Victoria wrote the account at the kitchen table rather than the counting room, because the counting room had people in it and every one of them had an opinion about adjectives.
"One sentence," Alaric said, the first evening, having followed her home with a sheaf of notes she had not asked for. "At the very end. A single sentence observing that the burden falls unequally. That is not an accusation. It is a description."
"It's an adjective wearing a description's clothes."
"Victoria—"
"No." She did not look up. "The moment there is one line in this document a reasonable man could call a complaint, every clerk in the March reads the whole thing as a complaint. Then it's a grievance, and grievances go to courts, and this council agreed not to go to court." She dipped her pen. "Columns, Alaric. If the figures don't make the argument by themselves, a sentence won't rescue them."
He went home unpersuaded. She kept working.
Thomas watched most of it from the chair by the hearth over the following week, generally with Edmund asleep on him, and found it one of the more remarkable things he had seen her do — not because it was clever, but because of the discipline involved.
She went through every line of the town's spending for the coming year and asked the same two questions of each: what does this pay for, and who. Then she wrote down, in a separate column, what would not now happen. She named nothing emotionally. She named quantities.
Second cohort of the school: fourteen places, deferred.
Drainage of the eastern spur: deferred. Three households affected by spring standing water.
Winter stores of the fever house: reduced by a quarter.
"Which one was hardest?" Thomas asked, on the fourth night.
She considered the question honestly, which he appreciated.
"The school," she said. "Fourteen places. I know six of those children by name. Cecily told me which ones, and I made her stop after six." She turned the page over. "I had to write them as a single figure. If I write their names it becomes a plea, and a plea is exactly what that man wants from us."
Edmund woke at some point and demanded to know what she was doing, in the manner of a person who had been asleep and felt he had missed something important.
"Accounts," Victoria said.
"I want to do accounts."
So she gave him a scrap of spoiled vellum and a stub of charcoal, and he sat at the other end of the table with his tongue between his teeth and drew lines down the page, very seriously, for most of an hour. When asked what it was, he said it was an account. When asked what it was an account of, he said everything, and appeared to consider the question answered.
Thomas read the full draft on the sixth night.
It ran to nine pages and contained, as far as he could find, not a single word that could be objected to. It opened by acknowledging receipt of the writ and confirming payment in full. It listed every figure. It closed with one line, which he read twice.
The undertakings set out above shall not proceed in the coming year, the sum in question having been remitted in full to the March.
"That," Thomas said, "is the angriest sentence I've ever read."
"Good." Victoria took the pages back. "Nobody else will notice it."
Alaric read the final version standing up, the next morning, in the counting room, and went through it twice with his lips slightly pressed together, visibly hunting for the adjective he had been refused.
"It's cold," he said at last.
"It's supposed to be cold. Warm things get argued with."
"I was going to say," Alaric continued, with some dignity, "that it is cold, and that it is better than anything I would have produced, and that I resent both of those facts." He handed it back. "Nine copies?"
"Nine to start. The March, the chancellor, and every holding assessed under the same writ."
"And if they ask for more?"
"Then they'll have been read," Victoria said, "and that's the whole of what I want."
Edmund, the following morning, came down to breakfast and asked whether he could do accounts again, and was given another scrap of vellum, and produced another page of lines, and presented it to his mother with the gravity of a man handing over a treaty.
Victoria looked at it for a long while.
"God help us," she said, to nobody in particular, and put it with the others.