Free Sing Me Home by Lisa Ann Verge Page A

bee stings. Clean-shaven faces, close-cropped hair. No multicolored cloaks here. No flowing mustaches, no braided culans hanging over the men’s shoulders. Beyond the flax of the alehouse thatch, he glimpsed the stone cylinder of the castle—the forbidding spike the English had planted in Irish ground to claim it as their own.
    When he was last here, Tuam had been only a summer ring fort, a small mound of earth used by the O’Manns for hunting in the nearby woods. Now it was full of Englishmen—Englishmen and at least one treacherous Irishman by the name of O’Kelly who’d passed the troupe on the road, riding proud on his palfrey, his long mustache flowing, heading straight to that English castle.
    Tonight, Colin thought grimly, he would remind O’Kelly of his treachery.
    And so it all would begin.
    Colin snapped the scarf by a corner, then balled his hand and tucked the end in the tunnel formed by his fist. His gaze gravitated to a woman whose eyes began to glitter with knowing amusement.
    “Good day to you, my lady.” He mimicked a courtly bow. “Would you be so kind as to assist me?”
    She agreed with a lazy smile. He shoved the scarf into his fisted grip and asked her to poke it in tighter. She did, with a sturdy finger, taking her time with the ins and outs of the task, while bawdy comments flew around them.
    “Faith,” he said, addressing the crowd, “I’m usually the one doing the poking.”
    The words fell from his lips by rote, though he knew by the laughter that the joke had worked easily. He’d made the same joke a thousand times before, in French, English, and Langue d’Oc. He’d performed the same tricks and rolled with the same sort of woman in patches of spring clover in valleys all across Europe.
    He leaned into the woman as she finished. “Did that satisfy you as much as it did me?”
    She pursed her lips, as if still deciding. Then he raised his clenched hand and muttered a few words of Latin— veni vidi vici —then held his fist out to the wench again.
    “Time to yank it out, my lady.”
    The woman pinched the tip of the scarf between her thumb and forefinger and then tugged at it with languorous slowness. He released a grunt of relief as the knotted end popped out.
    “Lady,” he muttered, “don’t stop now.”
    She continued to pull, and out of his fist came another scarf, knotted to the first, a gossamer thing the shade of peaches in summer. The crowd gasped, and even the lady took enough time out of seducing him with her eyes to raise a brow as a succession of bright silk scarfs slipped out of his fist. Colin let his grin widen and made comments about the length of it, all the while wondering in the back of his mind why the sight of such a pretty, willing woman left his cock limp.
    When the last scarf fell out of his fist, the crowd applauded and Maguire, on cue, popped into Colin’s place. The little man gathered farthings into his hat even as he started telling a tale about an itinerant priest and the peddler’s daughter. Colin backed out of the clearing, avoiding the woman’s seeking eye, and ducked into the alehouse. He came out of the other side into the brightness of day.
    One sweep of the streets and he glimpsed what he hadn’t expected to see—a white coif, pure and clean. Maura, standing in the shade of the blacksmith’s shop.
    Colin’s gut tightened. Maura should be safe at the camp, not wandering around this English town alone. She wore her kitchen-servant garments, not the bells and rouge and silks of a minstrel’s trade. As he watched, three burly apprentices pressed close around her. He shot across the cobbles and without a pardon muscled himself between the men.
    “There you are, Abbess.” Colin draped an arm across her shoulders as he turned to eye the apprentices. “Angling to get me in a fight with a blacksmith?”
    She blinked up at him in surprise. By God’s Nails, the wench didn’t even know that three men were closing in around her, three