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Day Five
Rhys
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Rhys couldn’t help but feel a profound sense of failure. If he had caught the murderer, the castle might still be standing. Another day of wandering the festival without a culprit for these crimes might result in Rhys being out of his position as quaestor.
Maybe that would be a good thing. Certainly it would make his life more predictable. But, if he was being honest with himself, he wouldn’t want to serve the king without this additional burden. When he feared he’d lost the king’s favor at Vale Royal Abbey, he had considered leaving his service. Part of him wanted to run away every single day.
And yet, he couldn’t pretend that the world wasn’t as it was. In so many places in Wales, his people were exposed and unprotected. Before his death, Llywelyn had written to the Archbishop of Canterbury about the way the king’s officers had reduced his people to servitude. Rhys couldn’t be everywhere at once, but wherever he was, he could stand between his people and the king. In that way, he was serving Llywelyn once again, carrying on his legacy the best way he knew how.
To do so, he needed to be a trusted member of the king’s court, which meant he needed to solve these crimes, the sooner the better.
While he’d been speaking to Roger at the inn, he’d been thinking that he needed something dramatic to happen. He’d wanted to take this investigation by the shoulders and shake it to see what fell out of its pockets. The fire had fulfilled his wish for change, in a most dramatic fashion.
“Tell me again what you saw,” Rhys said to Math as they approached the laying-out room. Up until a half-hour ago, Math had been with the king because he had suddenly become a favorite. Rhys would find out later how Math was taking that elevation in station.
Once the fire was out, Rhys had found Catrin sitting on a log, filthy and wet. For once, Rhys had used his husbandly authority, which he employed as rarely as possible, to send her for a bath and to bed.
After hours of fighting the fire, they’d been saved by a rainstorm that blew in as dawn approached. Everything was blackened with ash and wet with rain, including Rhys and Math. In the end they’d saved most of the buildings on the other side of the bailey from the laying out room, including the hall, the kitchen, and the barracks.
“I was standing near the inner gatehouse when one of its guards and I smelled the smoke and then saw flames coming from here.”
Rhys hesitated at the entrance to the building, feeling a bit of heat still coming off some of the larger timbers. The roof had been built with sturdy beams that were blackened and charred but had not collapsed. The thatch was totally gone, as were most of the wooden planks that had made up the walls. Then he ducked under the still-intact lintel, absent an actual door, and came to a halt by the remains of Hugh’s body.
Hugh was to have been buried at noon today, during a break in the festival proceedings, so the maximum number of people could attend. Now, Rhys honestly didn’t know what was going to happen.
The body had been lying on a spindly table, which had effectively vanished. Even Hugh’s remains were barely that, burned beyond recognition. Crouching to the floor, for a long moment Rhys couldn’t find anything to say. He didn’t know that he had ever seen anything this horrible. The fire had burned off Hugh’s skin and fatty tissues, exposing the muscles and bones beneath, and the body had deformed until it looked as if Hugh was holding his hands in front of him, ready to defend himself. It was the stuff of nightmares.
Finally, he managed, “He’s unrecognizable. He could be anyone.”
“Don’t we have enough intrigue without you inventing more?” Math said from the doorway.
Rhys was grateful for Math’s retreat to the sardonic. “That’s a very Simon thing to say.”
Math even managed something of a guffaw. “I can think like a Norman when I want to. In this case, all I have to do is think like me. Are you really worried the body isn’t Hugh’s?”
Rhys’s hands were so filthy he didn’t hesitate to sift through the ashes around the corpse. He didn’t know what he was looking for but also wasn’t surprised when he came up with the blade of a knife, still in its charred leather sheath, and a ring, since Mary had wanted Hugh buried with both.
He turned slightly to show them to Math. “Not anymore. But I have to wonder what else might have been on or about the body the killer didn’t want us to see.”
“Something like the mark on Moriddig’s neck?”
Rhys pushed to his feet, now looking directly down at the remains. “Maybe I missed something in my examination. Maybe the fact that I had to pick coins out of the wound distracted me from seeing more clearly.”
“If the killer had wanted the coins, he shouldn’t have poured them over the body.” Math was back to his dark humor. “I could be wrong, too, about the fire being set deliberately.”
“It was set deliberately.” Simon had arrived, and Math made room for him in the doorway.
Glancing over, Rhys noted neither had entered. “It is unlike you to be squeamish.”
“I’m not squeamish,” Simon protested. “I just bathed.”
“And I am untrustworthy at this point, same as you, Rhys,” Math said. When both men turned to look at him, he added more to Simon than to Rhys, “Rhys has been awake longer than I, and I am seeing double. If I took part, I’d likely tread on valuable evidence without knowing it.”
Rhys was exhausted and had been struggling to push through it. He was also covered in wet soot from head to toe. He hadn’t ever looked worse except after battle.
“Do you see anything that will help us find who did this?” Now Owen de la Pole appeared too, though he kept even further back, despite being more soot-covered than Rhys. He’d come with another man whom he introduced after Simon and Math backed out of the doorway. “This is my woodsman, Emyr.”
By the name, the man was Welsh, and when he spoke, it was in French with a thick Welsh accent. “I was just delivering a last supply of wood to the kitchen, so they’d have enough to start the morning, when I heard the shout in the bailey. Like everyone else, I ran towards the fire, which had just burst through the roof here.” His eyes went to Hugh’s corpse. “He was wrapped in linen, wasn’t he, in preparation for burial?”
Rhys returned his gaze to the body. “As far as I know. He should have been. Why?”
“If the arsonist soaked the linen in oil and set it alight, it could explain the rest of what I see.”
“That was what we smelled first.” Math perked up. “An oil fire.”
“We haven’t found an oil lamp,” Rhys said.
“Doesn’t mean there wasn’t one. Whoever did this could have brought it away with him. Oil would explain the speed at which it spread, even without much fuel in here. Then it jumped to the stables. Let me show you.” Emyr made a motion to indicate they should follow him to the narrow alley between the laying-out room and the stables.
The two buildings were a matter of two feet apart, and there was another gap between the back of the buildings and the very damaged palisade that protected the bailey of the castle. The reason for the gap had been to deter a fire from spreading. It hadn’t worked.
“See how blackened both walls are, particularly right in the center? They match one another.” Emyr stood in the alley and flapped a hand back and forth. “It’s a miracle any of the timbers are still standing. We’ll have to take them down anyway, but what it tells us is that the fire burned hottest first in the dead room, and then spread to here.”
Rhys looked from one wall to the other, both of which were charred and being held up more by habit than actual construction materials. Then he walked past Emyr towards the palisade. The wall was in a similar condition right at the back of the laying-out room, but the farther he moved away from the core of the fire, the less damaged were the walls. Many of the buildings in the bailey had burned, but that was more because the fire had passed from thatch roof to thatch roof, than because the flames had burst through the walls of the buildings.
It was Owen de la Pole who finally stated the obvious. “Someone set fire to my castle. Math was right the first time.” Owen pressed his lips together pensively. “Moriddig, Hugh, the castle. Were they killed to get at me? Because of me? Am I next?” His expression filled with horror. “Or Joan?”
“We don’t know, my lord. We are doing our best.” Simon spoke sincerely, but it was exactly the wrong thing to say.
Owen gave them all a hard look. In this moment, he was Norman through and through. “Do better.”
