Victoria had been competent at everything she had ever attempted, and had come, by thirty-six, to regard this as a fact about the world rather than an achievement.
She had been competent at being a lord's wife at nineteen, which had required learning to be silent in a specific way for specific people. She had been competent at ledgers, then at diplomacy, then at governing. She had been competent through a siege and a plague and a decade of a man she loved dying by degrees in her kitchen. She had discovered no task yet that could not be reduced, given sufficient attention, to a set of problems with a correct sequence.
She had spent months now trying to reduce this one and getting nowhere at all.
The difficulty was not fear of the birth. She had watched enough of them to have an accurate picture of the risk and had made her peace with it in about a week, in the manner she made peace with most risks, which was by establishing the actual figures and then declining to revisit them.
The difficulty was afterward.
"I do not know what I am supposed to feel," she told Aldith, in the sixth month, in the fever house, having arranged the visit under a pretext neither of them acknowledged.
"About the child?"
"About the child. I am told — repeatedly, by women who mean well — that I will know what to do when it arrives. That something arrives with the infant which supplies the answer." Victoria's hands were folded and still, which Aldith had long ago learned to read. "I have no confidence in that whatsoever. I have never once in my life known what to do without working it out first, and I cannot work this out, because there is nothing to work with until it happens, and by then it will be happening."
Aldith did not laugh, which Victoria noted and was grateful for.
"You are asking whether you will love it," she said.
"I am asking whether I will love it correctly." The words came out sharper than intended. "I am not a warm woman, Aldith. I know this about myself. I have been told it by three separate people who liked me. I run a town well and I am loyal past the point of sense and I have made exactly four friends in thirty-six years, and I am about to be handed something that requires an enormous quantity of a thing I have never had in abundance."
"And you cannot prepare for it."
"I cannot prepare for it. There is no ledger." Victoria looked at her hands. "And I find that I am more frightened by that than I have been by anything since I was twenty-four years old and a man told me he came from somewhere that does not exist."
Aldith was quiet for a moment.
"May I tell you something that will annoy you?"
"You generally do."
"You have described yourself as a woman who is not warm, and you have done it with complete conviction, and it is not true, and I have thirty years of evidence." Aldith held up a hand before Victoria could object. "I am not going to list it. You would argue with each item and we would be here all evening. I will give you one."
"Go on."
"The memorial ledger." Aldith's voice did not change. "Nineteen dead in the first wave, and you could not hold it as a number, so you sat down alone in the evenings for the best part of three months and wrote a page for each of them about what they were like. Cuthbert was frightened of geese. Merrild would not share her bread recipe. Nobody asked you to do that. Nobody would have thought of it. There is no colder woman in England who has ever done such a thing."
Victoria did not say anything.
"You are not a woman without warmth," Aldith said. "You are a woman who expresses it by doing an enormous amount of unnecessary work on other people's behalf and never mentioning it. That will translate to an infant entirely intact. It will simply look like you, and not like Elsbeth, and you will spend about two years being quietly convinced you are doing it wrong, and you will not be."
Victoria arranged her face, and failed, and gave it up.
"Thank you," she said.
"You will also be exhausted and short-tempered and you will say something unforgivable to Thomas at about the four-month mark," Aldith added, resuming her work. "Every woman does. He will have forgotten it by the following week and you will remember it for ten years. That is simply how it goes and I would not trouble yourself about it in advance."
Victoria did say something unforgivable to Thomas, in the event, somewhat later than predicted.
He did not forget it by the following week; he did not appear to register it at all, having been awake for thirty hours at the time with a colicky infant, and when she raised it eight years later, with some difficulty, as a thing she had been carrying, he had no memory whatsoever of the conversation and had to be convinced it had occurred.
She found this much more infuriating than forgiveness would have been.