Corradino was sixty-three and had not left Genoa in nine years, and he came anyway.
"I would not do this for a trading partner," he said, at the tally-bench, having arrived after five weeks on the road looking like a man who regretted several of his own decisions. "I want that understood. I am doing it because your wife's letter contained the phrase 'I do not know who to ask' and in thirty years of correspondence she has never once written anything of the kind, and I concluded the situation must be genuinely serious."
It is.
"Then let us be serious about it." He accepted wine, and did not drink it. "You wish to know who holds Lord Bramwell's debt. I can tell you, because it took my house's factor in London a matter of days to establish, and I am mildly insulted on your behalf that nobody thought to simply ask a banker."
The two houses were named Bardi and Peruzzi, and neither name meant anything at all to anyone at the table except Corradino, who explained with the weary patience of a man describing water to fish.
"They are Florentine. They are very large. They lend to kings — your king, specifically, and the French one, and several others who would be embarrassed to have it said aloud." He set down the untouched cup. "This is the part that matters to you. A house of that size does not care about Lord Bramwell. He is a small debt in a very long ledger. What such a house cares about, absolutely and above everything, is the reliability of its own accounting."
Victoria understood first. Thomas watched her get there about four seconds ahead of the room.
"They don't know what he's doing."
It is.
"They do not know, they would not approve, and they would be extremely annoyed to discover it." Corradino permitted himself a thin smile. "Consider it from their position. They have lent against the revenues of a March. Those revenues are secured by trade. Your lord has spent two years suppressing trade throughout that March in order to extract a larger share of a shrinking total. In the short term his payments improve. In the long term he is consuming the security itself."
"He's burning the collateral," Thomas said.
"He is burning the collateral to make his instalments look healthy, which is the single behaviour that terrifies a lender more than plain default." Corradino spread his hands. "A borrower who cannot pay is an ordinary misfortune. A borrower who is quietly destroying the asset while appearing to perform is a fraud, or near enough that no house wishes to find out which."
The room was silent.
"You are proposing," Alaric said slowly, "that we inform his creditors."
"I am proposing nothing. I am a guest and I have no standing here whatsoever." Corradino's expression suggested this was a formality he expected nobody to believe. "I am observing that your lady has produced a document — I have read it, and it is the finest piece of economic accounting I have encountered outside Florence, and I say that as a man who is professionally required to be unimpressed — which demonstrates the effect of his policy on the March's total trade with considerable precision. And I am observing that a copy of such a document, arriving at the correct desk in Florence through a respectable intermediary, would be read very carefully indeed."
"Would your house be that intermediary?" Victoria asked.
"My house has no interest in this quarrel and I would not ask it to acquire one." Corradino picked up the wine at last. "My house has, however, corresponded with Bardi's Bruges factor for twenty years on matters of exchange, and it would be wholly unremarkable for me to forward, as a courtesy, an interesting document concerning conditions in a March where we hold trading interests. That is not intervention. That is correspondence."
Alaric sat back and looked at the Genoese with something like admiration.
"You have done this before," he said.
"I have been a merchant for forty years, castellan. I have done everything before." Corradino drank. "I will tell you the risk plainly, because your lady would find out anyway and would think less of me for omitting it. If this succeeds, the houses will pressure him, and a man under pressure from Florentine bankers is a man who becomes desperate rather than reasonable. You will not get a chastened lord. You will get a cornered one."
"And if we do nothing?"
"Then in five years you will be a smaller town with a smaller school and he will still be your lord." He set the cup down. "I am not advising you. I would not presume. I am telling you what the two roads are."
They argued for two days. Thomas said very little, which Victoria noticed.
"You've already decided," she said, on the second night.
"I've decided I don't want to decide it alone, and that Alaric is right that it's dangerous, and that Corradino is right that the other road ends with Cecily's school closing in nine years." Thomas was watching Margery sleep in her basket, a habit he had not managed to break. "I keep thinking about something. Every hard thing this town has survived, we survived by being honest in public. The aid account. The court at Whitcombe. Even the fever protocols — we told everyone what we didn't know."
And?
"And this is honest, and it is in public, and it is also unmistakably a weapon." He looked up. "I want us to be clear-eyed that we are choosing to use one. I don't want anyone at that table in five years telling themselves we merely sent a letter."