by Jane Feather
"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 naivete 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.
<
br /> 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."
"And where did you learn this?" He sounded as surprised as he felt. Such a degree of education was most unusual for a woman, and particularly one who had grown up in such neglect.
"Our vicar has always taken an interest in me. Ever since he caught me as a tiny child in his apple tree with some Romany children." Her laugh now was musical as if the memory pleased her. "Reverend Collins believed that an idle mind made for mischief. I think he was afraid I would disappear with the gypsies. He may have been right too," she added with another laugh. "I dearly loved the freedom of their camp. They were so dirty and ragged, but it seemed to me they were forever laughing and dancing and singing. I was too young to see the misery that lay beneath such a life, of course."
Simon stretched his ankle and pain shot up his leg, so fierce that he drew a sharp breath. His face paled, and beads of sweat broke out on his brow. His hands on the tablecloth were clenched as he waited for the wave to break and recede.
Ariel sat quietly beside him, waiting with him for when he could breathe normally again. She noticed that all his friends were aware of the spasm, that they all watched him with anxious eyes.
When it seemed he had relaxed somewhat, she pushed back her chair and rose to her feet, swaying slightly as if she'd overdrunk. "Come, husband, I would to bed." She laid her hand on his shoulder and smiled down at him, her eyes narrowed, her lips slightly parted in invitation.
"You will excuse us, my brother?" She turned to look at Ranulf, glowering at the head of the table. "The bride and groom have business abovestairs." Raising her goblet, she drained the contents as if in toast to the company, her white throat arched.
Oliver Becket stood up and reached across his neighbor. Without Ariel's being aware of it, he pulled the pins from the knot of hair as she stood tipping the wine down her throat, her head bent back. The honeyed mass tumbled loose down her back. Oliver laughed as her head jerked upright and the empty goblet fell to the table.
"How amusing," Ariel said, shaking her hair over her shoulders. "And how considerate of you to speed me on my way to bed, Oliver."
Oliver's drink-glazed eyes burned as she laughed at him. Drunken cackles greeted her sally; only Oliver and the lords of Ravenspeare remained stone-faced.
Simon rose, reaching for his stick. The inebriated merriment grated on his ears, and the naked hostility in the eyes of his hosts was as menacing as a drawn sword. He understood that Ariel, aware of his pain, had chosen this way to extricate him from the table, but he didn't care for her suggestive jests.
Close lipped, he took her arm and managed to walk with her almost unaided to the stairs. With his hand on her arm, it appeared as if he were the one ushering her from the hall, instead of the other way around.
Chapter Nine
At the head of the stairs, out of sight of the crowd in the hall below, Simon released his hold on Ariel's arm and leaned against the wall, his eyes closed, his lips clenched. "Just give me a minute."
"As long as you wish," Ariel replied. "There's no one in sight."
"Are we to spend the night in your chamber or mine?" Simon inquired after a while. He opened his eyes and straightened up, leaning on his cane again. His smile was ironic.
"I prefer my own."
"Then lead on, wife of mine… no, I have no need of your arm now."
Ariel shrugged and walked slowly ahead of him to her turret chamber at the end of the passage. When she opened the door, the hounds leaped out at her, their tails sweeping like flails in a threshing room. Simon reeled under the welcoming onslaught and grabbed hold of the lintel.
"Your brother may have a point," he muttered, pushing the dogs away as they slobbered around his feet. "They are the size of ponies. Much more suited to the stables than a domestic drawing room."
"We don't have such an elegant apartment in Ravenspeare Castle," Ariel pointed out, slinging a cloak around her shoulders before shooing the dogs into the passage. "I'll take them with me now, and give you some peace."
He put a hand on her arm. "Where are you going?"
Ariel paused, her gray eyes narrowing slightly. "Am I to be accountable to you for all my movements, my lord?"
"For as long as we remain under your brother's roof," he replied. "I would like to be assured of your loyalty."
"You doubt my loyalty?" Her voice was tight.
"Do I have reason to trust it?" he asked quietly.
"We made a bargain. You insult me by implying that my word is not good."
"Yours is a Ravenspeare word."
Ariel flushed. "When have I given you cause to doubt me since we came to this agreement? Have I not gone out of my way to demonstrate to my brothers that we have an understanding?"
At that he smiled a little grimly. "That's another thing we should discuss. When yo
u return from the stables."
"How did you know that was where I was going?"
"Since it was the first thing you did in the morning, it wasn't hard to guess that it would be your last before retiring."
"Well, if you knew all along, why did you pick a quarrel?" she demanded.
"I wasn't so much picking a quarrel as making a point." He reached out a hand and lifted her chin on his palm. "I wished to make it clear that I have no intention of letting my guard down with you, Ariel, for as long as you keep yours up with me." He smiled and lightly pinched the pointed tip of her chin before releasing it. "You may go about your business, but make haste. If I weren't so damnably weak this evening, I'd come with you, but in the morning I hope you'll show me your stud."
Ariel turned away to hide a welter of confusion. Her chin felt warm where his hand had rested, and for some reason she wasn't annoyed, when she knew perfectly well that she should be. She called the dogs, aware that her voice was unnecessarily loud, and hurried away without a backward glance.
Simon leaned against the doorjamb as she almost raced away from him, her cloak billowing around her with the urgency of her long, swift stride. He'd noticed before that she made few concessions in her movements to the layers of petticoats and the hoop beneath her gown.
He looked down at his flattened palm, feeling the shape of her chin on his skin. Such a pointed little chin it was, with the most kissable cleft. In his mind's eye he saw her face, uptilted toward him. Her mouth, with that long, sensual upper lip. Her nose, small but well defined. And her magnificent eyes. Gray, almond shaped, wide set, beneath arched brows and a broad white forehead with a pronounced widow's peak. The Ravenspeares were gray eyed to a man, but Ariel's eyes were both softer and clearer, reminding him of a dawn sky after a rainy night. And they brimmed with the spirit that made the girl the intriguing, complex, private woman that she was.
His hand fell to his side. He limped across to his own chamber, wondering how long she thought they could conduct a marriage without consummating it. What game were they all playing?