Chapter 7: The Peak

Merko came home to a house that ran like a good watch, and had come to take the running of it for granted in the way a man takes for granted the road he walks every day without turning an ankle. The lamps were lit and trimmed. The fire was the right size. His slippers were where slippers should be, and the smell coming up the hall was the smell of a dinner that would be exactly on time and exactly right, and Vinda came to meet him already talking, which meant the day had gone well, because Vinda in a sulk made you come and find her.

“— and you will not believe, you simply will not believe what your purchase has been up to behind our backs.”

“Good evening to you too.”

“Good evening. Sit. Eat. Listen.” She had him by the sleeve and into his chair, and the girl was already there with the first dish, set down silent and square, gone again to the edge of the room where she stood with her hands folded and her eyes down, present the way a sideboard is present. Dinner was, as it was always now, without fault — the meat right, the wine right, the bread still warm, the whole of it arriving and clearing with a smoothness he no longer thought about any more than he thought about his own pulse. He ate. Vinda talked.

The Ferrant luncheon, it transpired, had been a triumph, and the triumph had been in some considerable part the girl’s. “I sang — you know I’d said I might — and it went down beautifully, the Ferrant woman’s been humming it since, I’m told. But that wasn’t the half of it.” Vinda leaned in, delighted with her own news. “I had her running the whole morning before — to the Ossuns, to the Hales, a word here and a word there so that everyone who mattered knew I’d be performing and knew to make something of it when I did. You cannot just sing, Merko, you have to be expected to sing, the whole room has to be leaning the right way before you open your mouth, and she managed every thread of it, quiet as you like, in and out of six houses before noon.” She buttered a piece of bread with great satisfaction. “And then — and this is the part — when the Ferrant girl sat down to play and there was that dreadful empty hole where the second instrument should have been, because the Loy boy never turned up, drunk no doubt — she played. My girl. Took up a flute and played the second part cold, no music in front of her, and made the Ferrant child sound twice as good as she is, and the room thought I’d planned it.”

Merko stopped with the wine halfway. He looked at the girl by the wall, surprised into actually seeing her for a moment. “She plays?”

“She plays.” Vinda was watching his face and enjoying what she found there enormously. “Flute, at least — I daresay there’s more she hasn’t owned to. I had it from one of the Ferrant aunts who’d known the family before. I didn’t tell you.” A small pleased cat’s smile. “I do like to keep one or two things back. It’s nice to be able to surprise one’s husband after all this time.”

He laughed, because it was the kind of thing that pleased him about her, the way she hoarded little advantages and produced them like a conjuror. He looked again at the girl — flute, of all things, the trader’s daughter, the dead life she’d had before this one furnishing his house with its leavings — and found he was, in a small way, impressed, the way you’re impressed to learn the cart-horse can do sums.