Edmund at two was, by the unanimous assessment of everyone who encountered him, a great deal of work.
He had opinions. That was the core of it. He had arrived with opinions and the intervening two years had only supplied him with the vocabulary to express them, and the result was a small furious person who objected — loudly, specifically, and on principle — to being dressed, to being carried, to being put down, to the wrong cup, to the right cup presented in the wrong manner, and to the sun going in.
"He's not difficult," Cecily said, watching him conduct a full-scale objection to a boot. "He's early. That's a three-year-old's tantrum in a two-year-old's body. He's simply got there sooner than most and he'll get out of it sooner too."
"That's very comforting," Victoria said, "and I notice you're leaving."
"I am leaving because I have a dozen students and you have one boot." Cecily gathered her bag. "Try giving him a choice between two things you're happy with. It works about a third of the time and the failures are no worse than what you've got."
It worked about a third of the time.
What Thomas noticed, and did not mention to anyone for months, was that Edmund's objections were almost never random. There was always a reason. It was usually a bad reason and it was frequently a reason about fairness — a sister's cup, a portion, a turn — and he had the reason ready and could produce it at speed.
"He's litigating," Thomas said, one evening, having been comprehensively argued at over bedtime by a person who was two.
"He is going to be exhausting for approximately sixteen years," Victoria agreed. "And then he is going to be extremely useful to somebody."
Wat, who was present, said nothing but looked quietly delighted, which he did most of the time now.
The second pregnancy was confirmed in the spring, and Victoria's reaction was entirely different from the first.
"Right," she said. "Good. Same again, then."
"That's it?"
"That's it. I have done this. I know what it is." She was already reaching for her work. "Thomas, the first time I spent eight months frightened that I would not know how to love an infant. I now know that I did, that it took about four days rather than arriving on the instant, and that the four days were the most frightened I have ever been and I have not told you about them until this moment."
Thomas stopped.
"Four days?"
"Four days." She said it without any particular weight. "He was handed to me and I felt — relief that it was over, and a kind of fierce responsibility, and absolutely nothing that I recognised as love, and I thought there it is, I was right about myself. And I told nobody, because what is there to say, and I did what needed doing for four days."
"And then?"
"And then he was asleep on my chest at some hour and I looked down at him and it arrived, complete, like a wall falling on me." She finally looked up. "I have never been so relieved about anything. And I have not mentioned it for two years because I was ashamed of the four days, and because Aldith told me I would spend two years quietly convinced I was doing it wrong and I have declined to give her the satisfaction."
Thomas sat down beside her.
"Aldith's dead," he said. "You could tell her."
"I have. Twice." Victoria returned to her ledger. "She was insufferable about it on both occasions, and I find that a considerable comfort, and I would ask you not to examine that too closely."
The second confinement they prepared for differently. Less arrangement, more furniture. Cecily was told in the first month rather than the second. The knitted thing came out of the chest.
"You're calmer," Thomas observed, in the sixth month.
"I am calmer because I am now frightened of quite different things, which is what progress looks like." Victoria was watching Edmund, who was attempting to climb the bench. "I am no longer frightened that I cannot love a child. I am frightened that I will love this one differently and that he will be able to tell."
"Does that happen?"
"Elsbeth says it does and that it evens out and that you must never on any account mention it to the child." She winced; the baby had kicked. "I am told the actual answer is that you love them entirely and in completely different shapes, and that the shapes are not comparable, and that every mother spends some portion of her life doing arithmetic on it anyway."
"And you'll do the arithmetic."
"Obviously I will do the arithmetic," Victoria said. "I have done arithmetic on your death for a decade. I am not going to be defeated by an infant."