Read 1635: A Parcel of Rogues - eARC for Free Online Page B

greetin’ yer wame in ma lugs, forbye. And will ye bide readin’ an’ no mither me? F’puir auld Meg? So’s I can clean, here?”
    Mackay sighed. She’d a sharp tongue on her, but she spoke sense. Of the nurses he’d hired to mind him while he was waiting to be measured for his last overcoat, this one was the only one who’d not gotten on his nerves beyond all enduring. Largely by trying her damnedest to get on his nerves, as far as he could tell, which made a change from irritating servility or slovenly dullard idleness. And she’d a half-sister who was a grand nurse for the wee girl, and a fair portion of her family had served here in the Edinburgh house over the years. Her closest relative was one of the hostlers down in the mews, if Mackay recalled aright. Of course, it’d been years since he’d been anywhere near the stables. A carriage for long trips, a litter for short ones. And so much arse and elbow he tried to avoid it if he could.
    Which meant he was sat here, a fowl on the water for crap like his chief had sent him. Clan loyalties cut through Scots politics like fault lines, which was to say they only really mattered during quakes. Or if you were mining for something, which Reay definitely was. Oh, he could dress it up all he pleased, but he was after something that Charles Stuart would not like. Of course, what Charles Stuart did not like and what he could do anything about were two different things. The man hadn’t called a parliament in years. Mackay couldn’t recall precisely how long, but it couldn’t be much less than ten years. Without taxes and levies, the House of Stuart was governing from its prerogatives. For a certainty, something had come in from the deal with the French, but how much of that remained in the Stuart’s coffers was a vexed question. Not much, if the reports on his spending on all those mercenaries were right. And there was replacing the navy ships the French had gotten shot to pieces. That had to cost right enough, and a necessity since Stuart seemed dead set on offending the United States of Europe.
    “Something’s no’ so much shite, I reckon.”
    “Aye? And what’d ye ken, fishwifie?”
    “Och, fishwifie, is it, y’aud de’il? I ken ye’re grinnin’ like ye’ve been thievin’ frae bairns.”
    “Aye, just that that idiot Stuart—”
    “Papist—” Meg put in, as though she didn’t even notice she was doing it.
    “—who may have some papist sympathies or at least be willing to tolerate them—is fire and flame for making himself a nuisance to the USE—”
    “Papists.”
    “Aye? And wha’ wad oor wee fishwifie ken?”
    “They have a cardinal. Papists ha’ cardinals. This is aye weel known.”
    Mackay looked at her. He could tell when she was quoting the blithering idiot of a preacher at her dementedly independent kirk, because she lost her own accent and used his. And the blithering eejit claimed to be a good Scots presbyterian, like he knew any more of scripture than a hungry dog that’d ate a testament. “I’ll remind ye, Meg, that yon bampot ye set store by disnae ken good sense fra’ a pint o’ pish on the subject o’ European politics or any religion he cannae get fra’ the bottom o’ a bottle.”
    “Och, you tak’ that back, ye auld thief! The reverend is a pious man—”
    “Haud yer tongue!” Mackay bellowed. He’d had to learn to put up with a lot since he’d broken his back, compensations like the granddaughter his bastard son had presented him with notwithstanding. But he wasn’t listening to some rabble of a half-educated excuse for a minister described as a pious man when the nearest he got to piety was sobering up on Sundays, the better to rant a meager collection-plate out of an ignorant congregation of waiting-women and idlers. After hearing one too many quotes from the man, Mackay had made inquiries. The man was technically no more than a deacon putting on airs as a curate, for all he insisted he was a lecturer after