Thomas discovered, over Edmund's first year, that he had been wrong about what fatherhood would require of him.
He had prepared, in the abstract, for something like teaching — for the transmission of things, the passing-on he had spent fifteen years thinking about. What the first year actually demanded was stupider and a good deal harder: an enormous quantity of physical labour performed at three in the morning by a man in his forties whose back had opinions.
"He doesn't want anything," Thomas said, at one such hour, walking the length of the room for perhaps the two hundredth time with a furious infant against his shoulder. "I've established that. He's fed, he's dry, he's warm, he's not ill. He simply objects."
"To what?"
"To existence. Broadly. He finds the entire arrangement unsatisfactory and he wants it known."
Victoria, who had been awake for most of the same hours and had rather better cause to complain, made a noise into the bolster that might have been laughter.
He got better at it. That was the part nobody had told him — that competence arrived not through insight but through repetition, the way it did at a forge or a tally-bench, and that by the ninth month he could settle the boy in a few minutes by a method he could not have described to anyone.
Wat came almost daily.
This was, by common agreement, out of character and entirely unremarked upon. The old man would arrive in the late morning, sit in the good chair by the window, and hold Edmund for an hour or two while Victoria worked, saying very little, occasionally offering the child a running commentary on whatever he could see out the window.
"That's the flume," Thomas overheard, one afternoon. "I built the second gate on that. Not the first, the first was rubbish and we replaced it. The rubbish one was mine as well but we'll not dwell on it."
Edmund, six months old, blew a bubble.
"Aye. Well. That's about the correct response."
Thomas mentioned it to Victoria that evening, carefully, because he had learned that Wat was a subject requiring some delicacy.
"He's saying goodbye," Victoria said.
"He's sixty-six."
"He's sixty-six and he cannot climb a ladder and his hands ache in the cold and he has spent the last two years teaching because it is the only thing he can still do properly." She did not look up from her figures. "He knows exactly what he's doing, Thomas. He is spending time he considers limited on a child who will not remember him, so that the child's father will remember it on his behalf. That's not morbid. It's about the most practical thing a man in his position could arrange."
Thomas thought about that for a long while.
"Should I say something to him?"
"God, no." Victoria finally looked up. "He'd be mortified and he'd stop coming. Let him have it."
The year had other business in it, and Thomas found — with some guilt — that he handled that business worse than he had ever handled anything.
He missed two council meetings entirely. He read a report on the eastern spur three times without absorbing it and had to ask Alaric to summarise. He was, by his own honest assessment, a substantially less effective participant in the running of the town than he had been at any point in fifteen years, and nobody said a word about it, which was worse.
He raised it himself, eventually, in a meeting, with some embarrassment.
"I'm aware I've been useless since the spring."
"You've been distracted since the spring," Alaric corrected. "Which is different, and expected, and was accounted for. Cecily and I redistributed your portions in April."
"You did what?"
"We redistributed your portions in April, without telling you, because you would have objected and it would have been the worst possible use of everyone's time." Alaric's expression did not change in the slightest. "You built a council specifically so that this town would not depend on the continuous attention of one man. You then spent fifteen years demonstrating that principle theoretically. This is the first occasion on which it has been tested in practice, and I am pleased to report that it works, and I would ask you not to undermine it by feeling guilty about a system functioning exactly as you designed it."
Thomas sat with that.
"That's an extremely irritating argument," he said.
"It is a correct argument, which you find irritating because you are the one being managed by it." Alaric permitted himself something close to a smile. "Welcome to the position I occupied for years under a man considerably less deserving of it. I find I am enjoying myself enormously."
Edmund walked at thirteen months, in the garden, from Victoria to a completely uninterested Wat, and fell over twice, and was furious about it, and got up both times.