The Silver Rose by Jane Feather Page A

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 methodswhen 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.
    Edgar was sitting on an upturned rain barrel cleaning tack as she entered the stableyard. “Saddle the roan, Edgar. I’m going to fly the merlin.”
    “Right y’are, m’lady.” Edgar rose to his feet. “I’ll be comin’ along. Or you want Josh?”
    “I’d best take Josh. I’d rather you stayed in the stables . . . keep an eye on the stud.” Ariel frowned. She wouldn’t risk provoking Ranulf further today by riding out alone, but it was also prudent to have a reliable watch on her Arabians while her brothers were around. If they started taking an unusual interest in the horses, she wanted to know.
    She went into the mews, alongside the stable block. It was dark, and the air was heavy with the blood of small birds, the acrid smell of bird droppings. The hawks shifted on their perches, eyes bright in the darkness.
    She went to the third perch and gently touched the merlin’s plumage. He turned his sharp, unkind eye upon her, his cruel beak close to her finger. “You are a nasty one,” she said affectionately, scratching his neck, refusing to move her finger.
    “You flyin’ Wizard this mornin’, m’lady?” The falconer emerged from the darkness, moving as swiftly and silently as his birds. He held the hood and jesses.
    “Just along the river.” She picked up the thick falconer’s gauntlet from a shelf along the wall and drew it over her right hand and arm as the falconer slipped hood and jesses over