Wat's chair by the cottage window had been a stool for about a week before Victoria replaced it, without comment, with something that had a back and arms and was the right height for a man whose hip locked if he sat wrong.
He did not thank her for it. He did not mention it at all. He simply used it for the next four years, every day it was warm enough and most days it wasn't.
The visits had a shape. He came in the late morning, after the forge had settled and before the works wanted anything of him, and he sat, and he took the baby if the baby was available and was content to sit without one if not. He stayed an hour, sometimes two. He rarely stayed for a meal and could not be persuaded to.
And he talked.
Not to Thomas or Victoria particularly. He talked to Edmund, in a low continuous gravelly commentary about whatever was visible, and he did it with such complete unselfconsciousness that after the first fortnight nobody in the household found it remarkable.
"That's a bad joint on that shutter," Thomas overheard, in the second month. "See where it's sprung? That's green wood put in wet by a man in a hurry. Your father did that. He'll tell you he didn't. He did."
"I can hear you," Thomas called.
"Aye, you can, and it's still a bad joint."
Victoria worked through most of the visits, at the small table, and said afterward that those hours were the only genuinely restful ones of Edmund's first year — the specific peace of a room containing somebody wholly competent whom you did not have to talk to.
Wat brought the bench in the spring.
He had built it himself, which was the first thing Thomas noticed, and he had built it badly, which was the second and far more alarming.
It was a child's bench — low, three feet long, with a back. The joints were wrong. Not fatally, not visibly to anyone who hadn't spent twenty years listening to Wat talk about joints, but they were wrong in a way that Wat himself would have made a fifteen-year-old take apart and do again.
Wat set it down by the hearth and did not say anything about it.
"That's good work," Thomas said, carefully.
"It's not."
"Wat—"
"It's not, and we'll not stand here and pretend." He lowered himself into his chair. "Took me the best part of a fortnight. Would have taken me two, once. My hands are going and they've been going for a year and I'd thank you not to make a thing of it."
Thomas sat down.
"Why the bench?"
"Because he'll sit on it." Wat was looking at the thing with an expression of frank professional disgust. "He'll sit on it for four or five years and then he'll be too big and it'll go in a corner, and somebody'll put a bucket on it, and in thirty years it'll be firewood and nobody will remember where it came from." He shrugged. "That's the correct life for a bench. I've made about nine hundred things that'll outlast me and I find I've stopped caring about those particularly."
"And this one?"
"This one he'll sit on." Wat's jaw worked. "I'll not be here when he's a man, Thomas. I've done that arithmetic and I'd rather do it plainly than sit about being brave. What I can have is him sitting on a thing I made while I'm in the room, and I've decided that's worth a fortnight and a set of joints I'm ashamed of."
Thomas did not say anything for a while.
"Should I tell him?" he asked eventually. "When he's older. Where it came from."
Wat thought about that for a long time — longer than Thomas expected, long enough that the fire needed attention.
"No," he said finally. "Tell him about me. Tell him I was rude and I was right about most things and I made him laugh when he was small. Don't tell him about the bench." He shifted in his chair. "A thing a man makes for a child shouldn't come with a story attached. It's a bench. Let it be a bench."
Edmund sat on it from somewhere around a year. He sat on it a great deal. He ate off it, stood on it against explicit instruction, fell off it twice, and used it as the base of a structure of some ambition at around age four.
Alys used it after him. Then Margery. Hugh, who was large, broke one of the bad joints at about five, and Thomas repaired it himself, badly, in an evening, and put it back.
It went into the corner of the store room eventually, and somebody put a bucket on it, and it was still there when Thomas was an old man.
He never told any of them, and none of them ever asked.