Edmund did not take to his sister, and the manner of his not taking to her was a good deal more sophisticated than anyone had braced for.
He did not hit her. He did not, as Elsbeth had warned, attempt to remove her from the house or feed her anything alarming. He was not, in any way that could be pointed at, badly behaved.
He simply stopped speaking to Victoria.
It took some days for anyone to notice, because a two-year-old's conversation is not the sort of thing one audits, and because Victoria was recovering from a confinement and had an infant attached to her for most of every hour.
It was Thomas who worked it out, on the fifth evening, and only because Edmund asked him — specifically him, crossing the room to do it — for water that was standing at his mother's elbow.
"Ask your mother. She's nearer."
Edmund looked at him.
"You ask," he said.
Thomas got the water. Then he sat down and paid attention for the rest of the evening, and by the end of it he was certain.
"He hasn't said a word to you in five days," he told Victoria that night.
"He has."
"He hasn't. He's said words in your direction. He's said want down and no in a room you happened to be in." Thomas kept his voice level. "He hasn't asked you for anything. Not once. He's come across the room to ask me for things that were on the table beside you."
Victoria was quiet for a long moment.
"I'm feeding her," she said. "That's the whole of it, isn't it. He's worked out where she came from."
"I think he's worked out that you're occupied and he's decided to be occupied elsewhere before you can tell him so."
"That's a great deal of strategy for two and a half."
"He is a great deal of strategy for two and a half. You said so yourself and you were being funny at the time."
Victoria did not sleep well.
She asked Elsbeth the next day, who was sympathetic and unhelpful, and Cecily, who was practical and unhelpful, and it was in the end Wat who supplied the thing that worked, in his usual manner, which was to say without any awareness of having supplied anything.
He was in his chair with Alys, who had been handed to him because Victoria needed both hands for a moment, and Edmund was on the floor not playing with anything in a determined way.
"You," Wat said, to the boy. "Come here. Your mother's busy and I need a man."
Edmund came, warily.
"Hold that." Wat put a spoon in his hand. "That's the whole job. You hold that and you don't drop it and when I say, you give it me. Can you manage that?"
Edmund could manage that. Edmund managed that for a solid ten minutes with an expression of tremendous gravity.
Victoria watched the entire thing from across the room and said nothing until Wat had gone.
"He needs a job," she said.
"He needs to not be the smallest and most useless person in the house, which is what he's been for five days and which he was not before." Thomas was working it out as he said it. "Everything he can do, she can't. And every single thing anyone says to her is about how lovely she is, and every single thing anyone says to him is be careful and not now and let your mother."
They gave him jobs.
They were invented jobs and they were not, on any objective measure, jobs — fetching a cloth, holding a spoon, telling Thomas when the pot began to steam. He performed them with total seriousness. He reported on the pot with the air of a man delivering important news from the border.
And within a fortnight he was speaking to his mother again, because a person cannot report on a pot to somebody they are not speaking to.
It was never mentioned. Victoria did not raise it with him, then or later.
"He'll not remember any of it," Thomas said, some months afterward.
"He will not remember it and I will remember it for the rest of my life," Victoria said, "and that is simply the arrangement, and nobody warned me about that part either."
She did tell him, in the end. Once. He was thirty-four and they had been arguing about something else entirely, and she told him about the five days, and about crossing the room for water.
Edmund said he had no memory of it whatsoever.
He was extremely quiet for the rest of that evening, and he wrote to her about it eleven days later, and she kept the letter.