The Silver Rose Read Online Free PDF Page A

things, but her brothers were contemplating murder. And she was to be the bait. She was to be the instrument of the Hawkesmoor’s humiliation, and the bait for the trap that would kill him.
    Outside in the courtyard in the lowering dusk, she looked up at the castle that had been her home since birth. In the failing light it was an ominous, forbidding structure with its battlements and parapets; the arrow slits were narrow black eyes amid the dark ivy.
    For nearly twenty years she had watched her brothers at their amusements, amusements that took no account of those whom they used to provide their entertainment. Many nights she had lain abed, trying to close her ears to the sounds from the Great Hall, the screams of the village girls they’d bought for their drunken orgies. She had watched them follow the hunt across fields bearing tender new wheat, crashing through carefully erected fences, trampling the produce of the small cottage gardens that kept impoverished tenants from starvation. She had watched Ranulf, and their father before him, sentence poachers to death for a single rabbit, vagrants to the whipping posts and the stocks. Justice was swift and merciless when it emanated from the lords of Ravenspeare Castle. It had once encompassed murder, so why should she be surprised that they were planning a single killing? A killing amid the bridal feasting, with their sister as the staked goat.
    Nausea rose in her throat and she turned and hurried, almost running, through the gate at the side of the courtyard that led into the orderly world of the stables. This was Ariel’s home. This was where she was at peace, where she could put the brooding dankness of the castle behind her—here and in the villages and hamlets of the fens where she was always greeted with warmth and the relief and gratitude owed a healer. The only Ravenspeare in a generation to be trusted and welcomed among the tenant farmers and the working poor whose lives were ruled by the house of Ravenspeare.
    Her Arabians were stabled in a long low building to the left of the yard. The door was closed to keep the night chill from the delicate, highly bred beasts. She let herself into the warm, dimly lit interior, heavy with the smell of horse flesh, manure, and leather.
    “That you, m’lady?” Edgar, with his face of wrinkled mahogany leather, appeared from a stall at the far end.
    “Yes, how’s she doing?” Ariel hurried up the aisle. The wolfhounds, well trained around the sensitive beasts, remained seated at the stable door.
    “Beautifully.” He stood aside so that she could enter the stall where the mare labored. “Won’t be long now.”
    Ariel stroked the animal’s nose, ran her hand over the distended belly. Then she took off her coat, casting it to the straw at her feet, pushed up the ruffled sleeve of her shirt, lifted the mare’s tail, and drove her arm deep inside. “I can feel him, Edgar.”
    “Aye. Another ten minutes.”
    Ariel withdrew her arm, matter-of-factly washed it clean with water from a bucket, and rolled down her sleeve. “We could do with another stallion.”
    “Aye, but we’ll take what God gives us,” Edgar said.
    “It’s rumored that the queen is going to establish a royal racecourse at Ascot,” Ariel mused. “If that happens, we’ll be one of the few stables breeding racehorses.”
    “Aye,” Edgar agreed stolidly. “Set your own price, I reckon.”
    Ariel nodded. If she could make money out of her racehorses, she could be independent of Ranulf’s rule. She could leave Ravenspeare, set up her own stud, be a person in her own right. She knew it was an extraordinary idea—that a woman should support herself with her own efforts and skill—an idea so far-fetched as to be almost unbelievable. But she believed she could do it. However, she had to keep her breeding program a secret until she had sufficient funds to make her move. If her brothers once suspected there was money to be made from what they merely