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Day One
Catrin
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Even with Catrin’s curiosity at its height, she was not immediately comfortable entering Moriddig’s wagon, much less going through his personal items. He would have hated to have her poking around in his things when he was alive. She wasn’t entirely sure he would have wanted her here even to catch his murderer.
That said, Catrin was by nature a nosy person. It wasn’t that she gossiped herself. Quite the opposite. She never told anyone but Rhys what she learned, and sometimes not even him. It wasn’t that she enjoyed seeing people falter either. It was more that, ever since she was a little girl, she wanted to know what was happening with the people around her. Given the fraught waters in which she swam, the acquisition of information could mean the difference between surviving and not.
When she was younger, she had endeavored to make herself invisible in order to eavesdrop. At times, she’d been too successful and overheard things she wished she hadn’t. These days, she tried to be more straightforward in her approach. To emphasize the degree to which she wasn’t doing anything wrong, she hooked the canvas door of Moriddig’s wagon open. Still, as she started in on Moriddig’s things, she prepared a little speech to give to Adam and/or Patrick if they came by, in order to explain her presence.
She had poked her nose into the castle kitchen before she started, just to check on their whereabouts. They had both looked well into their cups. At some point, they might leave off their drinking long enough to remember that Moriddig’s wagon (and thus, Patrick’s inheritance) was standing unattended in the bailey of the castle. Although the two men seemed in accord right now, Catrin wasn’t necessarily convinced that had always been the case. Adam had implied, at the very least, that there had been some friction between Moriddig and Patrick. She could believe there had been some between the two brothers as well.
These were questions that would need to be asked, but maybe not right now.
She went through every box; every basket; every drawer, working more slowly as time went on as she found nothing of note and she became less concerned about someone objecting. The more she worked, the more necessary she knew her activity to be. Bards were clever men for the most part, inventive too, always willing to try new sounds and new instruments. Moriddig had dozens of whistles, large and small, stringed instruments of all sizes, and multiple drums for keeping the beat. He was also literate so, like Gruffydd, he kept papers and ledgers filled with music and lyrics, some that he’d written himself, most that were part of the bardic tradition in Wales.
Unlike Gruffydd, Moriddig had liked his things ordered, so she made sure to put everything back where she’d found it, which wasn’t hard since she found nothing out of the ordinary.
Until she did.
She was just turning to leave when two unexpected events happened simultaneously. The first was that her foot touched the bottom of one of his trunks, and a drawer popped out. It was perhaps two inches high at most. But for her glancing touch, she would never have known it was there. And then, a young woman appeared at the back of the wagon and said in Welsh, “Excuse me!”
Catrin turned abruptly, plastering a smile onto her face, while at the same time pushing the drawer almost all the way closed. “May I help you?”
Every fiber of Catrin’s being wanted to know what was in that drawer, but it had to wait. The very fact that Moriddig had a secret drawer meant he had something he wanted kept hidden. She certainly wasn’t going to expose him to a stranger.
The woman was perhaps thirty years old, her hair wrapped in a white cap, a few blond tendrils hanging artfully down, and a sweet smile that might have been equally artful. “Is Moriddig really dead?”
Catrin suspected her own smile had suddenly become glassy. She forced a touch of sympathy into her voice. “Yes, I’m afraid he is.”
The woman’s face fell. “He was just so good with my Thomas.” She took a step to her right to reveal a boy of eight, who’d been hidden in her skirts.
“Hello, Thomas.” Catrin took another few steps herself, until she was at the end of the wagon, and then crouched down so she wasn’t looming over him. “Can you sing?”
The woman’s face lit as she answered for her son. “Like an angel. Moriddig said he was going to be a great bard one day.”
Catrin shook her head regretfully. “I don’t know what to tell you.”
“I had such hopes for my boy.”
“Perhaps Patrick could teach him. I’ve heard he’s good.”
The woman wrinkled her nose at the suggestion. “But not great.”
“We do have nearly a thousand bards here this week,” Catrin said even more gently. “You could look to one of them.”
The woman blinked. “I hadn’t thought of that!” All of a sudden, her demeanor transformed to one of determination. She turned away, herding her son ahead of her. Now that she had a new direction, she could dispense with Catrin.
“One more thing, if you will.” As much as Catrin would have liked to return to the drawer, she wouldn’t be doing her duty as an investigator if she did just yet. “When did you last encounter Moriddig?”
The woman turned back. “I saw him this morning.” Then she put a hand to her mouth, gasping around it. “Was that not long before he died?”
Catrin restrained herself from leaping at the woman. “Did you speak to him?”
“I wanted to, but didn’t dare approach.” Although the woman had been ready to leave, now she preened a bit to be able to relate her special knowledge. “I had hoped to bring Thomas for a lesson, since Moriddig had left the castle before we could speak about it. I went to his wagon where it was parked at the festival grounds. He and another person, a woman, were arguing inside. I overheard the woman say, How could you do this? Her voice was quite loud, louder than Moriddig’s reply, which I didn’t hear properly. Then she said, Who do you think you are? and You have no right!”
“Did you recognize her voice? Did she speak in French, English, or Welsh?”
“French. I may be exaggerating how loud she was, though. I could make out what she was saying, but her actual voice was a bit muffled.” She had the grace to look a little sheepish. “I left because I decided it would be better not to interrupt. Moriddig had already told me he would resume the lessons after the festival. I had just been hoping for sooner. It makes such a difference to know that he might have made Thomas an apprentice once his son was inducted as a full bard. That was to happen within the next year. To tell the truth, I was concerned that Moriddig would encounter a more promising candidate at the festival, one who was older and already established.” The woman’s shoulders fell. “And now it no longer matters.”
“I wish you the best. I am sorry for your loss.”
Despondent again, the woman turned away, her hand on her son’s head. He hadn’t spoken a word throughout, and Catrin had no idea if the mother’s notion about his potential was accurate or not. She appeared ambitious enough for Catrin to believe she could make her son a bard by sheer force of will. Catrin also believed what she’d said about the argument. She stood to gain nothing from the story, and thus had no reason to lie, even for a bit of attention.
Unfortunately, that Moriddig and a woman had conversed in French wasn’t immediately helpful. Many people here spoke multiple languages. Catrin had heard all three—French, English, and Welsh—in the castle since she arrived. It was also rare for a woman to murder, and even rarer for her to do it by a means as personal and physical as strangling. Although Moriddig was a small man, he still wouldn’t have been easy for a woman to overpower, and the bruises around his neck indicated largish hands.
Then Catrin remembered the drawer, which had slid out a few inches again, once she’d stopped holding it closed. Pulling it out all the way revealed another collection of papers, stacked in two piles and written in a neat hand Catrin had come to recognize as Moriddig’s. Beside these piles was a bag of silver coins.
Each, in its own way, represented a small fortune.
Sitting on the floor with a stack of papers in her lap, Catrin read poem after poem lamenting the loss of Wales and expressing a hatred of the English that might actually exceed Catrin’s own. One ballad even expressed disdain for Owen, Moriddig’s lord.
These writings were objectively more flammable than Gruffydd’s poem, both in content and in quantity.
When Gruffydd had told her about Moriddig’s true self, she hadn’t necessarily believed him. But just as he had promised, Moriddig had been a secret combrogi all along.
