Maud had never taught a child, and within a week of Margery starting at the workshop she had worked out that she was bad at it, and within a fortnight she had decided this was Margery's fault.
"She doesn't say anything," she complained to Cecily, at the schoolhouse, in the tone of someone reporting a fault in a bearing. "I explain a thing. I explain it well. I can see her listening. And then she says nothing at all, and goes back to whatever I gave her, and I have no idea whether a word of it went in."
"Have you asked her?"
"I asked her whether she understood. She said yes." Maud folded her arms. "Everyone says yes. Your scholars say yes. Thomas's journeymen say yes. It is the most useless word in the language."
Cecily looked at her for a while with an expression Maud did not care for.
"You're describing every teacher's first year," she said. "You're just describing it about a six-year-old instead of a roomful of twelve-year-olds, so it feels personal."
"It isn't personal."
"Then why are you here at the end of the day telling me about it?"
Maud did not have an answer to that, and left.
The workshop sat at the end of the works lane, a long low building with a north light and a smell of oil and hot iron that had soaked into the timbers over the years. Maud had built half of it herself. It held two lathes, a forge Ralf had laid for her, a bench along the whole south wall, and a quantity of half-finished things that nobody but Maud was permitted to move.
Margery came every morning after her letters at the schoolhouse and stayed until the bell. She did what she was given. In the first weeks that was mostly sorting -- drawers of bolts by size, pins by length, a box of old gear blanks that had been thrown together years ago and needed separating by tooth count. She did it slowly and completely, and when she was done she brought the drawer to Maud and put it on the bench and stood beside it without speaking.
Maud would look at it, and find nothing wrong, and give her another.
What Maud did not see, because she was not looking, was the way the child watched her work. Margery sorted with her hands and watched with everything else. She watched Maud set a tool in the lathe and walk away and come back. She watched Maud swear at a casting and throw it in the scrap bin and then, half an hour later, fish it out again. She watched the way Maud stood when she was thinking, with one hand flat on the bench and her head tilted, as if listening to the wood.
And she watched the second lathe, the old one in the corner, which Maud never used.
Victoria came down in the fourth week, unannounced, in the middle of the afternoon.
She found her daughter at the long bench with a file and a small bronze bearing in a vice, working the inside edge in short careful strokes. The child's hands were red. There were two blisters on the right palm, one broken. She did not look up when her mother came in. She did not stop.
Victoria stood and watched for a while. Then she went to find Maud, who was at the back with a drawing, and said, very quietly, "How long has she been at that?"
Maud glanced up. "Since noon."
"It is past the middle of the afternoon."
"She wanted to finish it." Maud went back to the drawing. "I told her she could stop whenever she liked. She didn't like."
"She is six."
"I am aware of her age."
"Then you should be aware," said Victoria, still quietly, in the voice she used at the tally-bench for men who thought they had cheated her, "that she does not ask for things. She has never asked for anything in her life. She endures them until somebody notices. You told her she could stop whenever she liked. She has never once in six years stopped anything because she liked."
Maud set the drawing down.
For a moment the two women looked at each other across the workshop, and Thomas, had he been there, would have recognised it as the look that had passed between them over the garden gate three years before -- something old, older than either of them would have said, about clever girls and the people who had once let them get on with things and the people who had not.
"You think I'm working her too hard," Maud said.
"I think you don't know how hard you're working her, because she won't tell you, and you don't know how to look."
"And you do?"
"No," said Victoria. "That's why I came down. I wanted to see what you'd seen." She paused. "It seems you've seen a bearing."
That landed. Maud's jaw tightened. She looked past Victoria at the child at the bench, still filing, and something in her face changed -- not softened, exactly, but shifted, the way a person's face shifts when they look at a familiar thing from a new side and find it is not the shape they thought.
"I have never taught a child," she said. "I had nobody teach me. I went to Genoa at twenty and they laughed at me for a year and I learned by being laughed at. It's the only method I know."
"It's a bad method."
"It worked."
"It worked on you," said Victoria. "You'd have done well under any method. So will she. That isn't the question. The question is what it costs her on the way." She turned to go. "I'm not taking her out of here. She'd never forgive me. I'm asking you to look up from your drawings once an hour and see whether she's bleeding."
Maud did not answer. But when Victoria had gone she put down the drawing and went over to the long bench and stood beside Margery, and watched the file going in and out of the bearing for a while.
"Stop," she said.
Margery stopped.
"Show me your hands."
Margery put the file down and held them out, palms up, the way a child holds out her hands to be checked for dirt. Maud looked at the blisters. She looked at the broken one for some time.
"Why didn't you stop?"
Margery thought about the question with the same level attention she gave everything.
"It wasn't finished," she said.
"I said you could stop whenever you liked."
"I didn't like." A small pause. "I liked finishing it."
Maud found, to her own irritation, that she could not argue with this, because it was what she would have said herself, at six or at twenty or last week.
She fetched a pot of the salve Joan made at the fever house and did the child's hands herself, clumsily, getting more of it on her own fingers than on Margery's. Margery let her. Neither of them spoke.
When it was done, Maud said, without quite looking at her, "You've been watching the old lathe."
Margery's eyes went to the corner.
"Every day," said Maud. "I've seen you. You look at it when you think I'm not looking. Why?"
Margery considered whether to answer. Maud saw her consider it, and understood, quite suddenly, that this was what the child's silence had been all along -- not emptiness, not boredom, but weighing. She weighed every word before she spent it.
"It's got a short leg," Margery said. "Like the bench at home. You put a wedge under it, but the wedge is wrong."
Maud stared at her.
"It's wrong how?"
"It's too thick at the back." Margery pointed, not at the lathe but at the floor under it. "So when you run it, it moves. Only a bit. You can see it in the shavings. Yours are all the same on the new one. On the old one they get thicker and then thinner." She lowered her hand. "That's why you don't use it. You think it's worn. It isn't. It's the wedge."
Maud went over to the old lathe, and knelt, which she had not done in years, and looked at the wedge under the short leg. She had put it there herself, a long time ago, in a hurry, and forgotten it. She pulled it out and looked at it, and it was too thick at the back.
She sat on the floor of her own workshop with the wedge in her hand and did not get up for a while.
That evening she walked up to the cottage, which she did perhaps twice a year, and found Victoria at her table, and stood in the doorway and said, without greeting:
"I'm going to need a better method."
Victoria looked up.
"She found the wedge on the old lathe. I've been not using that lathe for six years. She found it by watching the shavings." Maud's voice was flat. "I have been giving her bolts to sort."
Victoria put down her pen.
"What will you give her instead?"
"I don't know. That's what I'm telling you." Maud folded her arms, and unfolded them, and did not seem to know what to do with them. "I came to say you were right. I don't say that often. I wanted to get it over with."
"Come in," said Victoria. "Sit down. Have some wine. And we'll work out a method together, since neither of us has one."
Maud came in. They worked until late. Upstairs, Margery slept with her bandaged hands on top of the blanket, and dreamed, as far as anyone ever found out, of nothing at all.