The rule was simple and they broke it nearly every week.
One hour on Sunday, after the children were down. No ledgers. No council. No children, which in practice meant no talking about the children, which was the part that failed most often. They had kept it for the better part of five years now, with interruptions for fevers and births and one memorable night when Edmund had been sick on the stairs, and the hour had become, without either of them saying so, the most protected thing in the house.
This was one of the ordinary ones. Late autumn. Rain. A fire that needed another log and was not going to get one, because getting up would mean admitting the hour had started.
Victoria began, as she usually did, with an accusation.
"You were at the works today."
"For a moment."
"It's Sunday."
"Ralf had a question about the new bearing." Thomas shifted on the settle so that his bad knee was out straight. "It took less time to answer it than it would have taken to tell him to come back tomorrow."
"That," said Victoria, "is what every man says on the first day of his fifteenth year of saying it." She had her feet up on the hearth stool, which she permitted herself only in this hour. "That's a quarter of an hour you owe me. I'm noting it."
"Where are you noting it?"
"In my head. It's the only ledger I'm allowed tonight."
He laughed, and she looked pleased with herself, and the hour settled in around them.
They talked about nothing, which took practice.
They talked about the weather in a way that was not about the harvest. Thomas described snow, the dry kind, the kind that squeaked underfoot, and Victoria said she did not believe snow could squeak and that he was making it up to see how much she would swallow, and he said he would prove it if they ever had a proper winter, and she said they would not, because they never did, because it always went to slush by noon here, which was one of the reasons she liked it.
She told him about Ashfield when she was small. Not the house, which he had heard about, but the orchard behind it, and a particular tree she had climbed every summer until she was twelve, and fallen out of at nine, and broken her wrist, and told nobody for two days because she had been forbidden to climb it.
"Two days," Thomas said.
"It was a very small break."
"You were nine."
"I was nine and I had been forbidden. I wasn't going to give them the satisfaction." She considered the fire. "My mother found out because I couldn't hold my spoon. She was so angry she didn't speak to me for a week, and then she sat with me every night for a month while it mended, and never said a single word about the tree again."
"That sounds like someone I know."
"It sounds like Alys," Victoria said. "That's what frightens me."
"That's about the children."
"That was an observation about my mother." She did not look round. "Note it if you like."
Somewhere in the middle of the hour she asked him the thing she almost never asked.
"Do you still think about her?"
She did not say who. She did not need to. The fire made a small sound.
"Not as often," he said. "I used to think about her every day. Then it was most days. Now it's --" He tried to be accurate. "It comes when I'm not expecting it. Margery does something, or Hugh. And I think, she'd have liked that. And then I remember I don't actually know what she'd have liked, any more, because the last letters I had from her weren't from the woman I remember." He was quiet a moment. "So I think about the one I remember. I think that's allowed."
"It's allowed."
"I keep a book," he said. "You know I keep a book."
"I know."
"I think about her when I write in it. You were right about that." He looked at his hands. "It doesn't hurt the way it did. It's more like -- when you walk past a house you used to live in. You don't go in. You just know which window was yours."
Victoria did not say anything wise. That was one of the rules too, though neither of them had ever said it aloud.
Then she said something he did not expect.
"I want to go to Genoa."
He turned his head. She was still looking at the fire, quite calm, as if she had remarked on the rain.
"Not now. Not this year. But before I'm old. Before my knees are like yours." A small movement of her mouth. "I've been writing to that city for thirty years. I've been doing sums about its ships and its exchange rates since before I could do sums about anything else. Corradino said the harbour at dawn was the most beautiful thing in the world and that he'd stopped noticing it at twenty-five and was sorry. I want to notice it. Once."
Thomas felt the list assemble itself in his head before he could stop it. The roads. The passes. Five weeks each way, and Corradino had nearly not made it. The children. The council. Bramwell, wherever Bramwell was now, and whatever the letter to Bruges had or had not done. The fever. The sea.
He opened his mouth.
"Don't," Victoria said.
"I wasn't--"
"You were about to tell me why I can't. I watched the list go across your face. You had about nine things on it." She finally looked at him. "I didn't ask you whether I could. I told you a thing I want. I've wanted it for a long while and I've never said it to anyone, and I said it to you, in this hour, because this is the hour for it." She held his eyes. "You don't have to like it. You have to let it be said."
He shut his mouth. He sat with the list, and found that most of it was true and none of it was the point.
"The harbour at dawn," he said.
"The harbour at dawn."
"I'd want to come."
"I know you would," said Victoria. "I haven't decided whether I'll let you. You'd spend the whole voyage telling me how ships work."
The hour ended the way they often ended, which was not on time.
It ended with a small sound on the stairs, and then Alys in the doorway in her nightshirt, with her hair stuck up on one side, saying that there was a noise in the roof and she could not sleep and could she sit here, just for a little, she wouldn't talk.
Victoria looked at Thomas. It was very nearly the end of the hour. It was not quite.
"Come on, then," Thomas said.
Alys climbed onto the settle between them, and tucked her cold feet under her mother's skirts, and did not talk, for nearly a minute. Then she asked what they had been talking about.
"Nothing," said Victoria.
"You can't talk about nothing for an hour."
"You can," said Thomas. "It takes practice."
Alys considered this with deep suspicion. Then the fire and the warmth got the better of her, and she leaned against her father's arm, and was asleep before either of them had decided who would carry her up.
They sat on past the hour with the child between them and the rain on the shutters and the fire going down, and did not get up, and did not talk, and Victoria said afterward that it counted, and that he still owed her the quarter hour from the works, and that she would collect it.
She did. Some weeks later. She spent it telling him exactly which ships sailed from Genoa in spring, and for where, and at what cost, and he listened to every word.