by Jane Feather
Ariel shook her head, standing her ground. “When the earl of Hawkesmoor comes to claim his bride, Ranulf, then and only then will she dress herself for sacrifice.”
“Why, you obstinate, disobedient—” The angry words died and he fell back, his hand still upraised, as the wolfhounds ranged in front of Ariel, facing him, teeth bared, hackles raised. “Call them off,” he demanded tightly.
“Not until you lower your hand, brother.”
His threatening hand dropped to his side. Ariel said, “Down,” in a soft voice, and the dogs sat, but they remained in front of her, staring fixedly at the earl.
“I command that you dress immediately for your wedding.” Ranulf spoke through compressed lips. “Hawkesmoor may well be intending to arrive at the chapel at the very stroke of noon. I will not have him find us unprepared. This family will give no sign of hesitation, of reluctance, for this wedding. The queen will receive reports that the Ravenspeares conducted themselves impeccably, and if there is to be any criticism, it will be directed at the Hawkesmoor.”
“Why do you think he hasn’t come yet?” Obliquely, Ariel deflected the subject. She stepped backward and hitched herself onto the broad windowsill of her chamber overlooking the inner courtyard. “He should have been here for the prenuptial feast last evening.”
“I don’t know,” Ranulf said as tightly as before. “He’s playing his own game. But he’ll not outplay us, Ariel. If he thinks to embarrass us, I’ll not have him thinking he succeeded. We will give him no indication that his late arrival has caused the least anxiety.”
“So you do expect him to come?” She flicked at a straw on her skirt, a remnant of her recent visit to the stable.
“Of course he’ll come!” Ranulf spat out the words, his charcoal gray eyes blazing in his angular face. “He’ll come because he started this. He arranged the queen’s command.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know, goddamn it! But whatever his plan, it won’t succeed. And he will not ever feel that he has humiliated us. You will be ready and waiting at the altar with a smile of welcome and the promise of obedience whatever time he comes.” His riding whip slashed across the surface of an inlaid table, and the dogs rose with a growl.
Ariel had rarely seen her brother at a disadvantage, but it was clear that Simon Hawkesmoor’s tardy arrival for his wedding was causing Ranulf a fair degree of consternation. She turned to look over her shoulder down into the court. It was deserted, the February day too cold and sharp for the wedding guests to venture outside. “Is there a watchman in the tower?”
“Aye.” Ranulf seemed for once uncertain. He didn’t know how to compel his sister’s obedience when the damn dogs prevented his getting close to her. Ariel had acquired them as puppies two years earlier. At first they had been little threat to his usual manner of exercising control, but in the last twelve months they had grown into these gigantic creatures who stood menacingly in his path whenever his temper rose against his sister. Something would have to be done about them, he thought grimly.
“When the watchman sees them coming—and he’ll see them from a good five miles away in this light across the fens—then I’ll dress.” Ariel turned back to her brother. “You cannot find fault with that, Ranulf.”
He glared angrily at the dogs, who fixed him with their great yellow eyes and didn’t move. He swung on his heel and strode from the room, slamming the door behind him.
Ariel chuckled slightly, stroking the dogs’ heads. “I wonder if you know how useful you are, boys.” She slipped off the window seat and went to the bed. She had spent Ranulf’s money with abandon. Travesty of a marriage or no, she had reasoned she might as well get as much out of it as she could. The wedding gown of cream silk edged with vanilla lace was only one of the garments she had acquired. She had bought enough materials to bring a fatuous smile to the faces of the Cambridge milliners and enough work to keep an army of seamstresses busy for a week.
But her most prized new garment was her riding habit. She went to the armoire and drew out the coat, waistcoat, and skirt of matching crimson velvet, thickly decorated in silver braid. She fingered the deep cuffs, the richly braided pockets.
On impulse, Ariel threw off the old riding habit she wore, tossing the green broadcloth garments to the floor. She dressed rapidly in the new costume, fumbling in her haste with the looped, braided buttons. She tied the stock of crisp white muslin at her neck, put on the new tricorn hat edged with silver lace, and examined herself in the cheval glass.
It was a most satisfactory image. She had never really given much thought to her appearance before. Life in the Fens was somewhat socially circumscribed, and besides, Ranulf kept a close hand on the purse strings. She didn’t need elegant garments for her midwifery in the hamlets, and when she wasn’t out and about on such duties, she was happiest in the stables, or riding or hawking, and her old green broadcloth habit had done perfectly well for that. But she felt a tingle of pleasure at her present elegance. During the month ahead, when the earl of Ravenspeare’s guests would be entertained with every kind of sport, she would have ample opportunity to show off her finery.
Unless, of course, the wedding festivities came to a very abrupt end early in the month. Ranulf had said nothing further to her about his plans for the bridegroom, but she wasn’t fool enough to think he’d thought better of them.
But there was nothing she could do for the present. She hurried to the door. Ranulf wouldn’t accept defeat for long, but if she wasn’t around to be bullied into obeying him, there wasn’t much he could do. She whistled to the dogs and they came bounding after her.
At the head of the stone staircase, Ariel paused. The Great Hall below was crowded with guests, some eating a late breakfast at the long tables set before the fires, others already drinking deep as servants circulated with wine and ale. Ravenspeare Castle was a massive edifice and, in the past, had more than once housed a royal progression and the multitude of courtiers, servants, and hangers-on that that entailed. Two hundred wedding guests had been accommodated easily enough, since no one objected to sleeping two and three to a bed in such circumstances, and the young bachelors, much to their amusement, were accommodated in the dormitories in the old barracks.
Ariel knew very few of these people. Only those of her brothers’ inner circle came in general as guests to Ravenspeare Castle. Those she knew well. Her intimacy with Oliver Becket made her presence acceptable at their gatherings, except on the nights when the men went after female prey and she was banned from the hall.
Reluctant to go down into the hall and run the gauntlet of the guests, she turned aside, the dogs at her heels, and took a narrow stair set into the massive stone walls. It was a service staircase that emerged in the kitchens, where, to the uneducated eye, chaos reigned. Scullery maids, potboys, and sweating liveried footmen rushed through the series of connecting rooms, under the great vaulted stone ceilings blackened by the smoke from the massive ranges, where suckling pigs, whole sheep, and barons of beef roasted on spits turned at each end by red-faced potboys.
Ariel weaved her way through the throng, who were all too frantic to pay any attention to her, the cause of all the uproar, until Romulus, whose head rose above the tabletop, found a succulent cooling pork pie too much of an attraction to resist. His great jaws opened, his tongue slithered across the scrubbed pine boards, and the pie was scooped whole into his mouth.
“You bleedin’ varmint!” bellowed a woman wrapped in several layers of flour-streaked apron. Romulus bolted for the door, the pie still in his mouth, the woman, flailing her rolling pin, chasing after him.
“Oh, I’m so sorry, Gertrude.” Ariel ran outside into the kitchen yard. The cook stood panting, her breath rising in the cold air. Romulus was nowhere to be seen, and Remus had taken off after him. “He’s not really a thief.”
“All dogs is thieves, m’lady,” Gertrude stated. “It’s in their nature, if you don’t thrash it out of ’em. Their lordships knows that.”
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nbsp; “Yes,” Ariel said. Her brothers had very simple methods when it came to controlling animals—not to mention sisters. “It won’t happen again, I promise.”
The cook regarded her doubtfully, then her face creased into a smile. “Well, never mind. What’s a pork pie now an’ agin? An’ ’tis a weddin’ day after all.” She turned and bustled back to the kitchen.
A wedding day if it had a bridegroom, Ariel reflected, going toward the stables. It was surely inconceivable that the earl of Hawkesmoor should fail to appear for his wedding. Such an insult would call for another round of bloody vengeance.
But perhaps that was his intention. He had forced his enemies to agree to a loathsome connection and now he would stand aside and laugh at their public humiliation. Curiously, she didn’t feel in the least personally insulted. It was probably less mortifying to be jilted at the altar than compelled to be her brothers’ bait.
Edgar was sitting on an upturned rain barrel cleaning tack as she entered the stableyard. “Saddle the roan, Edgar. I’m going to fly the merlin.”
“Right y’are, m’lady.” Edgar rose to his feet. “I’ll be comin’ along. Or you want Josh?”
“I’d best take Josh. I’d rather you stayed in the stables . . . keep an eye on the stud.” Ariel frowned. She wouldn’t risk provoking Ranulf further today by riding out alone, but it was also prudent to have a reliable watch on her Arabians while her brothers were around. If they started taking an unusual interest in the horses, she wanted to know.
She went into the mews, alongside the stable block. It was dark, and the air was heavy with the blood of small birds, the acrid smell of bird droppings. The hawks shifted on their perches, eyes bright in the darkness.
She went to the third perch and gently touched the merlin’s plumage. He turned his sharp, unkind eye upon her, his cruel beak close to her finger. “You are a nasty one,” she said affectionately, scratching his neck, refusing to move her finger.
“You flyin’ Wizard this mornin’, m’lady?” The falconer emerged from the darkness, moving as swiftly and silently as his birds. He held the hood and jesses.
“Just along the river.” She picked up the thick falconer’s gauntlet from a shelf along the wall and drew it over her right hand and arm as the falconer slipped hood and jesses over the hawk and released him from his perch.
Ariel took him on her gloved wrist and secured the jesses. “I’ll be no more than an hour.” She went out into the yard, where the groom stood beside the roan mare and his own cob. The wolfhounds, looking very pleased with themselves, sat beside the horses, tongues lolling.
“I ought to lock you in the stables for the rest of the day,” she admonished them, but without much conviction. It was too late now to punish them. The groom helped her into the saddle; the hawk sat on her wrist, his hooded head to one side, his plumage slightly ruffled with the wind.
They trotted through the castle gates and over the drawbridge. The air was cold but clear, the sun bright in a cloudless sky, the road winding its way across the fens toward the distant spires of Cambridge.
Ariel shaded her eyes against the sun as she looked down the road. She could see only a trundling wagon. No sign of a belated bridegroom. She nudged her horse into a canter down to the riverbank, where she drew rein, unhooded the merlin, and held him up on her wrist to spy the land. A rook cawed from a copse a hundred yards away. A swift swooped low over the river, feeding on the wing. The hawk quivered. Ariel loosed the jesses, drew back her arm, and with an expert movement tossed the merlin into the air.
The earl of Hawkesmoor drew rein, looked up at the sun, and judged it to be close to eleven. The bulk of Ravenspeare Castile stood out against the skyline, no more than half an hour’s ride. Behind it rose the great octagon of Ely Cathedral.
“You’re in no hurry, Simon,” observed one of his companions. Ten men formed the cadre, ranged behind the earl of Hawkesmoor.
“I intend my arrival to be timed with precision, Jack,” Simon told him. “I’ve no desire to endure Ravenspeare hospitality a minute earlier than necessary.” This was why he was arriving only just in time to stand at the altar with Ariel Ravenspeare. Afterward he would remain for the month of wedding festivities. And while he was a guest at Ravenspeare Castle, he would have a chance to pursue some personal business. Maybe even the woman he sought.
But first things first. He nudged his horse forward along the causeway ridged with frost-hard mud. He had no mental picture of the girl who would be his bride an hour from now. He had asked for no description and none had been volunteered. If she was walleyed, crookbacked, clubfooted, doltish, it didn’t matter. He would marry her and he would remain faithful.
He glanced up at the pale blue sky to watch a soaring hawk. A plover rose from the reeds along the riverbank, then, as if alerted to the danger hovering above, swooped frantically, darting from side to side to avoid the killer now moving almost leisurely on its tail. Simon shaded his eyes and squinted upward.
“It’s a merlin,” Jack said. “No ordinary field hawk, that. Look at its flight.”
It was the most beautiful killing machine. It seemed to tease the desperate plover, hovering over it with its magnificent wingspan, before dipping lazily toward the little bird. The plover flew upward in response, but couldn’t maintain its height. It flew down, heading for the copse along the riverbank. The merlin plummeted with the force and accuracy of a lead bullet, its curved beak caught in a weak ray of sun. The plover was snatched from the air in the vicious curling talons, and the men on the road breathed again.
“Someone’s flying it along the river.” Jack pointed with his whip to where two figures sat their horses.
On impulse, Simon urged his horse into a canter, directing him off the causeway. The cadre followed him, cantering down to the riverside.
Ariel was watching Wizard. He was newly trained and had still been known to take off with his catch. So far this morning, he’d returned to her wrist, but she could sense that he was becoming impatient at handing over his well-earned prey. So intent was she on willing the merlin to come back from what had to be the morning’s last flight that she became aware of the horsemen only when they were almost upon her, the soft ground muffling their horses’ hooves.
Her initial reaction was one of angry frustration. Couldn’t whoever they were sense that she needed all her concentration for the hawk? But it seemed that they did sense it. They drew rein atop a small knoll, far enough away not to distract the merlin.
Wizard remained in the air, wheeling and hovering with his prey. Once Ariel thought he was going to head for the copse, where he could tear the plover apart in peace. The group of horsemen were absolutely still on the knoll. Then the merlin arced and flew with leisurely flaps of his wings toward the gauntleted wrist held up to receive him.
He settled on his perch, fluffed his feathers, and docilely yielded his prey to Ariel’s fingers. She dropped it into the game bag at her saddle and fastened his jesses.
“Bravo.” One of the horsemen separated himself from the group and rode down to her. The hounds pricked up their ears, but the horseman gave them barely a glance. “There was a moment there when I thought he might renege.”
Ariel’s first thought was that she had never seen anyone as ugly as this giant of a man astride a huge piebald of ungainly lines but undeniable power. He was hatless, his dark hair cropped close to his head. None of his features seemed designed to go with any other. The nose was a jagged spur, accentuated by the livid scar slashing his cheek. His jaw was prominent, his mouth slightly skewed in a smile that revealed crooked but strong-looking teeth. Thick dark brows met above deep-set, wide-apart blue eyes.
She took in the dark riding clothes, the short hair of a Puritan. Then abruptly she turned away, gestured to the groom, snapped her fingers at the dogs, and took off at a canter along the riverbank, the hawk securely on her wrist.
Simon frowned. An unusual, not to mention ill-mannered, creature. But a striking sight in that crimson rid
ing habit. “Come, we’ve dallied overlong.” He gathered the reins and returned to the road, the cadre falling in behind him.
They heard the blast of a horn from the castle’s watch-tower as they reached the causeway. “Someone’s on the watch for us,” Simon observed with an ironic smile. “Maybe they were afraid we weren’t coming.”
Twenty minutes later they clattered over the drawbridge and rode into Ravenspeare Castle.
The iron-studded doors to the Great Hall stood open, and as the bridegroom and his party entered the inner court, the earl of Ravenspeare, flanked by his brothers, emerged from the castle’s interior. They were all three dressed in the blue and silver colors of the Ravenspeare arms, wearing lavishly curled, gray-powdered, full-bottomed wigs. The family likeness was startling in the charcoal gray eyes, the angular features, the slightly sneering lips.
Simon’s attention, however, was taken by the figure standing in the middle of the court beside a roan mare. The girl from the riverbank. Judging by her mount’s labored breathing, she must have ridden her hard to arrive before them. It had obviously not been difficult for her to guess his identity. At her heels stood the two massive wolfhounds, on her gauntleted wrist sat the hooded merlin. Ariel Ravenspeare. No crookbacked, walleyed, dolt, this one.
She had removed her hat and held it under her arm. Hair the color of liquid honey tumbled unrestrained to her shoulders, framing an oval face. From beneath long, curling sable lashes, clear, almond-shaped gray eyes met the earl of Hawkesmoor’s startled scrutiny with an unnerving intensity. Her nose was small, her mouth full, her chin slightly pointed. She bore little physical resemblance to her brothers, and yet there was something about her that he saw now was intrinsically Ravenspeare. Something about the arrogance of her stance, the tilt of her chin.
She was beautifully formed, he noticed almost absently. From the sloping shoulders, to the nip of waist, to the curve of hip. He had a sudden reluctance to dismount, to reveal his own clumsy lameness to this girl, so perfect in her youth and freshness.