The labour began at dawn and went on for most of a day and all of a night, and Thomas learned, over the course of it, exactly how little use he was.
Cecily ran it. Aldith was there and deferred to her entirely, which Thomas found more alarming than reassuring until he understood it was deliberate — Aldith had made a decision, some years ago, about who was to be first in that room, and she was not going to undermine it for the founder's wife of all people.
He was permitted in for the early hours and then, around midnight, was sent out.
"You're not upsetting her," Cecily said, in the doorway, without unkindness. "You're upsetting me, because I keep looking at your face to see how it's going, which is a habit I've had since I was nineteen and it is unhelpful tonight. Go and be frightened somewhere I can't see you."
He went and was frightened somewhere she couldn't see him.
Diccon found him on the cottage step around two in the morning and sat down beside him without a word, which Thomas appreciated more than any attempt at conversation. Diccon had done this. Diccon had done this and then done it again three years later, and had been through a night when his daughter nearly died of the fever, and there was nothing in the world he could have said that Thomas didn't already know and no comfort in it whatsoever, and he seemed to understand that, and simply sat.
"Does it help," Thomas asked eventually, "knowing it's ordinary? That every man who's ever lived has sat on a step like this?"
"No," Diccon said.
"No. I didn't think so."
They sat.
The boy was born a little before six, as the sky was going grey, and Thomas heard him before anyone came to tell him anything — a thin, outraged, unmistakable noise from inside the cottage that went through him like a physical blow.
Cecily came out a few minutes later, looking about ninety years old.
"Both well," she said. "Both genuinely well, I'm not softening it. He's small and he's loud and he's cross and she's exhausted and quite herself. You can come in."
Victoria was propped against the bolster with her hair everywhere and an expression Thomas had never seen on her in fifteen years — undefended, unarranged, not composed for anyone's benefit.
"He's furious," she said. "He's been furious since he arrived. He has strong opinions about all of it."
Thomas sat down on the edge of the bed and looked at his son.
He had prepared, over eight months, for a great many possible feelings, and had rehearsed several of them privately, and every single one turned out to be irrelevant. What he actually felt was nothing so much as a kind of enormous, disorienting recognition — the sense of encountering someone he had somehow already known about for a very long time.
"Hello," he said.
The baby, unimpressed, continued being furious.
"He's got your chin," Victoria said. "Which is unfortunate for him but there it is."
"He's got your everything else."
"He's got my everything else, yes, and he's going to be impossible, and I find I don't mind." She was crying, without any of her usual objection to it. "Thomas. I want to say something and I'm too tired to say it well."
"Say it badly."
"You were never going to leave." Victoria's voice cracked. "I spent years knowing you were, and you weren't, and here he is, and you're going to see it. You're going to see him walk and talk and be an idiot at fifteen and you're going to be here for the whole of it." She pressed the heel of her hand against her eyes. "I've been holding that in since Cecily told me I was expecting and I could not say it out loud until I knew we'd both come through the night."
Thomas could not speak at all for some time.
They named him Edmund, which had been Victoria's grandfather's name and which she had wanted since about the fourth month and had refused to admit to wanting in case saying it aloud tempted something.
Wat arrived at nine, having been awake all night and having been told twice to go home, and held the baby with enormous scarred hands and a look of such open, undisguised delight that Aldith had to leave the room.
"Edmund," he said. "That's a good solid name. Nothing clever about it."
"That was rather the point," Victoria said.
"Aye." Wat did not look up from the child. "Well. Hello, lad. You've landed somewhere decent, as it happens. There's a great many worse places and I've seen most of them."
He was, by every account, the first person outside the family to say Edmund's name aloud, and he said it perhaps four thousand more times over the following nine years, and Edmund at forty could still do a passable imitation of exactly how the old man had pronounced it.