At the end of that summer there was a day when nobody needed anyone, and Victoria, who had been watching for one, took it before it could get away.
"We're going up to the pond," she announced at breakfast. "All of us. Until dark."
Thomas looked up from his bread. "I said I'd look at Ralf's new--"
"Ralf has been looking at it himself for three days and will go on looking at it whether or not you stand behind him." She was already wrapping cheese. "The council doesn't sit until next week. Cecily has Joan. Nobody is dying. I checked."
"You checked."
"I went down to the fever house last night and asked." She tied the cloth. "Six of us. One day. If anyone comes to the door with a crisis, Diccon can have it."
The pond lay above the head of the flume, where the stream had been dammed in the second year to give the wheel a steady fall. It had reeds at the shallow end and a stand of alders, and a flat shelf of rock on the far side that took the sun all afternoon. Thomas had walked past it ten thousand times on the way to something. He could not remember the last time he had walked to it.
It took most of the morning to get there. Hugh, at a little over a year, walked about a third of the way and then sat down in the path and declined to go further, and had to be carried, and was delighted about it. Margery walked the whole distance by herself and would not hold anyone's hand. Alys walked beside her mother and told her, at length, about a dispute with the miller's girl over the stilts that had apparently been running since early summer and had reached a stage of real legal complexity. Edmund ran ahead, came back, ran ahead again, and arrived at the rock shelf a quarter of an hour before anyone else and was found sitting on it with his arms folded, as if he had been waiting all day.
Thomas's knees noticed the climb. He did not mention it. Victoria noticed him not mentioning it, and also did not mention it, and the two of them came over the last rise together in a silence that was half irritation and half something warmer.
He tried to teach Edmund to swim. That was the thing he had decided on, somewhere on the walk up, without consulting anybody. He had learned himself in a municipal pool with a chlorine smell he could still summon if he closed his eyes, from a bored teenager with a whistle, and it seemed to him suddenly unbearable that his son should live beside a mill race and not know how.
Edmund stood at the edge of the shelf and looked at the dark water.
"It's cold."
"It's cold for about the count of twenty. Then it's not."
"How deep is it?"
"Over your head, here. Not at the reeds." Thomas had his shirt off and was already in to the waist, and it was much colder than the count of twenty, and he kept that off his face. "Come on. I've got you."
Edmund did not come on. He stood on the rock with his toes curled over the edge, and Thomas watched him weigh it -- the cold, the depth, the father in the water holding out his arms -- and saw the moment the boy decided that he preferred not to be seen trying something he might be bad at.
"I don't want to."
"You'll like it once you're in."
"I don't want to." Flatter, now. The council voice.
Thomas held out his arms a while longer. Then he let them drop.
It was Alys who went in, in the end. She had been watching from the alders, and when her brother walked away along the bank she came down to the edge in her shift, considered the water with the same cool attention she gave the miller's girl, and said, "If I go in, can I have the first of the honey cake?"
"You can have the first of the honey cake," said Victoria from the rock.
Alys went in. She shrieked at the cold, climbed straight out, went in again, and by the end of an hour was splashing about in the shallows with Thomas's hand under her belly, swallowing a good deal of pond and furious about it, and loving every minute.
Edmund watched from the bank and pretended he was not watching.
"Leave it," Victoria said, later, on the rock, when the children were scattered and Hugh was asleep on the blanket between them.
"I didn't say anything."
"You're about to go and say something to him. Don't."
Thomas lay back on the warm stone. "He won't try anything he can't already do."
"I know."
"He's been like that since the school. That business with Osbern telling him his letters are the best in the room. I've half a mind to go and have a word with--"
No.
He turned his head. She was looking at the water.
"If you go to Osbern," she said, "then the founder has gone to the schoolmaster about his son. Osbern will be mortified, and Edmund will hear about it, because everyone hears about everything, and he will learn that when the master says something he doesn't like, his father fixes it." She did not raise her voice. "That is worse than letters with backward e's in them."
"So we let him believe it."
"We let him find out. It won't take long. It never does." She reached over and moved a fly off Hugh's cheek. "You want to fix him. You can't. You missed the part where you could have done it easily, and now it's going to be slow, and you'll have to sit on your hands."
That landed harder than she perhaps intended. Thomas lay on the rock and let it.
"I'm sorry," Victoria said after a while. "That was unkind."
"It was true."
"It can be both. I'd prefer it were only one."
Margery spent the whole afternoon at the reed end, building a dam.
Nobody had suggested it. She had found the place where a trickle ran into the pond over a lip of gravel and had decided, apparently, that it ought not to, and had set about stopping it with stones and handfuls of mud, wholly absorbed, talking to nobody. Thomas went down once to look and was handed a stone, wordlessly, and shown where it went. He put it there. She took it out and put it a little to the left. He did not offer another.
By late afternoon the trickle had stopped and a small brown pool had formed behind her wall, and Margery sat back on her heels and looked at it with an expression of deep, private satisfaction, and then -- while Thomas watched -- kicked a hole in the middle of it and watched the water run out.
"Why did you do that?" he asked.
She looked up at him as though the question made no sense.
"To see it go," she said.
They walked home in the long gold light, slowly, Hugh on Thomas's shoulders now, which his back would complain about tomorrow. Alys was still damp and talking about the honey cake. Margery had mud to the elbows and was silent and serene.
Edmund walked a little apart from everyone, kicking at stones, and about halfway down he fell back until he was level with his father.
"Next summer," he said, not looking up. "The swimming. Maybe."
"Next summer."
"Not with Alys there."
"Not with Alys there," Thomas agreed.
Edmund nodded and walked on ahead again, and Thomas understood he had been offered something, carefully, on terms, and that he had better not say anything else in case it was withdrawn.
Nothing had happened all day. Nobody had died or been born or come to the gate with a letter. Victoria said, at the door, that it was the best day she had had in years, and then went straight to her desk and worked until midnight to make up for it, and Thomas sat in the kitchen with the remains of the honey cake and could not have told anyone, if they had asked, what exactly he was so happy about.