The Silver Rose (36 page)

“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 bitter 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, of 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

H
ELENE’S CARRIAGE JOLTED
in a cart track as it ascended Forehill 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.

Her husband’s will had left her financially independent and in full charge of all decisions affecting herself and her children. It was a consideration and respect not often accorded widows, and Helene was fully sensible of its advantages, but there were times when it was rather pleasant to be taken care of by a pair of strong male hands.

Helene peered out of the window as the hired carriage, in the charge of her own coachman and postilions, rattled over the cobbles toward the Lamb Inn. The early dusk had been creeping over the damp, flat land for the last half hour. Rooks cawed, circling over the gaunt treetops as they prepared to settle for the night. Helene could smell fog. She had the native-born Fenlander’s nose for the rolling ground mist that could engulf every landmark in its path, thickening as it drifted.

Simon would have taken care of her. There was a time when he had wanted nothing else. After Harold’s death he had pressed her, gently, and with complete understanding of her situation, but he had made no secret of his own desires. He wanted her as his wife. He wanted her to bear his children. He wanted to love her and care for her—to achieve the emotional destiny that with the carelessness of youth they had squandered at the only time when it would have been possible to fulfill.

But then it was too late. She could not have given up her children. Not even for Simon. Not even for the happiness of a lifetime of his loving care. To see them only occasionally, to have almost no say in their education and care, to have them under her roof for only a few weeks a year? No, she couldn’t have done such a thing.

And now Simon was married to a Ravenspeare, and there was no point even fantasizing anymore.

Helene touched her soft skin. Did it feel dryer, like parchment, these days? Were the crow’s-feet etched deeper as
each day passed? What kind of a creature was this new countess of Hawkesmoor? Young, certainly. Twelve years younger than Helene. In the full flush of youthful beauty, of course. Life as yet would have planted no faint lines and wrinkles on the fresh complexion. Her eyes would be as yet unfaded by the yearnings and the sorrows that a succession of even relatively uneventful years brought with them.

The carriage came to a rattling halt in the yard of the Lamb Inn, and an ostler leaped to open the door for its passengers. Helene descended, followed by her maid, a rosy-cheeked youngster who grinned mischievously at the ostler as she directed him in a mock-haughty tone to be careful of her ladyship’s dressing case.

The lad winked at her and hoisted the leather case onto his shoulders. The innkeeper had come running as soon as he’d judged the quality of the passenger in the hired coach and was now escorting her ladyship into the inn with promises of a private parlor and his best bedchamber.

Helene detested staying in inns. The Lamb was respectable enough but Ely, despite its cathedral, was not a crossroads town or on a major highway, and its main hostelry served mostly local travelers and neighborhood folk. The private parlor was small, slightly musty, and overlooked the street, which was quiet enough at this time of day, but by cockcrow it would be a babbling sea of activity.

“Do you have a lad I can send with a message to Ravenspeare Castle?” She drew off her gloves and set her plumed hat on a gateleg table, noticing a swath of dust that some chambermaid had missed in her clearly desultory cleaning.

“Tonight, ma’am?” The landlord surreptitiously swiped at the tabletop with his baize apron.

“It’s but three miles.” Helene shivered in the dank chill that the sullen coals in the fireplace couldn’t dissipate. The bed linen was bound to be damp.

The landlord poked the fire. “I can send Billy Potts. Would you be wantin’ a nice drop o’ milk punch to warm ye?”

“Tea,” Helene said decisively. “And I’d like a coddled egg and a bowl of soup for my dinner.”

“An’ a nice bottle of best burgundy?” her host offered hopefully.

“Just the tea, thank you.” She sat down at the table with her folding leather standish, containing several sheets of paper, a quill pen, and a leather inkwell.

The landlord bowed and left his sadly unexpansive customer to her letter writing.

Helene wrote two letters. She addressed one to Lady Hawkesmoor and folded it into the second sheet of paper, which she sealed with wax from the candle and addressed to Lord Hawkesmoor.

Billy Potts loped off on his errand cheerfully enough. He was a spry lad and ran easily over the fields, hopping over stiles, ducking through hedges, leaping dikes and narrow drainage cuts, reducing the three miles by road between Ravenspeare and Ely to a mere mile and a half.

He arrived at Ravenspeare Castle within half an hour to find the central courtyard ablaze with pitch torches and flambeaux staked around the perimeter. The wedding guests were watching riders tilting at a quintain set up in the center of the court. Whenever a rider’s lance struck the quintain awry and he was unhorsed by the great sack of flour swinging round on him, shrieks of laughter and applause rocked the evening air and the man was obliged as forfeit to down a sconce of burgundy in one breath.

Billy Potts stood watching in wide-eyed fascination. He’d heard tales of what went on behind the walls of Ravenspeare Castle, but this scene where the garish light of the flambeaux flickered in the wreathing fog was beyond his imagination. The guests were all lavishly dressed beneath fur-trimmed cloaks, their faces flushed in the strange light as if they were overheated, impervious to the dank winter chill.

“What’re you doin’ ’ere, lad?” A gruff voice arrested him as he made to slip along the wall to get a closer look at the sport. A hand caught his shoulder.