Priest of Bones by Peter McLean

Author:Peter McLean
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2018-10-01T16:00:00+00:00

TWENTY-THREE

When we got back to the Tanner’s Arms my aunt was waiting for me, sitting in the common room with a mug of beer in her hand. She had the same look on her face that she had always got when I had been a child who was about to get a switching.

“Aunt Enaid, what a pleasure,” I said.

Brak was standing behind her chair like a bodyguard, and his expression said he felt somewhere between proud and foolish to be doing it. I hadn’t seen him since Enaid had got her house back, and I could only wonder what old stories she had been filling his head with of an evening.

“Come and sit down, Tomas, and talk to your fat old aunt,” she said, and it wasn’t so much an invitation as an order.

I did as she said, while Bloody Anne disappeared into the back to put her weapons away.

“How are you, Auntie?” I asked her. “I hope the house is adequate.”

“My house is fine and never mind that,” she said, fixing me with a glare from her one bright eye. She lowered her voice and leaned forward across the table toward me. “Who is that tart behind our bar, and where the fuck did she come from?”

I cleared my throat and offered up a silent prayer to Our Lady that Ailsa’s hearing wasn’t good enough to catch Enaid’s words.

“Ailsa is a barmaid, not a tart,” I said. “She’s working here, and she’s doing a good job.”

“That’s not all she’s doing, to hear your men talk,” Enaid said.

She grabbed her crotch for emphasis in a way that immediately reminded me that she had been a soldier herself. All the same, that wasn’t what I wanted to see from my own aging aunt.

“Men talk,” I said, trying to shrug it off. “What of it?”

“I’m disappointed in you, Tomas Piety,” she said. “I thought perhaps you and Anne, yes, but this? You and some foreign tart off the tea ships?”

“She’s not a tart,” I said again, starting to get angry with her now, “and she’s not off the tea ships. And you thought it would be Anne? No, Auntie. Never Anne.”

“If you can’t see past a scar, then I raised you wrong, Tomas,” she growled at me. “Anne’s a good woman, I can see that.”

“Aye, she is,” I agreed, “and she’s a good friend too. Anne doesn’t enjoy male company, Auntie, not in that way.”

Aunt Enaid looked at me for a moment, then turned and spat on the floor.

“Bugger,” she said.

“The fuck is it to you, anyway?”

“I know how strange women can get to a man,” she said. “I don’t want that one whispering ideas into your ear on the pillow at night and making you soft in the head.”

My head had never been on the same pillow as Ailsa’s, but as I watched her serving drinks and moving among the men I had to admit to myself that I wished it had. There was something about her that fascinated me, and it wasn’t just her looks.

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