by Jane Feather
"I dunno I can go that low, sir," the man whined. "I've got ten nippers an' the wife's mortal bad. Three shillin' an' we'll call it a deal." He held out a filth-encrusted claw to shake on the bargain.
Simon glanced around. Ariel was pushing her way toward them. "Here." He slapped a crown into the man's filthy palm and turned away from him.
"They didn't have venison, but they had goose and bacon. They smelled so wonderful, I couldn't resist." Ariel proffered a steaming pie even as she bit into the flaky crust of her own. "And there's a gingerbread stall," she mumbled through a mouthful. "But I didn't have enough money. We can go back, though. They had little marchpane figures. Oh, and there's a snake charmer. Truly… He has a real snake and it curls out of the basket when he plays the flute."
Simon ate his pie, listening to her excited babble, smiling to himself. While her pleasure delighted him, it also saddened him a little. It showed how much her childhood had lacked the simple joys of ordinary growing.
"Come and see the snake charmer." Dusting flakes of pastry from her hands, she took his arm and led him into the fray, still chattering. Everything fascinated her; it was as if she had lost several layers of defensive shell, Simon thought, allowing himself to be pulled hither and thither as sights caught her attention, or the enticing wares of a food stall set her juices running.
It was midafternoon when he finally managed to drag her away, back to the Bear Inn. "It'll be dusk before we get back, and we have to pick up that misbegotten nag, if he's still there."
"Oh, yes, I'd forgotten about him." Ariel was suddenly sober, almost as if she were replacing the layers of responsibility she had shed during the day. She shivered, cold in the late afternoon chill as her exuberance left her. It was time to go back. She had a lot to arrange in a very short time.
"You're cold." Simon took her hand. "We'll go into the inn and have a tankard of porter before facing the ride back."
Ariel let her hand lie in his, but he felt it as a passive gesture rather than one with any feeling to it. He cast a sidelong glance at her. The day's glow had faded from her cheeks, and the brightness of her eyes was now dulled. Her mouth was set.
"Do you not want to go back?" he asked on impulse, lightly brushing her taut mouth with a fingertip. "If you like, we could stay in town for the night. I'll send a message to Ravenspeare."
Her heart jumped. A night with just the two of them in an anonymous chamber of the town's best inn? But she could no longer lose herself in the ephemeral dream of pleasure. She had to get her horses out of Ravenspeare. Her horses and herself.
"No," she said. "I don't think that would be a good idea."
He shrugged. "I don't see why not. But it's up to you."
Ariel bit her lip. "All the wedding guests…" she murmured vaguely. "And I can't leave the household to manage alone. It wouldn't be fair."
"Of course not," he said, smoothly agreeable, not a hint of his puzzled frustration showing in voice or expression. "But before we go back, I have a wedding present for you."
"Oh. But… but when… how… when did you buy it?" She stared at him in astonishment, having completely forgotten their earlier conversation.
Simon took a deep draught of porter from the leather tankard at his elbow. "When you weren't looking." He drew the whalebone horse from his coat pocket and placed it carefully on the counter.
"Oh, how lovely!" Ariel exclaimed, as he had known she would. She picked it up and held it to the light slanting through the mullioned window. "How it glows… how it moves!" She turned a radiant face up to him. "It's the most beautiful present I could ever imagine having. Thank you." Leaning over, she kissed his cheek and it felt a more intimate caress than the most passionate kisses she had showered on him in the privacy of the bedchamber.
For a moment her eyes held his and he thought he read a question in the gray gaze, then the shutters came down again and she said politely, "It really is very lovely. It was very clever of you to find it." She stood up, shaking down the skirt of her riding habit. "We should go before it gets dark."
They said almost nothing throughout the cold ride back to Ravenspeare, both lost in their own thoughts. Ariel held the bone horse tightly in her gloved hand.
The queen's gift was grazing placidly where they'd left him. Reluctantly, Ariel mounted him and again he sighed and creaked in weary protest. "Never mind," she said, reaching down to pat his curved neck. "From now on you can live a life of luxury. Bran mash, green pastures, and no one will ever mount you again." The nag whinnied and almost picked up his hooves as if in perfect understanding of this promise.
When they reached the stableyard, Ariel said she wanted to make her evening rounds of her horses. Simon hesitated, wanting to suggest that he accompany her, but she had swung on her heel and strode off before he could open his mouth.
"What the hell is going on with you, girl?" Simon muttered. If something was troubling her, why would she not confide in him? He'd surely done nothing to give her cause for mistrust. Exasperation warred with unease as he limped away toward the castle, from where the sounds of merriment were already floating on the night air.
Edgar came out of the gloom to greet his mistress as she slipped into the warm, brazier-lit stable. "Good even, m'lady."
"Good evening, Edgar. Is everything all right? No unexpected visitors while I was gone? No sounds of trespass? No signs of anything untoward?"
"Nothin', m'lady." Edgar leaned against a stall, sucking the inevitable straw. "We patrolled every half hour last night, an' the dogs were in 'ere, on watch the 'ole time. But I 'aven't seen the 'ounds today."
"Oh, Lord, I forgot!" Ariel exclaimed. "They must still be shut up in my chamber. I'll let them out directly and they can roam loose again tonight. We must keep our guard up until I can arrange to ship all the horses out to Derek." She began to walk up the aisle, pausing at each stall, recognizing the individual shuffles and welcoming whickers of her stud. They were all so beautiful, glossy with health.
Where was the mare in foal? A wave of impotent fury rocked her, and unbidden tears of loss and rage pricked behind her eyes. How dared anyone take what was hers? The theft was more than a nuisance, more than a simple statement of power. It was a violation of her self. No one would ever, ever have that power over her again.
"It will be new moon the day after tomorrow," she said, her voice clipped. "We will move them that night. Have the men bring three barges to the dock in the morning and we'll ship them out before midnight. My brothers and their guests will be well gone in drink by then. We'll need at least six men to move the horses quickly and quietly. Can you arrange that?"
"Aye," Edgar agreed, phlegmatic as always.
Ariel frowned to herself. It should be safe enough, once the revelry in the hall had reached its peak. But she would have to slip away from Simon.
Her hand slid into her pocket and closed around the beautiful bone horse. Tears pricked behind her eyes and with an angry gesture she dashed them away with her free hand and went back outside into the cold.
Oliver Becket lurched through the arch into the stable-yard as Ariel appeared. His head felt as huge and swollen as a decaying pumpkin, about to burst and spew forth its rotting seeds. The noise and smells in the Great Hall had become intolerable, and he'd stumbled out into the air, hoping to calm his roiling stomach and soothe his pounding head. He was accustomed to getting drunk, but this was the worst he had ever felt. Common sense told him that wasn't the case. The mind had the devil's own ability to spread the gentle blanket of amnesia over the more unpleasant consequences of excess.
He tossed his wig to the ground, put his head under the pump, and worked the handle, sending a stream of icy water over his head and down his back, soaking his clothes; and his head, while it still ached, began to clear.
He let go the pump handle and straightened, throwing off the freezing water with a shake. He blinked water from his eyes, staring blearily at Ariel, who came across the yard toward him.
"You look as if
you've been for a swim." She greeted him unsmiling, her voice level. "Hardly wise in these temperatures. If you've the headache, I can give you a powder."
Her accurate diagnosis of his condition did little to improve it. Anger knotted his chest. An anger that swelled to a crimson rage as he looked at her. She returned his gaze steadily, and he knew that she no longer saw the man who for a twelvemonth had been her lover. Once she had looked at him with smiling eyes, tentatively expressing her desire. He had become accustomed to the idea that she was his for the taking, ready and willing whenever he thought to snap his fingers.
But now she looked at him and there was no hiding that she didn't like what she saw. Her disdain shone from her clear gray eyes, radiated from every still, straight line of her lissome frame.
He had a sudden vivid image of her at the table the previous evening. Crimson and gold, lusciously sensual, her eyes filled with the mischievous promising pleasure that used to be for him alone. But now it had a different object. He'd watched her turn the full power of that sensuality upon the Hawkesmoor, and only then had Oliver Becket understood what he'd taken for granted, mocked even, certainly underestimated when, with her brother's connivance, he had possessed the little Ravenspeare.
He remembered now, and it was gall and wormwood, the way she'd played with the Hawkesmoor last evening-that private, wicked little game they'd played together. He had seen the moment when pleasure had overwhelmed her, had recognized the sudden relaxation, the transfiguration of her face, the suddenly heavy eyelids, the glow of her skin. And the smug satisfaction of the Hawkesmoor had been a twisting knife in his gut.
For a minute he was speechless, impotent with rage. He stared at her, imagining her body joined with the Hawkesmoor's. His nostrils flared as if he could scent the odors of sex clinging to her.
Ariel unconsciously took a step backward, away from him. From the naked viciousness in his eyes, the taut malevolence in his set face. "Are you ill, Oliver?" She tried to sound normal, to keep the unease from her voice.
"Sickened by the sight of you," he said in a low rasp. "Are you enjoying the Hawkesmoor, Ariel? Does he know what to do to make you whimper… to make you…"
She listened for too long as he continued with a stream of soft vile obscenities that smirched her just by their sound. But somehow she couldn't move away, couldn't even turn her eyes aside from the dreadful hating glare of his bloodshot gaze.
Neither of them was aware of the silent spectator, of the moment when the earl of Hawkesmoor moved out of the shadows of the archway leading to the inner court. The intense tableau was shattered when his silver-knobbed cane smacked down across Oliver Becket's shoulders. Oliver reeled sideways with a yell that sounded more surprised than pained. He stumbled to one knee. A hand grabbed the back of his collar and hauled him upright.
"If there is one thing I cannot abide, Becket, it's a foul mouth in the presence of women." The earl's easy voice sounded as mellifluous as honey after the vileness of Oliver's tirade. Ariel shook her head as if to rid herself of the slimy tendrils of Oliver's malevolence.
"Ariel, would you leave us, please? Mr. Becket and I have some private business to attend to." The earl's hand twisted in Oliver's collar, and Oliver found himself hauled up onto his tiptoes. He realized then what Ariel had realized long since-that whatever weakness had resulted from the injury to the Hawkesmoor's thigh, it was more than compensated by the strength in his arms and upper body.
Ariel looked uncertain. Simon repeated, "Go."
His voice was quiet and courteous, but it didn't occur to Ariel that she had any choice in the matter. She obeyed immediately, almost stumbling into the stable block, trembling, her knees quivering like jellies, her skin feeling soiled and sticky. It wasn't so much the filthy words Oliver had spoken. She knew them all, heard them in the fields all the time. But it was the concentration of his spite that had crept beneath her skin. The dreadful realization that someone could loathe her, could wish to harm her with such single-minded intensity.
Greedily she inhaled the rich scents of manure and horseflesh and hay. The loamy, earthbound purity of her animals. She leaned against the open door and breathed deeply, watching the two men, mere outlines in the night gloom. She was too far away to hear what was said.
Simon's hand twisted again in Oliver's collar, and Becket's suffused eyes began to pop, his mouth falling open like that of a gaffed fish. "My patience has finally run out,"
Simon declared without heat or emphasis. "You are a tedious bore, Becket, and I am sick to death of your attentions to my wife. For as long as I remain on Ravenspeare land, you will make yourself scarce."
Almost indifferently he jerked his wrist upward and Oliver's toes left the ground. The corded veins stood out on the earl's wrist, the muscles of his arms bunched hard as they took Becket's weight.
"I have ten men, soldiers and friends, loyal to me to the last drop of blood. If I see you anywhere in my wife's vicinity again, they and I will ensure that you never possess a woman again. We have learned some tricks in our campaigning… tricks that work well on men who make sport of women. I assure you we will not hesitate to use them."
He held Oliver aloft for what to the suspended man seemed like an eternity at the doors of hell, then he dropped him, dusted his palms off against each other, turned his back on Becket, and limped slowly and deliberately to the stable block, where Ariel waited.
Oliver stood massaging his throat. He would have given anything for the courage to leap on the cripple's back, bring him down, and pound him into the cobbles. But he didn't dare. The Hawkesmoor had turned his back on him with all the contempt a cat would show a mouse, and here he stood as paralyzed by terror as any mouse toyed with by a cat.
Ariel was shivering, her arms wrapped around herself in a convulsive hug. She wanted to run from Simon even as he came up to her. She couldn't bear that he had heard Oliver's dreadful words, the filthy insults that marked her body and her soul with his vile possession… a possession that, God help her, she had once enjoyed.
Simon stopped a short way away from her. He regarded her in silence and she stared back at him, her eyes haunted. Again she shivered, knowing that she could not bear him to touch her. Could not bear the touch of any man when she was seared with such hideous self-disgust and contempt.
"Becket was your lover for a twelvemonth, you said." His voice was flat but she heard the flick of repulsion. She couldn't answer, merely turned away with a tiny gesture of distress.
"What in God's name did you see in such a sewer rat?" Simon hadn't intended to use this tone with her, but he couldn't help it. The corrosive memory of Becket's slimy jibes over Ariel's sleeping body the night of her fever rose anew, and his mouth filled with the sourness of bile.
Ariel flushed deepest crimson and then paled, whiter than milk. A blue tinge appeared around her gray lips, and her eyes were dead as ash, sunken in their sockets. And as always her response to attack was to attack back.
"I suppose, my lord, I felt for him what I felt for you," she said, her voice thin and bitter. "Desire, isn't that what you call it? Lust. Isn't that what it comes down to? If I satisfy my lust with you, is there any reason why I shouldn't have satisfied it with Oliver? It's a basic human need. Oliver was a poor choice, I admit it freely. But then my choices were somewhat limited. As indeed they have been all along."
She turned on her heel and walked swiftly away, far too swiftly for him to follow. She held her head high although tears of rage and misery stung her eyes. She would not be despised by anyone. And most certainly not by a damned Hawkesmoor. How could he not have understood the loneliness, the need for affection and attention that had made her such easy game for Oliver's advances?
But he didn't understand because he didn't care to. And it didn't matter anyway. It was over, this brief interlude of married bliss. And she would kick the dust of Ravenspeare and marriage from her heels with the greatest of pleasure.
Simon didn't attempt to follow her. He was stunned by her bi
tter words, reminded forcefully that she had grown in this hostile, depraved soil and had to have been damaged by it. Maybe he had been harsh, but there had been no need for her almost vicious response.
Did she really not feel anything for him? It would explain her withdrawal, her stiffness, but it wouldn't explain the warmth and easy affection, the humor. But then, those, o course, were the products of lust-a basic need to be satisfied on the only available object!
He swore under his breath, knowing he didn't believe she meant what she'd said. But it still angered him.
He limped back to the castle, preferring for the moment the revelry of the Great Hall to privacy with his bride.
Chapter Nineteen
Helene's carriage jolted in a cart track as it ascended Fore-hill in the town of Ely. The winter afternoon was drawing in and she was weary and now beginning to feel a little uncertain about this unscheduled bride visit.
She had left home in good time that morning and should have arrived at Ravenspeare comfortably by midafternoon, when she could have simply paid an afternoon visit to the bride, and if an invitation to stay the night had been forthcoming, then she could have accepted it without too great a sense of intrusion.
But ill luck had dogged the journey, and it was now far beyond a respectable hour for visiting. She would have to spend the night at a hostelry in Ely and send greetings to Ravenspeare by messenger.
A leader had thrown a shoe just outside Huntingdon, and a few miles farther on, just as they left St. Ives, the front wheel had rolled over an ice-filmed puddle that proved to be a crater in the road large enough to swallow a coach and four. The wheel axle had split, the coach had listed dangerously, and Helene had had to extricate herself by climbing through the window into the ditch beside the disabled vehicle.
At which point she had been on the verge of giving up this ill-fated expedition, when a young squire had come to her rescue, all polite solicitude and eagerness to help. Without listening to her vague expostulations, he had loaded Helene, her maid, and her portmanteau into his gig and driven her back to St. Ives, where he had procured a coach for her from the Jolly Bargeman. And Helene had somehow allowed matters to run their course, rather enjoying having decisions made for her, all the details taken care of by this personable and extremely attentive youth.
