It was, as Victoria had said, an awful winter, and Cecily did all of it.
She opened the schoolhouse at first light and taught the older scholars until noon. She walked down to the fever house and saw to whoever was in the beds, and wrote the tallies, and went out to lying-ins in the lower parish and the outlying farms at whatever hour she was sent for. She came back up to the schoolhouse for the evening class twice a week, because Osbern could not manage the older girls and she would not let anyone else try. She slept on the pallet across the doorway of the back room, though there was no one in the back room now, because it was the closest bed to the door when the knocking came.
People offered. She refused them, and was short about it, and then went to find them afterward and apologised for being short, which took longer than the help would have saved.
Thomas watched it the way you watch a wheel that is running slightly out of true. Nothing visibly wrong. A sound under the sound.
The thing that broke it was small, and nobody died of it.
A carter's wife in the lower parish went into labour on a night when Cecily was at a farm two miles up the north road with another one. The carter's boy was sent to the fever house and found it dark. He was sent to the schoolhouse and found it dark too. By the time anyone thought to send up the hill, a neighbour had got the child out on her own, alive and loud, and the mother was weak but well, and the neighbour, who had watched Aldith work for twenty years, said afterward that it had gone easier than most.
Cecily came back at dawn and heard about it at the fever-house door, and sat down on the step there, and did not get up.
Thomas found her there an hour later. He had heard it at the tally-bench, which meant everyone had heard it.
"Don't," she said, as soon as she saw him.
"I wasn't going to."
"You were going to say it's not my fault, and it isn't, and it doesn't matter whether it is." She was looking at her hands. "There should have been someone here. There's always been someone here. For thirty years if you knocked on that door at night someone answered it, and last night nobody did, and it was a woman who knew what she was about who happened to live next door. Next time it won't be."
Thomas sat down beside her on the cold step. He did not say anything. He thought about Aldith's third sheet. Take something off her whether she likes it or not. He had been trying all winter to work out what, and how, and whether he had the right, and he still did not know.
In the end he did not have to.
Joan came to the schoolhouse three days later, after the evening class, when the room was empty and Cecily was putting out the lamps.
Thomas was there by accident. He had come down to fetch Edmund's slate, which Edmund had left behind and declared on the edge of tears to be essential, and he was in the cloakroom when he heard Joan's voice in the hall, and stopped.
She was eighteen or so, Diccon's eldest, tall and plain-spoken and quick with her hands. She had worked in the household since Edmund was in her cradle. She had taken the fever at two, the bad year, and lived when a good many children in the lower parish had not, and she had a white seam of a scar along one forearm from where Aldith had lanced something that would otherwise have killed her. She did not talk about it. Thomas had not known, until he heard her in the hall, that she still thought about it.
"I want to learn the fever house," she said.
Cecily turned with the snuffer in her hand.
No.
"You haven't heard what I —"
"I don't need to. You're needed up the hill. Victoria can't spare you. And you don't know what you're asking for."
"I asked Victoria. She said she could spare me if I found someone for the little ones, and I have. My cousin Bet. She starts at Candlemas." Joan did not raise her voice. "And I know what I'm asking for. I've been in that house more than you think. I was in it when I was two. I don't remember it. My mother does. She says Aldith talked to me the whole time she was cutting, so I wouldn't look, and that I looked anyway."
Cecily put the snuffer down.
She asked questions, then. Thomas stood in the cloakroom with Edmund's slate and listened to them, and they were not kind questions. What she would do with a child that came out blue. What she would do if the mother was screaming and the grandmother was screaming louder and the father was in the doorway. How many hours she could go without sleep and still count. Whether she could put her hands into a wound. Whether she could sit with someone who was going to die and not leave the room, and not lie to them, and not cry where they could see it.
Joan did not know the answers to half of them, and said so. To the last one she said, after a long pause, "I don't know. I think so. I'd want to find out with you there, not on my own."
Cecily was silent.
"She took me at nineteen," she said at last. Her voice had gone odd. "Aldith. I had nothing. I'd walked out of a village where everyone was dead and I could barely read and she took me anyway."
"I know," Joan said. "Everyone knows. That's why I came now and not next year." She hesitated, and then said it straight, as Aldith would have. "You can't do it all. I heard about the carter's wife. Everybody did. I'd rather you had me than nobody."
Thomas held his breath in the cloakroom.
"Candlemas," Cecily said. "You start with the cloths. You boil every cloth in that house every day until you hate the sight of them, and if you complain once I'll send you back up the hill to Bet."
"I won't complain."
"You will. Everyone does. Aldith made me boil cloths for a year." Cecily picked the snuffer up again. "Go home. It's late. Tell your father I'm stealing you and he can come and shout at me if he likes."
Joan went. Her step in the yard was quick, almost a run, and then she checked it, as if remembering she was eighteen and about to be serious, and walked the rest of the way.
Cecily put out the last lamp. In the dark she said, not loudly, "You can come out. I knew you were there. You breathe like a bellows."
Thomas came out with the slate.
"I didn't do anything," he said.
"I know. That's why I'm not angry." Cecily stood in the dark hall a moment. "She said take something off me whether I liked it or not. She didn't say it had to be one of you." Her voice was almost steady. "I think she'd have liked that it was a girl from the lower parish who lived. I think she'd have said that was the whole point."