Victoria built the formula over most of the autumn, at the tally-bench, with Margery under the table.
The child had started coming down with her in the mornings without anybody deciding it. She was five now. She did not chatter and she did not ask to be amused, and she would sit for an hour at a time on the floor beneath the long bench with a box of old tally-sticks, sorting them by length, then by notch, then by the colour of the cord, while her mother worked above her. The clerks had stopped noticing her. Victoria had never stopped.
The formula was harder than anything she had done since the itemised account, and it was harder in a different way. That had been a matter of finding things out. This was a matter of deciding things -- what to count, and what to leave out, and how to weigh a weaver's loom against a cartload of ore against a scholar at the school who would earn nothing for ten years and then earn a great deal. Every choice was an argument, and every argument would be read by every holding in the March and by every lord who came after Bramwell, and some of them would be cleverer than Bramwell and a good deal less tired.
She wanted it simple enough that a reeve could check it on his fingers. She wanted it fair enough that nobody in four counties could call it a bribe. She wanted it hard enough to reopen that the next lord would not bother. These three wants pulled against each other like oxen yoked badly, and for weeks she could get any two of them to walk together but never the third.
"That one's wrong," Margery said, from under the table, one wet morning in the middle of it.
Victoria looked down. The child was holding up a tally-stick, one of a bundle from the eastern spur that Victoria had pulled out of the box the day before and set aside to check.
"Which one?"
"This." Margery held it up higher. "It's got the wrong knot. All the others have this knot." She showed a second stick, cord tied in a particular doubled loop. "This one's got the plain knot. It's from somewhere else."
Victoria took the two sticks and looked at them. Then she looked at the bundle. Then she went and fetched the ledger for the eastern spur, and turned back four years, and found -- after some searching -- that one season's tallies from the north pasture had been bundled with the spur's by a clerk who had since died, and counted twice, and that her population figure for the spur, the one she had been building half the formula on, was too high by the best part of forty households.
She sat down on the floor beside her daughter.
"How did you see that?"
Margery looked at her as though the question were faintly stupid.
"It's a different knot," she said, and went back to sorting.
Victoria sat on the floor of the tally-bench for some time. Then she got up and wrote to Maud that night, a short letter, and the only line in it that mattered was: You said send her when she can count. I think she has been counting for some time and nobody noticed. Maud wrote back within the week. The whole of her reply was: I noticed. Next spring.
Cecily, meanwhile, practised being shouted at.
She did it in the small room off the council chamber, with the door shut, and Alaric played Bramwell. He played him, Thomas thought, listening once from the passage, far better than was comfortable -- not as the tired, courteous man who had eaten pottage at their table, but as the worst version of him, the version that had nothing left to lose and a London lawyer at its back.
"Your formula is an insult," Alaric was saying, in a voice Thomas had not heard him use in twenty years. "You propose to pay me a fraction of what this town earns, call it fair, and publish it so that I cannot ask for more without looking a thief. You are not offering me terms, mistress. You are offering me a cage with your arithmetic painted on the bars."
"It isn't a cage. It's a--"
"You are twenty-nine and you have never negotiated with anyone who could have you hanged."
"I'm thirty," said Cecily. "And nobody's going to hang anybody."
"You do not know that. You are guessing. I can hear you guessing." The old voice was cold and unhurried. "Why should I accept a fraction when I can take the whole by law in three years? Answer me without the word fair. I am bored of the word fair."
There was a pause. Then Cecily, with an edge Thomas had heard perhaps twice in all the years he had known her: "Because you'll be dead or ruined in three years, my lord, and this is the only offer that gets you through the winter."
"Silence."
"Better," said Alaric, in his own voice. "Cruel, and true, and you will regret having said it. He will respect it. Again from the beginning."
They went again from the beginning. They went again from the beginning most evenings for a month. Cecily came out of that room some nights white with fury and some nights near tears, and on one night -- Thomas saw it from the lane -- she came out and kicked the doorpost so hard she limped home, and was back at the same hour the next evening.
The clause came last, and it came from Thomas and Victoria together, and they asked her at the kitchen table on a night when the children were down and the fire was low.
"There's one more thing we need in it," Thomas said. "A condition. No confirmation review by the Crown. Ever. Not sought by us and not sought by him."
Cecily looked from one of them to the other.
"Why?"
Neither of them answered.
"Why?"
Neither of them answered.
"It's a strange clause," Cecily said slowly. "He'll notice it. He'd be a fool not to. Any lord would wonder why a borough with a good charter doesn't want it confirmed. It's the first thing he'll ask me." She waited. "So I'm asking you first. Why?"
"We can't tell you," said Victoria.
The room went very quiet.
Cecily sat back on the bench. Thomas watched her understand -- not the thing itself, but the shape of it. He saw her go back over Alaric's words at the council, the founder, where he came from, no record. He saw her arrive somewhere near it, and stop, and decide not to go further, and he had never been more grateful to anyone in his life, nor more ashamed.
"You want me to sit across a table from that man," she said, "and put my name to a condition I can't explain, and defend it without knowing what it's protecting."
"Yes," said Thomas.
"And if he presses?"
"Then decline."
"On what grounds?"
"On no grounds," Victoria said. "Just decline."
Cecily was silent for a long while. The fire settled.
"I came to this valley at nineteen," she said at last, "with a dead village behind me, and you took me in, and Aldith made me competent, and I have trusted the people at this table with my whole life since." Her voice was quite steady. "I'm going to go on doing it. I'd like it noted that it isn't free. You're asking me to lie to that man by omission, to his face, about something I don't understand, and I'm going to do it because you asked."
"It's noted," said Victoria.
"Good." Cecily stood and took her cloak from the peg. "Then when he asks me, I'll tell him I won't say why. Which will at least be true. I won't be able to tell him, because I don't know, and I find I'd prefer it that way." At the door she stopped. "Don't ever tell me. Even if I ask. Even when we're all very old. I've decided."
She went out.
Thomas sat at the table for some time after. Victoria came and sat beside him, and neither of them said anything, because there was nothing to say that would not have made it worse. Above them, Margery murmured something in her sleep about knots, and was quiet.