Brother Anselm arrived without warning on a wet Tuesday, five years older in the face than the last time Thomas had seen him, and considerably less inclined toward the careful diplomatic softness he'd used at their first meeting.
"I had hoped," he said, shaking the rain from his cloak in the gatehouse doorway, "that three years would be sufficient time for you to have completed the engine you demonstrated to the Archbishop's own delegation. I find instead that Argenton has built towers, and medicine, and a currency the Bishop's own chancellor has seen fit to ratify — and has said remarkably little, in all that time, about the steam works the Church was given every reason to believe it held a claim upon."
Thomas had known this conversation would come eventually, in the way a man knows a debt will eventually be called, and found he was almost relieved to have it arrive now, in the daylight, rather than folded into some larger crisis.
"You hold a claim on the design I showed the delegation," he said carefully. "Not on the engine itself."
"That is a distinction I suspect you intend to lean on rather heavily, Lord Thomas, and I confess I find it a thin one." Anselm settled into the chair Victoria offered him, his old scholar's eyes sharper than Thomas remembered. "The design you showed us three years ago was a working steam engine — crude, by your own admission at the time, but sound. The Archbishop's own engineers have spent three years attempting to refine it, at no small expense, and have produced a device that consumes more coal than it saves in labor. I begin to suspect, watching how quietly this valley has continued to run its mills on water rather than steam, that you built us a design you knew to be inferior from the start, and kept the better one for yourself."
There was no accusation of malice in it, only the flat, weary patience of a man who had waited a long time to have his suspicion confirmed or denied, and Thomas understood that any answer short of the truth would cost him more, in the long run, than the truth itself.
"You're right," he said. "The design I showed the delegation works. It's also decades behind what I could have shown you. I kept the better version back because a steam engine that actually competes with water power is a weapon as much as a tool, and I didn't trust a design that powerful in the hands of anyone who hadn't first proven they could be trusted with paper money and clean water."
Victoria, standing at the edge of the room, didn't so much as flinch at the admission, though Thomas suspected she'd have preferred more warning before he made it.
Anselm was quiet for a long moment, turning the confession over with the same careful attention he'd once given a Latin text of disputed authorship. "That is either the most honest thing anyone has said to me in this March in a decade," he said finally, "or the most dangerous. I find, to my own considerable surprise, that I am inclined to believe the former."
"Why?"
"Because a man building a weapon in secret does not, as a rule, spend three years teaching a fever book to a midwife's apprentice, or defending a defective land grant in open court rather than simply bribing the judge, as I am reliably informed several of the Baron's own vassals would have done in your position." Anselm folded his hands, the old scholar's gesture Thomas remembered from their first meeting. "I did not come here today to demand the better design, Lord Thomas, whatever my opening words suggested. I came to determine whether you were a man worth trusting with it a little longer, or a man the Archbishop ought to be considerably more worried about than he currently is."
"And your determination?"
"I have not yet made one. I am, however, considerably less worried leaving this room than I was entering it." He rose, gathering his still-damp cloak. "I will tell the Archbishop that the design he holds is genuine, if inferior, and that the valley's continued silence on the matter reflects prudence rather than deception. I will also tell him, privately, that I believe you are sitting on knowledge this March is not yet ready to receive safely, and that I would rather you continue sitting on it than see it fall into hands less careful than your own." He paused at the door. "That is not absolution, Lord Thomas. It is patience, offered at my own discretion, which I reserve the right to withdraw if I ever have cause to believe I was wrong to extend it."
"I understand."
"I hope you do. Patience is a scarcer resource in this March than either of us would like, lately." Anselm's gaze sharpened, briefly, into something almost like genuine warning. "I passed a stranger on the ridge road on my way in, Lord Thomas — foreign dress, foreign tack, moving with considerably more purpose than a lost traveler ought to move. I did not think much of it at the time. Having now seen what you've built here, I think rather more of it. You would do well to ask yourself who else has begun asking the same questions I came here to ask, and whether they intend to leave as patiently as I do."
He left before Thomas could press him further, his escort already waiting in the wet lane, and Thomas stood in the gatehouse doorway a long while afterward, turning over the shape of a warning that had arrived, once again, from entirely outside the direction he'd been watching.