Victoria kept a small private account that nobody else had ever seen, in the back of an old tally-book, of the kind of thing a woman of orderly habits writes down about her own body. It had been reliable for twenty years. In the first hard frost of the winter after Corradino left, it was wrong by three weeks, and then by five, and she sat with it at her table one morning while the house was loud around her and understood that it was not wrong at all.
She was forty-one. Margery was barely walking. The last time had very nearly killed her.
She closed the tally-book and went to find Cecily, and did not tell Thomas first, and knew while she was walking down the lane that this would be a conversation later.
Cecily was at the fever house, which meant Aldith was there too. Aldith was always there, these days, in the high-backed chair by the door where she could see who came in and comment on them. She had been slowing all winter. She did not walk to stricken villages any more. She walked to the chair, and sat in it, and ran the place from there with a ferocity that had, if anything, increased.
Victoria said it standing up, plainly, the way she said accounts.
Cecily put down what she was holding.
"How far?"
"Two months, I think. A little less."
Cecily asked the questions she always asked, and Victoria answered them, and at the end Cecily sat down on the edge of the table and looked at her for some time without saying anything at all.
"Tell me," Victoria said. "All of it."
It was Aldith who answered, from the chair.
"You lost more blood with the last one than I like to see a woman lose and live." The old voice was dry and quite steady. "You're past forty. Your body's done this three times and it was harder each time and it'll be harder again. You'll likely be fine." She let that sit. "Likely is a word I've buried people under. I'll not pretend to you it's a better word than it is."
"Aldith," Cecily said.
"She asked for all of it. I heard her." Aldith fixed Victoria with a look. "You did ask."
"I did."
"Then that's all of it. Cecily will be gentler, and she'll mean the same thing." The old woman settled back. "And you'll tell your man before he hears it from someone at the tally-bench, because if he hears it at the tally-bench he'll be unbearable for a month, and I have to live in this valley too."
She told him in the garden that afternoon, a bright cold one, with Margery bundled asleep in her basket by the bench and the older two somewhere out of earshot being loud about something.
She watched it go through him. He went white first, which she had expected, and then very still, which she had also expected, and then he said nothing for long enough that she began, against her own intentions, to be angry.
"Say something."
"I'm trying to say the right thing."
"Say any thing. I don't need it to be right."
He took a breath. "I'm glad," he said. "I am. And I'm frightened half to death. I'd have liked to hear it before Cecily did."
"I told Cecily first because I needed to know what to be frightened of," Victoria said, "before I sat and watched you be frightened of it. I can manage one of those at a time. Not both."
He took that. She saw him take it, and decide not to argue, and she was grateful and slightly annoyed in equal measure, because she had been ready for the argument.
"What did she say?"
"That I'll likely be fine. Aldith said the rest." She told him the rest. She did not soften Aldith's word. He would have known if she had.
Thomas looked over at Margery in her basket, the small closed face, the fist up by the ear.
"This has to be the last," he said.
Victoria's head came round.
"Has to."
"I didn't mean —"
"You did mean. You meant has to." She kept her voice low, because of the child, and that made the words harder, not softer. "I told you once that I would not be the next thing you carry about and check. I meant that. You don't get to say has to about my body to me in my own garden." She stopped. Then, because she was honest, and because it was true: "I'd have said it myself in a moment, if you'd let me get there."
He was quiet. Then: "I'm sorry. Get there."
She looked at Margery for a while. At the older two, audible beyond the hedge. At the house, which had been extended twice.
"This is the last one," she said. "I'm deciding it. Not Cecily, not Aldith, not you. Write it in whatever book you like."
"I won't write it anywhere."
"Good," said Victoria. "Then it's mine."
That night she lay awake a long time, which she rarely did, and in the end she said into the dark, not turning toward him, the thing she had not said in the garden or at the fever house or to anyone.
"I'm frightened."
"I know."
"I was frightened with Edmund. I told you then that I was competent at everything except this. I thought I'd have got better at it."
"Have you?"
"No," she said. "Worse. I know more now. That's the trouble with knowing things." She found his hand without looking for it. "Don't say anything wise. I'll throw you out of the bed."
He didn't say anything wise. After a while she slept, and he did not, and in the morning neither of them mentioned it, and she went down to the tally-bench and was wholly herself all day, so that nobody who saw her would have guessed.
Aldith guessed. Aldith sent a boy up the lane at noon with a pot of something hot and foul-smelling and a message that said only: Drink it. Don't argue. Likely is still likely.