The arithmetic was straightforward and Thomas did it one morning out of idle curiosity and then wished he hadn't.
An hour a day, at the light end. Rather more in the bad years — the transcription months had run to six or seven, the year of the missed Sundays had eaten whole evenings at a time in a way he had never properly counted. Call it an hour and a half, averaged, across fourteen years.
Something over seven thousand hours.
"That's not a useful way to think about it," Victoria said, when he made the mistake of telling her.
"It's not meant to be useful. It's an observation."
"It's an observation designed to make you feel that you wasted your thirties, and I would ask you to consider who you are addressing." She did not look up from her work. "I spent four of those years doing arithmetic on your death. Shall I total that up as well? Would that be a productive morning for either of us?"
He took the point.
What he did with the hours, in the end, was arrived at by accident rather than decision.
He had been walking past the schoolhouse in the late morning — a thing he did most days, by a route that was not the direct one and that he had stopped pretending was coincidental — and had heard, through the open shutter, a boy of about nine getting something comprehensively wrong about the way water moves through a pipe.
He stood outside and listened to the whole of it.
The master had corrected him, accurately and patiently, and the boy had accepted the correction and written it down, and Thomas had known with absolute certainty, standing in the lane, that the boy had not understood a single word and had simply recorded the right answer for later use.
He mentioned it to Cecily that afternoon, carefully, because he was conscious of being a man with too much time and a history of interfering.
"So go in," Cecily said.
"It's not my school."
"It's not your school and I run it and I am telling you to go in." She was writing while she spoke, which was how she conducted most conversations. "We have eleven masters and four of them can actually teach. The rest know things and say them in order, which is not the same and which I have been trying to fix for three years without success." She looked up. "You are the only person I have ever met who can explain a thing to someone who does not already understand it. I have watched you do it to frightened villagers, to Alaric, to a royal justiciar, and to me when I was nineteen and knew nothing. Come in and do it to children. Two mornings a week. I'll clear it with Osbern."
"Osbern will object."
"Osbern will object at length and I will outlast him."
So Thomas taught, two mornings a week, and then three, and by the autumn it was most mornings and Cecily had quietly stopped pretending it was an arrangement.
He was not, he discovered, particularly good at it.
He was good at explaining, which was not the same thing. Explaining was a performance conducted at a person; teaching turned out to involve enormous amounts of waiting, and repeating oneself without irritation, and working out which of eleven children had stopped following and at exactly which word. He was impatient. He had, he learned about himself at forty-three, a tendency to answer a question with the interesting version rather than the useful one.
The children did not care about the interesting version. They cared about passing Cecily's assessments, which were brutal.
"You're lecturing again," a girl of about twelve told him, in his sixth week, with the merciless directness of the young. "You were doing it right and then you got excited and now nobody knows what you're talking about."
"Thank you, Sibb."
"You do it most days."
"I'm aware. I'd be obliged if you'd keep telling me."
She did. For two years.
Thomas found, by the winter, that the hours had filled themselves without his noticing, and that he was tired at the end of the day in an entirely different manner than he had been for fourteen years — the plain tiredness of having done something, rather than the specific exhaustion of having carried something.
He mentioned this to Hamo, who was by then eighty or thereabouts and no longer taught, and who listened to the whole account without interrupting.
"You have replaced an anxiety with an occupation," Hamo said. "That is the correct substitution and most men never manage it. I would caution you only about one thing."
"Go on."
"You have arranged, twice now, to be indispensable to something." Hamo's eyes were still entirely clear, whatever the rest of him was doing. "First a device, then a town. You are about to be a father, and I would suggest that a child is the one thing in a man's life that does not benefit from him being indispensable to it. Teach. Be tired. But leave room."
Thomas thought about that for years afterward, and never fully decided whether he had managed it.