The dispute over who got to hold the baby began in the first month and was not, strictly speaking, ever resolved.
It was Edmund who proposed rules. This surprised nobody. Edmund at four and a half had arrived at the conviction that any disagreement could be settled if the correct procedure was found, and he spent a good deal of his waking life searching for the correct procedure.
"Turns," he announced, having summoned Alys to the hearth with the air of a man opening proceedings. "You hold her while I count to a hundred. Then I hold her while you count to a hundred."
Alys, not yet three, considered this.
"Yes," she said.
This was the first mistake, though Edmund would not understand it for some years. Alys agreed to terms readily and completely. She agreed to them the way Victoria signed letters of cordial goodwill to Lord Bramwell — sincerely, promptly, and with no intention of being bound by anything not explicitly written down.
Edmund counted. Alys held her sister, very carefully, on her lap in the big chair, with Joan's hand under the baby's head. At a hundred, Edmund held out his arms.
"She's asleep," Alys said.
"That doesn't matter. It's my turn."
"You can't have a turn when she's asleep. It doesn't count if she doesn't know."
Edmund's face went through several stages of outrage.
"That's not in the rules!"
"It's not not in the rules," Alys said, with a serenity Thomas would later recognise, with some alarm, as her mother's.
Edmund appealed to the nearest authority, which was his father.
"She's cheating."
Thomas, who had been trying to read a report on the salt yields and had been listening to the entire proceeding with increasing delight, put the report down.
"Did you say anything about sleeping when you made the rules?"
"No, but—"
"Then she hasn't cheated. She's found a gap." Thomas considered. "It's a gap you left, Edmund. Next time you make rules, you'll have to think about what happens when the baby's asleep."
Edmund stared at him with the betrayal of a litigant who has been informed that the court is not, in fact, on his side.
"That's not fair."
"No," Thomas agreed. "It isn't fair. It's what happens when you write rules and someone cleverer than you reads them."
From the other chair, where she was working her way back through a fortnight of correspondence, Victoria made a noise that was very nearly a laugh and turned it into a cough.
"You're enjoying this," she said, when the children were out of earshot.
"I am enjoying it enormously. I'm watching the next council."
"You're watching Alaric and me in about thirty years, and I don't care for the comparison." She set down her pen. "He'll write very good rules one day. He'll write them because of her."
The dispute continued over the following weeks in increasingly baroque forms. Edmund amended the rules to include sleeping. Alys discovered that if she was feeding the baby a sip of water from a spoon, the count could be paused, since stopping mid-spoon was dangerous. Edmund added a clause about spoons. Alys observed that the clause did not cover cups.
Joan, who had to mediate most of it, told Thomas privately that she had not known it was possible for two children under five to conduct a legal proceeding and that she was going to have to have a very firm word with Wilf about his own negotiations over the bread.
It was Margery who ended it, in the end, and she did it without any apparent awareness that there was anything to end.
She was perhaps two months old and had lately learned to grip things. On an afternoon in the early summer, Alys was holding her — legitimately, mid-turn, Edmund counting aloud from across the room — and Margery reached up and took hold of her sister's finger, and held it, and fell asleep.
Edmund reached a hundred.
"My turn."
Alys looked down at the small fist closed around her finger. She looked at her brother. She looked, for a moment, genuinely stricken.
"I can't," she said. "She's holding on."
"She's asleep. You said asleep doesn't count."
"She's holding on, Edmund."
And Alys — who had outmanoeuvred her brother on every point of procedure for the best part of two months — sat in the big chair for nearly an hour without moving, stiff-armed and increasingly uncomfortable, because the baby would not let go and she would not make her.
Edmund, magnanimously, waived his turn.
"You're welcome," he told her, at intervals, for the rest of the afternoon.
"I didn't want it," Alys said, which was plainly untrue, and which she maintained with great firmness until supper.