Stranger At The Wedding Read Online Free PDF Page B

proper incense for the rite, your grace?” She leaned around Esmin to address the Bishop, who was sitting rigidly between Lady Earthwygg and her daughter. “And then afterward one has to put up with being married in the strict form…”
    “The strict—or true—form of marriage is not a matter for disparagement,” the Bishop said in the golden-voiced baritone that every week had the congregation of St. Cyr Cathedral sighing and weeping like some delicately played wind instrument to the rhythm of his sermons. “Its form—and its symbolic materials—were all specifically laid down in ancient times and recorded in the Texts—”
    “Aye, and damned wealthy those old-timers must have been,” Lord Earthwygg jested in his thin, drawling voice. He raised a quizzing glass to one heavily painted eye. “Just watching poor Peldyrin here buying the incense, and the jewels, and the golden vessels, and the proper music… the horses drawing the bride have to be white mares and twenty ells of saffron silk to make the bridal tent… Makes me think I'll invest in a good broomstick when time comes for my Esmin to wed.”
    “Oh, what a japester you are, my lord,” his lady laughed, with a glare that could have fleshed a deerhide.
    “Well, I can easily understand how people started marrying by signature as a place holder to promise the Church that a real ceremonial would take place as soon as everyone could afford it,” Kyra remarked. “Which, of course, then nobody ever did.”
    “Kyra!” her mother said, shocked.
    “And once the women found out how much more convenient it was not to be legally their husband's chattel—”
    “A woman shall enter into a man's house and become as his daughter,” the Bishop quoted sententiously. He patted the corners of his mouth with his napkin with great care not to upset either his makeup or the black velvet beauty patch glued just beside his lips—a silly place for a patch, Kyra thought, if one was going to dinner. “He shall be a father unto her, and she shall come into his home with bowed head and contrite heart …”
    He leaned forward as he said it, to see around Esmin to Kyra, so Kyra was aware of Lady Earthwygg reaching behind his gray velvet episcopal back to hand something to her daughter.
    “I think that's… that's very touching,” Tellie Wishrom said hesitantly. “I mean, to be taken care of as a daughter…”
    The Bishop beamed paternally.
    “Well, that's all very well if your father keeps his accounts straight and doesn't drink,” Kyra remarked, ladling applesauce onto a fragment of ham.
    “Accounts!” Lord Mayor Spenson raised his wrinkled visage from his plate for the first time during the meal. The same dog, Kyra thought, must have tied his neck cloth as well—beside him, his son sat stolidly consuming baby peas and fricasseed goose, radiating consciousness of Esmin Earthwygg like heat from a stove.
    “Just taking the time for this wedding is putting our accounts out of balance!” the old man went on, jabbing with his oyster fork in Kyra's direction. “Our ships should have set sail two days ago when the first of the easterlies began to blow—and a week early they are—and old man Nyven's fleet is already on the sea. Ours would be, too, but for this wedding, for there isn't a trader in the fleet up to Spens for getting his cargoes past the islands and away! No, nor for avoiding pirates in the Jingu Straits, either!”
    His hand trembled with a slight, continuous quiver of palsy, but his eyes were pinpoints of blued steel. It wasn't difficult to see how this man had built the old banking house's modest family fortune into a staggering trade empire on will and stubbornness and bulldog strength.
    “Pirates!” Esmin gasped, clutching her hands—and whatever her mother had passed her—to her bosom. “It sounds thrilling!”
    “When a boy's young, I suppose it is,” he allowed dourly. “But a man can't keep at it forever, and time comes when he must