Osbert Fenn was, by his own careful account, the fourth son of a Suffolk reeve, and he had been reading other men's books for a dozen years.
Thomas established this on the second morning, over the sort of small conversation that occurs when two people are working in the same room and one of them is being watched.
"Do you enjoy it?" he asked.
Fenn looked up from the toll schedules with an expression of genuine surprise. "Nobody has ever asked me that."
"I'd imagine not. I'd also imagine that's rather the point of the job."
"It is just the point of the job." Fenn set down his pen, which Thomas noted; a man who wished to avoid a conversation would have kept writing. "The answer is that I do, in fact, enjoy it, and that saying so tends to make people uncomfortable, because they assume it means I enjoy finding things."
"And do you?"
"I enjoy the reading. What is found is generally somebody's misery and I have never developed a taste for it." He straightened a page that did not need straightening. "May I say something, Master Thomas, which I would ask you not to repeat and which I will deny?"
"Go on."
"Your accounts are the best I have ever seen. I have reviewed perhaps forty holdings. Four of them were honest and three of those were poor." Fenn's voice was entirely even. "I have spent two days waiting for the discrepancy that is always there, and it is not here, and I confess I find it slightly disorientating."
He worked for the best part of a fortnight.
He was methodical in a manner Victoria found admirable and Alaric found alarming. He requested documents in a sequence that made sense only if you already knew what you were looking for. He asked, on the sixth day, about the school's endowment in terms so precise that Cecily had to fetch a ledger she had not opened in four years.
And he never pressed. That was the thing Alaric kept returning to. He never once pushed on an answer, never asked a follow-up that suggested dissatisfaction, never came back to a subject a second time.
On the ninth evening Thomas found him in the schoolhouse yard, alone, watching nothing in particular.
"I have finished a day early," Fenn said. "I am expected to take the full fortnight and it would look strange to finish early, so I am taking the air and I would be grateful if you did not report it."
"Your secret's safe."
Fenn almost smiled.
They stood for a while. The light was going.
"May I ask you a professional question?" Thomas said.
"You may ask. I may not answer."
"Understood." Thomas chose his words. "You've been given a list. I don't expect you to confirm that. What I'd like to know — and you can refuse — is whether a man in your position is ever told why the list is the list."
Fenn was quiet for some time.
"No," he said. "Not once, in a dozen years. I am given headings and I return copies. I have sometimes worked out the purpose afterward, from what subsequently happened to the holding, and I have sometimes not." He looked out at the yard. "I want to be clear that I am not complaining. It is the correct arrangement. A clerk who knows the purpose begins to shape the return, and then the return is worthless. My value is that I do not know."
"That's a considerable thing to build a career on."
"It is a considerable thing to build a conscience on, which is the part people miss." Fenn turned to face him properly for the first time. "Master Thomas, I am going to say one thing and then I am going to go in, and you will have to decide for yourself what weight to give it."
"All right."
"In all that time I have been asked for a holding's charter terms perhaps six times. On four of those occasions the holding no longer existed in its previous form within three years." He said it in exactly the same flat register he had used about his father. "That is not a warning. I have no knowledge of anyone's intentions and I would not share it if I had. It is an observation about a pattern in my own work, offered to a man who asked me a civil question and gave me a chair."
He went in.
He left the following morning with four volumes of copied material, thanked the cook by name, and was, by universal agreement, the most pleasant threat anyone in Argenton had ever encountered.
Alaric had the whole exchange from Thomas that night and sat with it a long while.
"He told you," he said.
"He told me as much as a decent man in his position could tell anyone, and he did it in a form that could not be quoted against him, and I think he had decided to do it before I ever went out to that yard." Thomas rubbed his eyes. "Alaric — what do we do with that?"
"We believe him," Alaric said. "And we understand that a clerk of a dozen years' standing has just gone considerably out of his way to be kind to us, and that this is itself information, because men like Fenn do not do that for holdings they expect to survive."