Casimir Vale brought the silver up the Great Hall steps himself, one chest at a time, with his own men at the handles and his own clerk walking ahead with a lantern and a ledger. There were four chests. They were iron-bound and oak-built, and each had been sealed at Thornwick with the lord’s own wax, a red-brown disc stamped with a stone tower, and each sat on a pair of poles that bent under its weight. The men sweated and swore on the steps. Vale did not help them. He walked behind the last chest with his silver-frogged coat buttoned to the throat and his face set in the expression of a man conducting a funeral he had paid for.
He had asked, on the way up from the river gate, that the chests be opened in the Hall before the Chamber’s clerk, and not at the Gatehouse. He had asked for it very politely. He had said that a sum of this size deserved to be counted where the people who had earned it could see the counting, and Mott, walking beside him with her cloak drawn tight, had looked at him sideways for a moment and then said nothing at all, which Vale had taken for consent.
