Much Ado In the Moonlight (6 page)

“It means nothing,” Connor said, suffering a brief but unsettling moment of unease.

“Doesn’t it?” Roderick mused. “Well, I suppose we’ll see when they arrive at the keep. Ah, look you there. Here comes someone now.”

Connor looked down the way and up the road to find a lone man walking toward the castle.

“Bloody hell,” he said, scratching his head. Then he remembered himself and his position. “Not to worry. ’Tis but a tourist.”

“Let’s go see, shall we?” Roderick suggested. “We’ll collect the new candidate for your captainship whilst we’re about it. Oh, look at all the men lining up for the pleasure.”

Connor looked to where Roderick was pointing. Well, men were certainly scurrying about, but it was hard to tell if they were trying to get in line, or out of it.

He gave Roderick a shove off the parapet, just on principle, then made his way in a more dignified fashion down the stairs to the floor of the bailey. Roderick was cursing him fluently as he dusted himself off, but Connor ignored him. He had more important things to see to.

Mainly, the man coming inside the gates, gaping like a slack-jawed fool who had never been farther from his cooking fire than his village green.

“Well, this one looks to be impressed by our idyllic little pile of stones, doesn’t he?” Roderick remarked.

Connor grunted, then took up a position in the middle of the bailey. He folded his arms over his chest and watched as the man took a lengthy tour of the castle, still wearing that look of amazement.

Not a tourist, Connor noted without hesitation. No sketchpad, no
National Trust Handbook
with sights to be seen marked in red, no video camera ready to capture Thorpewold at its best. Who, then, was this simpleton who couldn’t seem to shut his mouth as he stared at everything around him?

The man looked nothing like Thomas McKinnon, so Connor thought he might be safe on that score. To be sure, no McKinnon Connor had ever known would have been caught sitting down on a rock and staring off into space as if all his wits had suddenly vacated his poor head.

Then the man leaped up and began to pace.

Connor glanced at the men gathered in the bailey. To a soul, they looked as baffled as he felt. They stood in huddles well away from the madman as he walked, stopped, counted, then walked some more. He made little writings in a notebook he produced from a pocket on his shirt.

Connor watched with growing alarm as the man continued to perpetrate his unfathomable activity. What did it all mean? Striding here and there, scribbling, muttering, holding his hands up as if he framed bits of the castle between his fingers? Indeed, he even managed a chortle or two, as if his discoveries were so delightful, he couldn’t stop himself from letting everyone within earshot know of them. By all the saints above, what was this man about?

Connor wondered.

He didn’t care to wonder overmuch, actually. He wanted peace and quiet, not a mortal cluttering up the inner bailey and distracting his men with his antics.

The man finally ceased his strange and unfathomable behavior. He gathered up the sheaves of paper he’d scribbled on and made his way out the front gates. Connor looked after him, then slowly turned back to the bailey.

A single sheaf lay there, discarded.

Connor felt doom descend.

He strode over to it and looked down. It galled him to the very depths of his soul to admit it, but he could not make out the scrawls scribbled there. He should have learned to read. He’d had the opportunity, a year or so ago. Many men in the keep had submitted to lessons from another of their kind trying to master the skill, but Connor had kept himself aloof, feeling it too far beneath him to engage in such foolishness.

Now, he wondered if he might have been the foolish one.

He looked unwillingly at Roderick, who stood next to him, waiting patiently.

“Well, damn you,” Connor snapped, “what are you waiting for?”

“An invitation?”

“You’ll have a skewering—”

“I can’t read if I can’t breathe,” Roderick said pleasantly. He leaned over and peered at the paper. “It says, ‘
Hamlet,
produced by V. McKinnon.’”

Connor only heard
McKinnon
.

He roared.

“Oh, do be quiet,” Roderick complained. “You don’t know that it’s one of
those
McKinnons.”

Connor unclenched his jaw. Roderick had it aright. There was no sense in aggravating himself without cause. “What means the rest?” he said, gesturing impatiently toward the ground.

“
Hamlet
is a play by William Shakespeare. Do you know him?”

“I’ve no stomach for jongleurs,” Connor said shortly.

Roderick smiled dryly. “You might find this play quite to your liking. There is a great amount of death involved, some revenge, and a good haunting or two.”

Connor refused to be distracted by those enticing thoughts. “I’m certain I would find it deadly dull,” he muttered. “Now, what is this Vee McKinnon business? What does that mean?”

Roderick shrugged. “Produced means ‘put on by,’ so I daresay this McKinnon fellow intends to mount a stage play here in our own humble home.”

“Never,” Connor vowed. “Not while I have means to stop it.”

“If you can survive Thomas remodeling the corner tower last year,” Roderick began, “you could certainly survive—”

“I will not have another McKinnon in my hall,” Connor said curtly. “Not even if he isn’t kin of Thomas McKinnon’s. I will make the life of this new one a misery. Indeed, I will make him sorely regret his intentions before he even sets foot inside the gates. Or perhaps I will wait until he comes inside the gates, then not allow him to leave, giving me ample time to torment him as I will.”

He paused and contemplated the possibilities, finding that just thinking on them made him feel warm and contented inside.

“Lads, to me!” he 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 are you wearing?”

Fulbert made accompanying sounds of horror. Connor had to agree, but he refrained from comment.

Hugh doffed a purple velvet cap and made the other two a low bow. “Theater gear.” He drew his sword with a flourish, but it became caught in his cape, flipped into the air with a bit of aid from its hapless wielder, then dove point-down against the floor, where it collapsed into itself. “’Tis meant to do that, that sword,” he said quickly. “You know, it isn’t as if those players can go about stabbing each other truly, can they now—”

“And how would you know any of that?” Ambrose asked suspiciously.

“Well, I had a day or two of leisure and though I was first for France, I soon felt the pull of the apple.”

“The apple?” Fulbert echoed.

“The Big Apple,” Hugh said, staring off into the distance with a dreamy expression on his face. “Broadway. Central Park. Those loudly braying cabbies in their swift-moving yellow automobiles . . .”

Connor wondered if Hugh had lost his mind. Apples? Cabbies?

“Do you mean to tell me that you actually ventured into New York City?” Ambrose demanded.

Hugh stuck his chin out. “I thought it best to do a bit of investigating before the troupe arrives.” He dragged up a chair of his own and struggled to get himself, his cape, his sword, and sundry other props including wigs, rather authentic looking Elizabethan scientific instruments, and a lute, into his seat. He failed. His gear clattered in a heap about him.

Ambrose hissed him to silence. “Will you wake the entire household?”

Hugh scowled. “I came prepared. I see nothing in your hands to further our plan.”

Ambrose tapped his head meaningfully. “It all resides in here, my good man. I’ve spent hours ferreting out secrets, learning important details, discovering—”

“The play being done?” Hugh asked archly.

Connor almost blurted out the name, but stopped himself just in time. It wouldn’t do to let on to his eavesdropping self.

“Hamlet,”
Fulbert supplied.

“And how do
you
know that?” Ambrose demanded.

“I eavesdropped.”

Connor shrugged to himself. He wasn’t above it; he couldn’t fault Fulbert for the same thing.

“Where?” Ambrose asked. “Where did you go to eavesdrop?”

“In London,” Fulbert said. “Went to make certain that young Megan MacLeod McKinnon—”

“De Piaget,” Hugh added.

Fulbert cursed at him, then continued. “I took meself to London to see that that McKinnon gel who wed with me nevvy wasn’t keepin’ him from doing a proper day’s labor. For as ye know, me nevvy Gideon de Piaget is the powerful and quite capable head of a vast international conglomerate.”

“And I take it you left my sweet granddaughter Megan—several generations removed, of course—untroubled?” Ambrose demanded.

Fulbert shrugged. “Untroubled enough, I suppose. She only screeched once, but that wasn’t
my
fault.”

Connor reached a hand inside the door to stroke his chin thoughtfully. Unrepentantly causing mortal screeching? Perhaps he had judged Fulbert too harshly. ’Twas possible he might have overlooked a lad with his own sentiments on the living—

Hugh glared at Fulbert. “She screeched? You forced such a sound from Thomas’s sweet sister?”

“Only once.”

“Did you show yourself to her?” Ambrose asked sharply.

Fulbert scowled. “She’s seen me ’afore and knows me well. But as I was sayin’, she was about some new beauty treatment and when I saw her with her face all a’slathered with green goo, well, can ye blame me for a screech of my own?”

Connor frowned. ’Twas one thing to wrest a scream from a mortal; ’twas another thing entirely to give vent to one oneself. Perhaps he
hadn’t
judged Fulbert too quickly. Obviously, those de Piaget lads possessed the weak spines he’d always suspected they did.

“Anyhow,” Fulbert continued, “I heard her sayin’ that
Hamlet
was the play being done up the way this summer and that gear had already been sent ahead in preparation.”