The thing Lord Bramwell had been doing for two years came to light, as such things generally do, by accident.
A carter from the southern route mentioned in passing to Diccon that the tolls at the Millbrook crossing had gone up again, and Diccon — who had no particular reason to care and who was mainly making conversation — asked how much, and the answer was large enough that he mentioned it to Victoria that evening.
Victoria pulled the toll records the next morning and did not stop working until well after dark.
"He hasn't touched us," she said, at the council, with the whole of a wall behind her covered in her own figures. "That's what took me so long to see it. He has not levied a single thing on Argenton since the aid. He has been raising tolls, licences, and market fees on everyone we trade with, in a specific pattern, for two years."
She traced the line with her finger.
"The Millbrook crossing. The Whitcombe market fee. The bridge licence at the eastern ford. The wool staple at Ashfield." She turned. "Those four points are on every route between this town and its customers. Not one of them is our property. Not one of them is subject to our charter. And every single one of them now costs a merchant significantly more to use than it did two years ago."
Alaric had gone very quiet.
"He is not taxing you," he said. "He is taxing the act of trading with you."
"That's it exactly. And it's invisible from here, because the cost doesn't appear in our books at all. It appears in theirs." Victoria set down her chalk. "Our scrip volume is down a tenth over two years and I attributed it to the bad harvest. It isn't the harvest. It's that a merchant out of Whitcombe now pays about nine percent more in fees to complete the same journey he made in the old lord's time, and he is beginning, quietly, to find other suppliers."
Nobody spoke for a moment.
"That is superb work," Alaric said, with the flat sincerity of a professional acknowledging a rival. "I would very much like to know who is advising him. This is not a wool merchant's idea. This is somebody who has read our charter closely enough to understand precisely what it does not protect."
"Can we challenge it?"
"On what grounds? Every one of those fees is lawful. He is entitled to set tolls on his own crossings. He is entitled to license his own bridges. There is no court in this Kingdom that would entertain a complaint from a town whose objection amounts to the lord has made it more expensive for other people to come and see us." Alaric shook his head slowly. "Our charter protects Argenton. It says nothing whatsoever about the roads to Argenton, because in 1147 nobody imagined a lord would think to strangle a town by squeezing everything around it."
Cecily asked the obvious question. "How long before it hurts properly?"
Victoria consulted her figures. "At the current rate, and assuming he continues — which he will — we lose the marginal Whitcombe trade entirely within three years and the eastern trade within five. Not the whole of it. The margin. The part that pays for the school."
That landed in the room in a way the aid never had.
"There is a further consideration," Alaric said, "which I would rather raise now than in a year. This method is slow, lawful, and requires no confrontation whatsoever. It also has the effect of impoverishing every other holding along those routes, who are paying the same increased fees without receiving anything for it." He looked around. "He is not merely attacking you. He is attacking the March in order to attack you, and he is doing it in a form where the March cannot see who is responsible."
"Then we show them," Thomas said.
"That worked once."
"It worked once because it was true and legible and nobody had to take our word for it." Thomas leaned forward. "Victoria has just spent a day and most of a night producing the single most legible document about this March's economy that exists anywhere. There are a dozen holdings that asked for her aid account three years ago. I'd suggest they'd be extremely interested in this one."
"And when he understands what we've done?"
"He'll already understand. He's understood since the aid." Thomas rubbed his eyes. "Alaric — I want to ask you something and I want the real answer. Is there any version of this where the man simply stops? Where he takes his revenue and gets bored and leaves us alone?"
Alaric considered it for a long moment.
"No," he said. "He arrived in debt and he purchased this appointment specifically to service it, and this town is the only thing in his fee capable of servicing it at the rate he requires. He cannot stop. He will escalate until something stops him, and the only things that can are the Crown, the Church, or his own creditors."
"Then we should probably find out about his creditors," Victoria said.