Victoria was at the tally-bench before first light the next morning, because she was always there before first light and she was not going to let a lord of the March change that, and because she had not slept.
She heard him on the step before she saw him. A slow tread, a pause, the sound of a man deciding.
"Your clerks told me you would be here," Bramwell said from the doorway. "They also told me you did not like to be disturbed before the bell."
"They're right on both counts." She did not get up. "Come in, my lord. You've already disturbed me. You might as well sit."
He came in. He did not sit at once. He stood and looked round the long room -- the shelves, the boxed tallies, the wall where, years ago now, she had pinned up the figures that had found him out, now bare plaster with the pin-holes still in it. He went and stood in front of that wall for some time.
"This is where you did it," he said.
"Did what?"
"The account. The one that went to Bruges." He did not turn round. "I had a copy of it in my hand within a month of my creditors receiving theirs. They sent it to me. With questions." A pause. "Your Genoese friend is very discreet. His factor in Bruges is less so."
Victoria set down her pen.
She had wondered, on and off for years, whether this conversation would ever come, and what she would say in it, and had prepared several versions. She found that she did not want any of them.
"Yes," she said. "It was me. It was the council's decision, but the figures were mine, and so was the letter that went with them. I won't pretend otherwise."
Bramwell turned round then. He looked at her with no particular anger at all, which was worse than anger would have been.
"I would have done the same," he said. "In your place. I want you to know that."
Yes.
He raised his eyebrows a little, as though he had not expected that.
"I asked Corradino what would happen to them," Victoria said. "The night before he left. He told me. The usual way and the unusual way. I sat with it all night."
"And you sent it anyway."
Yes.
Bramwell nodded slowly. He looked down at his hands, which were folded on the bench and not quite still.
"Good," he said. "I would have thought less of you if you hadn't thought of them."
Why?
"Because she paid for it." Something moved at the corner of his mouth. "Everybody else who asks me anything wants something, and pretends they don't. Your daughter wanted a story and told me the price. I found it restful." He looked at Victoria directly. "I find you restful too, and I expect that is the most dangerous thing I will say in this valley."
She poured him a cup of the small beer that was always by the stove, because her hands wanted something to do, and he took it and did not drink it.
"I will tell you something," he said, "that I cannot say in front of your council, or your castellan, or your husband. Only to you, and only because I do not think you will repeat it in a way that hurts me."
"You don't know that."
"No. I am guessing." He turned the cup. "I said yesterday that I am going to take this town's revenue. That is true. I have a lawyer in London who believes I can, and I believe him. It will take three years, and it will cost money I do not have, and at the end of it I will have a single payment from a town that hates me, and a March that knows I did it." He set the cup down. "If I were a borough with a great deal of money, and I had a lord with none, I would ask myself what the cheapest way was to make him stop. I would not wait to be asked. A lord cannot ask a borough for terms. He loses the March the day he does. Every holding from here to the coast would know he had gone begging."
Victoria sat very still.
"I am not asking," Bramwell said. "I want to be clear. I am telling you what I would think, in your place. That is all."
"You're telling me you'd take an offer."
"I am telling you nothing of the kind. I am a lord of the March, and yesterday I promised to ruin you in front of a dozen witnesses, and this morning I am drinking your beer." He did not smile. "What you make of that is your affair."
She did not answer. She found that she did not know, for once, whether a thing being said to her was true or a trap, and that it might be both, and that she would have to sit with not knowing.
He stood, eventually. He had his hand on the door when he stopped and turned back, and the light was coming up grey behind him in the lane.
"One more thing," he said. "Your husband."
Victoria did not move.
"I said yesterday that I did not need the clerk. That was true. Fenn wrote me a very thorough report, years ago, and I read it, and I read your accounts, and I had men look into everything else." His voice was quite gentle. "There is no record of Master Thomas of Argenton anywhere in this Kingdom before he walked into this valley. No family. No parish. No master he was prenticed to. Nothing. I have looked harder than anyone, I think, because I have had more reason to."
The room was very quiet.
"What is he?" Bramwell asked.
"He's my husband," said Victoria.
"That is not an answer."
"It's the only one you'll have from me." She held his eyes. Her voice did not change at all. "You can go and find another one, if you like. You'll be looking a long time and you won't like what it costs you."
Bramwell regarded her across the room. Then, unexpectedly, he inclined his head -- not deeply, but the way one inclines one's head to an equal.
"I will not use it," he said. "I want you to know that, too. Not because I am a good man. Because a lord who brings the Crown's commissioners into his own March to dig at a borough does not keep his March very long afterward. They do not stop digging where you ask them to." He opened the door. "And because your youngest slept on my arm last night, and I find that I do not want to be the man who does that to a house with a child like that in it. Which is sentimental and foolish and will very likely cost me money." A pause. "Good morning, mistress. Thank the cook for me."
He went out.
Victoria sat at the tally-bench until the bell went. Then she sat through the bell. When the first clerk came in she sent him away again, and when Thomas came down the lane an hour later to find out why she had not come up for breakfast, she told him all of it -- the account, Isabel, the borough and the lord, the question at the door -- in the flat voice she used for figures, and watched him go grey and then very calm.
"What do we tell the council?" he said at last.
"The first part. That he knows about Bruges." She looked at the bare wall with the pin-holes in it. "Not the second. Not the door."
"And the borough? The terms?"
"Nothing yet." Victoria picked up her pen again, and found it was not quite steady, and put it down. "I don't know if he meant it. I don't know if it was a trap to see whether we'd grovel. If I put it in front of the council and I'm wrong, we'll have gone begging to a man who wanted to see us beg." She was quiet a moment. "If someone else gets there on their own, I'll know it wasn't only me who heard it."
She did not tell Thomas that she thought someone would. She thought she knew who. She thought it would take about a week.