Drums of Autumn - Diana Gabaldon [314]
Ian had taken her purse to pay for her passage, but she had two or three loose coins; she held one up and waved it to and fro. The bridie seller spotted the flash of silver and at once altered course, tacking through the chattering mob. She hove to in front of Brianna and reached up to snatch the coin.
“Mary save us, a giantess!” she said, showing strong yellow teeth in a grin as she tilted her head back to look up at Brianna. “Ye’d best take twa, my dearie. One will never do a great lass like you!”
Heads turned, and faces grinned up at her. She stood half a head higher than most of the men nearby. Mildly embarrassed by the attention, Brianna gave the nearest offender a cold look. This seemed to entertain the young man quite a lot; he staggered back against his friend, clutching his breast and pretending to be overcome.
“My God!” he said. “She looked at me! I’m heartstruck!”
“Och, awa’ wi’ ye,” his friend scoffed, shoving him upright. “ ’Twas me she was looking at; who’d look at you if they’d a choice?”
“Nothing of the sort,” his friend protested stoutly. “It was me—wasn’t it, darlin’?” He languished, making calf’s eyes at Brianna and looking so ridiculous that she laughed, along with the crowd around her.
“And what would ye be doing with her, if ye got her, eh? She’d make two of ye. Now, off wi’ ye, spawn,” the bridie seller said, casually smacking the young man across the buttocks with her wooden spatula. “I’ve business, if you haven’t. And the young woman will starve if ye dinna leave off playin’ the fool and let her buy her dinner, aye?”
“She looks in fine flesh to me, grannie.” Brianna’s admirer, ignoring both assault and admonition, ogled her shamelessly. “And as for the rest—fetch me a ladder, Bobby, I’m no afraid of heights!”
Amid gales of laughter, the young man was dragged away by his friends, making loud kissing noises over his shoulder as he moved reluctantly off. Brianna took her change in coppers and retired into a corner to eat two of the hot beef pasties, her face still warm with laughter and self-consciousness.
She hadn’t been so aware of her height since she had been a gawky seventh-grader, towering over all her classmates. Among her tall cousins, she had felt at home, but it was true; here she stuck out like a sore thumb, despite her having abided by Jenny’s insistence and changed from her men’s clothes to a dress of her cousin Janet’s, hastily altered and let out in the seams.
Her sense of self-consciousness was not helped by the fact that no underclothes went with the dress, beyond a shift. No one seemed to find any lack in this state of affairs, but she was intensely conscious of the unaccustomed feeling of airiness about her nether parts, and the odd feeling of her naked thighs sliding past each other as she walked, her silk stockings gartered just above the knee.
Both self-consciousness and drafts were forgotten as she bit into the first hot pastry. A bridie was a plump hot pie in a half-moon shape, filled with minced steak and suet and spiced with onion. A rush of hot, rich juice and flaky pastry filled her mouth, and she closed her eyes in bliss.
“The food was either terribly bad or terribly good,” Claire had said, describing her adventures in the past. “That’s because there’s no way of keeping things; anything you eat has either been salted or preserved in lard, if it isn’t half rancid—or else it’s fresh off the hoof or out of the garden, in which case it can be bloody marvelous.”
The bridie was bloody marvelous, Brianna decided, even if it did keep dropping crumbs down the top of her bodice. She brushed at her bosom, trying to be unobtrusive, but the crowd’s attention had turned—no one was looking at her now.
Or almost no one. A slight, fair man in a shabby coat had materialized by her elbow, making small nervous movements as though he wanted to pluck her sleeve but hadn’t quite