by Jane Feather
Jack raised his eyes heavenward. “It’s probably Stanton to see if you need help getting downstairs.”
Simon grimaced. “Open it then, but don’t let anyone else in.”
Ariel stepped swiftly into the chamber as Jack opened the door, not giving him time to deny her entrance. She had a basket over her arm. “You seemed to be in pain when you dismounted, my lord. I can ease your leg, if you would have me do so.”
“I have no need of anything.” Simon glowered as he tried to pull a rug up over his exposed leg. “Leave me, please.”
Ariel set her basket down on the floor beside the chaise. She had changed out of her riding habit and now wore a gown of pale blue silk opened over a white lace underskirt, over which she had wrapped a white holland apron. Her hair was drawn up into a knot on top of her head with a fringe of curls clustering on her brow and around her ears.
Even in his pain and irritated dismay, Simon could appreciate the daintiness and elegance of her attire. She had clearly taken to heart the morning’s discussion over her scruffy riding habit.
“I have some skill in these matters,” she said with a briskness designed to hide her own hesitation in offering the intimate attention necessary to give him ease.
“My needs go far beyond a housewife’s stillroom skills, girl,” he said with a sardonic laugh. “Your husband, my dear, is a sad cripple, not to be eased with simples.”
“I understand,” she replied, reaching to twitch aside the rug. “And my skills go much further than the stillroom.”
He pushed her hand away roughly as she took hold of the covering. “I said, leave me be.”
Ariel sucked in her lower lip, regarding him in frowning silence for a minute. She held her hands loosely clasped and Simon was momentarily distracted by the bracelet encircling one slender wrist. He’d seen it somewhere before, he’d swear to it.
“Are you embarrassed by your wound?”
His harsh laugh grated again. “How should I be? A man in his prime reduced to a helpless cripple with a wasted leg! Some kind of a bridegroom I make!” He knew his bitterness was fueled by pain, but as always, this was the one thing he couldn’t control.
“I think you should leave, ma’am.” Jack spoke gently, taking her arm. “Simon is a bad patient and always has been.” He tried to soften the rejection with a conspiratorial chuckle. “I swear he’s more ill-tempered than a wounded bear.”
Ariel resisted the pressure to move her back to the door. “It’s a wife’s duty to tend to her husband.”
“When you take up your place under my roof, madam, then shall you play a wife’s part,” Simon declared with another raw excuse for a laugh. “For the moment, I bid you leave me to my friends. They know well what to do for me.”
Ariel silently picked up her basket again and returned to her own room. Of all the stubborn, prideful men! He was in obvious agony, she knew precisely how to soothe his hurts, and he wouldn’t take her help because he was afraid she’d be disgusted by the sight of his wound.
Or was it because he couldn’t bear to accept her help? She was a Ravenspeare, and she must not be a witness to his mortifying weakness.
He wouldn’t give her brothers the satisfaction of seeing that their taunts needled him, and he had foiled the nastiest of their schemes so far. She knew that he wasn’t sure yet what part she had played in last evening’s attempt to humiliate him. It was only natural that he should keep her and her offers of help at arm’s length.
“If your wife has skill with medicines, man, you could do worse than let her minister to you,” Jack scolded, returning to Simon’s side. “I know little of how to ease you, and I’m damn sure all this pushing and prodding you insist on doing isn’t particularly helpful. It just causes you more pain, as I can see.”
“Oh, cease your railing.” Simon sat up, swinging his legs over the edge of the chaise with a grimace of pain. “Help me get dressed. I’ll not have it said that the bridegroom is too weak to attend his own wedding feasts.”
“Sometimes I think you have no more sense than a child.” Jack gave him his arm, supporting the man as he stood up.
Simon gritted his teeth as he put his bad leg to the floor. “Give me my cane.”
Jack handed it to him and watched with long-suffering resignation as Simon tottered around the chamber, trying to avoid putting weight on his lame leg.
“All right, I think I can pull this off without looking too pathetic,” Simon muttered. “Help me with my stockings and britches, if you please.” He sat down on the edge of the bed. Beads of sweat stood out on his forehead, and his skin had a gray cast.
Jack drew the woolen stockings over Simon’s legs. He was so used to the serpentine scar, a scarlet cicatrix against the pale, wasted flesh, that he barely noticed it anymore. He tried to be gentle but he knew how much pain he was causing his friend as he manipulated the stocking over the twisted knee.
“God’s grace, man, but you’ve missed your calling as a nursemaid.” Simon offered a twisted grin as Jack efficiently drew on his britches, fastening the buttons at his waist. “You’ll be washing behind my ears next.”
“Oh, do stop your complaining, Simon! You’re damn lucky to have any friends, such a grouse you are.” Jack handed him his coat, his smile doing nothing to hide his concern. “Are you sure you can manage to sit through the evening?”
“Of course.” Simon clasped his friend’s arm briefly. “Take no notice of my grouches, Jack.”
“I don’t,” the other said. “If I did, you’d see neither hide nor hair of me . . . of any one of us.” He put his shoulder beneath Simon’s hand. “You can lean on me until you get to the stairs. No one will remark it.”
But Ariel, the dogs sitting at her heels, was waiting outside her chamber when Simon’s door opened and the two men emerged. “We should go down together, my lord,” she said with a cool smile. “Since we’re presenting a united front to the world.” She stepped up beside him, saying to Jack, “I will give my husband my arm. No one will consider it in the least strange.”
Jack looked doubtful, but Ariel pushed aside his hand and took Simon’s arm beneath the elbow. “Shall we go, sir?”
Simon was immediately aware of the strength not only in her grip but in the slim frame beside him. It was more that she seemed to know how to use her strength to best purpose than a question of brute power, he thought, intrigued despite his reluctance to accept her help.
“I believe Simon is too heavy for you to support, ma’am,” Jack demurred.
“It seems not,” Simon said with a slight quirk of his lips. “Ariel is not the airborne sprite her appearance and her name might lead one to believe.”
“I for one have never encouraged such a whimsical notion,” Ariel retorted. “But then I happen to be a very down-to-earth kind of person. I don’t fret about circumstances that can’t be helped, and I know when it’s in everyone’s best interests to swallow my pride and accept what help is offered me.”
“Oh, that’s telling you, Simon,” Jack chortled.
“Well, I’ve no time for false pride,” Ariel declared as they reached the head of the stairs. “If you give Lord Chauncey your stick, take hold of the banister rail, and lean on me on your other side, you can descend these stairs as nimbly as a mountain goat.”
“Such confidence.” Simon found that he was smiling despite his pain. Such recrimination from this young thing was absurd, and yet there was something about her that inspired confidence.
He eased himself onto the bench at the top table, returning the greetings of his table companions.
Ariel sat beside him and clicked her tongue at the hounds, who immediately lay at her feet.
“I won’t have those damned dogs under the table,” Ranulf declared. “The dining hall is no place for them.”
“Yours are not banished, brother,” Ariel returned sweetly, indicating the pack of spaniels roaming among the tables.
“They are not the size of small horses,” Ranulf said.
“But mine are sitting quietly. Yours are in the way of the servants, and they’re begging.” Her voice was now sharp. “Mine are perfectly well behaved.”
“I will not have them at my table.” Ranulf snapped his fingers at a servant. “Take Lady Ariel’s dogs and shut them up in the stables.”
Ariel pushed back her chair, her face aflame. “You will do no such thing. My dogs stay with me.”
“Then perhaps, sister, you would prefer to take your meat in the stable with them.” Ranulf half rose from his chair.
“This is an unseemly brawl.” Simon’s voice cut like acid through the seething tension.
Simon couldn’t believe that this quarrel was taking place between brother and sister in the middle of a banquet with some two hundred observers. He looked around and saw that only his own friends seemed to be shocked. The other diners appeared merely curious to see who would win the argument.
“Take the hounds to your chamber,” he instructed Ariel softly.
She turned on him, her eyes blazing with fury. He said in the same low voice, “You only demean yourself by responding. Why would you play your brother’s game?”
Ariel remembered his cold displeasure that afternoon when she’d made mock of Oliver and answered her brother’s coarseness with some of her own. She glanced at Ranulf, red faced, blear-eyed, utterly menacing at the head of the table.
She slid out from the bench, signaled the hounds to follow her, and, straight backed, head high, she left the hall.
Ranulf reached for the wine bottle and refilled his glass. He drained the contents in one gulp. “She’s an insolent creature, your wife, Hawkesmoor. I wish you joy of her . . . always assuming you prove strong enough to ensure her exclusive devotion.” His offensive laugh was echoed around the table.
Simon ignored him as he’d ignored so many other taunts, merely turned with a comment to Lord Stanton, and continued with his dinner.
Ariel returned in a few minutes, sat down again, and took up her goblet. She looked with distaste at the food on her plate. She’d been ravenous an hour ago, but now all appetite had vanished.
“You are not eating?”
“I’m not hungry.” She gave her husband a quick sideways glance.
Simon reached for the wine flagon and filled her glass. He said quietly, “Sometimes it’s better to let things be, my dear girl.”
“Why would you let an injustice stand?” Ariel demanded, glad to get the issue into the open.
“There are some things that aren’t worthy of response. By responding to them, you only demean yourself.” He looked steadily at her and she felt her color mounting.
“You’re saying I shouldn’t have answered Ralph and Oliver this afternoon?”
“Yes, that is exactly what I’m saying.”
Ariel dropped her eyes to her plate, unable to meet his steady gaze. Could he be right? She’d always prided herself on meeting her brothers on their own terms. But was she stooping to their level? It was a viewpoint that had never crossed her mind before. And she didn’t like its implications one bit.
“Let me debone one of these excellent brook trout for you,” he said in a completely different tone, suiting action to words. “Are they locally caught?”
Ariel didn’t answer immediately. She seemed less able than he to switch moods. Her eyes fixed upon his large fingers, as deft at his task as if he were sewing a fine seam. The comparison made her smile and her tension eased a little. Such large knuckles, such plain square nails, such callused fingers juxtaposed with an embroidery needle was too absurd an image.
Oliver’s hands were white, long-fingered, and soft. But they were not always either deft or gentle. Somehow, Ariel couldn’t imagine Simon’s swordsman’s hands ever making a movement that wasn’t carefully ordered. They would never be accidentally rough, and if he used them to hurt, there would always be good and sufficient reason.
Again that little shudder rippled cold across her skin. It was the shuddering thrill of mingled apprehension and excitement. Her body responding to the imagined feel of those hands moving over her.
“Are you cold?” He slid the filleted trout onto her plate.
“No.” She shook her head vigorously, her cheeks now pink as if she were overheated. “The trout are caught in the Great Ouse about five miles away.” She took her fork to the fish, forgetting she wasn’t hungry in her anxiety to do something to cover her confusion.
“That’s an intriguing bracelet you wear.” Simon’s fingers lightly brushed over the delicate, pearl-encrusted gold strands.
Ariel laid down her fork and held up her wrist so that the candlelight caught the gold, the translucent glow of pearl, and the silver sparkle of the rose with its blood red center. “A present from Ranulf.”
“Aye, sister.” Ranulf boomed down the table, his voice slightly slurred. “A present from your brother. Take heed you appreciate it.”
Ariel’s lips thinned. “I am ever appreciative of your gifts, Ranulf. They have a great rarity value.” She felt her husband stiffen beside her, and deliberately he returned his attention to his plate. “I suppose you’re going to say I shouldn’t have responded,” she whispered. “But you don’t understand the situation.”
“Don’t I?” He turned toward her again, his eyes scanning her face. “If there is anything I should understand, please enlighten me.”
Ariel felt the telltale color mounting yet again. “You should understand that my brothers are not contented with this match, sir.”
He nodded. “Aye, that I had understood. It was somewhat forced upon Ranulf.”
“By the queen, as I understand it.”
“Her Majesty certainly had her say,” he replied, deliberately noncommittal.
“But it was not forced also upon you?”
He shook his head, and his crooked smile enlivened his somber countenance. “No, Ariel. It was not forced upon me. In truth, it was my idea.”
“But why?” Unthinking, she laid her hand on his arm. The bracelet gleamed against the dark brown velvet.
“I had a mind to make peace between our two families.” He shook his head, his smile becoming sardonic. “A piece of naïveté worthy of a village idiot.”
Ariel’s hand dropped from his sleeve. She picked up her fork again and poked at the fish on her plate. “I do not see how there can ever be peace when so much blood and treachery lies between Hawkesmoors and Ravenspeares.”
Simon took up his goblet, turning it slowly between his hands, watching the swirling ruby currents against the candlelight. “And love also. Your mother and my father were lovers. They died for that love.”
“It was a dishonorable love. Your father seduced—”
“Enough.” He broke sharply into her fervent speech. “This doesn’t lie between us, Ariel. If there was fault in either one, it went to the grave with them.” He drank deeply of his wine and addressed a question to one of his friends across the table.
Ariel drank her own wine. She broke a piece of bread between her fingers and rolled the soft dough into little pellets while the conversation rose and fell around her. If she didn’t believe that her mother had been a helpless woman, seduced, raped, dishonored by a scoundrel, then she must believe that her mother went with wholehearted joy into the arms of the Hawkesmoor. It was not possible for her brothers to believe that, any more than it had been possible for their father. He had killed the Hawkesmoor for dishonoring his wife, and Margaret’s death had been a dreadful accident. Or so he had always said.
But was it true? Or had a man and a woman put aside the hatred between their families and surrendered to a forbidden passion?
She had never thought of it that way before. She had received the family version as if it were holy writ. Unthinking, she flicked a bread pellet between finger and thumb. It landed in the middle of her husband’s platter of venison.
Startled, he looked down at this suddenly arrived foreign body before turning inquiringly to his wife.
“My apologies, sir.
I can’t think how it happened.” He looked so astounded that a gurgle of mischievous laughter lurked in her voice. She reached over to his plate with her fork and fished out the bread pellet.
“Playing with one’s food is behavior better suited to the nursery,” her husband said with a severity belied by the amusement in his own eyes. There was something immensely appealing about Ariel’s air of mischief. He had noticed it once or twice before, noticed how it banished the customary gravity that made her seem older than her years and softened the sharp, watchful awareness in her eyes.
“It sort of slipped from between my fingers,” she explained with mock solemnity. “Rather like a stone in a catapult.”
He laughed. “And are you skilled with a catapult?”
Ariel appeared to give the question some consideration. “I prefer to hunt with a hawk or a bow and arrow,” she said. “And I dislike fowling pieces.”
“But you seemed skilled enough this afternoon.”
She shrugged. “I have a good eye, whatever weapon I use.”
Simon leaned back in his chair, easing his leg slightly. This wife of his was quite out of the ordinary. “You have managed your brother’s household for some time, I would imagine.”
“Since I was fifteen.” She laughed, but without humor. “Before my father’s death, when I was eleven, his leman held the reins, but without much attention.”
“I see. Your father’s mistress lived here, then?”
“Oh, quite openly, for close on five years. It didn’t make the name of Ravenspeare any more popular in the county.” She had returned to playing with the bread pellets, her movements restless and nervous. “She and I didn’t take to each other, so I kept out of the way.”
She had fallen silent as if she had said all there was to say, but Simon could see the picture clear enough. A young motherless girl growing up in a depraved and unloving home. No wonder she was at times so abrupt and withdrawn in her manner.
“Did you have any learning, Ariel?”
“Oh, I can read Latin and Greek as well as English, write a fair hand in all three languages,” she said with another shrug. “I am not wonderfully adept at figures, but I am learned enough to ensure there’s no cheating in the household accounts.”
