The works had no succession arrangement, which nobody discovered until the fourth day.
This was, Alaric observed with some asperity at the time, a remarkable failure for a town that had a written document covering the transfer of every other significant function, and had had one for fifteen years.
"We have a clause for the school," he said. "We have a clause for the fever house, which Aldith insisted on. We have four pages on what happens if Victoria is incapacitated." He set the succession document down. "We have nothing whatsoever for the works, because Wat refused to discuss it on three separate occasions and we all let him, because he was Wat and nobody wanted the conversation."
"Including me," Thomas said.
"Including you, and I would like that in the record, because in twenty years you have never once let anyone else off that hook." Alaric's tone was not unkind. "We made an exception for a man we loved. That is what exceptions are for and it is also why they cost something."
The cost was about five weeks of mild chaos.
Osgar assumed he was in charge, reasonably enough, having been the hands for a year. The second forge assumed nothing of the kind, having historically reported to Wat directly and regarding Osgar as a peer. The apprentice allocation — Cecily's elegant system from years earlier — turned out to have depended on Wat personally adjudicating three or four cases a season by a method nobody could reconstruct.
And the material orders stopped, wholly, for nine days, because Wat had kept the supplier relationships in his head and had renewed them verbally at fairs.
"He wasn't hoarding it," Diccon said, defending him at the council, which nobody had asked him to do. "That's how it was done when he learned. You knew a man, you shook on it, you turned up next year. It never occurred to him to write it down because writing it down would have been an insult to the fellow."
"I am not criticising him," Alaric said. "I am counting."
They sorted it out. It took most of a season and it was done, in the end, by Ralf — eighteen, three years in, with no standing whatsoever — who simply walked to four suppliers over a fortnight and introduced himself and asked what the arrangement had been.
Three of them told him. The fourth, an ironmonger out of Whitcombe who had dealt with Wat for twenty-two years, asked him what had happened, and when told, sat down on his own doorstep and did not speak for some minutes.
Ralf reported all of this to the council in a state of considerable nerves and was thanked formally, which mortified him.
"Who should run the works?" Thomas asked, afterward.
"Osgar," Cecily said, immediately. "He is the best smith and everyone knows it and he wants it."
"And in ten years?"
Cecily paused.
"That is a different question," she admitted.
"It's the only question. Osgar is forty-two and superb and will be running the works excellently for fifteen years, and we will be sitting in this room having exactly this conversation again in 1183 unless somebody does something about it now." Thomas looked around. "Wat had less than a year as the eye. He improved the standard of every forge in this town measurably in under a year by doing nothing but watching and being rude. That was the single most productive year of his life and he took it up at sixty-eight, reluctantly, because his hands failed."
"You want to make it a position," Alaric said slowly.
"I want to make it a position that exists whether or not somebody's hands have failed." Thomas was working it out as he spoke. "Osgar runs the works. And somebody else — not his deputy, not his subordinate, somebody who reports to the council — holds the standard. Watches. Says what's wrong. Trains the eye rather than the hands."
"That is going to be an extremely unpopular job."
"It's going to be a loathed job and it will need somebody with no interest in being liked, and it will make every forge in this valley better for fifty years." Thomas sat back. "And I would suggest that we write it down this time, and that we write down who follows them, and that we do not make an exception for anyone ever again regardless of how much we love them."
They created the post that autumn.
The first holder was a woman named Edith who had come out of Cecily's third cohort, who was twenty-six, who had never held a hammer professionally in her life, and who was chosen precisely because she had no standing in any forge and therefore no relationships to protect.
She was, for about four years, the most disliked person in Argenton.
By the time she died — in 1191, having held the post for twenty-three years and trained her own successor — there were three towns in the March that had copied the arrangement and one that had sent a man to study under her for a year.
Her page in the memorial ledger is two lines long and was written by Ralf, who by then ran the second forge.
Edith, who held the standard. Nobody liked her and everybody's work was better for her and she knew both of those things perfectly well.