Chapter 18: The Dinner

The talk had been getting serious. Merko understood that without anyone saying so — the way these things tightened, the jokes thinning, the same four men drifting to the same corner and the room politely not noticing. He had been in that corner more often lately, and said careful things there, and seen them land. It was the most alive he had felt since the war.

So when the boss himself came and sat beside him — not summoned him, came to him, lowered into the next chair with a glass already in hand, easy, as though they were old friends — Merko felt it in his chest before he understood it. Valerian did not sit beside men to pass the time. His sitting beside you was the time.

“You’ve been good value,” Valerian said, to the room, not to Merko, looking out over the warm dark with the contentment of a man who owned more of it than anyone knew. “I like a man who says the hard thing in a soft voice. There’s few of them.” Then he turned and looked at Merko directly, and his eyes were pleasant and without any warmth at all, and the look went through Merko like a draught through a door he’d thought shut. “Come to dinner. My place, past the gardens. Tomorrow, the two of us — no club, no careful talk in corners like a pair of thieves. I’d like things straight between us before we go further. A man should know the men he’s bound to. Properly. In his own house, with the doors shut.”

Bound to. Something in Merko stood up and saluted it.

“I’d be honoured,” he said, and heard how fast it came, and could not have slowed it. There was no version of him that said anything else. It was not an invitation; it was the hand coming down on the shoulder, the thing all his careful work had been reaching toward without his admitting it. He would have walked there barefoot.

“Good.” Valerian drained his glass and rose — it had cost him two minutes and he had other men to be unhurried with — and set a hand on the back of Merko’s chair, light, the way you touch a thing you’ve nearly decided to buy. “Oh — bring your girl.”

It was tossed back over his shoulder, already half-turned away.

“My—”

“You’re forever on about her. The clever one, the bargain you got. I’ve a girl of my own; we’ll make an evening of it.” Something moved in his smile that Merko did not examine. “It’s that sort of house.” And he was gone, toward the next man, leaving Merko alone with a feeling he mistook for happiness.

He told her over the undressing, the way he told her most things — not because he wanted her opinion but because a man liked a voice in the room that wouldn’t argue back, and hers was a good quiet one for that. She had his coat off his shoulders and his boots half-attended before he’d got to the heart of it, and he found, telling it, that the telling made it bigger and better, the way good things grew in the saying.

“Valerian,” he said. “His own house. Past the gardens — you don’t get asked there. The two of us, he said. Things straight between us.” He let that sit, so she’d take its weight. “Bound to, he said. The men he’s bound to.”

“That’s a great thing, master.” She said it simply, and she meant it, he could hear that she meant it; she had a way of giving him a thing fully when she gave it, no edge under it. It was one of the reasons he kept her. “After all the work. They’ve seen you, then.”

“They’ve seen me.” He liked her saying it. He turned it over once more in the warm of her saying it. “Tomorrow night.”

“I’ll have your grey pressed by—”

“You’re coming.”

There was a small silence then. He didn’t mark it as anything; she was often quiet, and a man learns the furniture of a woman’s quiets and stops hearing them. He bent to his other boot.

“The house, master.” Her voice was level. “You were concerned about the house. You said so. It’s never empty at night — you said that was the worry, an empty house in this lane, with the sort that watch it.”

“It’ll keep a night.”

“You were the one concerned.” A small return, gentle, on his own ground. “I only thought—”

“It’ll keep, girl. One night.” He had not expected to be arguing the house, of all things, the very thing he’d had to whip her over; it irritated him obscurely that she’d raise it now, as though to make a fool of his concern by agreeing with it at the wrong time. “There’s a man on the corner I can pay.”

“The streets, then. After dark, out past the gardens — that’s a long way back, master, for a girl alone if—”

“You’ll not be alone, you’ll be with me, and we’ll have his people to send us home. You think Valerian’s guest walks back through the dark?” He almost laughed. She was being strange tonight. “What’s got into you?”

“Nothing’s got into me.” A beat. “I don’t know how to be in a house like that, master. I’ll shame you. I don’t know their ways — which fork, how to stand, when to speak and when not. A girl like me at a great man’s table.” She had folded his shirt and held it against herself, and she looked at him over it, plain. “You’ve worked so hard for them to think well of you. I’d not want to be the thing that’s wrong in the room.”

That one slowed him, because it touched a real fear, and for a moment he saw it her way — saw himself walking in with a house girl who didn’t know the forks, and the boss’s mild eye going over her, and over him. But the boss had asked for her. The boss knew what she was; he’d said it, the clever one, the bargain. So it was wanted, whatever it was, and a thing the boss wanted was not a thing Merko would be shamed by; the wanting made it right by definition.

“He asked for you,” Merko said. “So it’s done. They don’t ask the wrong thing, men like that. You’ll be told what to do and you’ll do it, and you do that well enough.” He found his voice had hardened and didn’t trouble to soften it.

“I’ve nothing to wear to it.”

“There’s nothing wrong with your street dress. You’ll be on my arm — chin up, that’s your dressing. They’ll see whose girl you are, and that’s worth more than any frock.” He felt expansive saying it; it was good of him to say. “You don’t walk into a great man’s house hanging your head. You go in proud, like you belong — because I do.”

She was quiet again, and he thought he’d done with it, and reached for the cloth to see to his face. And then she said, lower:

“I’m not pretty, master. Not for that kind of evening.” She said it without complaint, the way she said true things. “You know it — you near sent me back, that first day, before. His girl will be a fine thing, men like that keep fine things, and I’ll be the plain one in the corner. I’ll not show well beside her. It’s not the night for a girl like me.”

And that was true — he did know it; he remembered the broker’s room, his own near-shrug, the way she’d been nothing to look at with her clothes on and a different matter once they weren’t — and the truth of it almost moved him, because no man wants the plain girl beside the fine one, the comparison going the wrong way in front of the men he’s bound to. But Valerian had asked. Round and round it came to the same wall: Valerian had asked.

“That’s his lookout, not yours,” he said. “You’ll do.”

And then she did a thing she rarely did. She set the shirt down, and came a half-step, and spoke to him quite directly, quietly, not pleading — she was never a pleader — but as though laying a fact on the table between them that he might want to pick up.

“You’re the only one, master.” A small pause. “There’s never been anyone but you. Not before you, not since.” Another. “You’d not want your girl to be ... common.”

And it landed. He felt it land — felt, for the length of a breath, the thing she’d set down: that she was his, only his, the one thing wholly and singularly his in a way the boss’s fine girl, used and passed and professional, could never be; that there was a worth in that, in the only-his of her, and that an evening of that sort of house might spend it, might make her — the word she’d chosen, and she’d chosen it well — common. Something in him pulled toward it.

And then it was gone, because it had to be, because there was Valerian and the gardens and the doors shut and the men he was bound to, and a thing you could not do was be the guest who would not come, or come and hold his girl back like a miser at the one table in the kingdom he’d crawl to. So he did not pick up the thing she’d laid down. He looked at it, and felt it, and left it on the table, and could not have said, after, that there had been anything there at all.

“That house’ll not make you common,” he said. “We’ve decided, then. You’ll come, and you’ll do as you’re told, whatever it is, and you’ll be glad you were asked. There’s nothing more in it than that.” He turned back to the glass. “Now leave it. Press the grey.”

“Yes, master,” she said.

The estate sat behind a wall in a part of the city Merko had only ever passed, and the gate gave onto a garden — a garden, grown for nothing, land inside the walls given over to grass and trees and a still pond, which told Merko more about Valerian’s wealth in one glance than a year of the club had: that a man could own ground in this city and grow nothing on it, for the pleasure of the eye, was a thing past Merko’s arithmetic. He felt it work on him and could not help it working.

Valerian showed him through unhurried, the way a man shows a thing he has stopped seeing. The stables — and here Merko, who knew horses, stopped being able to pretend; there were four animals in them worth more than everything he had ever owned laid end to end, and Valerian named their lines the way you’d mention the weather. The house, when they came to it, was the same: not grand in the showy way, but deep, room past room, more rooms than a household could use, which was the point — rooms you did not need were the truest wealth there was. Slaves moved through it quietly and there were a great many of them, more than the place required, and that too was the point.

“And here,” Valerian said, opening a door onto warmth and steam, “is my one true indulgence.” It was a bath — but a bath like a small pool, sunk into the floor, tiled, and hot, hot water laid on and waiting, the steam rising off it into the lamplight. “Hot water, all of it you could want, any hour. Big enough for...” He let it hang, mild, and did not finish it. “A man does his best thinking in the water. And his best other things.” The smile was easy and went nowhere. “You’ll see.”

Merko felt a thing turn over low in him at the sight of it that he did not trouble to name — a warmth that was partly the room and partly the memory of his own girl in his own poor tub at home, the one pleasure of that house, scaled up here past dreaming. He noticed, then, that his girl had stopped at the door and was looking at the water — just looking, still, the way she went still over things — and it pleased him, the way it pleased him when a child of his own might have gaped at a fine thing.

“Isn’t that very nice?” he said to her, expansive. “You see the sort of house.”

She said nothing, which was proper, and he turned back to Valerian, who was watching the both of them with his pleasant cooling eyes, and had not missed the girl going still, and had filed it where he filed things.

“Come,” Valerian said. “A drink before we eat.”

He took them to the library — and that was another blow, though a quieter one: walls of books, more books than Merko had seen outside a temple, and he could not read above the plain need of his work and had never wanted to until this moment, when the wanting arrived all at once and uselessly. There were pictures on the walls between the shelves, dark old paintings in heavy frames, men and horses and women with the faces of people who had mattered so long ago their mattering was finished, and Valerian named none of them, because to name them would be to suppose his guest might not know, and the supposing would be unkind. He poured the wine himself, good wine, into glasses thinner than Merko had known glass could be made, and put one in Merko’s hand, and Merko held it carefully, as a man holds a thing he is afraid of breaking, and felt enormous and clumsy and exactly as out of place as he was meant to feel, and grateful, helplessly grateful, to be feeling it here.