Victoria stopped work in the eighth month, under protest, after Cecily threatened in front of the entire council to have her carried out of the counting room.
"You would not dare."
"I would ask Diccon to do it and he would be extremely apologetic throughout," Cecily said. "Your ankles are the size of my forearm, you have not slept properly in three weeks, and you fell asleep in this chair on Tuesday with a pen in your hand and I had to take it off you. Six weeks. It is not negotiable and I have already told Alaric to stop bringing you things."
So Victoria went home, and hated it, and was bored within a few days in a manner that made her genuinely unpleasant to live with for about a fortnight.
Then something shifted, and Thomas was never able to identify exactly when.
They were simply in the house, the two of them, for the first time since they had married. There was no council. There was no crisis. Alaric came twice a week with a brief verbal report that Victoria pretended not to want. The days had no shape at all except the ones they gave them.
Thomas moved his teaching to mornings only. Nobody objected; Cecily had arranged it before he asked.
They talked, in the afternoons, for hours at a stretch, about nothing in particular, in a way that made the deliberate Sunday hour look like the stiff arrangement it had been.
"I've worked out what this is," Victoria said, in the fourth week, from the chair by the window that had become hers. "We are courting. Eleven years late, and enormously pregnant, but that is unmistakably what this is."
"We never did, did we."
"We did not. We were married by arrangement to a man who turned out to be a stranger wearing my husband's face, and then there was the mine, and then there was the Baron, and then there was your number." She shifted, uncomfortable, waving him off when he moved to help. "We have been allies for fifteen years, Thomas. Extremely good ones. We have never once had six weeks of nothing to do."
The knitted thing arrived in the fifth week.
Aveline brought it herself, wrapped in linen, and would not come in and would not stay, and handed it over at the door with the air of a woman discharging an obligation.
"It's yellow," she said. "I'd have done white but white's a nonsense on an infant, they're sick on everything. Yellow doesn't show."
"Thank you, Aveline."
"It's not a gift, it's practical." She was already going. "And there's more where that came from, so don't go being careful with it."
Victoria unwrapped it in the kitchen and sat looking at it for a long time.
It was very small. That was the thing that got her, Thomas saw — not the kindness, which she had been absorbing in food form for six months. The size. A tiny yellow woollen thing with sleeves, sized for a person who did not yet exist, made by a seventy-year-old widow over some number of evenings by her own fire.
"I've been treating this as a problem," Victoria said.
"I know."
"I've been treating it as a problem for eight months, and I've been solving it — the confinement, the succession arrangements, who chairs what for six weeks, whether I'm warm enough to be a mother." She did not look up from the small yellow thing. "And that woman has been sitting in a cottage in the lower parish knitting sleeves."
Thomas sat down beside her and did not say anything.
"I want to keep it," Victoria said, after a while. "Not use it. Keep it. Is that absurd?"
"It's wholly absurd. Aveline told you not to be careful with it about thirty seconds ago."
"I'm aware of what Aveline told me."
They used it, in the end, for all four children, because Aveline had been right about the sick and about the yellow, and it went through ten years of hard service and came out of it the worse for wear.
Victoria washed it, and wrapped it in the same linen, and put it at the back of the chest in the bedroom.
Thomas found it there three years later, looking for something else, and understood immediately what it was and put it back exactly as he had found it, and said nothing about it for a very long time.
The last fortnight was slow and hot and Victoria was magnificently intolerable.
"Is it always like this?" Thomas asked Cecily, in the yard, having been driven out of his own house.
"The last fortnight? Universally." Cecily did not look up from her bag. "She is enormous, she cannot sleep, she cannot bend, she has been told six times that it could be any day now, and she is a woman whose entire character is built on controlling outcomes. You are experiencing the worst two weeks of her life and she is experiencing them from inside." She snapped the bag shut. "Do not attempt to fix it. Do not suggest a remedy. Bring her things without being asked and absorb whatever she says to you."
"That's the whole advice?"
"That is the entire advice and it is correct, and in a fortnight none of it will matter."
It was nine days.