The invitation had been given on the first day, before anyone knew what the man had come to say, and by the evening of the third day Thomas wanted very badly to take it back.
"We can send word," he said. He was standing in the kitchen with his boots still on, and the whole town was audible through the open window, the way a town is audible when it has just been told in public that it is going to be robbed. "He'll understand. He'll expect it, frankly."
"That's why we won't." Victoria was at the table cutting bread with more force than bread required. "He said it in front of a dozen witnesses to see what we'd do. If we cancel supper, we've told him we're frightened. If we feed him, we've told him we aren't."
"We are frightened."
"Yes. And he doesn't get to know that from the menu." She set down the knife. "He eats what we eat. You said that yourself, at council, a dozen times. Pottage and small beer, and the children at the table, because they're always at the table, and I will not send my own children up to bed early because a lord is in the house. That would be staging something."
Thomas looked at her. She looked back. He had been married to her long enough to know when an argument was over before it had started, and he took his boots off.
Bramwell came up the lane alone except for one man, whom he left at the gate with instructions to stay there and be inconspicuous, which the man achieved poorly. He was dressed no differently than he had been all week, plain and good and slightly worn, and he stopped inside the door and looked round the kitchen -- the long table, the hearth, the bench by the door with a stone wedged under one leg, the four children in a row along the far side in various states of scrubbed and suspicious -- and something in his face eased that Thomas had not seen ease all week.
"Thank you," he said, to Victoria. "I had assumed, after this afternoon, that I would be eating alone at the inn."
"We had an invitation outstanding," said Victoria. "Sit there, my lord. Hugh, move up."
Hugh, who was three, moved up by about the width of a finger, and stared at the lord with frank, enormous interest for most of the meal.
It was Edmund who started it, as it was always going to be. He had been at the schoolhouse that afternoon. Everyone had. He had sat through the pottage in a silence that Thomas recognised, the silence of a boy assembling a question and checking it for weak joints, and when Bramwell set down his spoon Edmund said, very clearly:
"Are you going to take the school?"
The table stopped.
Thomas opened his mouth. Bramwell lifted one hand from the table, not much, and Thomas -- to his own surprise -- closed it again.
"No," said Bramwell. He said it to Edmund directly, the way one man answers another. "I have no interest in your school. I think it is the best thing in this March. I said so this afternoon and I meant it."
"Then what are you going to take?"
"Money. The town's revenue. What it earns from its trade. Most of it, if I can."
Edmund considered this. "Why?"
"Because I owe a great deal of money to men who will not wait any longer, and this town has a great deal, and I am its lord, and the law may let me." Bramwell picked up his cup. "Those are the reasons. They are not good reasons. They are the ones I have."
There was a silence.
"That's not fair," Edmund said.
"No," said Bramwell. "It is not. Most of what lords do is not fair. That is half the point of being one."
"Then you shouldn't."
"Possibly not." The man looked at Thomas's son with an expression Thomas could not read at all. "But I will tell you something, because you asked me straight and nobody else in this valley has. When you are grown, you will have to do things that are not fair, because the other choices will be worse. Everyone who runs anything does. The only question is whether you say so out loud, as I have done today, or whether you pretend." He drank. "I find I prefer to say so. It costs more. It is also the only thing I have left that is mine."
Edmund did not answer. He sat back on the bench with his face set, and Thomas saw that the boy was angry, and that under the anger he was something else -- flattered, almost, to have been answered as if his question mattered. Thomas did not like either half of it. He liked even less that he could not have given the boy that second thing himself, at that table, in that moment, without it costing something he was not willing to spend.
Alys handled him differently.
She waited until the honey cake came out, which was later than usual, because Victoria had not been going to make it and had made it anyway. Then she said, in her most reasonable voice, "Have you got children?"
Bramwell turned to her. "A son and a daughter."
"How old?"
"My son is fourteen. My daughter is ten."
"What's her name?"
Isabel.
Alys took this in. Thomas could see her filing it. "Does she do sums?"
"Better than I do. She does my household accounts when my steward is ill, and finds his errors, and he resents her for it."
"My mother does accounts," Alys said. "She found everyone's errors in the whole March. That's why you're here."
Victoria made a small sound into her cup.
"That," said Bramwell gravely, "is very nearly true."
Alys pushed her own slice of honey cake an inch across the table toward him. "You can have half of that if you tell me about Isabel's house."
He told her. It took some time. Isabel's house turned out to have a dovecote with a broken door that nobody had mended in three years, and a hound that slept on the stairs, and a long gallery where the girl rode a hobby horse on wet days because the rest of the house was full of men waiting to speak to her father. Bramwell told it plainly, without any particular warmth, and somewhere in the middle of it Thomas understood that the man had not described his own home to anyone in a very long time, and that he was doing it now because a seven-year-old had paid him in cake.
At the end of it Alys pushed the whole slice across, not just half.
"That was a long one," she said. "That's fair."
Margery said nothing all evening. She ate. She watched. When the lord's knife slid off the edge of his plate and onto the floor, she got down from the bench, picked it up, wiped it on her skirt, and gave it back to him without a word, and climbed up again.
Bramwell looked at the knife, and then at her.
"Thank you."
Margery looked at him for a while with her level, measuring stare.
"Your hands shake," she said.
The table went still again.
Bramwell turned his right hand over and looked at it as though it belonged to someone else. It was shaking, a little. Thomas had noticed it on the first day and had assumed it was the cold.
"Yes," said Bramwell. "They have started to. I am told it is worry."
Margery nodded, as though this was a reasonable answer to a reasonable question, and went back to her cake.
Hugh fell asleep before the end, sideways against the lord's arm, with his mouth open.
Victoria half rose to move him. Bramwell shook his head, and did not move, and sat through the last of the conversation -- which was about nothing, about the weather and the roads and the price of wool in Flanders -- with somebody else's three-year-old breathing against his sleeve, keeping very still so as not to wake him.
When he left, at the door, he stopped by the bench with the stone under its leg, and looked down at it.
"Someone has mended that," he said.
"My daughter," said Victoria. "The quiet one. When she was three."
Bramwell looked at the stone for a moment longer.
"I am sorry," he said, not to anyone in particular, and Thomas could not tell whether he meant the revenue, or the afternoon, or something else that had nothing to do with Argenton at all. Then he went out to his man at the gate and down the lane in the dark, and Victoria stood in the doorway and watched him go, and did not come in for some time.