Wat heard it from Aldith on a Tuesday and the entire forge knew by Wednesday noon, and Victoria's campaign to control the information was over before she had properly begun it.
"I asked her to keep it quiet," she said.
"You asked Aldith to keep quiet about a pregnancy," Thomas said. "Aldith, who has delivered every child in this valley for thirty years and regards a confinement as a matter of public infrastructure."
"I am aware, in retrospect, that it was optimistic."
Wat arrived at the cottage that same evening carrying nothing, which was unlike him, and stood in the doorway looking at Victoria with an expression of such transparent delight that she had to look away.
"Don't," she said.
"I've not said anything."
"You're about to say something and I'd rather you didn't."
"Aye, well." He came in and sat down heavily in the chair that had become his. "I'll say one thing and then I'll stop, and you can be as cross about it as you like."
Victoria waited, visibly braced.
"I've known you nineteen years," Wat said. "I watched you run this town when you were twenty-four and everyone here thought you were a lord's ornament. I watched you run it through a siege and a plague and four years of watching your husband die by a number in his pocket. You've never once had anything that was just yours." He examined his hands. "You've earned this. That's all. I'll not mention it again."
He did not mention it again.
He came almost every day from that week forward, and never once referred to why, and Victoria — who was not a woman who cried in front of people — went outside for several minutes after he left that first evening and came back and said nothing about it.
Diccon's reaction was entirely different and, in its way, more useful.
"Right," he said, arriving the following morning with the air of a man reporting for duty. "Elsbeth's sent me. You're going to get a great deal of advice over the next eight months and most of it will be rubbish, so here's ours, and then we'll not push it on you again."
"Go on," Thomas said.
"One: everyone will tell you what worked for their child. It worked for their child. Two: Elsbeth says the first three weeks are the worst three weeks of your life and nobody warns you because it's bad advertising, and that it lifts, and that when you're in it you won't believe anyone that it lifts." Diccon counted on his fingers with visible concentration. "Three: Cecily knows more than all of us and you should do what she says and not what your instincts say, because your instincts are worthless and hers aren't."
"That's it?"
"That's it. Four's mine and it isn't advice." He shifted, slightly awkward. "You sat on a step with me. Twelve years ago, when Joan was coming, in the middle of the night. You didn't say anything useful because there isn't anything useful, and you sat there until it was over." He cleared his throat. "I'll be on the step. That's all."
The food began on the Thursday.
It began, as best anyone could reconstruct afterward, with a widow in the lower parish named Aveline, who was seventy and had known Victoria since she arrived in the valley as a lord's new wife with a face like a closed door, and who took the view that a woman running a town in her condition was not eating properly.
She brought bread.
By the second week there were four households doing it. By the fourth there were eleven, and Victoria had begun eating at the tally-bench specifically to avoid the deliveries, and the deliveries had simply relocated to the tally-bench.
"It is a siege," she said. "I am under siege by kindness and I have no defence against it whatsoever."
"You could ask them to stop."
"Thomas, I cannot ask a seventy-year-old widow to stop bringing me bread. There is no form of words. I have tried to construct one for a fortnight." She glared at a crock of honey. "And they are so pleased. They are visibly pleased with themselves and with me and I cannot puncture that, and so I am simply going to have to absorb approximately nine pounds of pickled onions."
Thomas found, over the following months, that he could not entirely explain to himself why the food moved him as much as it did.
He worked it out eventually, at some point in the sixth month, watching Aveline hand over a covered dish at the gatehouse and refuse, as she always did, to come in.
Forty years earlier this woman had lived in a manor where a lord's wife was a distant and slightly frightening fact. She had watched them build a wire she did not understand, and a currency she had not trusted, and a school she had not sent her own children to because they were grown by then. She had been suspicious of the whole business for a decade.
And she had now decided, at seventy, entirely on her own authority, that the woman running the town was hers to look after.
"That's what we built," Thomas said, that evening, trying to explain it to Victoria and not managing it well. "Not the wire. That."
"You are being sentimental about onions."
"I am being extremely sentimental about onions," he agreed. "I intend to continue."