The Silver Rose (28 page)

Ariel opened her mouth to respond but any words were lost in a spasm of coughing. Simon, with a muttered exclamation, leaned over her, rubbing her back in a futile attempt to ease the dry hacking. At last it ceased and Ariel fell back against the pillows again. Simon wiped the sweat from her brow with his handkerchief.

Ariel closed her eyes, not wanting to meet his steady gaze. She remembered what she’d said about his ruined face, and the words now sounded dreadful to her. It didn’t matter that she’d been beside herself with rage and fear for the injured roan; it had been unforgivable, almost taunting. But she was too tired to begin to apologize or explain. Her tiredness was bone deep and seemed to have replaced the marrow-deep chill. The hot bricks packed against her body had done their work, although somewhere she felt the cold lurking, a menacing shadow waiting to take shape again. She wanted to sleep but her fatigue was not sleep inducing, it merely brought aching limbs and dry eyes.

Simon turned away from her and went to the window, looking down into the inner court. He was waiting for the two women to appear with Edgar, but in the gloaming the court was deserted. The sounds of feasting from the Great Hall burst forth loud and raucous when the ironbound door was suddenly flung open and a man appeared, bent double, vomiting into the shrubs beside the steps. The celebrations and excess went on, even without the bride and groom.

Simon raised his eyes from the disagreeable sight and looked out over the castle walls to the flat countryside beyond. But it was too dark now to see anything; not even the octagon of Ely Cathedral was visible.

There was a sharp rap on the chamber door as he peered into the dark. He swung round, calling admittance as he did so. Two women, accompanied by Doris, entered. “Mistress Sarah, my lord, and Miss Jenny.” Doris bobbed a curtsy as she performed introductions.

“My thanks, madam, for coming so quickly.” Simon spoke courteously as he crossed the chamber, extending his hand to the older woman. Dumb, daft Sarah, Doris had called her. But there was nothing in the least daft about this woman’s blue eyes as they surveyed him. She was gaunt, her hair white as snow, and deep in those unnerving eyes lurked a knowledge that made Simon oddly uneasy.

To his astonishment she took his large hand in both of hers, the warm dry skin of her palms enclosing it, her fingers curling around his. Simon felt the strangest sensation, as if something from this woman had passed into him. Only with the greatest difficulty did he resist the urge to snatch his hand from her clasp.

Then she released her hold and turned to the bed where her daughter was already bending over Ariel.

“Sarah, there was no need for you to come,” Ariel protested, struggling up against the pillows. “All I need is some ephedra, and some coltsfoot lozenges and slippery elm bark for the cough. Jenny could have brought everything.”

“Mother insisted,” Jenny said, beginning to unpack the basket. Sarah merely smiled and opened Ariel’s robe. Abruptly her fingers ceased their unbuttoning as her eyes fell on the bracelet around Ariel’s wrist. She picked up the wrist delicately between finger and thumb and looked at the bracelet. The charms danced as she turned Ariel’s wrist over to see the underside of the encircling serpent with the pearl apple in its mouth.

Slowly she turned her head to where the earl of Hawkesmoor stood just behind her. Her haunted eyes held his gaze for a minute as she still clasped Ariel’s wrist, and there was a question in her gaze that he couldn’t identify, let alone answer.

“What is it, Mother?” Jenny touched her mother’s hand. She could feel her mother’s tension.

“You’re right, Ariel should take off the bracelet. It’s hardly appropriate to wear it in bed.” Simon’s voice was brisk, masking his own unease. He didn’t know what it was that had disturbed the older woman, but he found he couldn’t bear the gaze of those blue eyes in the gaunt white face. It was as if she was stripping him bare, seeing through him somehow. The only obvious explanation was that something about the bracelet had upset her—it was something of an acquired taste after all—so he did as he always did when faced with a threat, attempted to remove it. He reached for Ariel’s wrist and Sarah released her grip, brushing her hand across her eyes as if dispelling some image.

Simon unclasped the bracelet. For a moment he fingered the emerald swan, the silver rose, the delicate pearl insets in the serpentine chain, the round pearl apple in the serpent’s mouth. The hairs on his neck lifted as he traced the reared head of the viper, the tiny black jet of its eye. Where had he seen it before? Why was it so familiar? He couldn’t capture the nagging elusive memory.

He became aware of the woman Sarah’s eyes on him again and looked up sharply, almost flushing as if caught in some wrongdoing. But she turned back to her patient immediately, and he dropped the bracelet into his pocket.

Sarah’s fingers were once again deft and efficient as they finished unbuttoning Ariel’s robe. Jenny removed the camphor-soaked cloths and Sarah unscrewed the lid of an alabaster pot and began to anoint Ariel’s chest with an ointment that filled the chamber with fumes so strong that Simon’s eyes began to water.

Recognizing that he’d only be in the way if he hovered by the bed, he sat down by the still-blazing fire. The dogs came to him immediately and sat at his feet, their heads resting on his knees. Simon watched the proceedings around the bed, struck by the sure-handed efficiency of the two women as
they tended to Ariel. Once, Sarah glanced at him over her shoulder, and again he was shivered by that strange sense of knowledge. It was as if she knew him in ways that he didn’t know himself. Perhaps she was a witch woman, he thought uneasily. One who had the “sight.”

Doris came in with a jug of steaming hot water and a flat skillet. She placed the copper jug on the bedside table and then set the skillet on a trivet over the fire. Simon shifted his knees sideways so that he wouldn’t hinder her work, and the girl blushed and pushed the dogs aside with rather more bustle than was strictly necessary.

She straightened and smoothed out her apron. “Will that be all, Mistress Sarah?”

“For the moment,” Jenny responded, reaching into the basket again, taking out a handful of coltsfoot. “If you’ll excuse me, my lord . . .” She reached across Simon’s lap to throw the leaves into the skillet.

Simon grabbed his cane and stood up. He limped over to the window, out of harm’s way, and perched on the cushioned seat beneath. He was unaware of Sarah’s covert glance as he moved awkwardly to his new site, and by the time he was seated again, she had returned her attention to the cough medicine she was mixing with the hot water in the copper jug.

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.”