The garden gate had a latch on the inside, an iron thumb-latch Ralf had forged the year the house was extended the second time, set high on the post on purpose so that small children could not get out into the lane. It had worked perfectly for Edmund. It had worked, with some difficulty, for Alys. On a grey morning that summer, Margery, who was three, discovered it.
She discovered it in the way she discovered most things, which was by standing in front of it without moving until other people began to find it unsettling.
Victoria saw her from the kitchen window and went on kneading.
Margery was the quiet one. Everybody said so, in the tone people use when they mean that a child is easy and have not yet considered whether that is the same thing. She had been a watchful baby and she was a watchful small girl, round-faced and self-possessed, with a habit of looking at a thing until she had finished looking at it and only then deciding what to do. Edmund talked. Alys bargained. Hugh, now walking after a fashion, sat down abruptly wherever he happened to be and laughed about it. Margery looked.
She looked at the latch from the path. Then she looked at it from closer, with her head tipped back. Then she reached up, on her toes, as high as her arm would go, and found that her fingers came to about the middle of the post and the latch was a good way above that.
She stood back and looked at it again.
Alys came out into the garden, saw what her sister was doing, and went straight over.
"I'll do it."
"Leave her," said Victoria from the doorway.
Alys turned round, indignant. "She can't reach."
"I know."
"So I'll do it for her."
"No," said Victoria. "You won't, and nor will anyone else. If she asks for help she can have it. If she doesn't, she can't."
Alys looked at her mother as if she had said something very cruel and quite stupid, which was a look Alys had recently perfected, and Victoria returned it with one of her own that she had perfected thirty years earlier, and Alys lost, and went and sat on the wall to watch with an air of protest.
Thomas came up from the works at mid-morning for something he had forgotten and found the whole family arranged around the garden gate in a silence that would have been comic if it had not been so serious. Alys on the wall. Victoria in the doorway with flour to the elbows. Hugh asleep in the grass. And Margery, alone in the middle of the path, holding a stick.
"What's happening?"
"She wants the latch," Victoria said.
Thomas looked at the gate. He looked at his daughter, who was trying to reach the latch with the stick, which was not long enough. He went to step forward.
"Don't," said Victoria.
"She's been —"
"An hour and a half. I know. Don't."
He stopped. He found it was much harder than he would have guessed to stand still and watch a three-year-old fail at something that would have taken him no effort at all. He found, too, that his hands wanted to be in his pockets, and that one of them had gone to the inside of his tunic where the dark glass was, and he took it out again.
"Why?" he said, low.
"Because every single person in this house does everything for her," Victoria said, also low. "She's the third. She's quiet. Edmund fetches things for her, and Alys talks for her, and you pick her up whenever she looks at something high. And she lets you. And I don't think she likes it. I think she lets you because she can't yet stop you." Victoria watched the small figure with the stick. "I want to see what she does when nobody comes."
Margery dropped the stick.
She stood for a while. Then she turned round, and walked back up the path, past her father without looking at him, past her mother, and in through the door.
"There," said Alys from the wall, with satisfaction. "She's given up. You should have let me."
Victoria said nothing.
Margery came back out of the house a little later, backwards, pulling Wat's bench.
It was the low child's bench by the door, the one the old smith had made for Edmund the spring before he died. It was too heavy for her. She did not seem to have noticed this. She dragged it down the step, which nearly had her over, and along the path in short, determined hauls, stopping every few feet to look at where it was and where it needed to go, and then hauling again. It took her an age. Nobody moved. Hugh woke up and watched with his thumb in his mouth.
She got it to the gate. She set it against the post. She climbed on it.
It rocked.
Wat's bench had always rocked. Wat had made it wrong, deliberately or nearly so, and it had one leg a little short of the others, and every adult in the house had long since learned to sit on it at a certain angle without thinking. Margery had never sat on it at all. She was the only one of the children who never had.
She got down.
She looked at the bench for a while. Then she knelt on the path and put her face very close to the ground and looked at the legs, one after another, the way Thomas had seen Wat look at a joint. She stood up and went to the flower bed and came back with a flat stone, and turned it over in her hands, and went back and got a smaller one. She lifted the short corner of the bench, which took both hands and all her weight, and pushed the stone under it with her foot. She let it down. She pushed on the seat, hard, with both hands.
It did not rock.
Thomas heard Victoria let out a breath.
Margery climbed up. On her toes on Wat's bench, with her arm at full stretch, her fingers found the iron thumb of the latch, and pressed it, and the bar lifted with a clank, and the gate swung outward onto the lane.
Alys, on the wall, said nothing at all.
Margery stood on the bench and looked out at the open gate and the lane beyond it. Then she reached out, took hold of the gate, pulled it shut again, and let the latch fall. She climbed down. She did not go out. She had not, it appeared, ever wanted to go out. She had only wanted the latch.
Maud was coming up the lane at that moment, on her way to the schoolhouse with a roll of drawings under her arm. She had stopped at the sound of the gate, and she had seen it open and seen it close again, and she came and leaned over the top of it and looked at the bench and the stone and the child.
"Did anyone help her?"
"No," said Victoria.
"Did she put that stone there herself?"
"Two stones. She tried a big one first and changed her mind."
Maud looked at Margery for a while. Margery looked back at her with the same unblinking attention she had given the latch, a level, measuring, not-unfriendly stare.
"I told you to send her to me when she could count," Maud said.
"She's three. She can count to about six on a good day."
"That isn't counting. That's reciting." Maud nodded at the bench. "Finding the short leg is counting. Choosing the smaller stone is counting. She's been counting all morning." She straightened up and tucked her drawings under her arm. "Send her to me in a year or two."
"She'll be five."
"I didn't say make her an engineer. I said send her." Maud glanced at Thomas, and then at Victoria, and something passed between the two women that Thomas was not part of. "And stop letting him lift her up to things. I can see it from here. He's itching to."
She went on up the lane.
Margery had gone over to Hugh and sat down beside him in the grass. She did not tell anyone what she had done. She did not seem to think it needed telling. It was Alys who climbed down off the wall and went over to the bench and looked at the stone under the short leg, frowning, as if she were adding something up and did not like the total.
That evening, when they moved the bench back to its place by the door, Victoria left the stone under it. It stayed there for years, and the bench never rocked again, and nobody ever sat on it at the old angle after that except Thomas, now and then, by mistake, out of habit.