Much Ado In the Moonlight (3 page)

“Matchmaking,” Fulbert said with a snort, coming over to draw up his own chair. “I’m beginnin’ to think it isn’t a dignified occupation for a man of my stature.”

“Then find something else to do,” Ambrose said pointedly.

“I would, but you’d never manage any of these marriages without my aid and then where would I be?”

“Well—”

“Unraveling your disasters, that’s where I’d be,” Fulbert continued in a superior tone, retrieving his mug from its invisible storage place. “Now, who is it this time? The name escapes me . . .”

“You know very well who is coming.”

Fulbert took a deep pull of his ale. “I’ve been trying to forget.” He looked at Ambrose over the rim of his cup. “Go ahead. Spew out the name.”

“Victoria McKinnon, and do not dare disparage her.”

“Disparage her?” Fulbert echoed weakly. “I wouldn’t dare! But, by the saints, must we be involved with
that
particular McKinnon wench? I remember Mistress Victoria from young Gideon’s wedding to that granddaughter of yours, that Megan MacLeod McKinnon.” He shivered. “As if Megan wasn’t bad enough, wedding me nevvy and ruinin’ him for decent labor, now we’ve another of your descendants to be tormented by—”

“Don’t you talk about me wee granddaughter thusly!” a voice bellowed suddenly. Hugh McKinnon appeared, his face red, his sword grasped in his hand, the business end pointed toward Fulbert’s chest.

“I won’t say more about Megan,” Fulbert grumbled, “but that Victoria—”

“Do not malign her, either!” Hugh thundered. “She’s a spirited gel—”

“Hugh, she’s a bleedin’ garrison captain!” Fulbert exclaimed.

Hugh squirmed uncomfortably for a moment or two, then scrunched his face up in his most determined expression. “She’s . . . er . . .
focused
.”

Fulbert leaped to his feet, sending his chair toppling backward. He drew his sword with a flourish. “And
I
say she’s impossible! Spending her life trying to keep those flighty actors and dancers in proper form . . .” He snorted. “Foolishness. Damn me if I couldn’t wish for just one wench who’s for a bit of bloodshed—”

“I’ll give ye all the bloodshed ye want, ye pompous Brit!” Hugh vowed, giving Fulbert a healthy shove.

Fulbert took a firmer grip on his sword. “Whey-faced skirt-wearer.”

“Whey-faced,” Hugh echoed. “
Whey-faced!
”

They raised their swords as if they intended to do damage with them. Ambrose cursed. He was all for a bit of proper exercise when circumstances warranted, but now was not the time and the kitchen was not the place.

“Take it outside,” he bellowed.

Hugh hesitated in midswing; Fulbert paused before he cleaved Hugh’s skull in twain. They looked at each other, shrugged, then tromped out the door with word or two of pleasant conversation between them.

Soon there came the sound of a mighty battle from the back garden. Ambrose wanted to believe that would be the end of it, but he knew better. He began to count silently. He expected that he wouldn’t reach a score before the kitchen door would burst open—it did at ten-and-six—and a be-curlered, hastily garbed Mrs. Pruitt would come racing through the kitchen with her video camera at the ready—which she did, clutching her pink robe to her breast and nearly putting out an eye as she dashed across the wooden floor. She rushed out the back door.

Ambrose sighed as the sounds outside changed in tone. Bloodshed? Aye, there might be a bit, and not just Mrs. Pruitt tripping over garden implements.

Curses and screeches mingled outside. Ambrose tipped back in his chair, waiting for what was to come. The curses ceased abruptly and the screeching became the low murmuring of a woman who was reviewing her videotape and finding it completely lacking the kind of paranormal activity she had intended it to capture. Ambrose was unsurprised several minutes later when Mrs. Pruitt marched through the kitchen and cursed her equipment thoroughly as she continued on her way into the dining chamber.

Hugh and Fulbert came in not far behind her, with swords sheathed, and heads shaking.

“Parley with her,” Fulbert said to Ambrose.

Hugh nodded nervously in agreement.

Ambrose sighed. “I will. Soon. After this next bit of business is finished. I should have been preparing for that long before now, but the winter was quite pleasant in the Highlands—”

“It always is,” Hugh agreed wistfully.

“And I lingered when I should have labored. Now, I’ve much to do and little time in which to do it.” Ambrose took a long pull from his mug. “Fortunately, we know all we need to about the lad up the way.”

“Do we?” Fulbert mused. “I’m the first to choose interesting rumor over tedious fact, but I must ask meself how much of what we know about him is true.”

Hugh gaped at him. “What’s there to know?” he managed. “Connor MacDougal is unpleasant, impolite, and dangerous.” He looked at Ambrose. “
I
wonder why it is we’re sending such a sweet, delicate gel as my Victoria into that lion’s den.”

“Sweet?” Fulbert choked. “Delicate? Have ye gone mad—”

“Be that as it may,” Ambrose interrupted firmly, “’tis the match we’re determined to make. I daresay in the end, there will be several things we’ve misjudged about the pair. Well,” he added, “I daresay
I
will not be surprised, but others will no doubt be so. In the end, all will be well. Now, for the present, we’ll rely on rumor to guide us with regard to the laird up the way and I’ll be about a bit of digging into what our dear Victoria is combining. We’ll rendezvous here in a fortnight and make our plans.”

“That is ample time,” Fulbert agreed.

Ambrose frowned at him. “Ample time for you to remain hereabouts with Hugh and make no trouble.”

Fulbert opened his mouth to argue, which forced Ambrose to produce one of his fiercer scowls. Fulbert contented himself with muttering into his cup. Hugh looked ready to protest as well, but Ambrose cowed him with a similar look. Hugh folded his arms over his chest and stared into the fire with a scowl of his own.

Satisfied that his companions would remain where they had been instructed to, Ambrose bid them a firm good-night, dispensed with his chair and cup, then turned and walked out of the kitchen. He made his way through the dining chamber, through the entryway, and up to his own bedchamber, the one that always remained empty even when the rest of the inn was full and more guests wanted to stay. No one ever seemed to want to spend the night there in that bit of sixteenth-century splendor, though he couldn’t understand why not.

Well, whatever the reason, it gave him a place to rest and he suspected he would do well to be well-rested for what was to come. There was still much to do, many details to ferret out, and many plans to be laid which would need to go undetected by the man and woman in question.

There were games afoot, and he could scarce wait to be about the playing of them.

Something
foul was afoot and Victoria MacLeod McKinnon didn’t like the smell of it.

It wasn’t dinner; she was fairly certain of that. She sat at the beautifully distressed farm table in her brother’s equally beautiful house in Maine and enjoyed a supper of wonderful, if not overly healthy, delights designed to tempt the most discriminating palate. Victoria looked up from her dinner steaming on the table and admired Thomas’s dining room, overlooking as it did the Atlantic ocean in all its tumultuous glory. The smell of salt air seeping in through the kitchen skylight mingling with dinner should have left her refreshed and contented at the same time. The peaceful, tastefully decorated interiors should have soothed her. The thought of an entire weekend with nothing more to do than relax in such choice surroundings should have left her with her only regret being that she could not stay longer.

She sniffed.

There it was again. Something that said there was something quite rotten in Denmark.

As it were.

Victoria looked at the Brussels sprout on the end of her fork and suppressed the urge to shove it down her brother’s throat.

“I fail to see what is so funny,” she said, waving that particularly plump sprout threateningly at him.

Thomas, the cook, decorator, and benefactor extraordinaire, only shook his head, seemingly unable to stop smiling. “I just can’t help myself.”

Victoria pursed her lips. “You
offered
me your castle, if you remember,” she said pointedly. “You
gave
me money to pay for putting on my next play there. You
are
covering every expense associated with this production and not even demanding any part of the receipts in return. Why is it when we discuss any of it, you seem to suddenly be overcome by uncontrollable fits of giggles?”

“Your brother has spent too much time at high altitude,” her father said from where he sat next to her. “He’s damaged the appropriate humor sensor centers of his brain.”

“Oh, John, it isn’t that,” Victoria’s mother said with a laugh. “Thomas is just happy. He’s going to have a baby.”

“No, Mom,” Thomas said, reaching for his wife’s hand, “Iolanthe’s going to have a baby. I’m just the giddy father-to-be.”

Victoria submerged her sprout into as much cheese sauce as was available on her plate and ate it before she thought better of it.
Giddy
hardly described her brother and his bride, but
demented
described her own mental state at the time of the phone call she’d received inviting her up into her brother’s love nest. What had she been thinking, to say yes?

It was familial guilt, pure and simple. Her mother had invited; Victoria had capitulated. She’d been lured up to Maine on the pretext of having a little rest and relaxation before diving headfirst into her next production.
A restful weekend away from the rat race
was what her mother had termed it. Victoria had been suspicious, but she hadn’t seen her parents in a month and her brother in longer than that, so she’d given in and reluctantly accepted the invitation.

Unfortunately, a weekend spent in Thomas’s dream house, being forced to watch him be deliriously happy with his equally joyful and barely pregnant wife was, in her opinion, neither restful nor relaxing. She needed to be back in the city, where she could be the captain of her own ship, the mistress of her own fate, the cook at her own fire.

She hated Brussels sprouts, if anyone was interested.

They were Thomas’s doing; she knew that. He was on a health kick. Gone were the days when her brother divided his time among the various pursuits of making buckets of money, scaling dangerous mountains, and eating things full of saturated fat. In the place of that wild man was
Homo sapiens domesticus
, complete with apron and list of foods appropriate to fix a wife who was in the throes of violent morning sickness. How Brussels sprouts were supposed to help that, Victoria didn’t know. It was no doubt the least of the indignities Iolanthe MacLeod suffered in being married to Thomas McKinnon.

Though Iolanthe didn’t look unhappy. Victoria studied her sister-in-law from across the table and saw only a glowing but rather green beauty who seemed quite content to find herself shackled to a man who had once picked his nose onstage. Never mind that he’d been nine years old at the time. Victoria had written him off as an actor and never looked back.

Obviously, Iolanthe didn’t have the benefit of history to alert her to Thomas’s failings.

No, it was clear that the poor woman was suffering under the delusion that being married to Thomas McKinnon was a good thing. In fact, it was worse than that. Thomas and Iolanthe periodically shared glances that spoke of a truly deep and abiding love—as if they had overcome some great trial to be together.

Victoria snorted. The only trial they’d suffered was that Iolanthe had been unlucky enough to run into Thomas at his castle, where she had apparently taken complete and permanent leave of her senses and married him.

Leaving Victoria with the unhappy pleasure of watching them coo at each other like a pair of bilious pigeons.

Victoria turned away from the nauseating lovebirds and looked at her parents. Things were no less loving there, but considerably less mushy. Her mother looked serene. She was looking serenely at Iolanthe, who was holding her nose and waving away Thomas and the vegetables he was trying to foist off on her. Victoria hazarded a glance at her father. He was looking suspiciously at what was left of Thomas’s vegetables.

Victoria loved her father.

Not that she didn’t love her mother. She did. Helen MacLeod McKinnon was a lovely woman, supportive, enthusiastic, able to sit through very long dress rehearsals without shifting uncomfortably. But despite those virtues, Helen also possessed an abundance of what she termed “MacLeod magic.” Victoria called it like it was: woo-woo business. As far as she was concerned, those MacLeods could keep their second sight and knack for always being in the middle of odd happenings; Victoria would take her father’s solid, staid dependability over the unexpected any day.

“So tell me again what your plan is,” her father asked. “Point by point.”

Victoria gladly abandoned the rest of her sprouts to her father’s searching fork. “Lights and sound left two weeks ago. The costumes are being packed tomorrow. I’ll be back in Manhattan on Monday to make sure they get shipped off properly with the rest of the remaining gear. The actors are all quitting their restaurant jobs to get on the plane a week from Monday.”

“Restaurant jobs?” Thomas echoed. He choked, but apparently saved himself by means of a long drink of water.

Victoria briefly mourned a missed opportunity for just desserts, then decided it was for the best. Thomas was, after all, funding her. No sense in wishing too hard for his demise right away.

“Passports in order?” her father asked. “Actors with up-to-date shots?”

Helen laughed. “They’re humans, dear, not pets.”