Victoria told him in the least romantic manner available to her, which Thomas later decided was entirely in character and possibly deliberate.
They were reviewing the second cohort's intake figures — Cecily had asked for a decision on numbers by Thursday and it was Wednesday — and Victoria said, without any change of tone whatsoever, "I'm expecting. Cecily confirmed it Tuesday. I'd have told you Tuesday but you were arguing with Maud about bearing alloys and looked happy, and I decided it would keep a day."
Thomas heard the words, understood each of them individually, and then sat quite still.
"Thomas."
"Give me a moment."
"Take one." She waited, with her hands folded, watching him with an expression he could not read at all.
"How long?"
"Twelve weeks, Cecily thinks. Possibly thirteen." Victoria's composure held for about four more seconds and then did something complicated around the mouth. "I have known for a day and a half and I have been unbearable to everyone I've encountered and Aldith guessed within about ninety seconds, which I resent."
Thomas got up, came round the table, and knelt beside her chair — the same undignified manoeuvre he'd made two years earlier at a different conversation, and his knees objected in exactly the same way.
"You are going to have to stop doing that," Victoria said. "You are forty-two."
"I'm aware." He took her hands. "I want to say something and I want to get it right, and I'm going to fail, so I'd ask you to be generous."
"I'm never generous."
"I know. Be generous anyway." He looked up at her. "I have spent eleven years thinking I was going to leave you. Every single day of them. I planned for it, I wrote documents about it, I made your life smaller and more careful than it should have been because I was always half gone." His voice was not entirely steady. "And it turned out I wasn't leaving. And I have not known what to do with that, and I have been sitting in a room with you in the evenings not knowing what to say, and now you're telling me we're going to have a child, and I find—"
He stopped, and started again.
"I find I've been given a future," he said. "I haven't had one of those since I was twenty-eight years old. I don't know how to hold it."
Victoria put her hand on the side of his face.
"Badly, I expect," she said. "You hold most things badly at first."
They did not tell anyone for another month, which was Victoria's decision and which lasted approximately four days, because Aldith already knew and Cecily already knew and Aldith had told Wat within the week on the grounds — which she defended without a trace of shame — that Wat was old and had earned some good news and she had judged the risk of him keeping quiet as acceptable.
Wat did not keep quiet.
Wat, in fact, told the entire forge within an hour, and by the following morning the valley's congratulations had begun arriving at the cottage in the form of food, which continued for eleven consecutive days and which Victoria found so mortifying that she took to eating at the tally-bench to avoid the deliveries.
"I have been the most feared woman in this March for a decade," she said, on the eighth day, confronting a basket containing four loaves, a crock of honey, and a quantity of pickled onions that could not reasonably be interpreted as a gesture of goodwill. "And now there is a widow in the lower parish who wants me to eat onions for the good of the child, and I have no defence against her whatsoever, because she is seventy and she means well and she has knitted something."
"Has she."
"It is very small and it is yellow and I am not going to discuss it further."
Thomas found the knitted thing three years later at the back of a chest, carefully wrapped, kept.
He did not discuss it further either.