The first letter from Lord Bramwell was read aloud at the council and produced, by Alaric's later count, a full ten minutes of complete unanimity — the longest such interval in the body's recorded history.
It was charming.
I am given to understand that Argenton is the most remarkable holding in the fee I have inherited, and that its charter is of some antiquity and its schools of some distinction. I confess to a keen curiosity. I hope to visit in the summer and to be shown whatever your council thinks worth showing a man who knows nothing of engineering and quite less of medicine. I would be grateful for your patience with an ignorant northerner.
"Well," Cecily said. "That's — encouraging?"
"It is superb," Alaric said.
Something in the way he said it made the room turn.
"I want to be precise," he went on, "because I am about to be extremely tedious and I would rather be tedious now than wise in three years." He set the letter down. "There is nothing wrong with this document. I want that established. It is courteous, it is proportionate, it contains no request, and a man who meant every word of it would have written something very like it."
"But."
"But it was written by a man who has never been here, about a place he has never seen, and it identifies — in four sentences — just the two things about this town that are most remarkable and least visible from outside." Alaric tapped the page. "The charter's antiquity. Not its terms. Its age. And the schools, which most lords in this Kingdom would not consider worth mentioning and which several would consider a nuisance."
"He's read Fenn's return," Victoria said.
"He has read Fenn's return, closely, and he has written a letter designed to demonstrate that he has not read it, and he has slightly overdone it." Alaric almost smiled. "An ignorant northerner does not know that a charter's age matters. That is a lawyer's detail. He has borrowed a fact and dressed it as curiosity."
Diccon, who had been listening with growing frustration, put it plainly. "So what do we do? Write back something equally false?"
"No. We write back something completely true and slightly boring." Alaric produced a sheet. "We thank him. We welcome the visit. We describe the school at unnecessary length, because a man pretending to curiosity should be rewarded with four pages about ventilation. And we say nothing whatsoever about the charter, because he did not ask about the charter and we should not be the ones to raise it."
"That's it?" Cecily said. "That's the whole strategy?"
"That is the whole strategy for the next several years, and I would ask this council to commit to it now while we are calm." Alaric looked around the table. "We are going to be correct. In every letter, in every return, in every dealing, for as long as this takes. Not warm — warmth invites intimacy and intimacy produces obligations. Not cold, which invites grievance. Correct."
"And if he's genuine?" Thomas asked. "If he really is a curious man with a difficult inheritance and we spend four years being impeccably distant to someone who'd have been an ally?"
Alaric was quiet for a moment.
"Then we will have been unjust to him," he said, "and he will never know it, because being treated correctly does not feel like an insult. That is the cost and it is small and I accept it." He looked directly at Thomas. "I would ask you to consider the alternative error. If he is what I believe and we are warm, we will hand him, over four years, an enormous quantity of information about what we value, which is precisely the map a man in his position needs."
Nobody argued.
Thomas walked home thinking about it, and found the thing that bothered him only when he was most of the way up the lane.
"He might be genuine," he said to Victoria that evening.
"He might."
"And we've just decided, as a body, to treat a man as an enemy on the basis of four sentences and a clerk's reading list." He sat down heavily. "That's what Bramwell is to us now. Permanently. Whatever he actually turns out to be, we've already decided, and we'll interpret every kind thing he does as technique."
Victoria considered.
"Yes," she said. "That's accurate and I think Alaric is right anyway."
"So do I. That's what's bothering me."
"I know." She did not look up. "Thomas, we did this to Alaric. Do you remember? For a year and a half. Every letter he sent, we read for the trap. He rode in under a peace banner and half this council assumed it was a feint."
"He was our enemy at the time."
"He was, and he was also a decent man doing an honest job badly, and the reason we know that is that he eventually came and stood in front of us." Victoria set down her pen. "Which is the only thing that ever breaks it. Bramwell has to come here. If he comes here, we'll find out what he is, and if he never comes, we'll never know and we'll be right to be careful."
He did not come that summer.
The visit was postponed in June, on entirely reasonable grounds, in a letter of considerable warmth.