Thomas walked the baby every morning that autumn, round the garden and down the lane to the mill and back, because Hugh slept better moving and because, if he was honest, Thomas did too.
It was not a duty anyone had given him. Nobody needed him at the tally-bench before noon any more. The council met without him one week in three and did perfectly well. The works ran under Ralf and Osgar, and the school under Cecily, and his own portions of all of it had been handed out years ago, during the worst of the glass, and had quietly never come back. He had expected, when he noticed this, to mind. He found he did not mind at all. He had a heavy, warm, perfectly placid son on his shoulder and a lane with the leaves coming down on it, and a whole morning with nothing in it that had to be counted.
He came back through the gate on one of those mornings and found Edmund sitting on Wat's bench by the door, waiting for him.
Edmund was six and a half, which he would tell anyone who asked and several people who did not. He had his chin on his fists. He watched his father come up the path with Hugh, and he did not get up.
"You're not at your letters," Thomas said.
"Mam said I could wait."
"Wait for what?"
Edmund considered the baby, who was asleep with his mouth open.
"You never carried me about," he said.
It was said without complaint. That was the worst of it. It was said the way Edmund said things he had worked out and was checking, the way he would later say things in council, flat and careful, to see whether anyone would contradict them.
"I did," Thomas said. "Of course I did."
"Mam says you were at council. When I was little. She says you were at council most of the time and the rest of the time you were tired."
Thomas stood in the path with Hugh breathing against his neck and looked for something to say. He found that Victoria had told the boy the truth, which was very like her, and that the truth did not have a second half he could offer. He had been at council. He had been tired. There had been a dark piece of glass in his pocket counting down, and a town that came to him at all hours, and a wife who had told him, more than once, that he was missing it. He had known he was missing it. He had gone to council anyway.
"That's true," he said. "I was."
Edmund nodded, as if a figure had come out where he expected it to. Then he got up and went in to his letters, and Thomas stood in the garden for some time with the baby and did not walk anywhere.
The boy could not sleep that night. Thomas heard him moving about overhead, the creak of the boards and then the creak of them again, and after a while he went up.
Edmund was at the window, looking at the ridge. The near tower stood up black against a sky that had a little moon in it.
"It's not lit," Edmund said.
"It only lights for messages. And at the hour, for the check."
"What's the check?"
"The near tower sends one signal to the far tower, to say it's awake. The far tower sends one back." Thomas came and stood beside him. "It means nothing has gone wrong on the line. That's all it says."
Edmund was quiet. Then, not looking round: "Can I see it?"
Thomas thought of every sensible answer. It was late. It was cold. The keeper would not like it. Hugh might wake and want him. He thought of the boy on the bench in the morning, chin on his fists, saying you never carried me about without any complaint in it at all.
"Get your boots," he said.
The path up the ridge was steeper than he remembered and he had to stop twice on it, which Edmund noticed and was kind enough not to mention. The keeper that season was a long-faced young man called Piers, who had come up through Cecily's school in its early years, and who was not at all pleased to find the founder of the valley at his door an hour before the check with a child in a nightshirt and a cloak.
"He can watch," Piers said. "He's not to touch anything."
"He'd like to work the shutter."
"The shutter's logged. Every throw of it. If it goes outside the hour, or sends anything but the check, the far tower writes it down and it comes back to me at the end of the month and I answer for it." Piers folded his arms. "With respect, I don't care whose boy he is."
Thomas found he liked the young man a good deal.
"The check only," he said. "At the hour, with your hand on his. You log it in your own name. If it goes wrong, I'll answer for it myself to whoever you like."
Piers looked at him, and at Edmund, who had gone completely still in the way he did when he wanted something and had learned that wanting it visibly made adults say no.
"The check," Piers said. "Once."
They waited for the hour in the small cold room at the top, with the lamp shuttered and the big frame of the signal arm above them creaking a little in the wind. Edmund did not say anything. He watched Piers trim the lamp. He watched the sand in the glass. When it ran out, Piers put the boy's hands on the lever and his own over them, and said now, and they threw it together — open, closed, open — and the light went out across the dark toward the far ridge.
Nothing happened.
Edmund held his breath. Thomas found he was holding his own.
Then, a long way off, very small, a light opened on the far ridge and closed and opened again.
Edmund let out a sound that was not a word.
"That's them," Piers said. "Nothing wrong on the line." He wrote it in the log, and then, after a moment's thought, he turned the book round and held out the pen. "Put your mark by it. Under mine. You sent it."
Edmund wrote his name, in large uneven letters, in the tower log, under the keeper's.
He talked the whole way down. Thomas could not afterward remember a word of it. He remembered the sound of it, the boy's voice going on ahead of him in the dark, quick and bright and certain.
At the bottom of the path, by the gate, Edmund stopped.
"Will you take Hugh up? When he's big?"
Thomas thought about lying, and could not see the point.
Probably.
Edmund nodded. He did not seem unhappy. He seemed to be putting the figure where it went.
"I was first, though," he said.
"You were first."
In the morning Thomas walked the baby down to the mill and back, the same as always. When he came through the gate he looked up, without meaning to, and saw Edmund at the upstairs window, watching. The boy lifted a hand. Thomas lifted one back. Neither of them, then or for many years after, said anything about the distance between that window and that path, and both of them knew exactly how far it was.