Stranger At The Wedding (12 page)

Rain in the night, the sound of chimes,

Thinking of you…

An empty pillow, the empty hope

That your bed is empty, too…

Her mind went back to the poems she'd found in Alix's dresser, slipped beneath the handkerchiefs and the stockings of pink and lilac silk.

… But the sun break sweeps the buttercups

And the last of my winter's despair

Melts to song in the light of your smile,

and the sunlight on your hair.

She shook her head, quickened her pace a little, and pushed open the heavy carriage gate.

The aspect of the square had changed considerably since her expedition that morning. Servants—or the clerks of the merchants who had their countinghouses nearby, which amounted to nearly the same thing—hurried here and there on errands. A nursemaid hustled her overdressed charges on a rapid constitutional around the encircling flagway, her starched white cap wings vibrating and her veil flapping with every step she took. Kyra tried to guess whose she might be, but the children were young, and after six years she had no way to guess. Another nurse, her pink dress announcing the sex of her absent charge, stood gossiping with the day watchman in charge of the square, while a passing cabman pulled briefly up beside a woman selling sausages to buy himself lunch on the move. The blue of the cabman's long coat, the red of the watchman's, the bright dresses of the pair of women taking a stroll, showed up like flowers against the heavy gray of the buildings; the sausage woman was singing about steam and grease and sugar, and somewhere someone was again playing a hurdy-gurdy, the sound of it muted by distance and air into something less like the caterwauling of a dying beast and more like music. Some movement caught the corner of Kyra's eye as she started to cross the square, and she stopped, looking quickly around, remembering the two men in the cab that morning.

But there was no one near her.

Frowning, she hurried on.

It was slightly less than two miles to the great central market of the city, a distance Kyra had been used to walking two or three times daily, even as a child. A rapid and businesslike walker at need, she soon came in sight of Algeron Brackett making his way along the streets of narrow-fronted brown-brick houses that constituted the Springwell district. Small cafes and fashionable rooming houses created bright spots amid erratic turnings and tiny courtyards of crumbling flats, with laundry flapping overhead and squads of shrieking children playing in the gutters. Eastward, past the Imperial Guards' barracks, the aspect of the town seemed to improve, an occasional house front gaudy with paint or bright with window-box daffodils, until they crossed through Prince Dittony Circle under the bronze prince's benevolent agate eyes. Kyra picked her way on Algeron's heels amid the usual tangle of cabs, sedan chairs, private carriages, scarf sellers' barrows, and the inevitable religious procession, and so through the intensely fashionable colonnade on the other side of the square, half a block of silk shops and merchants in expensive liqueurs, and thence, like diving into a murky swamp, into the densely packed, winding, and odoriferous lanes of the market district beyond.

Algeron was easy to follow. Though he did not dawdle, he stopped frequently to admire the dark-purple hyacinths an old man was selling from a wheelbarrow, to see the way the sunlight turned the gilded windows of the Woolmarket Hall to a wall of flame, to watch a thin, tired-looking man and a young woman in a scholar's robe leave sesame candy at the feet of a leaden saint in a street-corner shrine. He seemed oblivious to the smell of putrefying vegetable parings under his feet and the prostitutes who whistled invitingly from the gloom of every doorway. Even on his errand, Kyra realized, he was captivated by the strange, bewildering beauty of the city—to the extent that, as he crossed the Guildhall Square, he was nearly run over by a costermonger's barrow while staring dreamily at a little girl feeding doves.

Kyra's mouth twisted in a wry smile. Hardly the man, she thought, to do murder in a fit of thwarted passion—his poems had contained nothing but doglike adoration. She wondered if she was wasting her time following him this way. But the whisper of stronger emotions had clung to the paper, deep and biting as triple-strong khala liquor, and she lengthened her stride as he stood wiping from his breeches' knees the mud the barrow had thrown up on him and called out his name.

“Miss Kyra!” He nearly jumped out of his shoes; clearly he had been deep in his own meditations. But immediately he smiled and swept off his cap to her. The expression in his gray eyes seemed open, clean, and kind. “You shouldn't have come all the way down here. I was coming to bespeak the eggs. You could have told me what you wanted.”

From the tail of her eye Kyra had again the brief, nagging sensation that there was something behind her that she ought to see. But when she turned her head, only the gay confusion of the Guildhall Square met her eyes, rainbow movement in which it would have been impossible to distinguish a single element as threatening even if she had known what she was looking for. Still…

“What I wanted,” Kyra said, tucking her hand into the crook of his arm, “was to speak to you.”

His eyes widened nervously, and he flinched a little, as if to pull away, then caught himself when he realized how rude that would be. “Uh… Oh?”

“Yes.” She turned their steps across the square. Though originally intended as an ornament to offset by its spaciousness the intricate statuary that covered the Guildhall in a fashion regrettably reminiscent of her sister's wedding cake, the square had become over the years a choked and clamorous marketplace of dealers in used clothing and vendors of secondhand household goods. “I came across one of the poems you wrote about Alix. It's very good.”

She said it to see what color he would turn—a very becoming carnation, as it happened. Much prettier than Spenson's blotchy vermilion.

But he only said, “You didn't show it… Your father hasn't seen it, has he?”

“Well, he may have taken to searching her dresser, but I'm quite sure if he had, we'd all have heard about it by this time. How is it that, with a talent for poetry such as you obviously have, you're still whipping meringues and grating orange rinds for Imper Joblin?”

“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.