"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 fight 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."
"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.