Chapter 5: Domestic Paradise

Some weeks on, the evenings had found their shape. Merko came up his own street in the long gold light with the good tiredness of a day spent well — and was stopped, three doors down, by old Pell leaning on his gate looking up at the sky like a man who suspected it of something.

“Turning,” Pell said. “You feel it? Be rain by the week’s end, mark me.”

They agreed at length about the rain, which neither of them could do anything about and both enjoyed thoroughly. Then Pell’s face clouded with a smaller, realer worry: his girl was abed with a fever, three days now, and his wife was trying to get the house ready for her sister’s visit single-handed and not managing, and—

“Send to us,” Merko said, easy, expansive, a man with resources to spare. “My girl’s very good — quick, clean, trained at Madrigal, if you’ll believe it. Vinda can spare her a morning. Let your wife have the loan of her to get the rooms straight.” He said it the way you’d offer the loan of a ladder. Pell was delighted, and grateful, and said so, and Merko walked the last three doors warmed by his own good-neighbourliness, not having had occasion to wonder whether the girl had a morning to spare or what she might have meant to do with it.

Inside, the house was lamplit and smelled of something good, and Vinda was waiting for him in the front room already dressed — properly dressed, the deep blue, the good earrings, her hair done up in a way that someone had clearly spent real time on — and lit up with the particular brightness she had when there was somewhere important to be.

“You’re late, and I forgive you, and we have to leave the moment you’re decent. The girl’s laid out what you’re wearing — the dark coat, I’ve told her, you’re not to choose it yourself after last time, you went out looking like a man come to sell a horse.” She turned for him to admire her, and he did. “The Harrolds’. For the Harrolds’, Merko. Half the division will be there and all the wives that matter, and I am not arriving after the Cavasins, I am simply not.”

“You look—” He meant it, and couldn’t find past the first word, which pleased her more than a finished sentence would have.

“I know. It took the whole afternoon.” She said this with enormous satisfaction, as though the afternoon had been a campaign. “I was run quite off my feet supervising — you’ve no idea, managing a household is relentless, there’s not a moment — but the hair-woman came, and she’s a marvel, and — oh, you’ll love this.” She sat forward, the story already lighting her. “You remember I have her because Sera Cavasin swore by her. Well. Last week, the Ferrants’, and there is Sera across the room in the identical hair. The same twist, the same little business at the ear, the whole of it — the woman had gone from Sera’s house straight to ours that very morning and done the pair of us like a matched set of candlesticks and breathed not a word to either. And we couldn’t be cross, you see, because to be cross was to confess we’d each thought it was our clever idea — so we stood there being radiant at one another the entire evening, each plotting how to keep the woman to herself.” She laughed, delighted all over again. “I’m keeping her, of course. Anyone that good is worth being a candlestick over.” She dropped into the good chair then with the sigh of the justly rewarded. “And after all that, I had the most heavenly hour. Truly heavenly.”