Edmund went to the schoolhouse in the spring he turned seven, with a new slate, a satchel Victoria had cut down from an old one of her own, and a set of instructions from his father that he had been made to repeat back twice and had privately decided were unnecessary.
"You're a scholar like the others," Thomas had said. "Not anything else. If anyone treats you as anything else, that's their mistake, not your due."
"I know."
"Say it back."
Edmund had said it back, in a voice that made clear what he thought of being asked.
He walked down the lane with Joan, who was going to the fever house and had been told to see him to the door and no further. At the gate she gave him a look that he did not understand until much later, a look that said she had done this herself once, at a different door, and knew exactly how big a room could seem.
"Mind your letters," she said. "And don't tell anyone who your father is."
"Everyone knows who my father is."
"That's why you don't tell them," said Joan, and went.
Master Osbern taught the youngest scholars that year, in the long room on the north side with the good light. He was a careful, thin, slightly anxious man who had come from a cathedral school in the south and had never quite stopped being surprised that a place like this had a school at all. He saw Edmund come in. Edmund saw him see.
"Ah," said Master Osbern. "Here. At the front, I think. You'll see the board better."
There were nineteen or twenty children in the room. Edmund walked between them to the bench at the front, and felt them watch him go, and sat down where he had been put.
It went on like that all morning. Master Osbern set them letters to copy and came round to look, and when he came to Edmund's slate he stood over it a little longer than over the others, and said, "Very good. Very good indeed," in a voice that carried. Edmund looked at his letters. They were the same letters he had been making at the kitchen table all winter, while his mother sighed at the backward ones. Two of them were backward now. He waited for Master Osbern to notice. Master Osbern moved on.
He was asked to read aloud, first, before anyone else. He was asked to hand round the chalk. When a girl at the back spilt the water pot, Master Osbern looked at Edmund, oddly, as though Edmund might report it somewhere.
By the middle of the morning Edmund had begun, cautiously, to like it.
At the midday break the scholars went out into the yard, and a boy found him by the wall.
He was bigger than Edmund, nine or so, with the blue-stained fingers of the dyers' lane. Edmund did not know his name. He had two friends behind him who were mostly there to watch.
"You're his boy," the dyer's son said. "The one with the columns."
Edmund did not know what that meant. He said nothing, which he would learn later was sometimes the cleverest thing to do and sometimes only looked like it.
"My da says it was your da's columns that set the lord on us. That we lost the Whitcombe orders because your da and your mam had to be clever in a book." The boy did not seem angry. He seemed to be passing on news. "My da says we're poorer this year because of it."
"That's not true," Edmund said.
"It is. He said so at the meeting. Everyone heard."
Edmund did not know whether it was true. He found, standing by the wall with his satchel strap in his fist, that he had no way of knowing, and that he very badly wanted to. The two friends were watching his face. He made it do nothing.
"Master Osbern says my letters are very good," he said, which was not an answer to anything, and he knew it as he said it.
The dyer's son looked at him with something almost like pity.
"Course he does," he said, and went off to the other end of the yard.
There was an old man on the bench by the schoolhouse door, in the sun. There usually was, Edmund would discover. He was very old, with a bald brown head and a monk's shapeless robe that had been mended more often than it had been washed, and he had been watching the whole thing without seeming to.
Edmund knew who he was, in the way children know who the old people of a place are. He was Brother Hamo. He had been here before the school, and before the wire, and before almost anything. Edmund's mother spoke of him in a particular voice.
He went and stood in front of the bench. He held up the slate.
"Are these good?"
Hamo took the slate in both hands, which shook a little, and held it at arm's length, and looked at it for some time.
"No," he said.
Edmund stared at him.
"They are a seven-year-old's letters." Hamo handed the slate back. "For a seven-year-old, they are ordinary. That one and that one are backward. You know that already, because you looked at them twice when the master went past."
"Master Osbern said they were very good."
"Master Osbern believes your father pays his wage." Hamo said it mildly, as if it were a remark about the weather. "He does not, as it happens. The town does. But Master Osbern came here from a place where the founder's son was always very good, and he has not yet unlearned it, and I do not think he will."
Edmund turned this over. "Then why did he say it?"
"Because he wanted you to like him, and that is the quickest way." The old man folded his hands in his lap. "You will meet a great many people who tell you that you are good at things you have only just begun. Be careful of them. Not because they are wicked. Most of them are only frightened. But they are not looking at your letters. They are looking at your father."
Edmund stood in the sun with his slate. He did not like the old man very much at that moment.
"The boy from the dyers said Da's columns made us poor."
"Did he." Hamo considered it. "That is a harder one. Some of it may be true. Your father would tell you so himself, if you asked him, which I suspect you will not." He leaned back against the warm wall and shut his eyes. "Go on. The bell will go. Fix the backward ones before he sees them, and then see whether he notices that you did."
Edmund did fix them. Master Osbern did not notice. He said very good again.
At supper Victoria asked him how it had gone, and Edmund said it had gone well, and that Master Osbern said he was the best in the room at letters.
Victoria's eyes went, briefly, to Thomas, across the table. Thomas put down his spoon.
"Did he."
"He said it twice."
"And what did you think?"
Edmund thought about Brother Hamo on the bench, and the slate held out at arm's length, and the single flat no. He thought about the dyer's son, and the yard, and the word poorer.
"I think he's a good master," Edmund said.
He did not mention Hamo. He did not mention the dyer's son. He kept those, both of them, somewhere he did not look at very often, and it was Master Osbern's very good that he took to bed with him that night and turned over in the dark like a coin, and found, in the way of seven-year-olds, that it was warmer to hold than anything else he had been given that day.