Diccon's daughter was twelve that spring, and Thomas — who had known her since the night she was born and had sat with her through the fever at two — discovered over the course of a single afternoon that he had entirely failed to notice her becoming a person.
She arrived at the cottage on an errand from her mother, delivered it, and then did not leave.
"Can I see him?"
"You can. He's asleep, which is rare and which we'd all like to preserve."
Joan looked at the baby in the basket with an expression of grave assessment.
"He's not very interesting yet," she concluded.
"No. He's not. It's a well-known defect of the first year."
"Ours was the same. Wilf, I mean. My brother." She sat down on the floor beside the basket without being asked, in the manner of a child who had been in and out of this house her whole life. "Everyone kept saying isn't he lovely and I kept thinking he doesn't do anything. He's four now and he's much better. He's still annoying but he's annoying on purpose, which is more of an achievement."
Thomas laughed.
"Master Thomas," she said, in a different tone, "can I ask you a thing?"
"Go on."
"When I was sick. When I was small." Joan was not looking at him; she was looking at Edmund. "I remember it, a bit. I remember being hot and it being dark and somebody holding me. And I said so, ages ago, at supper, and everyone went strange about it, and afterwards my mother cried in the kitchen and thought I hadn't noticed."
Thomas set down what he was doing.
"You remember correctly," he said. "You were two. You were very ill, and a great many people held you over about five days, including me and your father and your mother and Wat, who was so frightened he could not be in the room for more than a quarter hour at a time."
"Wat was frightened?"
"Wat was terrified. Wat had buried a wife to a fever thirty years before and did not talk about it, and he sat outside that door for most of five days doing absolutely nothing useful, which for Wat is a kind of agony."
Joan thought about this.
"Why did everyone go strange at supper, then?"
"Because you nearly died, and nobody in that room had ever said so to you, and you produced a memory of the worst week of your parents' lives as though it were an ordinary thing you'd recalled." Thomas chose his words carefully. "Your father has spent ten years not thinking about it. You handed it back to him over bread."
"I didn't mean to."
"I know. Nobody thinks you did." He sat down on the bench, which put him closer to her level. "Joan — can I tell you something that your parents may or may not want you to have yet, and which I'm going to tell you anyway because I think you're old enough and because you asked a direct question?"
She nodded, wide-eyed.
"Four children died in that fortnight. One of them was Cuthbert, the cooper's boy, who was seven and who was frightened of geese." Thomas kept his voice level. "You lived. There was no reason for it. Aldith was not there — she was two days east — and we did what we knew how to do and it was enough for you and it was not enough for him, and nobody has ever been able to tell me why."
Joan was very quiet.
"That's not a nice thing to tell someone," she said eventually.
"No. It isn't." Thomas did not look away. "I've told you because you're going to hear it eventually, probably badly, from somebody who's been drinking at a fair. And because you asked me a true question and I'd rather answer it than manage you."
She sat with it.
"Is it in the book?" she asked. "Cuthbert. The ledger Mistress Victoria keeps."
"It is."
"Can I read it?"
Thomas thought about that for some time.
"You'd have to ask her," he said. "And she'd say yes, and she'd sit with you while you did it, and she would not make it a thing. But you'd have to ask her yourself."
Joan asked her a few days later, having clearly spent the interval working up to it.
Victoria — who was six weeks into an infant and functioning on very little — put down what she was doing, fetched the quire, and sat with a twelve-year-old at the tally-bench for an hour and a half while she read about nineteen dead people she had mostly never met.
She let the girl cry, and did not comfort her out of it, and answered every question she asked.
"What did you tell her?" Thomas asked afterward.
"The truth, mostly. That I couldn't hold it as a number so I wrote them down as people." Victoria was looking out the window. "She asked me who wrote my page. I told her nobody had, and that it doesn't work like that, and that somebody would when the time came."
"And?"
"And she said she'd do it." Victoria's voice was not entirely steady. "She said it the way children say things, seriously and without any idea what she was volunteering for, and I said thank you and changed the subject."
Joan did write it, in the event. Fifty-one years later.
It is three pages long and it is the best thing in the ledger.