Chapter 8 #2
Once the first new knight had smiled and waved to his own content and stepped off to the side to get his new order medal pinned to his sash, the queen took a little steadying breath, her fingers brushing the hilt of the sword again, and gestured to Ambrose.
“Approach, Mr. Ambrose Aster,” the herald boomed, looking very pleased with himself despite an exhausted glance from the queen herself. “To receive the honor of knighthood!”
Vix swallowed.
She felt oddly nervous about it as her intended stepped forward.
Ambrose himself had no expression to speak of on his face, the handsome lines of his features kept in neutral respect as he met the queen’s eye once before kneeling down on his left knee and bowing his head.
His hair, Vix noted, looked neat for once, swept into carefully combed order.
She didn’t care for it.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the ruffled frame of Caroline Sedgewick spin toward her husband and grasp his arm in breathless anticipation.
The annoyance she felt flare in her body was keen enough in that moment that she briefly regretted inviting them.
She tilted herself slightly to the side, trying to keep her focus only on Ambrose, at least for the next few seconds.
The queen drew the sword back up from its cushion and swept it right over Ambrose’s bent head.
Vix amended her earlier curiosity. She hoped it was not sharp.
She tapped him gently on either shoulder with it, looking utterly bored with the entire affair.
“Arise,” she said, at what was likely a perfectly natural volume, though it sounded damn near a whisper after that herald had deafened them all, “Sir Ambrose Aster.”
He winced, just a slight little thing, before straightening his shoulders and coming to his feet.
It was enough to melt every tensed-up, anxious shard of ice in her lungs all at once, each of them plopping into the warm puddles of amusement at how much he very clearly hated being called Sir Ambrose, even by the Queen of England.
It made her lift her own hands up and join in the applause, if only to goad him.
This time she was certain he actually had found her in the crowd, and this time she was certain he was not smiling about it, even if she was.
“Sir Ambrose,” she mouthed to him from across the room, delighting in the way the corners of his mouth sagged before he shook his head and trudged off to the corner of the platform to get his stupid medal.
She kept watching him all throughout the third and final knighting, smirking at him as he narrowed his eyes in graduating, increasing degrees the longer it went on.
She sipped her champagne, an odd little thrill fluttering in her stomach at the exchange, even though it was both perfectly petty and utterly ridiculous.
She felt a little lightheaded about it.
When the whole thing had completed and the queen threw the sword back on the pillow with the relieved finality of a woman who had just been unshackled after a decade in prison, it felt like the entire room sagged in relief.
The footmen immediately appeared at the corners with trays of cheese and fruit and refreshed glasses of champagne, and the queen beat such a hasty exit that Vix briefly wondered if there was a trapdoor somewhere that shot her directly from the back rooms to her private salon in Windsor.
The other two new knights turned and began an orderly procession down the tiny wooden stairs on the edge of the platform, but not Ambrose.
He turned and immediately hopped right off the side of the thing, cutting a direct line through the gasping onlookers toward Vix, his eyes blazing with annoyed mischief.
“You,” he said, coming right up to her toes with a flare of his nostrils, pausing only to sweep his gaze down the line of her dress with a minuscule raise of his brows.
He cleared his throat sharply and snapped his eyes back to hers, as though remembering he was meant to be irritated.
“You are enjoying this entirely too much.”
“Oh, I am having a marvelous time,” she confirmed, tilting her head at him innocently as she took another sip of her champagne. “Look at you, pinned and sparkling. My gallant Sir Ambrose.”
“Intolerable,” he replied with a curl of his lip. “Where’s the liquor?”
She tittered into the rim of her glass, watching him over the top of it. “I wonder what would have happened if you had simply refused to attend,” she said. “Do you think Her Majesty would have chased you down the streets of St. James, sword aloft?”
“Doubtless,” he replied, dry as a bone. He sighed as though it pained him when she laughed again.
Zeller appeared with a glass for Ambrose, depositing it directly into his suffering fingers and vanishing back into the crowd before he could even be thanked, with Vix spinning around after him in bafflement.
“He’s after the cheese,” Ambrose said to her hair. “And to argue with a footman about how to pronounce Munster.”
“He is a treasure,” she snapped, turning back to him with a raise of her brows. “You ought to be grateful.”
He frowned. “People are always saying that.”
“We were supposed to wait over there,” came a hushed, urgent male voice behind Vix’s back, making her pause.
“Yes, but he jumped right off the platform. It will be fine, come along, Jonathan,” came the response, all too familiar, even in adulthood.
Vix stilled, raising her eyes to Ambrose’s face to see his own attention drawn to the same conversation, a wary and marked lack of recognition reflected in his features. She smiled.
“Ah, Sir Ambrose!” came Caroline’s trembling soprano. “How very thrilling this has been. We wanted to come thank you personally for inviting us.”
“Oh, ah,” Ambrose said, sending an urgent request for help with just his eyes to Vix, which she declined by simply standing there, watching him with a lazy smile until he turned those panicked eyes of his back onto the approaching interlopers. “Of course. Naturally.”
“My father couldn’t attend because he is still in Canterbury, of course,” she continued, her voice close enough to make gooseflesh erupt on Vix’s neck.
“Oh! Miss Sedgewick,” Ambrose said, relief washing over his face.
Vix’s smile widened.
She could hear the disappointment behind her. “Redwynne, actually,” Caroline corrected. “You remember my husband? He is curate to your father’s chaplain? Set to replace him next year, in fact, when the dear man retires.”
“Erm,” said Ambrose, blinking. “Of course?”
Jonathan Redwynne coughed delicately.
“I apologize if I seem scattered,” Ambrose said, grimacing.
“My fiancée sent out the invitations and should be the one you are thanking. My dear,” he said, with a harsh and pointed glance down at Vix, whose back was still to their visiting conversants, “let me introduce you to Miss Sedg—Mrs. Redwynne.”
Vix took a little breath, turning slowly to reveal her face to Caroline, keeping a placid smile firmly in place as she watched the full, glorious theater of surprise, disbelief, doubt, shock, outrage, and embarrassment flicker in rapid tandem across the other woman’s pale features.
“Oh,” said Vix softly, leaning back against Ambrose’s chest. “We are acquainted. Aren’t we, Caroline?”
Ambrose stiffened in surprise, his hand going automatically to her elbow with an intimate little grip, like she was always using him as a support beam.
She blinked, trying not to register that he smelled faintly of cardamom or at how the warmth of his torso felt against the exposed skin at the top of her shoulders. There would be time for those revelations later.
“Miss Beck?!” Caroline said shrilly, almost choking as she took a startled step backward. “Victoria! How! I … how lovely! To see you?”
“And Mr. Redwynne,” Vix said softly, raising her eyes to the frozen, pale face of the husband, who, it seemed, also remembered her. “Why, I haven’t seen you since that Christmas I spent in Canterbury as a girl. And you married our Caroline. How sweet!”
“Miss Beck,” he repeated. “Good evening.”
Vix turned her smile up briefly at Ambrose and then back at Caroline.
“I am so proud of my husband-to-be. We delayed our wedding by a few weeks so that his knighting could take precedence. We must express our gratitude for you making the effort to attend to represent his parents’ interests tonight.
We wanted someone in service of Canterbury present, of course, to remind the crown of his breeding. ”
Caroline looked like she’d swallowed a tooth.
“I … how long … when did you …?” Caroline stammered, looking from Vix to Ambrose and back again.
“Oh, darling, I’m afraid we’re needed elsewhere,” Vix said, batting her lashes. “There are peers to speak to, you understand. Enjoy the hors d'oeuvres.”
Before they could reply, she spun on her heel and took Ambrose by the hand, pulling him through the crowd.
She walked briskly, her curls bouncing, aiming for the nearest gathering of people in oversized jewels, and weaved Ambrose through them to the rear, where they could vanish into the crowd with plausible inclusion into the conversation.
She stopped a moment later, oddly out of breath, and turned to set her now-warm champagne flute on a passing tray, blinking away the suddenly bleary world around her.
“What,” said Ambrose, using their clasped hands to tug her around to face him, “was that?”
She kept blinking, resisting the urge to reach up and rub the blur from her eyes, instead focusing on his face and the bemused, suspicious little half smile that was forming on it to try to regain her focus.
“What do you mean?” she said, still blinking. “An innocent girlhood reunion.”
He laughed. He properly laughed, a deep, full sound that startled her a little. He pushed his thumb into the palm of her gloved hand, rubbing it in a lazy circle.
“You just assassinated a woman in front of a hundred and fifty witnesses, Vix,” he said, stepping closer to her, looming down almost nose-to-nose. “Don’t try to flounce out of that glorious fact with your nonsense.”
“I do not flounce,” she replied, refusing to step backward or be crowded. “Ever.”
He grinned then, a full, genuine grin to match that laugh he’d just released. “I want to know what that talking pink bow did to you to make you destroy her so savagely,” he whispered, still not backing away. “Will you tell me?”
“Why should I?” she asked, trying to breathe, heat starting to fan up over her throat and along her jaw.
He slid his thumb up over her wrist, against her pulse. “Because I’m your accomplice,” he suggested. “Willing or no.”
“Are you implying that you are unwilling, Sir Ambrose?” she asked, her own voice now a whisper too, thin and breathy.
He shook his head slowly, that grin still wide and in place.
Finally, he released her, stepping back with such a sudden gust of cool reprieve that she almost shivered with the sudden chill of it, the sudden mourning of his presence.
He saw it. He saw it happen and he lifted his chin a notch in silent but clear gloating.
“No,” he said at last, examining her once more from the tip of her head to the toes of her slippers. “I am many things tonight, but unwilling is not one of them.”
She gave a pointed glance to the Order of the Rose insignia glinting on his sash and lifted an eyebrow, making him chuckle.
“All right,” he said with a shrug. “Maybe a little unwilling. More champagne?”
“If you insist,” she answered with an airy little shrug, watching him turn to retrieve it with the oddest flicker of feeling in her chest, like a tiny thing inside her that had been askew when the night began had finally been nudged back to rights.