Thomas hung his tunic on the peg by the kitchen door every evening when he came in, and had done for fifteen years, and had never once thought about it.
On a warm evening in early summer he came in from the works, hung it up, washed, ate, sat in the garden with Hugh asleep on his chest and Margery solemnly feeding grass to nobody, and went to bed. In the morning he put the tunic on, and walked halfway down the lane, and his hand went to the pocket in the old way, the way it still did a few times a week, after all these years — and found nothing there.
He stopped in the middle of the lane.
He checked the other pocket. He checked the first one again, turning it inside out, so that a few crumbs and a bent nail fell into the dust. He stood there with the empty cloth in his fingers and felt something happen in his chest that he had not felt since the last night the glass had lit.
He went back up the lane at a pace that made Diccon, coming the other way, stop and stare.
He searched the peg, and the floor under the peg, and the bench, and the garden path. He went through the tunic a third time. He was aware, distantly, that he was not breathing properly, and that the fear he felt was out of all proportion to a dark, dead, cracked thing that had not done anything in years, and that knowing this made no difference whatever.
Then, from somewhere at the back of his mind, without being asked for, came the wet grass outside the chapel, a lifetime ago. Hamo in the mud. Blue light going up a man's arm, because he had put his hand on the glass when the glass did not want to be touched, and he had very nearly not got up.
Thomas went cold all the way through.
It was dark now. It had been dark for years. Nothing had happened to anyone since. He knew all of that. He stood in his own kitchen and told himself all of that, and his hands were shaking anyway, and he thought: one of the children has it. One of my children has had it in their hand all night.
"What have you lost?" Victoria was in the doorway, with Margery on her hip. She took one look at his face and set the child down.
He told her. He did not have to say what else he was afraid of. He watched her understand it, and watched her put it away, quickly, the way she put away things that were not useful yet.
"It's dark," she said. "It's been dark since before Edmund. It isn't anything now."
"I know."
"Then stop looking like that, because the children will see it." She was already moving. "Edmund's at school. Margery hasn't been out of my sight. Hugh can't reach the peg." She stopped. "Alys."
Alys was in the garden, under the apple tree, conducting some kind of business with a row of pebbles. She was five. She had her father's colouring and her mother's eyes and a small white seam on her chin from the winter she had followed her brother up a tower of stools. She looked up when they came out, and looked at her father's face, and her own face went very still.
"Did you take something from Da's coat?" Victoria asked.
Alys considered lying. Thomas saw her consider it. She was the only one of the children who ever visibly weighed it, as if it were a sum.
"The black stone," she said.
"Where is it?"
"I traded it."
"You did what?" Thomas heard his own voice. It was much too loud. It came out of him in a way he had never used to any of his children, and Alys flinched from it as though he had raised a hand.
There was a silence in the garden. Victoria did not look at him. She did not need to.
Thomas crouched down, slowly, so that he was at the child's height. His knees complained. He made himself breathe.
"I'm sorry," he said. "I shouldn't have shouted. I'm not angry. I was frightened. Tell me what happened."
Alys watched him for a while, deciding whether this was true. Then she told him, in an orderly way, as if giving evidence. She had seen the stone in his coat pocket when he hung it up, because the coat had swung and the stone had shown. It was black and shiny and it had a line in it like ice on a puddle. She had wanted it for doing the lights, the way Edmund did the lights with the candle, because it was shiny and would catch them better. She had done the lights with it in her bed until she fell asleep. In the morning she had taken it down to the mill to show Tib.
Tib was the miller's youngest. Tib had wanted it at once. Tib had offered a blue glass bead from a fair and two turns on the rope swing over the race, and Alys had taken it, because two turns on the swing was a very good price and the bead was blue.
"It was a fair trade," Alys said. "I asked for three turns and she said two and I said two and the bead."
Victoria made a small sound that might, in other circumstances, have been a laugh.
They walked down to the mill together, Thomas and the child. Victoria stayed with the little ones. She said it was because of the little ones. Thomas understood that it was also because she thought he should be the one to do this, and that he should do it without her in front of him.
Tib was on the swing. She was perhaps six, sunburnt and freckled and fierce, and when she saw who was coming up the bank she let the rope go and stood squarely in front of the mill door with her hands behind her back.
"It's mine," she said. "She traded it."
Thomas opened his mouth. Alys put her hand on his sleeve, and he closed it.
His daughter went forward alone and stood in front of the miller's girl and they looked at each other, two small women in the dust.
"I want it back," Alys said.
"You traded it."
"I know. I'll give you the bead back." Alys held out the blue bead. "And you can keep the turns. I had them already, so you can't have them back anyway. And I'll give you my turn on Edmund's stilts on Sunday."
Tib frowned. "That's not as good as a stone."
"It is. The stone doesn't do anything. It's just shiny. The stilts make you tall." Alys waited. Then, without any change in her voice, she said, "And it's my da's and he's frightened. Look at him."
Tib looked past her at Thomas.
Thomas did not know what his face was doing. Whatever it was, the miller's girl studied it for some time, the way children study adults who have forgotten to arrange themselves. Then she brought her hands round from behind her back. The dark glass was in one of them. She held it out to Alys, not to him, and took the bead, and said, "Sunday. Both stilts. Not just one," and went back to her swing.
Alys turned round and held the thing up to her father.
He took it. It was warm from the miller's girl's hand, and from his daughter's. It was nothing. It was a cracked black slab that had not lit in years. He put it into the pocket of his tunic and kept his hand over it, and the feeling in his chest went slowly, slowly away.
They walked back up the lane. Alys said nothing as far as the bend in the lane.
"Why were you frightened of a stone?" she said.
Thomas had known it was coming. He had been trying, since the mill, to think of an answer that was not a lie, and had not found one that a child of five could carry.
"It was given to me by someone I loved very much," he said. "A long time ago. Before you. Before your mother. I can't get another."
That was true. All of it was true, in a way, and none of it was the answer, and he felt the shape of what he was not saying sitting in the lane between them like a third person.
Alys walked a few more steps.
"You were more frightened than when I cut my chin," she said.
He did not answer. There was nothing to say that was true and that she could have.
She did not ask again. She took his hand, which she did not usually do, being a child who preferred to walk on her own, and held it the rest of the way up the hill. And Thomas understood, with a sinking that was also a kind of pride, that he had not satisfied her at all. She had simply taken the figure he had given her, found it did not add, and put it somewhere to come back to.
"She'll remember," Victoria said, that night.
I know.
"Not the stone. That you were frightened." "She'll keep it. She keeps everything."
"I can't explain it to her."
"No." Victoria handed it back to him. "You can't. Not now, and not ever." She watched him put it away. "Hang the coat on the inside peg from now on. And she's owed an apology about the shouting. A proper one. In daylight."
"I gave her one."
"You gave her one when you wanted something from her," said Victoria. "Give her one when you don't."