The third was not planned, and Victoria found this more unsettling than either of the first two, which had not been planned precisely either but had at least been hoped for.
"I'm forty," she told Cecily, in the fever house, with the door shut. "Or near enough that the difference is decorative."
"I'm aware."
"I want to know what that means. Plainly."
Cecily set down what she was holding and gave it her full attention, which from Cecily was a considerable thing.
"It means you are more likely to have difficulty than you were at thirty-six," she said. "Not certain to. More likely. The carrying is harder. The birth can be longer. Things that are rare become less rare."
"How much less rare?"
"I can't tell you that."
"You can tell me roughly."
"No." Cecily's voice did not change. "I know that isn't the answer you want. I've watched you for twenty years reduce every frightening thing to a number and then stop being frightened of it. I'm not going to give you a figure, because I don't have one, and anything I said would be a thing I'd invented to make you comfortable, and you would carry it around for the next eight months as though it were true."
Victoria's face did something Cecily had seen perhaps twice before.
"That's cruel."
"It's honest. I'd have thought you of all people would prefer it." Cecily sat down opposite her. "Here's what I can give you. More women your age come through this well than don't. More of them struggle than younger women do. I will see you every fortnight rather than every month, and more if anything troubles me, and I will tell you the truth each time, including when the truth is I don't know yet. That's what I have."
Victoria sat for a while.
"You're very like Aldith," she said eventually.
"I'm going to take that as a compliment and I'd ask you not to tell her I did."
Thomas heard all of it that night, in the dark, in the careful voice Victoria used for things she had already decided how to feel about.
"She wouldn't give me a number."
"No. She wouldn't give me one either, when I asked her yesterday."
Victoria turned her head. "You asked her yesterday?"
"You'd told me the day before. I went to the fever house at first light." Thomas did not particularly enjoy admitting it. "She told me she'd give you everything she had and nothing she didn't. And then she told me to stop looking at her face, because I was doing the thing I did at Edmund's birth."
Victoria laughed despite herself.
"I want to say something," she said, after a while, "and I want you to hear it without deciding what I mean first."
"All right."
"I'm not sorry."
Thomas did not say anything.
"I'm frightened. I'm forty and I'm frightened and I have three-quarters of the March's accounting on my desk and a son who's started organising his sister into committees." She was looking at the ceiling. "And I'm not sorry. I've been lying here trying to find the part of me that is, because it seems like the sensible reaction, and I can't locate it anywhere."
"I'm not sorry either," Thomas said. "I'm terrified. I don't know how those fit together."
"They fit together the way everything else in this house fits together, which is badly and all at once." She found his hand in the dark. "Thomas. One more thing."
"Go on."
"Don't hover." Her voice was gentle and completely serious. "You spent fourteen years hovering over a piece of glass in your pocket. Checking it, counting it, carrying it into every room. I watched you do it and I couldn't stop you, and I have no intention of being the next thing you carry like that. If you start checking on me the way you checked that number, I will know, and I will not forgive it."
He promised.
He lasted until the following Thursday, when she came down the stair and found him in the kitchen having apparently been standing at the foot of it for some minutes, listening for her, with an expression he had not realised was on his face until she saw it.
She stopped on the bottom step and looked at him.
"That," she said, "was nine days."
"I'm aware."
"Nine days, Thomas."
"I did say I was terrified."
She came the rest of the way down and put her forehead against his shoulder for a moment, which she did not do often, and then went past him to the table as though nothing had happened.
"Ten, next time," she said. "I'll accept incremental progress. I'm told that's what marriage is."