The tally-bench had a stone step outside it, worn into a shallow dip by thirty years of people sitting on it to wait their turn at the counting, and on the first night of the argument Thomas found Corradino on it a little after midnight, with a blanket round his shoulders and his eyes on the empty lane.
"Strange beds," the Genoese said, before Thomas could ask. "At my age a strange bed is a kind of lawsuit one brings against oneself, and it runs until dawn. I decided to lose it in the open air."
Thomas sat down beside him. The step was cold through his breeches. Below them the lane fell away toward the flume, and the flume made the sound it always made, which most of the town had stopped hearing years ago.
They had spent the whole day in the council room going round the same ground. Diccon was for it, because he had seen the lower-parish order books and did not like what was in them. Cecily was undecided, and said so every hour, which was more useful than it sounded. Victoria had hardly spoken, which in council meant she was counting something. And Alaric had been against, steadily and courteously, in the language of a man who had read a great many law books and intended to use all of them.
"Imprudent," Corradino said, as if he had been following the same thought. "Unprecedented. Without proper standing. Your castellan has a fine vocabulary for a thing he will not say."
"Which is?"
"That he has served a lord in difficulty, and he remembers it, and he does not wish to describe it at your table because it would sound like a man defending the dead." Corradino adjusted the blanket. "I watched him today. Every time someone said the word Bramwell he was thinking of a different name."
Thomas did not answer that. He had thought something of the same kind himself, around midafternoon, and had not known what to do with it.
"I will tell you a story," Corradino said, "because your wife will do the arithmetic, and your castellan will do the law, and nobody in that room is going to do the part where you imagine the man. I came a long way. I would like that part done before I go home."
The man had been a shipowner in Genoa, forty years ago, when Corradino was young and his house was smaller and hungrier. He had a good name and three hulls and a habit of borrowing against cargo before it had been loaded. Corradino's house held a good deal of his paper. When the habit became a danger to them, they called it in.
"Correctly," Corradino said. "I want you to understand that. We did everything correctly. Notice was given. Terms were offered. Nobody was unkind. I sat in his counting room myself and explained it, and he thanked me for my courtesy."
The shipowner did not become reasonable. He sold his best hull to a Pisan at half its worth. He borrowed against his daughter's dowry, which was not his to borrow against. He brought his brother into it, and then his brother's house. And at the end of the second year, with nothing left to sell and our notes falling due, he loaded the oldest of the three hulls with a cargo that would have cleared everything he owed, though every man on the quay knew her seams were bad, and sent her out at the turn of the season.
"She went down off Corsica," Corradino said. "A crew of twenty or so. I did not sink her. I have spent forty years being quite certain that I did not sink her." He looked at his hands. "I find I have to be certain of it fairly often."
The flume went on talking to itself below them.
"Why tell me?" Thomas said eventually.
"Because you are going to do this. I watched you today as well. You have already decided, and you are waiting for the others so that it will not be yours alone, which is wise and also a little cowardly." Corradino said it without heat. "And when the man does something stupid — and he will — I would like you to have known in advance that the stupidity was coming, and to have done it anyway. It is the only honest way to use a weapon. The other way is to be surprised."
"Would you do it? In our place?"
"I did it in my own place. I would do it again." Corradino's mouth moved. "That is not the same thing as advice."
They sat a while longer. A dog went down the lane on some errand of its own. Corradino shifted on the stone and winced.
"This will be my last long road," he said. "Do not look at me like that. I knew it at the gate in Genoa, and my knees confirmed it in the passes. I am not complaining. I wanted to see what your wife had built before I could not. It is better than her letters, which I would not have believed possible."
"She'll be glad you said so."
"I shall not say so to her. She would become insufferable, and she would be right to."
The council voted on the morning of the third day.
Alaric spoke last, and for once he did not reach for the law books.
"I served a man who was cornered," he said. He had his stick across his knees and his hands were folded on it, so that the shaking hardly showed. "I will not describe that year. I will say that he did things at the end that he would not have done at the beginning, and that the people who paid for them were not party to his quarrel. They never are." He looked round the table. "I am against. I would like my objection recorded in my own words, not summarised."
"It will be," Victoria said.
The hands went up. Four for. Alaric against. Cecily's was the last to rise, and she kept her eyes on the table while she raised it.
Victoria wrote the vote into the minute book, and Alaric's objection after it, read it back, and he nodded once.
"There's one more thing," Thomas said. "I want it written down that we are doing this knowingly. That we have been told what kind of man we will get at the end of it, and we have chosen it anyway. In those words or near enough."
Diccon frowned. "What for? It's a letter. We're sending a letter."
"That's what for."
"It makes us sound like —" Diccon stopped, searching for it.
"Like people using a weapon," Cecily said. "Which we are." She looked at Victoria. "Put it down."
Victoria put it down. It took her two lines. She read them aloud without any expression at all, and nobody asked her to change them.
Alaric waited at the door afterward until the others had gone, leaning on the stick, and when Thomas came out he fell into step with him, slowly.
"Thank you for that sentence," the old man said. "It is the first thing anyone has said in two days that I would have written myself."
"You still think we're wrong."
"I think you are probably right and that it will be very bad anyway." Alaric stopped at the top of the lane to rest. "Those are not opposites. I spent a long time learning that they are not, and I learned it from the wrong side of the table."