In the Shadow of Midnight - By Marsha Canham Page 0,10

apprenticeship toward knighthood. She too looked forward to the day when she would earn the right to wear the golden spurs and smite mighty dragons in battle.

It came, therefore, as a rude and unaccepted shock when she was forced to wear gowns and girtles instead of the more practical garb of jerkins, tunics, and leggings. When Henry turned thirteen and she nine, instead of applauding proudly at his investiture as the lord marshal’s squire, she launched an insurrection in the castle nursery—by then swollen in number with three of the marshal’s natural children—that lasted several months and saw five nurses flee in terror for their lives. No amount of whippings or threats had any lasting effect. It took promises from both Henry and the marshal to finally restore a semblance of peace, with the one agreeing grudgingly to share every scrap of knowledge he gained during his instruction and training for knighthood, and the other agreeing to turn a blind eye to her tutoring, a promise she held her uncle to even some years later when he found her in the stable yards, bruised head to toe, but stubbornly learning how to ride and handle one of the huge warhorses.

Lady Isabella was openly horrified by the calluses on her niece’s hands and the whiplike leanness of a body that should have been growing round and soft and dainty. She scolded and clucked over torn hose and soiled tunics—patches of which were left clinging to trees and pallisades that had been climbed and conquered in the heat of a mock battle. She complained often to her husband, but Ariel had long since managed to wheedle her way into a special place in his heart and he could never quite stop the smile that lit his face each time he confronted her with one of her mischiefs. Moreover, in dangerous times and in dangerous surroundings, he saw no reason why a woman should not be proficient with a sword and bow, and had, on occasion, supplemented Henry’s instructions with a lesson or two of his own.

The countess, recognizing defeat when she saw it, had thrown up her hands in surrender and concentrated her efforts on grooming her own sweetly natured daughters to be the proper chatelaines and hostesses they were expected to be as Pembroke heiresses. Thus, at age eighteen, when most young women were long married or at the very least, betrothed, Ariel was still tilting at quintains with her cousins, scorning any and all advances by prospective suitors.

But because she was the niece of the Earl Marshal of England, and because there were a number of modest estates endowered to her through her mother’s will, there was no shortage of two-legged bloodhounds sniffing after her skirts. From the time she came of eligible age at twelve, there was a constant flow of knights, nobles, first sons, second sons passing under those same portcullis gates that had intimidated Ariel as a child. Some erstwhile swains sought only to ally themselves with the House of Pembroke. Some were more intent upon supplementing their holdings in Wales and could not have cared a whit if her teeth were black and her body bloated with suet. Ariel had sent them all riding out again, their ears pinned to their heads and, more often than not, stinging from the vehemence of her rejection.

The countess had despaired; the earl had supported his niece’s right to choose whom she would or would not marry, although he admittedly grew impatient at times with her various reasons for refusal. One had crossed eyes and breath that stank of dead rats. Another possessed narrow, greedy eyes. Yet another, she claimed, had pissed himself when she had drawn her dagger and offered to defend him from an attacking dog.

It should not have come as any surprise to hear of this stubbornness finally reaching the king’s ears, since many of those first and second sons would have whined straight to court with news of the insolence of a certain flame-haired heiress. It was also well within the royal right to contract unions between one powerful house and another, and to use such contracted marriages as a means of repaying debts the crown could not otherwise raise from its depleted coffers. The fact that there were not already writs of betrothal for each of the earl’s five daughters and five sons was solely due to King John’s reluctance to rouse the great lion’s wrath. William the Marshal, with his vast estates in Pembroke,