The worst of it came in the dead of that winter, at a public meeting in the schoolhouse, and Thomas sat through the whole thing with his hands under his thighs.
He had promised. That was the trouble. On the day the settlement was signed he had stood in the council room and said, in front of everyone, that it was Cecily's proposal and Cecily's negotiation and that he wanted it to stay hers. He had meant it. He had not understood what it would cost to keep meaning it through a year in which the town was angrier than he had ever seen it, and the anger had one face to land on, and the face was not his.
The schoolhouse was full. It was always full now. Since the settlement had been published -- the formula pinned up in the tally-bench window and copied out on every church door in the March, exactly as Cecily had promised Bramwell it would be -- there had been a meeting every month, and every month more people came, and every month they asked the same question in a different voice.
Tonight the voice belonged to the dyer.
"I want to understand it," he said. He had stood up near the front, where he could be seen. He was not shouting. That was worse. "I want somebody to explain it to me slow, because I'm a dyer and not a clerk. The man comes here with thirty swords. He tells us to our faces he's going to rob us. He spends seven years squeezing every crossing in the March till my lad's got no orders and my neighbour's gone to Whitcombe to work for wages." He turned slowly, taking in the room. "And then we pay him. Every year. Forever. On a paper. And the paper says it's fair."
There was a sound from the room, low and ugly, that was not quite agreement and not quite anything else.
Cecily stood at the front, by the master's desk, where she had stood every month. She had no papers in her hands. She had stopped bringing them by the third meeting, because nobody wanted the figures. They wanted her.
"It is fair," she said.
"Fair to who?"
"To the March. To us. To whatever lord comes after him." Her voice was steady and quite tired. "We were paying nothing for roads and peace and courts that we used every day. That wasn't fair. It was lawful, and it was comfortable, and it wasn't fair, and sooner or later somebody was going to make us pay for it on his terms instead of ours. Now we pay on ours."
"That's what you said last month."
"It's what I'll say next month. It hasn't stopped being true."
Thomas felt Victoria's hand settle, very lightly, on his forearm. He had not realised he had begun to shift forward on the bench.
It was a woman at the back who said it, in the end. Thomas did not see who. A voice out of the crush by the door, sharp and carrying.
"Why's it always you?"
The room turned.
"Why's it you up there every month?" the voice went on. "Where's the founder? He sat at that table for twenty years and never once let us pay a penny to a lord, and now he's sat at the side with his mouth shut while a girl from a dead village tells us it was all our fault for not paying sooner."
The silence after that was the worst sound Thomas had heard in the schoolhouse in all the years it had stood.
He felt Victoria's fingers tighten. He did not move. It took everything he had, and the thing that kept him on the bench in the end was not his promise. It was Cecily's face, which had gone very white and very still and had turned, for just a moment, toward him -- and in it was not a plea for help but a warning, as plain as if she had spoken it aloud. Don't you dare.
He did not dare.
Cecily turned back to the room.
"The founder," she said, "is sitting at the side because I asked him to. Because this was my proposal and not his, and if he stood up now and defended it, it would become his, and you would all feel better, and it would be a lie." She let that sit. "And I am from a dead village. That's true. I walked out of it at nineteen with everyone I knew in the ground. And I'll tell you what I learned in it, since you've raised it. I learned that the thing that kills a place isn't the thing you can see coming. It's the thing everyone could see and nobody would pay to fix, because it was cheaper to wait." She looked toward the door, toward the voice. "I wasn't going to let this town wait. You can hate me for it. I would rather be hated for a thing I can defend than loved for one I can't."
Nobody spoke.
Then, from the second row, Hawise stood up.
She was older now, greyer, and she had not spoken at a meeting since the one where she had asked Thomas for his clever answer and he had told her he had none. She stood with her arms folded and looked round the room as if she were counting it.
"My granddaughter goes to this school," she said. "Free. Because this town can pay for it. And it can still pay for it, this year and next, because the headmistress went to Ashfield and sat across from a lord who wanted all of it and came back with a paper that leaves us most of it." She jerked her chin at the dyer. "You don't like the paper. I don't either. I don't like paying a man who tried to starve my looms. But I'll tell you what I like less, and that's watching this room do to her what it wanted to do to him a few years back, at that meeting, when he told us the truth and we didn't like it." She sat down. "That's all."
There was a long, unsettled silence. Then the meeting went on, the way meetings do, into smaller things -- the carters' fees, the new ward at the fever house, a dispute about a drain -- and it ended at the usual hour, and people went out grumbling into the cold, and nobody had changed their mind about anything.
But nobody else stood up and asked where the founder was. Not that night, nor at any meeting after.
Edmund had been at the back.
Thomas had not known he was there. He saw him only at the end, when the room was emptying -- ten now, thin and dark and quiet, standing against the wall by the door with his cloak around him, watching the front of the room. Not watching his father. Watching Cecily, gathering herself at the master's desk, putting on her gloves with hands that were not quite steady.
As Thomas watched, the boy pushed off the wall and went down the emptying room, against the current of people leaving, and stopped in front of the headmistress. He said something. Thomas could not hear what. Cecily looked down at him in surprise, and then said something back, and Edmund nodded once, gravely, like a man concluding business, and walked out past his father without stopping.
"What did he say to you?" Thomas asked her later, outside, in the dark yard.
Cecily pulled her cloak closer.
"He said, you were right and they were wrong and you said so anyway." She was quiet a moment. "And then he asked me how you learn to do that. Stand there when everyone hates you."
"What did you tell him?"
"That you don't learn it. You just stand there, and keep standing, and eventually it turns out you've done it." She glanced at Thomas sidelong. "He's going to be dangerous, that one. He wants to be the one standing up there so badly he can taste it."
Thomas said nothing. He was thinking of the gallery stair, and the supper table, and a boy looking at his father the way you look at a sum with an error in it. He was thinking that Edmund had walked past him in that room without a glance and gone to the person who had stood up.
In the spring, the first payment went to the March, on the formula, to the penny.
A month later a letter came back, in Bramwell's own hand, courteous and brief. It acknowledged receipt. It confirmed that the sum agreed with the published arithmetic. It made no reference to anything that had passed between them.
At the bottom, under the signature, there was one more line, in a different and younger hand, round and very careful.
I have checked your sums and there are no errors. I was looking for some. -- Isabel.
Victoria read it twice at the tally-bench and then laughed, out loud, alone, which the clerks would talk about for a week. She pinned the letter on the bare wall where the old figures had been, over the pin-holes, and it stayed there for years.
That same spring Margery went to Maud's workshop for the first time, with a satchel and no apparent nerves at all, and came home at dusk covered in grease and declined to say anything about it except that one of the lathes had a short leg, and that nobody had noticed.
And on the first warm evening of the year Thomas and Victoria sat on the step outside the cottage above the flume, with the children inside making the particular noise that meant nobody was hurt, and the town below them going about its business with the lamps coming on one after another down the lanes.
"It held," Victoria said.
"This time."
"This time." She leaned her shoulder against his. "That's all anything does. You know that better than anyone."
He did know it. He sat with it, in the warm dark, and let it be enough, and found that it was.