Ralph was standing beside the Hawkesmoor's ungainly piebald. He had a hand on the animal's rump as if taking stock of his lines. Ariel strolled casually across. Ralph's fingers were on the girth strap. She stood a little way away, soundless, motionless, watching as her brother loosened the girth, slid his hand between the animal's belly and the strap, felt the slip of the saddle, smiled to himself, and turned and walked away, calling loudly for his own horse.
Ariel walked as casually as before over to the piebald. She began to unbuckle the girth.
"What are you doing with my horse, Ariel?"
The voice so startled her that she jumped guiltily, feeling the telltale heat invade her face. "Checking your girth strap."
Simon regarded her gravely. "I imagine my groom has already seen to it"
"He may have missed something," she said, still scarlet. "It seems a trifle loose to me, but perhaps you prefer to ride with a slipping saddle." She walked off, leaving Simon frowning in puzzlement as he slid his own fingers between the strap and the animal's belly.
The girth was indeed loose. But how had Ariel known it was? Had she loosened it herself? That guilty flush had meant something. And then she'd covered up her movements by warning him.
Simon refastened the buckle and mounted, the maneuver ungainly but efficiently accomplished. Had she decided to unhorse him? It didn't seem to sit right with what he knew of her. But she was a Ravenspeare, he reminded himself grimly. They were adept at spiteful tricks.
And yet he found it hard to believe, remembering her anguish over the dogs, remembering how she'd offered to ease his leg the previous evening, remembering that mischievous chuckle and quick smile. But he also suspected that there was much more to his bride than he had guessed already. She had some deep reserves that he hadn't begun to tap. Maybe the vengeful Ravenspeare spirit lurked in the shadowy recesses of her mind. It would hardly be surprising.
The shrill call of the hunting horn broke into this disturbing reverie. The hunt surged forward toward a stand of wind-bent trees just above the dike at the bottom of the field. A herd of deer scattered into the open as the hounds blazed through the trees.
Simon's mount soared over the dike, raced through the stream below, and up the dike on the other side. The deer were flying across an open field, the hounds streaking after them.
"Hawkesmoor! Follow me if you'd be in at the kill!" Lord Ralph Ravenspeare threw the mocking challenge at him as he drew alongside. "Or are you frightened of taking a risk, brother-in-law?" Ralph's little eyes shot darts of scorn. "Puritans are ever cautious!" He swung his horse to the right, raising his whip in a contemptuous salute, and charged across the field toward a distant copse.
Simon "hesitated for only a minute. In a cooler frame of mind, he would have dismissed the insolence of such a contemptible cub, but he'd had his fill of Ravenspeares for one day. He set the piebald in pursuit of Ralph's black. The hounds were in full cry, pursuing their quarry toward a meadow on the other side of the copse, and Simon saw that by traversing the copse, he would emerge ahead of the field. No one else, however, seemed to have seen the advantage of such a route.
As the first low-lying branches sprang out to meet him, Simon understood why this was not a preferred path. Ralph was leaning low over his horse's neck. He clearly knew the hazards of the copse, Simon thought grimly, ducking just in time to save his head from a branch across the narrow track. He didn't dare raise his head from the piebald's neck, merely hung on as the low roof of intersecting branches whipped overhead, leaves and twigs lashing the nape of his neck.
The copse couldn't be that deep, he thought. Ralph had presumably hoped the first series of branches would knock him off. Of course, if his saddle had slipped at the same time…
He raised his head an inch to look ahead and realized that there was no sign of Ralph on the path in front of him. His own mount maintained his speed along the track that was now so narrow as to be almost nonexistent. The trees crowded in overhead and the sounds of the hunt drifted faintly from beyond the copse to his right.
His horse broke suddenly into a small clearing. Simon raised his head fully with a sigh of relief but didn't check the animal. The sooner he got out of this godforsaken place the better. Then, horror-struck, he saw Ariel's roan rising up out of the ground directly ahead of him, soaring through the air toward him in a tightly bunched leap of pure muscle.
The piebald of its own accord reared up as the other animal hung for a dreadful instant in the air in front of him, then the roan landed two feet from the wild-eyed piebald. Ariel had lost her hat and her hair was escaping from its pins. Her face was deathly white-as well it might be, Simon thought furiously as he struggled to calm his horse, to turn it aside from its head-to-head confrontation with the panting roan. His own legs were like jelly in the aftermath of that split second of terror.
"What the devil kind of a stunt was that?" he demanded, when he could find his tongue. "Are you quite mad?"
Ariel was breathing heavily. She brushed a strand of hair away from her sweat-beaded brow and looked around the clearing.
"Why did you follow Ralph?"
"He offered to give me a lead. He knows the land; why wouldn't I follow him?"
"Because he's a nasty, treacherous, drunken snake," Ariel said succinctly. "As soon as I saw you heading after him I knew he had something up his sleeve. And when he reappeared from the side path without you, I was sure something had happened to you. It's almost impossible to ride through Perry's Copse, the trees are too low."
"So I'd noticed," he said dryly. "And a loose saddle wouldn't help."
"Precisely."
"I assume the loose girth was not your doing?" Simon inquired as aridly as before.
Ariel flushed and then paled. "Of course not! How could you think such a thing?"
He surveyed her thoughtfully. "I don't know whose side you're on, Ariel. What am I supposed to think?"
She turned from him without a word, swung off the roan, and walked to the middle of the clearing, where branches were heaped in a seemingly random pile as if for a bonfire. She picked up a large chunk of wood from a tree root and said over her shoulder, "Watch this." She hurled the wood into the middle of the pile of branches.
The pile collapsed in on itself, disappearing from the ground. "Neat, eh?" She came back to him. "It's an old peat bog. They're all over the place, left over after the drainage of the fens was completed. But you know that, of course, being a Fenlander yourself?" She raised an eyebrow in satiric inquiry.
Simon merely nodded. Ralph had intended to lead him into the bog. His horse would have floundered, his saddle would have slipped, and crippled as he was, in this deserted copse, escape would have taken a miracle. Ariel's mad jump across the concealed pit had saved him. And only just in time.
"Does that answer your question, my lord?" She was still regarding him with that satirical eyebrow raised.
Tight-lipped, she swung onto her horse. "If you leave the copse the way you entered it, you shouldn't find any more traps," she said coldly, set the roan to jump the bog again, and disappeared into the trees.
Oh, no you don't, Simon thought, suddenly angry. Maybe she wasn't prepared to see him die at her brothers' hands, but neither was she prepared to be a real wife to him. She would save his life in common decency, as she saved the lives of her dogs, but she would give him nothing else.
He set his own horse to jump the treacherous pit and followed the path Ariel had taken through the copse, emerging into the gray late afternoon light to see the hunt fast disappearing over the far meadow. His keen eyesight was one physical advantage that had, if anything, improved during the war years, and he stared fixedly at the retreating figures. There was no sign of Ariel among them.