Sir Roger de Vesci came to Argenton for the ninth and final time in the autumn, and everybody in the town understood what it was except, apparently, de Vesci himself, who behaved throughout as though he intended to come again in the spring.
He was seventy-one and had been ill for a year. He arrived with four men instead of his usual six and had to be helped from the horse, which he permitted with visible irritation and did not comment on.
"I am told," he said, "that you have produced a son."
"Eight months ago."
"I should like to see him, and I should like it understood that this is not a courtesy. I have four grandchildren and I find I have become entirely tedious on the subject."
He held Edmund for perhaps twenty minutes, in the good chair, with the practised unconcern of a man who had done it a great many times, and asked sensible questions about sleeping and feeding and pronounced the child large for his age, which pleased Thomas more than he expected.
Then he handed him back and said, without any change of register: "Bramwell will have this March within two years."
The room stopped.
"My lord—"
"Do not." De Vesci waved a hand. "I am dying, Master Thomas. I am aware of it, my physician is aware of it, and I have been enduring a considerable amount of pretence from people who love me and I would be grateful for one conversation without it."
Thomas sat down.
"All right."
"Thank you." De Vesci settled back. "Now. I have no authority over the succession. The March will go where the Crown sends it and the Crown will send it to whoever has made the necessary arrangements, and the man who has made them is a northerner named Bramwell who has bought his way in and who I have met twice."
"What's he like?"
"He is intelligent, he is not cruel, and he is in a great deal of debt." De Vesci's eyes were clear. "I want to be precise about that, because the first two facts will tempt you to believe the third is manageable. It is not. I have watched a considerable number of men in this Kingdom and I will tell you that debt of the size he carries does not produce a villain. It produces a reasonable man who does unreasonable things slowly, while explaining to himself at every stage that he has no alternative."
"That's worse."
"That is very considerably worse, and I would rather you heard it from me while I am able to say it." He shifted, uncomfortable. "I have also come to say something else, and I would ask you to let me get through it without interrupting, because I have rehearsed it and I will lose it otherwise."
Thomas said nothing.
"I have governed this March for twenty-one years," de Vesci said. "In that time I have adjudicated perhaps four hundred disputes, confirmed a dozen charters, and hanged nine men, three of whom I have since concluded were probably innocent. I have not been a bad lord. I have not been a distinguished one either, and I have made my peace with that, and it is not what I came to say."
He paused.
"The single act of my tenure that I am certain was correct was riding out here, in the winter of forty-eight, to look at a valley I had already been told was a nest of sorcery, and standing at an old woman's grave, and deciding on the evidence of my own eyes rather than on a report." He looked at Thomas. "I did not save this town. You had already saved it. What I did was decline to destroy it, which required no courage whatsoever and which perhaps nine lords in this Kingdom would have managed, and it is the thing I will be remembered for and the only thing I have done that will outlast me."
"My lord—"
"I am not finished." A flicker of the old dryness. "I want to say plainly that I am aware what this place is. Not the wire or the school or your wife's accounting, remarkable though those are. I mean that in twenty-one years I have never once had to intervene here. Not once. Every other holding in this March has required me — for a dispute, or a failure, or a cruelty. Argenton has governed itself competently and honestly for two decades and has never given me cause to do anything at all."
He seemed to run out at that point, and sat for a moment recovering.
"That is the whole of it," he said. "I have no advice about Bramwell. I have no instrument to protect you and I would not insult you by pretending otherwise. I came to hold your son and to tell you that I know what you built, in case there is nobody left afterward who was here at the start."
They walked him out at dusk. He refused help mounting and needed it.
"Spring," he said, from the saddle, entirely steady. "I should like to see whether the boy walks."
"Spring," Thomas agreed.
He died in January.
Thomas wrote his page in the memorial ledger himself, which was not the usual arrangement, and Victoria did not object.
Sir Roger de Vesci, King's justiciar, then lord of this March. Came here once when nobody made him and looked at the ground with his own eyes. Declined, for twenty-one years, to interfere with a town that did not need him, which is a thing almost no man with authority has ever managed.
He held Edmund for twenty minutes in October and told us who was coming, when nobody else would.