As the leaves heated in the skillet, the room filled with powerful fumes that smelled like incense, that pierced Simon's lungs with a clear coldness as he breathed it in. "It'll help Ariel to breathe cleanly," Jenny explained, hearing his slight gasp of surprise. "Perhaps you would prefer to go downstairs, sir."
Simon shook his head before he remembered that the woman couldn't see the gesture, but Sarah was looking directly at him with a thin eyebrow lifted, a question in her steady gaze.
"I am no nurse," he said, "but if you give me clear instructions, I'm certain I can manage."
Sarah nodded and turned back to Ariel, who was now propped high on pillows, the hectic flush still startling against her pale cheeks, her eyelids heavy and swollen, but to Simon's ear it seemed that already she was breathing more freely.
Ariel swallowed the hot tea of slippery elm and coltsfoot that Sarah poured from the jug, and then lay back, closing her eyes. "There's no need for you to stay longer, Sarah. You should never have come in the first place."
"You know quite well you can't prevent Mother from doing what she wants," Jenny said with a slight laugh. She came back to the bed and laid a hand on Ariel's forehead. "If you can sleep, Ariel, I think we might be out of the woods."
Ariel smiled somewhat feebly. "Let's hope so. It's the last time I'll be taking a swim in the Ouse in the middle of winter." —
"You never spoke a truer word," Simon declared, rising from the window seat and joining the others at the bed. Ariel still looked very ill to him, but her voice was less croaky and she hadn't been racked with one of those violent coughing spasms for five minutes or so.
"Sarah, there's no need for you stay longer," Ariel repeated with a mixture of pleading and urgency. "I can look after myself now, and I know you want to get home."
"If you explain what I need to do, I can manage to care for Ariel now." Simon hoped his hesitation didn't sound in his voice. It clearly mattered to Ariel that her friends shouldn't remain in the castle any longer than necessary, and it seemed to him that it was equally important she didn't get agitated. "And I'm sure Doris will help."
Sarah gave him another of her unnerving glances, then she touched Jenny's arm, drawing her away from the bed, her eyes bidding Simon to follow.
"Ariel needs to sleep," Jenny said in an undertone, taking the smoked-glass vial from her mother's hand as Sarah held it out. "But I doubt she'll take the laudanum. She's not the best patient," she added with a smile.
"Is the laudanum necessary?" Simon directed his question to Sarah, who responded with a decisive nod.
"Then Ariel will take it," he said evenly, glancing down at the small bottle he now held in his hand.
The older woman's eyes rested on his face for a minute, again with that intense and questing gaze. Slowly she raised a hand to Simon's face. As slowly, she touched the scar, tracing its jagged length with a fingertip.
Simon stood very still; he couldn't have moved away had he wished to. There was something so delicate yet so searching about a touch that was almost a caress. And the deep blue eyes looked into his and seemed to know him right through to his innermost core. But there was nothing sinister, nothing witchlike about the woman, only gentleness, and now he found there was something oddly comforting about that strange knowledge behind her eyes.
Jenny was standing very still. She looked puzzled. She couldn't see what her mother was doing, but she sensed the tension in the small space that enclosed the three of them, sensed the strangeness of her mother's taut vibrancy. Then Ariel coughed, a dry rasping sound behind them, and Sarah's hand fell from Simon's cheek. She moved away from him, gathering up her cloak, swinging it around her shoulders as she went back to the bed.
Jenny bent to replenish the leaves in the skillet on the trivet. "If you can keep these fresh, Lord Hawkesmoor, it will help, and you should rub the ointment onto Ariel's chest every three hours. And give her the tea for the cough whenever she wants it. There are also some lozenges she can suck to help soothe her throat and calm the cough. But if you can persuade her to drink the laudanum, she should sleep for six hours or so."
"Rest assured, I will persuade her," he said. His face and most particularly the scar still seemed to tingle with the lingering memory of Sarah's touch.
Jenny gave him a quick smile and returned to the bed, picking up her own cloak as she did so. She moved unerringly around the chamber, Simon noticed. Presumably she had been there before and had committed its contours and furniture to memory.
"We'll leave you now, Ariel." She bent to kiss the patient. "Be good and take your medicine and I'll ask Edgar to bring me back in the morning to see how you are."
Ariel's smile was rather feeble but it was definitely a smile. "I feel better already. Thank you both for coming, but I wish Sarah hadn't come."
"Your husband insisted," Jenny whispered against her ear. "According to Edgar."
Ariel flushed. "He had no right to do that."
Jenny shrugged. "Maybe not. But you know that no one could make Mother do something she really didn't wish to."
That, Ariel reflected, was certainly true. She glanced up into the older woman's thin face and read, as always, the hardness of purpose beneath the lines of suffering. "Thank you, Sarah," she murmured, returning the woman's kiss.
After the two women left, Simon came over to the bed, carrying the vial of laudanum and a glass.
"If that's what I think it is, you may save yourself the trouble," Ariel rasped, pulling the covers up to her chin and regarding him a touch belligerently. "I don't take laudanum, ever."
"There's a first time for everything," Simon responded, sitting on the bed beside her, holding flask and glass loosely between his hands. "Sarah said it was necessary for you to sleep, so sleep you will, my sweet."
"I wish to sleep and I will do so in my own good time," Ariel declared. "When my body's ready of its own accord."
"I don't think you should talk anymore." Simon continued to maintain his casual air. "Your voice is becoming fainter with every word." Carefully he unscrewed the top of the vial and poured a measure of laudanum into the glass.
"No! I won't take it," Ariel protested, ignoring the truth of his last comment.
"Why not?"
"Because it'll make me go to sleep!"
"I believe that's the idea," he said dryly.
"Yes, but it's a horrible, heavy sleep that I can't control. It's not like the belladonna draught I made for you. It's much much stronger and lasts for hours and I can't let myself sleep like that. I need to-" The rest was lost in a violent spasm of coughing so bad that it seemed as if all the women's ministrations had been for nothing.
Simon set the glass on the bedside table and lifted her up from the pillows, holding her against him, rubbing her back, until the convulsions finally ceased. "Here." He poured elm tea into the cup. She took it eagerly, then fell back on the pillows again.
"If Sarah had believed the belladonna to be sufficient, she would have prescribed it," he said. "But she prescribed the laudanum and it's as clear as day how much you need it." He proffered the glass.
Ariel pushed his hand away with a petulant gesture. "I won't," she said crossly. "I won't take it."
"I would never have believed such a child lurked behind that controlled exterior," Simon remarked. "And what a disagreeable child it is." He caught her chin, turning her averted face back toward him. "And if the disagreeable child doesn't wish to be treated like one, she'll know what's good for her and take the sleeping draught without any more silly fuss."
"You don't understand…"
"Maybe not, and you may help me to understand once you've taken your medicine." He slipped an arm beneath her neck and raised her head. "This could become ugly, my love. But one way or another, you will drink the sleeping draught."