The old knight arrived on a mule, unannounced, in the wet end of the autumn, and asked at the gate for "the woman who wrote the columns."
His name was Sir Walter Brock, he held a small manor called Kettlewell three days north, and he was somewhere past seventy, with the loose-jointed, careful movements of a man who had been a soldier once and had not forgiven his body for noticing. He would not come into the counting room. He stood in the yard in the drizzle and refused a chair twice before Victoria stopped offering.
"I've come to say thank you," he said. "I've no other business. I'd have written, but I don't write, and I'd not have my priest put it in his words."
Victoria, who was not often caught without something prepared to say, said nothing.
"The aid hit us hard," Sir Walter went on. "Harder than it hit you, I'd wager, proportionally. I've forty households and poor land. My tenants had it from the reeve that I'd agreed to it — that I'd gone to the castle and bargained them away for a favour." He shifted his weight. "I hadn't. I'd no more say in it than the mule. But try telling that to a man who's watching his winter stores go north."
"And our account helped?"
"Your account was read out." He looked at her directly for the first time, and she saw that his eyes were wet, and that he was entirely unembarrassed about it. "Father Oswin read it from the pulpit. Every column. Took him the best part of an hour and he stumbled on the figures, and half my people couldn't follow the half of it."
"Then how—"
"Because they understood the last page. These things shall not be done, the sum having been paid. Every one of them has a thing that shan't be done this year. Oswin read your school and your drainage, and a woman at the back said well, that's our bridge, and a man said that's my roof, and by the end of it they weren't looking at me anymore." He cleared his throat. "They were looking north. Which is where they ought to have been looking in the first place."
Nobody in the yard said anything.
Thomas, who had come out when he heard the mule, watched his wife's face and saw something happen to it that he had rarely seen — a woman who had written nine pages for clerks, deliberately cold, discovering that they had been read aloud in a village church to people who could not read, and had meant something to them anyway.
"I didn't write it for that," she said, eventually.
"No. I'd guess not. I'd guess you wrote it for men like the Bishop's clerks." Sir Walter shrugged. "You're a clever woman and you wrote a clever thing. Clever things travel further than their writers intend. That's all I came to say."
They got him inside eventually, by the simple expedient of Cecily appearing and informing him, in her clinical voice, that a man of his age standing in the rain for an hour was doing her the professional discourtesy of creating work for her. He came in. He ate. He talked, once he was warm, for most of an afternoon.
He told them three other holdings had been writing to each other since the account went out. He told them the reeve at Millbrook had proposed a joint petition to the Bishop's chancellor, and that two more manors had signed it, and that it had been sent. He told them — and Alaric, who had arrived by then, went very still at this — that Lord Bramwell's steward had been heard, at the castle, describing Victoria's account as sedition in arithmetic.
"I like that," Alaric said, after the old man had gone. "I would like that carved over the door of the counting room. I intend to raise it formally."
"You'll do nothing of the kind," Victoria said.
"I will raise it formally and you will overrule me, and it will be in the minutes forever, which is nearly as good."
Sir Walter left at first light, on the mule, having refused an escort, a horse, and a quantity of provisions Victoria tried to press on him. At the gate he stopped and said the one thing Thomas remembered longest from the visit.
"Be careful of that man, Master Thomas. I've known a few like him. A lord who's opposed in public, he'll fight you and you'll know where you stand." He gathered the reins. "A lord who's laughed at in private is a different animal altogether. And they're laughing at him now, in four counties. I'd not want to be the thing he decides to blame for it."
He died two winters later. Victoria wrote his page herself.
It is the only page in the memorial ledger for a man who never lived in Argenton, and she never once explained why she had included it, and nobody asked.