Plaid to the Bone Read Online Free PDF Page B

seem impressed. She stared straight ahead most of the time or fidgeted with her goblet without actually drinking much from it.
    Not the actions of a happy bride. Farquhar puzzled over this while he absorbed as many of the conversations going on around him as possible. Surprisingly enough, the same folk who’d pelted him with offal when his ear had been nailed to the pillory were chatty and gregarious now that he’d been pardoned by their laird. Only Mr. Shaw, the steward, kept sending fiery darts his way in the form of glares and frowns.
    Farquhar fiddled with the piece of twine he’d run through the hole in the upper flange of his ear. He’d decided to keep it open until he could afford to fill it with a truly garish ring.
    That should irritate Shaw even further, he thought with a smile. And make me look like an old pirate in the process!
    “I’m impressed the castle’s kitchens were able to put together a feast like this to honor the new lady on such short notice,” Farquhar said to the beefy man-at-arms on his right.
    The man grunted. “’Tis no feast. Our laird is a man of liberality and insists the folk of the castle eat well every day. A man attached to Bonniebroch will ne’er feel his stomach knocking on his backbone. That’s for sure. More bread?”
    Farquhar accepted the basket filled with bannocks and secreted a couple in his sporran, just in case the man was exaggerating about the laird’s generosity.
    One thing Lord Bonniebroch wasn’t sharing was that wine. And Farquhar had a weakness for the fruit of the vine that bordered on sickness. Ale was all well and good, and would do in a pinch, but there was nothing like a fine vintage to make a man feel utterly civilized and slightly superior to the rest of the world while he drank himself into a stupor.
    He’d been given the run of the place. While everyone else was eating their fill in the Great Hall, what was to stop Farquhar from doing a bit of reconnoitering? Who knew? He might accidentally discover the whereabouts of the rest of the laird’s stock of Rheinish.
    When a young boy started wheezing a particularly unmelodious tune on a set of pipes, Farquhar decided absolutely nothing was stopping him.
    He rose and slipped out of the Great Hall without exciting any notice.
    Sometimes there was enough moonlight fingering its way through the arrow loops to see the chambers he passed through, but when he came upon a torch sputtering in a wall sconce, he liberated it. The smell of burning pitch assaulted his nostrils, but it was better than groping in the semidarkness.
    Finally, he spied a set of stairs leading downward and decided to take them. A wine cellar would undoubtedly be below ground. Someplace cool and dark and vaguely mushroom-ish. With any luck, perhaps he’d discover the cool larder as well, where wheels of cheese might be aging. He’d cut himself a nice little sliver of fromage to go with the bottle of Rheinish he intended to pilfer.
    With such felonious thoughts to keep him company, he was a little aghast when he stumbled into a room that could only be the dungeon. Three barred cells opened off the main chamber. Thankfully, they all seemed to be empty. The air was musty and still as though the place hadn’t seen much use for a long time, but a note of rusting iron and ancient misery crept into him with each breath.
    There were a number of evil-looking devices spread about the space—a gibbet that was mercifully unoccupied in the corner, a cold hearth that had probably heated its share of hot pincers, and an assortment of manacles still affixed to the stone walls. The one thing that surprised him was a long looking glass suspended from the heavily beamed ceiling in the center of the chamber.
    Something about it made the hair on his scalp prickle. He approached it with caution, trying to walk on the balls of his feet, making as little noise as possible. The silvered glass was age-spotted. Another surprise. Making a mirror by affixing a thin