Wat died in the autumn, at the forge, which everyone agreed afterward was the only tolerable part of it.
He had not been working. He had been sitting on the bench by the door — his bench, the one nobody else used, positioned so he could watch his students without appearing to — and he had been watching a boy of fifteen make a poor job of a hinge, and he had said something about it, and the boy had turned round to answer him.
That was the whole of it. Cecily's assessment was the same one she had given for Elias, six years earlier: quick, and almost certainly without his knowing.
The boy — his name was Ralf and he was fifteen and it was his third month at the works — could not stop apologising. He apologised to Thomas, to Cecily, to Diccon, to anyone who would stand still, in a state of complete incoherent distress, because he had been making a poor job of a hinge and the last thing Master Wat had ever said in his life had been a criticism of it.
Thomas took him outside and sat him down on the step.
"What did he say? Exactly."
Ralf, hiccupping, managed it. "He said — he said 'you're fighting it, lad, let the metal come to you.'"
"That's a good last sentence," Thomas said. "That's a considerably better last sentence than most people get. He spent forty years trying to teach people that specific thing and he got to say it one final time to somebody who needed to hear it." He put a hand on the boy's shoulder. "You didn't fail him, Ralf. You gave him a student on his last afternoon. That's what he wanted and there's nothing in this valley he'd have swapped it for."
Ralf, in later years, became an extremely good smith, and told that story perhaps a hundred times, and always told the second half of it.
The funeral was the largest gathering Argenton had ever held — larger than the charter, larger than any of it. People came from Whitcombe. Three came from Oakhaven. A woman arrived from a village eight days east whom nobody recognised and who explained that Wat had built her father's mill wheel in 1141 and had refused payment on the grounds that it had taken him longer than he'd quoted.
Thomas had expected to speak and found, on the day, that he could not.
He stood up, and got perhaps six words out, and stopped, and stood there for a considerable time in front of the entire town.
It was Victoria who came and stood beside him — not saying anything, not taking over, simply standing there with her hand at his back until he could continue. He got through it eventually. He did not remember afterward what he had said and nobody was cruel enough to tell him.
Wat's letter, read aloud by Diccon, was four sentences long.
I've said what I wanted to say to the people I wanted to say it to, and I've done it in person, so there's not much for this page. I'd ask that the works keep the bench by the door. Not as a memorial — I'd hate that. Because it's the correct position for watching apprentices and it took me nine years to work that out and I'd rather the next man didn't have to.
I was happy here. I was not expecting to be.
They kept the bench. It is still there.
Thomas went to the forge alone that evening, after everyone had gone, and stood in it for a long while — the fire banked, the tools racked in the specific order Wat had used and had never explained to anyone, the whole enormous familiar smell of the place.
He had known this man for twenty-two years. Wat had been the first person in this world to believe him about anything — a blacksmith in a poor manor who had listened to a stranger describe a better way to run a crucible and had said, against every instinct he possessed, show me.
Everything else had come from that.
"Thank you," Thomas said, out loud, to an empty forge, feeling ridiculous and doing it anyway.
He went home and found Victoria awake with Alys, and took the baby, and sat with her in the dark for an hour without saying anything, and at some point Edmund appeared in the doorway having heard voices and was permitted, unusually, to stay up.
The four of them sat there together until the small one fell asleep.