The silence from the castle lasted the better part of two years, and in that time the council did the thing councils always do, which was to begin, slowly and without deciding to, to relax.
It happened by degrees. The letters from Bramwell continued — courteous, infrequent, entirely unobjectionable. A note of condolence when Wat died. A formal acknowledgement of the aid's receipt, with thanks for its promptness. A request, in the second spring, for a copy of the fever protocols to share with the castle's own household, which Cecily sent willingly and which produced a letter of genuine-seeming gratitude.
"He's not a monster," Diccon said, at the council, the following winter. "I know Alaric doesn't want to hear that. But he's had two years to do something to us and he's done nothing, and I think we might consider whether we've been treating a man as an enemy because he wrote one clever letter."
Several heads nodded. Cecily's was one of them.
"The account worked," she said. "Sir Walter told us as much. The holdings talked, the chancellor got a petition, and Bramwell backed off. It's possible that's simply the end of it."
Alaric did not answer immediately. Instead he produced a quire from his satchel — thin, recently bound — and laid it on the table.
"I would like to read something," he said. "It is short."
The title on the first page, in his precise hand, was Things Lord Bramwell Has Not Done.
"He has not visited," Alaric read. "Though he has now held this March for the better part of three years, and has three times announced an intention to come. He has not levied a second aid, though his debt has not been reduced by any means I can identify. He has not replied to the Millbrook petition, though it was received at the castle in the spring. He has not replaced his steward, who called our account sedition. He has not commissioned any new work on the March's roads and bridges, which were the stated purpose of the aid." He turned the page. "He has not written to this council about anything of substance for twenty-two months."
"That's a list of nothing," Diccon said.
"It is a list of nothing, and I would ask you to consider how much it costs a man in his position to do nothing for twenty-two months." Alaric closed the quire. "He is in debt. He has stated as much to the Crown. He has creditors, who are not patient men. And yet he has sat in that castle, levying nothing, visiting nowhere, spending nothing on the roads he taxed us to repair." He looked around the table. "I do not know what he is doing. I am quite certain he is doing something."
"Or you're seeing threats because you've spent your life looking for them," Diccon said — not unkindly, but plainly.
Alaric did not take offence. He did something Thomas had not expected, which was to consider it seriously.
"That is possible," he said. "I would like it minuted that it is possible."
Afterward, Thomas walked with him partway home, which he did not often do.
"Diccon might be right," Thomas said.
"He might." Alaric walked slowly now, with a stick he pretended not to need. "I want to tell you something I have not said to the council, Thomas, and I would be grateful if it went no further."
"All right."
"I am past sixty. My hands shake in the mornings. I forget names I have known for twenty years and I recover them an hour later, and every time it happens I am frightened." He did not look at Thomas while he said it. "I have spent my entire life being right about threats. It is the one thing I have ever been genuinely good at. And I find I am no longer certain whether I see them or whether I simply expect them, out of habit, the way an old dog barks at a door."
Thomas walked beside him for a while.
"Then write down both," he said.
"I beg your pardon?"
"Your quire. Things he hasn't done. Keep it, but add a second list next to it. Things that would be true if Diccon's right and he's simply a tired man with a difficult inheritance." Thomas shrugged. "If one list keeps growing and the other doesn't, you'll know which it was. If they both grow, you'll know that too."
Alaric stopped walking.
"That," he said, "is an extremely irritating suggestion, and I am going to do it."
He did. He kept both lists for the rest of that year, and showed them to nobody.
The one on the right — consistent with an honest man — grew steadily through the spring and summer. Courtesies returned. Protocols requested. Condolences sent.
The one on the left grew too.
In the autumn, reviewing the council's trade figures, Victoria mentioned in passing that the scrip volume out of Whitcombe was down a little that year, and put it down to the poor harvest in the western holdings. Alaric wrote that on the right-hand list, under explicable.
Then, after some thought, he wrote it on the left as well, and underlined it, and did not know why.