By the time the leaves turned, Aldith had stopped coming to the chair by the door.
She did not announce it. One morning she was simply not in it, and the next morning she was not in it either, and on the third morning one of the girls at the fever house asked Cecily, very carefully, whether they ought to move it, and Cecily said no in a voice that ended the matter.
Aldith kept to the small room at the back after that, the one that had been hers for nearly thirty years, with the window that looked onto the herb beds. She had a cough that came and went. She ate very little and complained about all of it. Cecily slept on a pallet across the doorway and went from there to the schoolhouse each morning and back each evening, and did both jobs, and grew thinner, and would not discuss it.
Victoria tried once. She came down with a basket and found Cecily in the outer room writing up the day's fever tallies by a candle that had nearly gone.
"Let me sit with her tonight."
No.
"You've not slept properly in a month. I can see it from the door."
"Then don't stand at the door." Cecily did not look up. "I know you mean it kindly. I know everyone does. I am going to do this and I would ask people to stop offering, because every time someone offers I have to refuse, and refusing takes something I don't have to spare."
Victoria put the basket down and did not offer again. She did not leave either. She sat on the bench by the wall while Cecily finished the tallies, and they did not speak, and when the candle went out Cecily lit another without comment, and Victoria took that as permission and stayed.
It was Aldith who asked for her, a week later.
The girl who came up the lane with the message said the old woman wanted the lady, alone, and had said alone twice, and had said that if Cecily objected Cecily could go and boil something.
Cecily did object. Victoria heard her, low and furious, in the outer room. Then she heard the door of the herb shed bang, and went in.
Aldith was propped on three pillows, small in the bed in a way she had never been small in a chair. Her hands were on the blanket. They were the same hands, broad and red-knuckled, that had pulled Edmund into the world and pressed on Victoria's belly in the worst hour of Margery's night until the bleeding slowed. They did not look like they belonged to the rest of her any more.
"Sit," Aldith said. "Not there. Where I can see you without turning. Turning's a nuisance."
Victoria sat.
"You gave me half a picture once," Aldith said. "Do you remember?"
"The second month with Edmund."
"You told me you were tired and a bit sick and it was nothing. It wasn't nothing, you'd been bleeding on and off for a week, and I knew it inside three questions." The old woman's mouth moved. "I never told you why I was so short with you about it."
"You were very short."
"I was." Aldith stopped for a breath or two, gathering herself. "When I was younger than Cecily, I had a woman come to me who was frightened half to death of her lying-in. Her sister had died of one. I liked her. I wanted her calm. So I told her it would be easy, that she had good hips and a good colour and nothing to fear, and I didn't tell her what I'd felt when I put my hands on her, which was that the child was lying wrong." She looked at the window. "She didn't send for me early, because I'd told her there was no need. By the time they fetched me she'd been at it a day and a half. I got them both out. I very nearly didn't. She never knew it was my kindness that nearly did it, and I never told her, and I never gave anyone half a picture again." Her eyes came back to Victoria's. "And I never took one either. I'll not start now."
Victoria understood, then, why she had been sent for.
"Ask me," she said.
"Cecily." Aldith did not waste the word. "Will she manage? The whole picture. Not what you'd say at her door."
Victoria thought about it properly, because the question deserved that, and because Aldith would know if she didn't.
"Not at first," she said. "She'll try to do both. The school and this. She'll do them both badly for most of a year and refuse every bit of help that's offered, and she'll be short with people who don't deserve it, and someone will have to take something off her eventually whether she likes it or not." She paused. "And then she'll be better at this than you were. Not kinder. Better. She writes everything down."
Aldith laughed. It turned into the cough, and Victoria held the cup for her until it passed, and Aldith let her, which was its own kind of answer.
"Good," the old woman said, when she could. "That's the whole picture. I'll take it."
They sat a while. The herb beds were going over outside the window, brown and leggy, and someone had left a rake against the wall.
"Something else," Aldith said. "You'll write my page."
"If you want me to."
"I want you to because you won't make a meal of it. Anyone else will make a meal of it. Keep it short." She fixed Victoria with a look. "Two lines."
Three.
Two.
"Three," Victoria said. "I'm the one writing it."
Aldith regarded her for a while, as long a while as she could spare, and then made a sound of disgust that was also, unmistakably, approval.
"Three. Not a word over. And nothing about my being a comfort to anyone. I never was. I was useful. There's a difference and I'll haunt you if you blur it."
"I won't blur it."
"No," said Aldith. "You won't. That's why it's you."
There was one more thing, and it came at the door, when Victoria had already stood and gathered her cloak.
"Your man," Aldith said, from the pillows. Her eyes were half closed. "Thomas. There's something about him he doesn't tell. I've known since the second year. A man doesn't arrive from nowhere knowing how to boil a cloth and not knowing how to hold a baby. I never asked."
Victoria stood very still in the doorway.
"I'm not asking now," Aldith said. "I'm telling you I didn't. That's all. It seemed a thing you might like to know, before I go." She turned her face toward the window. "Don't answer. Not answering's the whole picture too. Go on. Send Cecily back in before she boils the shed."
Victoria went out. She found Cecily in the herb shed, white with temper, standing over a pot that had nothing in it at all, and told her the old woman wanted her. Cecily went past her without a word.
Victoria walked home up the lane in the early dark. She did not tell Thomas what Aldith had said at the door. She turned it over all the way up the hill, and decided that it had been given to her and not to him, and that it was hers to keep. It was one of very few things in all their years together that she never told him. She did not regret it.