Much Ado In the Moonlight by Lynn Kurland Read Free Book Online Page B

called cheerfully. “Murder! Mayhem!”
    All the men looked up. Some of them came quickly; others dawdled, as if they hoped to avoid some bit of unpleasant labor. Connor’s good humors departed abruptly.
    “Damn ye all to hell,” he snarled, “must I best ye all in the lists yet again to prove my worth?”
    They gathered around him, not as eagerly or as quickly as he would have liked, but they gathered. He made a note of those whose feet seemed to drag the most, then turned his mind to the matters immediately at hand.
    “A McKinnon lad is coming here to put on a play,” he announced.
    Many scratched their heads; others looked at him blankly.
    “We’re going to be under siege,” Connor clarified, irritated. By the saints, he needed to import more intelligent guardsmen. “Do not show yourselves until I give you leave. I’ll explain as we go.”
    The men gave him various nods of assent and shuffled off. Connor called for the men who had been the least enthusiastic about answering his call. They looked a bit green as they clustered together in front of him.
    “The lists,” he said, nodding to the place that at various and sundry times had served as a garden. “One by one. You may watch until your turn comes. Then perhaps you will not be so slow next time I bid you come.”
    He strode over with his afternoon’s entertainment trailing feebly behind him. He supposed he might have felt a little sorry for them, for they would certainly receive the brunt of his irritation with one Vee McKinnon.
    Damn the man, whoever he was.
    Evening had fallen and was fast turning into night before Connor finished instructing his recalcitrant guardsmen in their duties and could take himself off to do a bit of investigating. He made his way purposefully to the Boar’s Head Inn. It wasn’t a bad place, as far as inns went. If Connor had cared, he might have been pleased by the look of the place, its fine construction, and the lovely garden laid out to delight both the eye and the nose.
    But Connor did not care for such things. He wanted to know what he could expect and given that there wasn’t a soul in his keep who could match him in wit, it was obviously up to him to do all the scouting as well as all the thinking.
    He shunned the front door and went around to the kitchen. It was simply a fact of life; more interesting conversations happened near the stove than in the entryway.
    He had just rounded the corner of the building when he saw none other than Hugh McKinnon descending upon the place in a tearing hurry, clutching a cap bedecked with feathers to his head with one hand and struggling to carry an armful of gear with the other. He was swathed, head to toe, in a luxurious velvet cape of indeterminate color.
    Connor stared at him in horrified fascination.
    He certainly hadn’t had much experience with that sort of thing, but it looked to him as if Hugh had decided to become, in his undeath, a perpetrator of frolics. Connor knew he shouldn’t have been surprised.
    Hugh was, after all, a McKinnon.
    Connor waited until Hugh had gone inside, then walked to the kitchen door and peered in the window.
    Aye, the customary lads were there: Ambrose MacLeod, Hugh McKinnon, and Fulbert de Piaget. Connor knew them all, had bested them all at one time or another, and disliked them all quite thoroughly. Matchmaking busybodies. Could they not find a more serious work to do than meddling in the affairs of poor, hapless mortals who likely could have found love on their own?
    Connor put his ear to the door. When that failed to provide him with the access he desired, he put his ear through the door. That was better, but still unsatisfactory. Connor leaned his whole face into the kitchen, where he could both see and hear. The lads before him were far too involved in their own conversation to pay him any heed. He waited patiently, ready to hear things that would prepare him for what was to come.
    “Hugh,” Ambrose said in a garbled voice, “what