Chapter 9: The Announcement

On the day itself Merko did not go to the ground at all, which felt like a holiday and a coronation at once. They had both sets of parents to a private brunch first, before the world was let in — his mother and father come up from the coast in their good clothes, stiff with the honour of the house and trying not to show how the silver unnerved them; Vinda’s people easy and expansive in the way of those who have never in their lives been unnerved by silver. And it went, Merko thought, beautifully. When the moment came and Vinda told them, there was the right gasp, the right tears from the mothers, the right gripping of hands — and then Vinda’s father, who could have claimed the first word by every right of blood and money, instead turned graciously to Merko’s father and let the fisherman speak first; and Merko’s father, overcome, said in his plain coast way that he’d always known the boy would do something, but that he’d never dreamed how much, and that the realm was lucky in him and so was the lady; and Vinda’s parents nodded along and said how impressed they were, how very impressed, with their hero son-in-law, and meant it, or meant it enough, which on a morning like this was the same thing.

Then the women went up — both mothers and Vinda, heads already together over the hundred things a coming child apparently required, and the girl taken up behind them to write it all down, because Vinda liked a list and the girl had a good hand and a better memory. And the men stayed below with the good brandy and the talk turned, as it does among men, to money.

Vinda’s father was shrewd and warm and had clearly been making enquiries. “I hear,” he said, “you’ve got yourself into Tarrin’s circle. The club off the Brand.” He nodded slowly, approving. “That’s well done, that. That’s better done than you maybe know. The braid will come and go, Merko, but the room a man’s let into — that’s the thing that lasts. Men who’ll remember you when it counts. You hold on to that.”

Merko’s own father, who had no idea what any of it meant but could see his son was being praised, glowed. And Merko, warm with brandy and blood and the morning, allowed himself to think aloud about a house — a proper house, something with a courtyard, in a better quarter. “Not yet,” he said. “But it’s coming. That’ll be my gift to Vinda. When the next one’s on the way — a house big enough for all of them. She’s earned a courtyard.” And the fathers drank to it, to the courtyard and the next one and the one after, to the whole bright crowded future laid out in front of them like a table set for a feast that would certainly come.

The evening was another thing entirely.

By dark the house was full to its walls — packed, all the downstairs of it, because there was not a person of any consequence in the quarter who had not contrived to be asked, the Harrolds and the Vessants and the Marshall’s people and half of Tarrin’s club and the wives, the wives above all, in their best, because everyone had known for weeks what tonight was for. That was the comedy of it, the lovely open secret: a newly married couple throws a great party at four months exactly and there is precisely one thing it can mean, and Vinda had besides been telling every woman who’d hold still that her husband was a marvel and a wonder and insatiable with it — so that when the moment came and she made the announcement, the room performed an astonishment so broad, so delighted, so entirely insincere, that Merko could have laughed aloud at the beauty of the machine. They knew. They had always known. And they gasped and pressed their hearts and cried out their joy as though the heavens had opened, because that was the dance, and they all knew the steps, and the knowing was the pleasure.