The Stranger at the Wedding

by Barbara Hambly

  “A man has to live,” Algeron said after a moment. A lock of his hair, the bleached color of sun-dried onion tops, fell forward over one cheek as he bowed his head. A man really has no business with eyelashes like that, Kyra thought dispassionately, viewing his face in profile. “Father was a journeyman baker, and it was my right to enter the guild. Alix...” He paused on the name, and his face flushed again. “Alix did try to get me a post as personal secretary to Janson Milpott, the banker, one of your father’s friends. But, well...”

  He turned his eyes upon her pleadingly. “You see, I’m really no good at all with dates and figures and keeping things in order. After the third time I lost something—I think it was a letter from some merchant... And I really did know more or less where it was! Well...” His free hand, the one not occupied by his rush shopping basket and her arm upon his sleeve, gestured helplessly. As a cook’s should be, it was clean and surprisingly muscular from stirring batters and sauces for hours on end. He smelled of soap and gingerbread.

  “And the thing is,” he went on, “I am quite good at making comfits and candying fruit. The gingerbread houses on the cake are mine, and they’re better than anything Joblin could have made, in spite of what he says. But I won’t be eligible for seniority in the guild in Angelshand until next year. And poetry...”

  He paused, his eyes following a sudden flight of startled pigeons that wheeled in unison around the market’s bronze clock tower, their wings catching the afternoon sunlight in a single flash.

  “Poetry isn’t something one can do, really, unless one is born wealthy. I was well educated—Mother used to be a governess—but unless one has a patron...” He shook his head, his twilight-soft eyes sad. “I know Alix must marry that... that merchant, and I won’t speak ill of your father, Miss Kyra, but... Well.” He turned away, and they crossed to the great open arches of the huge stone market hall, echoing with voices like the maw of some pungent hell.

  “I couldn’t keep silent.” He paused within the archways’ blue shadow. “The poems came out of me like flowers pushing out of the ground, before I could stop myself. Please understand.”

  She tilted her head to one side. “Are you lovers?”

  He went every color of the rainbow but could not find tongue to answer.

  “No,” Kyra said after a moment. “No, I suppose if you were, you would have written a poem about it.”

  Like a man suffocating, he managed to say, “I would never have... have the presumption to touch the tips of her fingers with anything less than reverence.”

  Or to kill her, Kyra thought, were she to wed another man?

  Looking up into that handsome face, like alabaster stained with attar of roses, she felt a pang of unexpected pity for the beautiful young poet who had such a talent with comfits and icings and no way to raise sufficient funds to even begin to support a bride. Certainly not a bride whose father expected to strengthen his dynasty with merchant capital. Her face softened, and she tugged gently on his arm.

  “Well, unless Father takes to ransacking her room, he won’t learn of it,” she said in what she hoped was a comforting tone. “Let’s go look for some eggs, and we’ll say no more about it.”

  “I wish it would just... get on with it.”

  Alix folded her arms around herself, though the bed-chamber’s tiled stove warmed the big room pleasantly, and walked to the window with a restlessness that wasn’t like her. Though, Kyra reminded herself, watching from the doorway, she didn’t know exactly what was like Alix anymore. For all the ease with which they had resumed their friendship, her memories were of a twelve-year-old girl—trusting, bubbly, softhearted, mischievous but checking herself almost automatically to think whether her pranks and jokes would hurt anyone before she pulled them, affectionate with an unthinking warmth. She’d always been holding hands with someone, Kyra remembered; their father, Briory, Sam the coachman, one or another of her little girlfriends.

  Six years was a long time.

  “Was it so very awful?” Kyra asked. “Having everyone descend on you this afternoon and demand to be told all about it when all you wanted to do was get out of here?”

  Alix looked around with a quick, rueful smile and shook her head. It was difficult to tell whether she meant it completely, for even as a very small child Alix had tried hard to like everyone, or at least to convince them that she liked them whether she truly did nor not. It wasn’t hypocrisy so much as an anxiousness to make others happy. Kyra, elegant in her adult dresses, with her mouth full of barbed, literary double entendre, had seldom troubled to completely conceal her likes and dislikes of relatives or their father’s business associates. Alix, she recalled, had never appeared less than wholeheartedly glad to see even such conversational horrors as Uncle Murdwym, with his loudmouthed advice on all and any topics, or their stuck-up and dirty-minded Cousin Leppice.

  “Oh, it was really very good of Frittilaire and Cira to come over and see if I was all right,” Alix said. “I mean, it’s the sort of story—the mice in the church, I mean—that gets put around if there’s something else really wrong.”

  “Nonsense,” Kyra said briskly. “They came to gossip, and you know it.”

  The dimple beside Alix’s mouth flickered into existence, and her brown eyes lost their tiredness for an instant in a sparkle of mischief. “Well... I can’t pretend I wouldn’t do the same.”

  But the brightness faded as quickly as it had appeared, and the drawn expression of exhaustion returned as Alix looked away once again.

  “I suppose it’s just stage fright,” she went on after a moment with a self-deprecation that to anyone but her sister would have sounded completely genuine. “I mean, we’re getting ready for this colossal ceremony, with processions and jewels and white mares to draw the carriage and special music and the petals of this particular type of flower have to strew a carpet of this particular color up to the altar, and memorizing the words and the steps of the dances afterward, and worrying I’ll forget or step forward with the wrong foot or trip over my train, and everyone we know going to be there... And having that thing—” She gestured toward the vivid bridal gown upon its stand. “—standing there watching me as I go to bed every night, as if it’s saying, ‘Don’t you dare gain any weight!’ And then have everything just stall.”

  Her hand fidgeted with the fringe of her shawl for a moment, then was still. She used to pick at her cuticles when she was unhappy, Kyra remembered. Their mother had drilled the habit out of her by threatening to make her wear purple sticking plaster on her fingers to dancing classes, but Kyra was interested to see that the angry pink abrasions had returned to the corners of her sister’s nails.

  She considered for a moment whether Spenson would risk murder to avert a scandal, but even on the shortest of acquaintances with him, the idea was absurd. He had a temper, certainly, and a touchy pride, but the match itself was the choice of a businessman, not a lover. There were plenty of equally wealthy young ladies in the town for him to choose. His father might kill or order killed—he had the ruthlessness that brooked no refusal—but all he had to do to prevent the match was to speak.

  Outside the wide windows daylight was dimming. Alix had already kindled the lamps on her dressing table to illuminate her work on the ivory-colored satin sleeve that lay amid a disembodied profusion of green ribbon and lace on the corner of the bed. In the garden below Kyra could just glimpse the stable hand who doubled as gardener—whatever his name was— finishing up weeding the lush beds of her mother’s early-blooming roses. Shadows clustered thickly around the little gate, and Kyra wondered, with a hot flicker of anger behind her breastbone, whether that was being watched, too.

  Coming away from the market with Algeron, she had felt that there was something she was missing, some element in the streets around them she wasn’t seeing. She was nearly back to Baynorth Square when she realized what it had to be.

  Someone was using a spell, or a talisman, of Look-over-There on her.

  And when sh
e knew that and concentrated on seeing through illusion, she easily glimpsed the sloppy-looking lounger in a brown coat whom—now that she thought of it—-she had seen in the square earlier that afternoon, when she’d left to follow the cook’s handsome assistant to market.

  She had stayed close to Algeron the rest of the way back.

  “Alix,” she said now, gently, as her sister turned away to gaze, like her, over the steeply mansarded roofs and clustering chimney pots toward the ash-colored eastern sky. “I have to know about Algeron.”

  Alix flinched just a little, the silken fringe of the shawl picking up the vibration like a ripple of water, then for a moment she was still. Her hand went up to her hidden face, quickly touched the feathery curls at her temples, a manufactured excuse, for her eyes were still perilously bright as she looked back.

  “He’s such a dear,” she said with a tinny falseness to her voice and her smile. “He’s been my mainstay through all this, like a brother to me.”

  “Are you in love with him?”

  The pink mouth trembled, then she made herself laugh. “How could anyone not fall madly in love with someone who has eyelashes like that? Aren’t you?”

  Kyra said nothing, just continued to look at her, and Alix’s gaze fell. She averted her head quickly, to stare out the window again, her fingers in the flower garden of the shawl tearing at themselves while the wedding gown watched like an ironic maiden aunt. Lamplight caught the glisten of a tear.

  After a time she drew a shaky breath. “I forgot,” she said. “You were always... impervious. Too sensible.” She met her sister’s eyes with a warm little smile, even in her wretchedness concerned to take the sting out of the unsaid words: You never loved. You were never loved. “Even back when I was eleven and desperately in love with Gwillim—you remember that gorgeous footman we had?—and I thought I was going to die of it, I remember thinking how nice it would be to be cool, like you. It’s nothing.” She shook her head. “I really should have outgrown things like this.”

  “If you truly don’t want to marry Master Spenson...” Kyra began, not certain how to proceed and not even sure where she wanted to proceed. The pain in her sister’s voice, the evident grief written so clearly on her face, were foreign territory to her. Gorgeous Algeron certainly was and, besides that, a thoroughly nice young man, but nothing to invoke the chasm of misery into which she found herself looking.

  “Of course I... I want to marry Master Spenson,” Alix made herself say. She drew her breath again and sounded more natural. “He’s a dear, sweet man, and I know that marrying him is going to be the best thing for me.”

  “Don’t be silly,” Kyra said acerbically. “Spenson is tactless, he has a temper like flashpaper, and he dresses like a fishmonger, and it’s quite obvious—”

  She bit down on the next words, realizing that telling her sister that her prospective husband quite obviously hadn’t two words to say to her—the way Alix babbled, scarcely a surprise—was no kindness. Alix was crying now, tears running down her cheeks, and Kyra felt, in addition to a growing apprehension, a flash of annoyance.

  Watching those tears, that utter wretchedness, she found herself wondering suddenly if the death she foresaw would come to her sister, in her despair, by Alix’s own hand.

  For LOVE? she thought in disgust. If Algeron had gotten her with child, maybe, though according to Algeron that wasn’t the case. If Algeron had been telling the truth...

  She wanted to cry, Don’t be a ninny, Alix! but decided that the words would only elicit more tears. Upon further thought she realized that they were probably unkind as well. She reached out awkwardly to touch her but had no experience of giving comfort; at the touch of Kyra’s hand upon her shoulder, Alix only shook her head, folding her arms again within her shawl and seeming to huddle closer against the window’s cold glass. Kyra was left standing helplessly, wondering how she could tactfully ask if her sister was pregnant and thinking uneasily of cases she had known...

  Girls of eighteen did commit suicide over lovers without being pregnant, though she herself couldn’t imagine why. One of the Nysetts’ maids had done so when Kyra was sixteen. Their parents, and Briory, had pretended to know nothing about it, but Merrivale had talked about it in the kitchen. And, she recalled, Merrivale had said that a cousin of hers had done so not many years before.

  “I’ll be all right,” Alix whispered finally. “It’s good of you to be concerned, Kyra, but... I’ll be all right. Now would you please... I’d just like a little time by myself.”

  Dear God, Kyra thought as she backed irresolutely from the room. How on earth could I prevent her...? She didn’t even phrase it to herself. The thought that Alix would cut her wrists over that fair-haired, poetic pastry fluffer was inconceivable, eyelashes or no eyelashes.

  But not so inconceivable that it didn’t lodge in her heart like a fragment of broken glass as she hastened down the stairs.

  Chapter VII

  ALIX WAS STILL IN HER room at dinnertime.

  “I thought I told you to stay away from your sister,” her father snapped as soon as Briory and her attendant footman had served the soup and borne the lobster-shaped crimson tureen from the room, leaving the family momentarily alone in the smaller of the two dining rooms, which overlooked the garden through intricate panes of beveled glass. “Until you appeared, she was perfectly happy, looking forward to marrying one of the finest men in Angelshand.”

  “Well, certainly one of the richest,” Kyra drawled, dabbing at the small dollop of soured cream in the midst of the green lake of peas and sherry. She had forgotten the maddening leisureliness of family meals, and the necessity of sitting still and waiting it through itched like insect venom in her veins.

  Small red blotches darkened the thin skin of Gordam Peldyrin’s cheekbones. “After all the trouble I’ve gone to in arranging this match... After all the maneuvering I’ve undertaken to have people forget what happened, I’m not going to have you stirring matters up now! Bad enough—”

  The doors to the little warming room opened again, and he fell quickly silent. Briory and the footman—Lerp or Paskus, Kyra could never tell which was which—reentered, bearing scarlet platters of ham, green goose, jellied quail, and carrots in dill sauce. While they circulated the dishes and then laid them on the sideboard, there was no sound in the dining room save the graceful airs of the musicians, softened and altered to accommodate the smaller room and more modest setting.

  Kyra recognized the tune, though it had been shifted from a minor to a major key and had been changed in modality to render it different, innocuous, free of the yearning grief it had held the previous night.

  ...An empty pillow, the empty hope

  that your bed is empty, too...

  The light of the hanging lamps flashed in the harpsichord player’s spectacles, glimmered like threads of vibrant gold in the mandolin’s strings, and traced the lines of gilt flowers up the milk-white porcelain of the flute. Sensitized by Alix’s desperation, Kyra had watched the maids—and Neb Wishrom’s maids, who were more and more finding excuses to hang about the Peldyrin kitchen—as they dealt with these young men: tussles in the hayloft, last night’s midnight scamperings up and down the back stairs. No wonder her father was irked.

  Would this meal never end?

  “Bad enough I’m going to have to repurchase every garland and wreath and bushel of rose petals the Texts demand,” her father continued the moment the doors had shut behind Briory’s plump blue back. “And the food for the feast, and a hundred twenty pounds of ice for the ices, and you know what ice costs this time of year, and thank God it isn’t June! But it’s never going to hold until the day after tomorrow.”

  “Will the mice be gone the day after tomorrow, dearest?” Binnie Peldyrin inquired anxiously.

  Kyra brought up her napkin to disguise a smile. She’d scryed the church again after speaking to Alix and had seen her father and Spenson both there, uneasily shifting from foot to foot and keeping a sharp eye on t
he floor in their immediate vicinity while they argued in dumb show with the priest.

  “They can stay in St. Farinox until midsummer if it suits them,” her husband retorted, jabbing at the squab on his plate as if he were not only eating it but killing it also.

  “Oh, don’t say that, darling,” his wife pleaded. “Even though Alix will be worshiping down at Holy Slippers in Fennel Street, I simply couldn’t abide a church where I even suspected there might be mice, and poor Tellie Wishrom is positively terrified of them.”

  “I’ve spoken to Nissom Elfridge at St. Creel,” Master Peldyrin went on, cutting in over his wife’s chatter with the determination of long experience. “It cost me close to a hundred crowns, even with Bishop Woolmat’s word added to mine, but arrangements are made to hold the wedding there the morning after tomorrow. I’ll have the invitations sent out tonight.”

  “How lovely!” Binnie smiled radiantly.

  “It’s not in the best part of town, but Elfridge is of decent family, and Fyster Nyven worships there,” he said. “And it was the best that could be had on short notice, since neither Holy Slippers nor Holy Sun is available for any money, though I expect if I were related to a member of the Court, they’d agree quickly enough.”

  He glanced sharply across at his elder daughter, who was meticulously dissecting a morsel of quail on her plate as a means of stilling the questions still racing in her mind. All the meal yet to go, she thought, and then the wait while Merrivale supervised the cleanup—she’d never find out in time. Never track down what she needed to know.

  His voice was carefully controlled but steely with anger.

  “Briory tells me the Inquisition is watching the house.”

  “Ah,” Kyra said, not looking up from her task. “So that’s who the young man in the brown coat is working for.”

  “I won’t have it!”