“Me? I’d make an excellent whore,” Ambrose replied with a sniff. “Look at me.”
“All right,” said Roland, who then leered theatrically.
It made Ambrose laugh, a great deal of the tension in his shoulders seeming to ease. “That isn’t what I meant.”
“It isn’t what I meant either,” said Reed, chuckling and resuming his languid posture. “I meant that I thought you would understand not being at all like your parents. Not embodying their chosen path. It seems you do not, either, unless I am mistaken.”
Ambrose blinked. “You aren’t mistaken. Though it is not the same as vocation, simply being born to status.”
“Of course it is,” said Reed. “Ask your wife, if you don’t believe me.”
“My wife,” Ambrose repeated, a little weakly.
Reed blinked at him. “Vix is a good girl,” he said, suddenly sounding rather serious. “She always has been. Take care of her.”
“I will do my best,” he answered. “Though I think she is fairly determined to take care of herself.”
The other man nodded. “Until she learns otherwise.”
He then departed the altar, hopping up and slinking away without fanfare to go join Mr. Beck. Ambrose watched him go, looking from one to the next and then glancing at the vicar for good measure.
“Take care of her” had been good advice. But it had been a threat too.
Hadn’t it?
He didn’t really have time to consider what it felt like to be threatened before the music started up and he was forced to straighten his posture and smooth his face.
When had all these people gotten here? He swept his eyes over the pews, now spotted with spectators, with a kind of dazeddisbelief. He couldn’t even make out any of their faces, just that there were bodies in the rows and that they were here to witness this thing he’d signed himself into.
The vicar cleared his throat, finding his footing at the center of the aisle. He took up his battered copy of theBook of Common Prayerand gave Ambrose an encouraging little half smile, nodding to the rear of the church.
Then the doors opened.
Ambrose wasn’t sure how she’d orchestrated it, but the morning light streamed in with such glowing and perfectly aimed golden perfection that she was, momentarily, nothing but an obsidian silhouette against the sun.
She began to walk, her matching the time signature of the organ as it plucked her bridal march, and inch by slowly sashayed inch, she started to come into view, eclipsing the bright tunnel of sunlight as she drew ever closer to him in a dress that appeared to be constructed entirely of cloud fluff.
Stormclouds, he amended, as she drew close enough for him to see the color, a rich and jewel-toned purple that swayed around her as she moved.
She was carrying a bouquet of foxgloves. They were purple too, he saw, with a few white ones sprinkled in through the center.
It was easier to look at her hands. When he raised his eyes to meet hers, the wasps jumped to life again, this time clustered around the center of his chest, their stingers all pointed directly at his heart.
When she reached him, she looked up through those dark lashes and gave him the smallest, most careful little smile, then turnedand handed her flowers to Hannah, who was waiting by the pews. Once her hands were free, they were his to take. His to claim.
She didn’t wear gloves, he noted, her bare fingers sliding into his palms.
He wondered how many couples only held hands for the first time as they were saying their wedding vows.
He did not so much as have a chance to greet her before the thing began, the vicar’s voice going posh and solemn as he launched into the official tirade about sanctity and matrimony and sacrifice and giving and so on. Ambrose didn’t hear most of it. He just looked at her.
Her lips were purple too. How had she managed that? They glinted like they’d been dabbed with plum juice. They parted and began to curve as he realized he’d been caught staring, his eyes darting back to hers to find her watching him, silently, in the moments before it was time to begin reciting things to one another and to the church at large.
It was only then that he realized that he was being married not as Ambrose, but as Sir Ambrose. He heard thesirin three rapidfire successions, his outrage going first to the damned book and then to the vicar himself.
Perhaps only because the queen wasn’t there to shout at.
“Do you, Sir Ambrose …” the vicar said, oblivious to the insult as Ambrose gnashed his teeth through the entire ordeal, agreeing in gradually sharper snaps of affirmation.
