The covering note took Victoria the better part of a week, and Corradino crossed out the first sentence of every draft.
"You cannot write this," he said, the third time, tapping the line with a dry finger. They were at her table in the evening room, with the account itself between them in its fair copy and the children asleep overhead, more or less. "Lord Bramwell is consuming the security against which he has borrowed. It is true. It is also an instruction. You are telling a Florentine what to think."
"I'm telling him what the figures show."
"The figures will tell him what the figures show. That is why you spent all those hours at that wall." He set the quill down. "A man in a counting house in Bruges receives a great deal of paper. Most of it wants something from him. If he can see what this wants by the end of the first line, he will read the rest of it as a request, and resist it. If he cannot see what it wants, he will read the whole account looking for the trick, and he will find the conclusion himself, and then it will belong to him." He spread his hands. "Men act on conclusions they believe they reached alone. It is the whole secret of my trade, and I give it to you for nothing."
Victoria looked at her sentence. It was a good sentence. She had been pleased with it.
"It feels like hiding," she said.
"It is the opposite of hiding. You are putting everything in front of him and declining to point." Corradino picked up the wine she had poured an hour earlier and found it had gone cold, and drank it anyway. "Your town has an admirable habit of saying the thing aloud. It is very fine at a public meeting. Bankers are not a public meeting."
She struck the sentence out herself. The note that went with the account, when it was finished, said only that the house of Corradino forwarded it as a matter of possible interest, concerning conditions in a March where the house had trading connections, and that the figures had been compiled locally and in good faith. It said nothing about Bramwell at all. His name appeared for the first time on the fourth page of the account, in a column.
It was, Victoria thought, the most effective thing she had ever written, and nearly none of it was hers.
She asked him the other question on his last evening, when the note was sealed and the account wrapped in oilcloth and the whole parcel sitting by the door with his saddlebags.
"What happens to his family?"
Corradino had been half asleep in the good chair. He opened his eyes.
"You have not asked that before."
"I've been thinking it for a fortnight. I didn't want to ask it in council. Diccon would have taken it as doubt and Alaric would have taken it as agreement." She sat down across from him. "He has a wife. There's a son, I think, quite young. There may be others."
"There is a son. Nine or ten. And a daughter younger." He said it without needing to think, which told her he had already looked. "You want the usual way or the unusual way?"
Both.
"The usual way, he sells what is not entailed. Then he finds ways to sell what is. The household shrinks. The wife's people are asked for money and give it once and then stop answering. When the boy is old enough he is married to whatever family will pay most for a name, and that family despises him for the rest of his days, and he knows it, and he is very careful never to show that he knows it." Corradino folded his hands on the blanket. "I have seen it perhaps a dozen times. It is not a cruel story. It is merely a long one."
"And the unusual way?"
"The unusual way, he is frightened into good sense, and stops, and his creditors are pleased with him, and in ten years he is a dull and solvent lord and the boy inherits a March with trade in it." He shrugged. "If that happens, I will write to you from wherever I am and apologise for my pessimism."
Victoria looked at the parcel by the door.
"I keep thinking," she said, "that the boy is about the age Edmund will be, when this is over. Whichever way it goes."
"Yes," said Corradino. "I thought you would get there. You count everything, so you were bound to count that." He did not soften it. "I will tell you what I told your husband on a step at midnight. Do it knowing. Do not do it and then find out."
"I know."
"Then there is nothing else to say." He closed his eyes again. "Except that your wine is better than it was in your father's day, and I would like another cup of it before bed, if it is not too much trouble to a lady who has just decided the fate of a March."
She poured it. She did not move the parcel from the door.
He left at first light, on a mule rather than a horse, which was a concession to his knees that he described as a temporary measure.
Half the household came down to see him off, and Edmund, who was five and had decided over the past week that the old foreigner was the most interesting person ever to have entered the valley, came down in his nightshirt and refused to go back up.
Corradino looked down at him from the mule.
"You are cold."
"No, I'm not."
"You are lying, which is a start." The old man reached into his purse and brought out a small silver coin, thin and worn, with a castle gate on one face. He leaned down, slowly, and put it in the boy's hand. "Do you know what that is worth?"
Edmund turned it over. "No."
"Here, nothing. Nobody in this valley will take it. In Genoa, it buys a loaf." Corradino straightened. "That is the first lesson of my trade, and the only one I have time for this morning. What a thing is worth depends on where you are standing."
"Then why did you keep it?"
"I did not keep it. I have just given it to you." Corradino gathered the reins. "Which is the second lesson, and you have had it for free, so do not tell your mother."
Edmund closed his fist round the coin. "Are you coming back?"
The old man looked at him, and then up at Victoria, and then back at the boy.
"I am old," he said. "Old men do not promise roads."
"That isn't an answer."
Corradino laughed, properly, for the first time since he had arrived. "No. It is a merchant's answer. Learn the difference and you will do very well."
He touched his hat to Victoria, and to Thomas, and turned the mule, and went down the lane with the oilcloth parcel strapped behind his saddle where everyone could see it. The letter to Bruges was leaving the valley at the pace of an elderly mule. It seemed to Victoria an appropriate speed for it.
They stood and watched until the lane turned at the mill.
"He won't come again," Thomas said.
No.
Edmund was still holding the coin. He kept it for most of his life, in the end, in a box with other things he had decided mattered, and he could never quite say afterward which of the two lessons he had meant to keep it for.