1635: A Parcel of Rogues - eARC Read Online Free PDF

one up the back of his shirt and rubbing his spine. “Heh,” he said, “keep doing that and I’m gonna start purring like a cat, see how manly that is. And didn’t Miz Mailey have somethin’ to say about liking what’s manly?”
    “A little. We talked about it a lot, actually. I quite like doing a lot of the woman’s work stuff, and don’t mind it so long as the man’s doing the man’s work. Fair, you see? She said she could see that, so long as it was me doing the choosing. And she said I’d been spoilt, what with most of the men in my family being hard workers, plenty of women didn’t get the choice, and to see how they’d like it if I’d wanted to follow a man’s trade. Well, I told her about my second cousin, Annabel, she’s quite a bit older than me, and she’s a journeyman wheelwright over by Cripplegate, and nobody much minds. Pays her livery dues and everything.”
    “That so? Well, whatever suits, long as its fair, I’m fine with it. You ever do any shooting?” He picked up his deer rifle and slipped the bolt he’d got nicely clean back into place. “Couldn’t rightly practice now while we’re guests and I reckon those kids in the farmhouse’ll be going to bed soon, but we could go over the care and feeding of these here.”
    “Maybe another time. I’ve fired muskets a time or two, and I’ve been along fowling with my dad on Hackney Marsh. For now, can we just sit and watch the sun go down? We’ve been scheming for weeks, running since the morning, and we’re probably going to be doing some hard traveling for a while yet, finding Master Cromwell’s children, poor man, and getting to Scotland. This might be the last comfy time we get, hey?”
    “Might at that,” Darryl said, putting the rifle back down, and packing away the oil bottles and tools into the wooden box he transported them in. “I guess there’s a time to relax, and if this ain’t it I don’t know when is.”
    Vicky answered with another nuzzle against his shoulder. “Until we can get a room of our own at some inn, hey?”
    Darryl chuckled. “Hope you looked around for Stephen before you said that, honey.”
    She scratched between his shoulder blades. “He likes you, silly. And it’s not like we can’t marry whenever we please. We don’t even have to do it in secret unless you’ve got people who’d object.”
    “Don’t we have to stop somewhere, marriage banns or something?” Darryl had a vague memory of hearing, probably in some old movie watched through the deadening fug of a hangover, about couples from England running away to Scotland to get married. A town just over the border, something Green, but he’d never taken the trouble to remember it. Girl stuff, basically.
    “Rita thought that too, when she had a little chat with me about you. Me and Mum set her straight. Don’t need a church at all, there’s some as says marriage isn’t even a sacrament. Of course, if we was to marry with just Stephen as a witness for the family I’d never hear the end of it. Although Mum did say if we couldn’t wait until everyone was together for the celebration, she’d understand. Not that I’m going to take her word for it, she’s got a mouth on her if she’s annoyed.”
    Darryl called up his mental file on Vicky’s mother Isabel and decided that he, too, would verge on the side of caution. The scary thing was, the woman didn’t look or act like a ravening monster most of the time, but Darryl had watched from the Tower’s inner walls one time while she took a couple of mercenary privates to task for disregarding the hygiene regulations Rita Simpson had drawn up. None of the Yeoman Warders had missed on them by so much as a thousandth of an inch—professionals all, with good reason to take Rita’s word for medical matters—but the mercenaries King Charles had dumped on them toward the end of their stay in the Tower had been a different story.
    The resulting explosion—no, detonation! brisance!—of