Victoria did not get up for most of a month after Margery was born, and she was, by her own later admission, the worst patient Cecily had ever had.
The birth had cost her more than either of the first two. She had lost a good deal of blood. For some days she could not stand without the room tilting, and for some weeks after that she could stand but not for long, and the combination of these facts with her own character produced a woman who was very weak and extremely angry about it.
"I could do the accounts from bed," she said, on perhaps the fourth day of asking.
"You could not," Cecily said.
"I could read them."
"You could read them and then you'd want to correct them and then you'd sit up to reach a pen, and I've told you what happens when you sit up too fast." Cecily was checking something at her wrist with complete calm. "No ledgers until I say so. I've told Alaric. I've told Thomas. I've told the boy who carries the post, in case you try it that way."
"You've told the post boy."
"You tried the post boy with Edmund. I remember."
The house ran, in that month, on a combination of Thomas's willingness and Joan's competence, and it was not long before it was obvious to everyone which of those was holding it up.
Joan was fifteen. She had been coming to the house most days since Alys was born, first to help with small things and then, gradually, to do larger ones, and by the time of Margery's birth she had become the one person in the household that both older children obeyed without argument.
"How do you do that?" Thomas asked her, having watched her get Edmund into his boots in under a minute on a morning when he himself had failed for a quarter of an hour.
Joan considered the question seriously.
"You ask him," she said. "You say are you going to put your boots on, and he says no, because it's a question and he's allowed to answer it. I don't ask. I say boots, and I hand them to him, and I go and do something else." She shrugged. "He only argues if there's someone to argue with. My mam did it with Wilf. It's not clever."
"It's cleverer than anything I've managed."
"You're his father," Joan said, with the brutal clarity of fifteen. "He wants to win against you. He doesn't care about winning against me. That's the whole trick."
On the eleventh evening — Thomas knew it was around then because he had stopped keeping count and started estimating — Victoria asked him directly.
"Bring me the eastern ledger."
"No."
She turned her head on the bolster and looked at him with an expression he had not seen directed at himself in twenty years of marriage.
"I beg your pardon?"
"No." Thomas sat down on the edge of the bed, which he knew was a tactical error because it put him in reach. "Cecily said not yet. You've asked everyone in the house and everyone's said no, so you've come to me, because I've never once refused you anything to do with the accounts in twenty years."
"Precisely. So bring it."
"No."
The silence that followed was of a quality Thomas had previously only experienced in council, during the worst of the Baron's war.
"You are overruling me," Victoria said slowly. "In my own house. About my own work."
"I'm overruling you about your own blood, which Cecily says there isn't enough of yet." He did not look away. "I watched you nearly go, Victoria. For about a quarter of an hour in the middle of that night, Cecily was making a decision I've never asked her about and never will. You were grey. I've seen that colour on people who didn't come back from it."
Victoria did not say anything.
"I'm not bringing you the ledger," Thomas said. "I'll bring you anything else in this house. I'll read it to you if you like — I'll read you Osbern on ventilation. But I'm not handing you the one thing I know will make you sit up."
She looked at him for a long time.
Then she turned her face to the wall, and he thought for a while that she was angry, and then realised from the set of her shoulders that she was crying, which she almost never did and never in front of him if she could help it.
"You've never refused me anything," she said, into the bolster.
"I know."
"You refused me the thing I most wanted, because I'm not well enough to be trusted with it, and you were right." Her voice was muffled. "I don't know what to do with that. I've been the person who decides for twenty years and I'm lying here and I can't lift a pen and my husband's decided for me and I'm grateful, and I hate that I'm grateful."
Thomas lay down beside her, carefully, and did not say anything, and after a while she found his hand.
She was up within the fortnight, and back at the counting room a fortnight after that, and she never once referred to the conversation again.
But Thomas noticed, over the years that followed, that on the rare occasions he said no to her about something that mattered, she stopped and considered it before she argued, which she had not once done in the two decades before.