The second confinement was easier and shorter and frightened Thomas rather more, for the wholly irrational reason that he now knew what could go wrong.
"You were calmer the first time," Cecily observed, sometime past midnight.
"The first time I was ignorant."
"Yes. I've noticed that about second children generally. The father's substantially worse and the mother's substantially better." She checked something, unhurried. "She's fine, Thomas. She's better than fine. Go and sit down before you wear a groove in that floor."
The girl arrived before dawn — quicker than Edmund by some hours — and was, from her very first minute, unlike him.
Edmund had come out furious. Alys came out watchful. She did not cry for long. She was awake, and quiet, and looked at things, and Cecily remarked that in twenty years of practice she had rarely seen a newborn so plainly interested in the room.
"She's going to be trouble of an wholly different kind," Victoria said, exhausted and pleased. "Edmund tells you what he wants. This one is going to work out what she wants first and then tell you something else."
She was not wrong.
Edmund, two years old, was brought in to meet his sister and considered her at length with an expression of deep suspicion.
"No," he said.
"I'm afraid so," Thomas said.
"No."
"She's staying, I'm sorry. It's been decided at the highest level."
Edmund thought about this and then, having apparently concluded that the matter was outside his jurisdiction, lost interest and demanded to be shown the fire.
They named her Alys, which had been nobody's grandmother's name and which Victoria had chosen simply because she liked it, and which Thomas found unexpectedly moving for exactly that reason — the first entirely free choice either of them had made in years that answered to nothing but preference.
Wat came the next morning, as he had for Edmund, and held her with the same enormous care.
"This one's quiet," he said.
"She's watching you."
"Aye, she is." Wat looked down at the baby with an expression Thomas had learned, over the past two years, to recognise as the old man's whole heart operating without any protection at all. "That's the more dangerous sort, lass. The loud ones tell you where they are. The watchers get a full account of everybody in the room before anyone's noticed they've arrived."
He was seventy that spring, or thereabouts, and it was the last of the four he would meet.
Nobody knew that at the time, and Thomas was glad, afterward, that nobody had.
The house changed shape around a second child in ways Thomas had not anticipated. With one, they had managed by taking turns. With two, there were no turns; there was simply a permanent state of one adult being actively required and the other adult being about to be required, and the evenings they had spent talking about nothing for three hours at a stretch became, for a period of some years, a thing they remembered fondly and did not do.
"I miss you," Victoria said, one night, both of them upright in bed for no reason except that the room was finally quiet.
"I'm here."
"You're present. That's a different thing and you know it is." She let her head fall against his shoulder. "I'm not complaining. I want to be extremely clear that I'm not complaining, because I would not undo a minute of this. I am simply reporting that I have a husband I speak to for perhaps ten minutes a day and that ten minutes is insufficient."
Thomas considered.
"Sundays," he said.
"What about them?"
"I spent fourteen years giving Sundays to a letter nobody received." He was surprised by how easily he could say it now. "The habit's still there. I've got nothing to put in it. Give me Sundays — one hour, after they're down, no ledgers and no council and no children, and we talk about nothing at all."
Victoria was quiet for a moment.
"That's the best idea you've had in two years," she said.
They kept it, with some interruptions, for the rest of their lives.