He had started it without meaning to, the winter Alys learned to talk, on a loose sheet he had folded into the back of an old tally-book because it was the nearest paper to hand.
Edmund, aged three, at supper, apropos of nothing: If Wat is in the ground how does he know when it's Sunday?
He had written it down because it had made him laugh and then made him have to leave the room. That was all. He had not thought of it as a beginning. But a week later Alys said something that needed keeping, and then Edmund said something else, and by the spring the folded sheet was full and he had sewn a second one to it, and by the time Hugh was walking there was a thin quire in the drawer of his writing table, in his own hand, that nobody else in the house had ever seen.
He did not write in it every day. He wrote in it when one of them said something he did not want to lose. He wrote the date, roughly -- late spring, the week of the hay -- and who had said it, and the words, as exactly as he could remember them. Nothing else. No commentary. He had found, early on, that when he tried to add anything about what the words meant, he ruined them.
Alys, four, having been caught with her hand in the honey crock: I didn't take any. I was checking it was still there.
Edmund, five, after the old Genoese left: What a thing is worth depends on where you're standing. He said that to me. He said it was a lesson. I think he meant the coin but I think he also meant me.
Margery, two, her first sentence that anyone could confirm, to the cat: No.
Alys, five, walking home from the mill: You were more frightened than when I cut my chin.
That one he had sat over for some time before writing. He wrote it in the end, because the rule was that he wrote down what they said and not what he wished they had said.
Hugh, a little past one, holding up a beetle to his father in the garden: Da.
It was the first word. Victoria said afterward that it had been directed at the beetle. Thomas wrote it down regardless.
Victoria found it on a wet evening in the autumn, looking in his drawer for a knife to sharpen a quill, and she did not pretend she had not opened it.
He came in from settling Hugh and found her at his table with the quire open in front of her, reading by the lamp. She did not look up.
"How long have you been keeping this?"
"Since Alys was talking." He stood in the doorway. He was surprised by how exposed he felt -- more than he had ever felt with the glass, somehow, when everyone had wanted to know what was in his pocket and he had told no one. "It's nothing. It's just things they said."
"It isn't nothing." She turned a page. "Margery, three, at the gate. It's the short leg." She looked up then. "When did she say that?"
"The evening after the latch. I asked her how she knew. That was all she said."
Victoria read on in silence. He watched her face, and saw the moment she came to one that caught her, because her mouth moved and then went still. He did not ask which. She closed the quire after a while and sat with her hand flat on the cover.
"There's very little of Edmund at the start," she said.
He had known she would see it. He had seen it himself, every time he opened the thing. A page and a half for Edmund's first four years. Then Alys, and the pages filled up, and Edmund's entries got longer too, as if Thomas had only started listening to his son once he had another child to listen to.
"I wasn't there," he said. "For a lot of it. I was at council. You told him so yourself."
"I did. I'd tell him again." She did not soften. Then she added, in a different voice: "But you weren't not listening. You were tired. Those aren't the same, and when he's grown you're going to have to tell him which it was."
Thomas came and sat down across from her.
"Who is it for?" Victoria asked.
He opened his mouth to say for them, for when they were grown, and did not, because she would have known.
"I don't know."
She looked at him over the lamp for a while. Then she said, very carefully, the way she said things she was not sure she had a right to:
"You wrote a letter every Sunday for fourteen years to someone who couldn't read it."
He went still.
"And then you stopped. And then a few years after you stopped, you started writing down what your children say, in the same hand, at the same table, a few times a week." She did not look away. "I'm not saying that's what it is. I'm saying you should know whether it is."
The rain went on against the shutters. In the next room Margery said something in her sleep and was quiet.
Thomas thought about it honestly, because she had asked honestly. He thought about the drafts that had piled up in the dead glass in his last years with it, the letters that went nowhere. He thought about his mother, whom he had not let himself think about directly in months, and about what she would have made of Margery at the gate or Alys at the honey crock. He thought she would have laughed exactly where he had laughed. He thought that, without ever once deciding it, he had been writing these down for a woman who would never read them, and who might by now, in whatever version of the world the letters had thinned into, not be a woman who would have known what to do with them at all.
"Some of it," he said. "Maybe. I didn't know until you said."
"Does that make it worse?"
"No." He found, to his surprise, that this was true. "It makes it -- I think it makes it all right. I think I needed somewhere to put them where they wouldn't be any use to anyone. Just kept."
Victoria nodded slowly.
"Then keep it," she said. "But I want something."
What?
She pulled the quire back toward her, and dipped the quill, and turned to the last page, and wrote in her own small upright hand beneath his last entry. He watched her do it and did not try to see what it was until she had blotted it and turned it round.
Victoria, forty-three, autumn, at his table: There's very little of Edmund at the start. Put more in.
"That's not something one of the children said," Thomas said.
"No. It's something I said. I'm entitled to one." She pushed it back across to him. "And now it's in there, and you'll see it every time you open it, and you'll write down what he says. Even the dull things. Especially the dull things. He says a great many dull things at seven, I expect, and you will want every one of them when he's thirty and won't speak to you for a month over something at council."
He kept it. He kept it for the rest of the time he kept anything, in the same drawer, and it grew to three quires and then four, and the pages for Edmund in the later part were as full as anyone's.
He wrote down, the week after Victoria found it, Edmund at seven telling Alys that the reason the river went downhill was that the sea was lower and had asked for it. He wrote down Edmund at eight explaining the council's structure to Hugh in tremendous detail while Hugh ate a piece of bark. He wrote down a great many dull things.
And on one page, months later, in among the ordinary entries, there was one from Hugh, not yet two, that Thomas read so often in later years that the paper went soft along its fold.
Hugh, at the window, when Alys asked him who was coming up the lane: That's Da. Da's the one who's here.
Thomas did not show that one to anyone. Not even Victoria. He had a feeling, writing it, that it was the truest thing anyone had ever said about him, and that it was true for one of his children and not for another, and that this was a thing a man could carry for the rest of his life without ever finding a place to set it down.