13 - The Midsummer Rose Read Free

underfoot. Above the boots, a stout pair of legs were shrouded in thick frieze breeches such as seafaring men wear. I dared raise my eyelids no further for fear of revealing that I was awake, but the two hands dangling loosely by the man’s side were as big as shovels, and one had a ship pricked out in woad on the back of it, with the word Clontarf underneath.
    ‘C–Captain Malahide?’ stammered the woman who had let me in. ‘But … but we thought …’
    ‘What did you think?’ The seaman was growing uneasy. I could hear it in his voice and could see it in the sudden shuffle of his feet on the dusty floor. At that point he must have noticed me for the first time. ‘Who’s this?’ he demanded suspiciously.
    I decided the moment had come to put the cat among the pigeons. It didn’t take much brainpower to work out the situation, even when that brain felt as though it had been pounded to a pulp. I dragged myself up on to one elbow.
    I heard someone curse, but whether a man or a woman I couldn’t be certain: I was too busy trying to steady my swimming senses. I must have moved too quickly, or was weaker than I had thought. Whatever the reason, the room was revolving dizzily about me. But my powers of speech were still strong.
    Fighting down a rising tide of nausea, I said as loudly and distinctly as I could, ‘I’m just a poor pedlar who sought shelter here from the storm. Instead, I was knocked over the head with my own cudgel and my murder planned while these villains thought I was still unconscious.’
    ‘But why?’
    ‘Isn’t it obvious?’ I demanded. ‘Use your common sense, man! They thought I was you!’
    I was prepared for my seafarer to have some difficulty in working out the implications of this remark, but he didn’t. Something he knew that they knew – or maybe guessed that they had guessed – made him accept my accusation without a second’s hesitation. He gave a roar of anger and drew a wicked-looking knife from the sheath attached to his belt. He didn’t falter for even a second, but went straight for the second woman in the blue brocade dress who, I now realized, had stationed herself just inside the parlour door. His intention was clear, and I desperately struggled to my feet in order to prevent murder being done. But I was too late – except that it was not the murder I had expected. It was the seaman who fell, stabbed to the heart by the expertly wielded short-handled, long-bladed dagger produced in a flash from the folds of the woman’s blue skirt. Eamonn Malahide, if that were indeed his real name, dropped with nothing more than a grunt and was patently dead even before he hit the floor.
    At the same time, I saw the first woman stoop and pick up my cudgel again. I divined her purpose without much effort and made a further frantic attempt to get to my feet. But it was hopeless. My knees buckled under me and I was violently sick just a moment before she dealt me another stunning blow to the back of my head, on almost exactly the same spot as before. For the second time that morning, I was knocked unconscious.
    I moved uneasily in and out of a nightmare in which I was being pursued along a river bank by a whole posse of women, all of whom were brandishing knives and intent on murdering me.
    The third time I recovered my senses, I was vaguely aware of being jolted across the rocky foreshore of the Avon, slung like an unwanted sack of flour between two people. My head and shoulders were being supported by someone I couldn’t see. But the blue brocade dress, which I could glimpse from the waist down, was immediately familiar to me as the gown of the unheard other woman who had the murderous ability to wield a knife as well as any man. The skirt had been hitched up indecently high to reveal the occasional sight of a thin, but well muscled leg in a yellow silk stocking with a garter of fine buckled leather.
    The lower half of my body was in the tender care of my attacker. She was grumbling