Victoria about it that night that she did not know either.
"Let her," Victoria said finally. "It's hers. If he thinks it's staged, he'll think it's staged. He'll also have met Hawise, and she doesn't stage anything."
The dyers wanted the gate shut.
Not barred -- nobody was mad enough to bar the gate against a lord of the March -- but shut, with a man on it, and the visitors' names taken going in and out, the way the cathedral towns did. The man who said it loudest at the next public meeting was the same dyer who had stood up two years earlier and blamed the council's columns for the lost Whitcombe orders, and he had not softened.
"He's coming to take something," the dyer said. "That's plain. A man with thirty swords doesn't come to admire the school. And you want us to stand there with the gate open and our hands out, smiling."
"Nobody's asking you to smile," Cecily said.
"Good. I won't."
"Then don't." She did not raise her voice. "Stand at your vats and work, and when he comes past, keep working. That's all we're asking. Be exactly as you are. If that's sour, be sour. Sour's honest."
There was a laugh, somewhere at the back. The dyer did not join it. But he sat down, and later Thomas heard that he had told his son at supper that the headmistress had more spine than the whole council put together, which from that man was close to a declaration of love.
Alaric spent the four months finishing the case.
It had been finished for years, as he had told Thomas, and it was in five places, and it was not enough for him. He went through every copy again, line by line, correcting nothing that needed correcting and finding things that did. He worked in the small room off the council chamber with the door shut and a stack of fair copies in front of him, and his hands shook now in a way that made his writing slow and careful and a little unlike the hand Thomas had known for most of his life.
On a wet afternoon in May he looked up from a page and saw, through the gap where the door had not quite closed, a small figure on the gallery stair across the passage, very still, listening to the council clerks argue in the next room.
Alaric watched him for some time. The boy did not see him.
He said nothing about it then. But the following week, when the stair creaked again in the same way at the same hour, Alaric got up, slowly, with the stick, and went to the door and opened it.
Edmund froze on the third step from the top.
The two of them looked at each other. Edmund, nine, white to the lips, plainly calculating whether there was any version of this in which he survived. Alaric, past seventy, leaning on a stick, with ink on his fingers.
"Can you write a fair hand?" the old man said.
Edmund stared at him.
"A fair hand. Even letters. No blots."
"Yes," said Edmund, which was a slight exaggeration.
"Then come down and prove it. I have a dozen pages of this to copy and my hands are no longer equal to it." Alaric turned back into the room without waiting to see whether he was followed. "You will not read it for meaning. You will copy it for accuracy. If you make an error you will start the page again. And you will tell nobody that you have been on that stair, because if your mother finds out she will have the stair taken down, and I find it useful to know where you are."
Edmund came down.
He copied four pages that afternoon, very slowly, with his tongue between his teeth, and two of them had to be started again, and Alaric did not praise him for any of it. At the end he looked over the last page for a long while, and then put it on the pile with the others, and said, "Adequate. Thursday," and Edmund walked home in the rain with his fingers black to the second knuckle and a feeling in his chest that he did not have a name for and would spend a good part of his life trying to find again.
Alaric told Victoria that evening, at the tally-bench, after the others had gone.
"He has been on the gallery stair for most of a year," he said. "I would guess. He is very quiet about it. He hears everything."
Victoria put down her pen.
"Do you want him removed?" Alaric asked. "It would be easy. A word to the clerks."
She thought about it for a long time, longer than he had expected.
"No," she said.
"You are certain."
"No. I'm not certain at all." She looked out at the wet lane. "He's going to run some part of this town one day, whether any of us plan it or not. He's nine. There's nowhere in the world he could learn more than on that stair, listening to you and Cecily disagree." A pause. "And you've given him something to do with his hands. Better he has that from you than from someone who wants something from him."
Alaric inclined his head.
"There is a risk," he said, "that he will hear something not meant for him."
"Yes," said Victoria. "There is."
She did not, then or for some months after, imagine which thing it would be.