| |
Day One
Rhys
––––––––
“What is a Welshman doing inside the city walls at this time of night?” John le Strange, Prince Edmund’s sigil emblazoned on his chest, accosted Rhys in the street as he reached the last house before the castle gate—a matter of a dozen yards at most.
Rhys was coming from the makeshift chapel, having installed the body in the even more makeshift laying out room next door. While he knew he needed to examine the body as soon as possible, it was late enough by now that first he needed to speak to Catrin—or at least make the effort to try.
He was both looking forward to seeing her again, because he’d always liked her, and dreading it, since it appeared she no longer liked him. He didn’t know much about her life in England, but he couldn’t help feeling that, in marrying a Norman, it had taken a turn for the worse.
Other than his origins, Rhys had never had anything against the man Catrin had married, but the Norman who stared down at him from his horse now was another matter entirely. John le Strange was the son of Roger, one of the masterminds—if not the mastermind—behind Edward’s conquest of Wales. His family had acquired the name le Strange when they’d come to England from France, and it was no less appropriate today than it had been a hundred years ago: John the foreigner.
Should the son bear the sins of the father? That was a matter for priests to debate, but John le Strange and his twin brother, Rolf, who was older than John by an hour, had never had a civil word to speak to Rhys in the times they’d encountered each other since Rhys had returned to Gwynedd. The two men were identical to look at in every way, not even having a difference in hair to distinguish themselves, since both were prematurely bald and had forgone any attempt to grow their hair long, instead clipping what was left close to their heads.
Thus, to aid in identification, John wore a blue chevron on the shoulder of his surcoat, and Rolf wore green. This was John tonight, and he appeared to have just arrived at Caernarfon after a lengthy absence—one in which he had not been missed, at least not by Rhys.
“I am on business for the coroner,” Rhys said, choosing to answer civilly instead of turning John’s question back at him. If he was in such a hurry to get to the castle, he should have entered it directly through the Queen’s Gate rather than riding first through the town.
“See that you take care of it quickly, rather than cluttering up the streets of our fair city. You aren’t allowed within the town walls after dark, you know.”
Rhys bowed his head. “Thank you for the reminder, my lord.”
John scoffed, possibly detecting a degree of insincerity in Rhys’s tone, and pointed his horse’s nose towards the King’s Gate, riding a little too close to Rhys as he spurred the horse away. If it had rained recently, John would have spattered Rhys with mud. As it was, Rhys’s already dusty boots grew only more dusty. As he let John get ahead of him, Rhys pulled a cloth from inside his coat and wiped down the leather. It wouldn’t do to enter the castle looking disheveled. He would have done the same two years ago when entering any of Prince Llywelyn’s palaces.
Even without the delay, it would have been later than polite when Rhys finally stood on the western end of the castle outside the doorway of the suite in the newly constructed Eagle Tower that had been given over to the queen and her ladies. The stones of the walls were not yet whitewashed and showed the masons’ marks of those who’d carved them. A few tapestries had been hastily mounted in order to add warmth and color to the otherwise gray corridor. It seemed the floor had been recently scrubbed, as the edges were still wet. Rhys could be glad for the servants’ sake he’d chosen to clean his boots. Everything in the castle smelled of stone and fresh mortar, for Caernarfon was to be the greatest castle ever built. That meant the corridors that led between the towers were inside the walls. It was like nothing he had ever seen before.
In his passage across the bailey, Rhys had inquired as to the whereabouts of the queen and her ladies and learned that the queen had retired from the hall some time ago—though well after Rhys himself had left. Eight months pregnant she might be, but her loyalty to her husband was absolute, and they’d wanted to put on a good performance tonight as they welcomed the obeisance, yet again, of many lords of Wales—Rhys among them, of course.
“Is the Lady Catrin within?” Rhys asked the guard who stood to one side of the door.
“She is.”
Rhys went straight for a figure of authority as justification for his presence. “I realize it is late, but Coroner Lacy tasked me with speaking to her. It really is a matter of great urgency.”
Rhys could see the reluctance in the guard’s face, but the man didn’t want to go against Guy any more than Rhys did.
“Yes, sir.”
That very night in the hall, when he’d raised up all the men who’d pledged to serve him, King Edward had decreed that any Welsh knight who submitted was to be treated with the same deference as a Norman knight. Present at the time had been Hywel, his brothers, and a dozen other noblemen from all over Wales. The king had waved a hand over them and, between one heartbeat and the next, they’d become citizens of the realm. Some among the Norman nobles felt the inclusion of formerly rebellious Welshmen corrupted their ranks. But King Edward had declared the Welsh to be returned to the fold, and he would have no distinctions amongst his men.
To declare equality was one thing. To live it was quite another, clearly, and accord wasn’t going to come without a great effort on everyone’s part—including Rhys’s. The fact that Rhys was no more interested in camaraderie than the guard who faced him didn’t help matters. But they did know each other, and he wasn’t going to argue with Rhys tonight. Instead, he nodded and disappeared inside the newly-appointed women’s solar in search of Catrin. The sleeping rooms lay on the floors above.
Rhys was grateful the queen was so far advanced in her pregnancy because it meant there was no chance he would be called in to speak to her. Rhys had changed in appearance in the years since he’d last stood before her, but Queen Eleanor was a perceptive woman. He didn’t want to risk recognition. So far, he had successfully avoided any direct contact with either her or her husband. He didn’t know how long that could last, but the sooner he resolved this investigation, the sooner he could disappear again into anonymity.
It took nearly a quarter of an hour, while Rhys cooled his heels in the corridor, before Catrin finally appeared, still fully dressed in the deep green gown she’d worn to the feast, but now wrapped in a thick cloak with her auburn hair loose down her back. It was April, but stone castles were cold. “What do you want?”
Her animosity was palpable, but Rhys resolved to ignore whatever was going on behind those hazel eyes. The queen would give birth, and then they’d all be gone again, and whatever Catrin thought about him wouldn’t matter.
Catrin had spoken in French, probably to maintain the distance between them, but Rhys answered in Welsh. “A man was found dead.”
“So I heard.” She didn’t take the bait, continuing in French.
Rhys smiled, not knowing whether or not to believe her, though news did travel fast in such a small community. He wasn’t even impatient with her attitude. Since he’d returned to Caernarfon, he’d been insulted almost daily by real experts in superiority. She was trying too hard.
“Did you hear he was wearing the tunic of your dead husband?”
She tried to hide her shock, but Rhys saw the flash of fear in her eyes. Still, she managed to keep her voice level. “No. I did not know that.”
She was a widow, so it was only mildly improper to add, “He was wearing your husband’s colors and nothing else.”
In the twenty years since Rhys had seen her, she’d learned to control her emotions well, because that elicited hardly more than a raised eyebrow. “What do you want from me? I heard you arrested a Welshman already.” The sneer was back in her face and voice.
“He wasn’t arrested, simply taken in for questioning—”
She cut Rhys off. “Which makes him as good as dead.”
Rhys continued as if she hadn’t said anything, “—but since he didn’t do it, I need to discover as quickly as possible who did do it before Aron is hanged as an example and to make the investigation go away. If the dead man is Norman, the coroner will want to blame a Welshman as a matter of course. I was hoping some information from you might help me find the real killer.”
She stared at Rhys without speaking.
His brows furrowed. “What?”
“Nothing.” She shook herself and looked into the room, told whoever was nearest that she’d been called away, and then turned back to Rhys, sounding for the first time like the Catrin Rhys had known, “How do you think I can help?”
He reached behind her and pulled the door all the way shut. Somewhere along the way, she’d started replying to him in Welsh, so he hadn’t worried about the guard understanding their conversation. There was no reason to disturb any of the other women, however, so he took her arm and walked her along the corridor.
“For starters, I need you to look at the body, as difficult as that might be ...” His voice trailed off, suddenly thinking better of what a few moments ago had seemed like a fine plan. Then he halted abruptly. “Never mind. It was selfish of me to ask. I’ll find someone else.”
“Who else is there to ask?” She tsked through her teeth. “Guy fitz Lacy obviously didn’t recognize him. I am lady to the queen now. I have no men of my own. They all serve my son or the Earl of Gloucester, and none of them are here.”
The Earl of Gloucester to whom she was referring was Gilbert de Clare, a powerful Norman magnate with extensive lands in Wales and England. Catrin’s husband had been one of Clare’s men, chosen deliberately as a husband by Catrin’s father as a means of alliance, since twenty years ago Prince Llywelyn had been allied with Clare against the English crown. In fact, for a brief period, Llywelyn, Clare, and Simon de Montfort, the leader of the Second Baron’s War, had been in rebellion and conceived a plan to divide Britain and Wales amongst themselves. She’d been sixteen herself at the time, with no say in the matter.
Six months after her marriage, Clare had forsworn Llywelyn and Montfort, betraying them to gain favor with Edward and his father, King Henry. Thus began Catrin’s twenty-year sojourn in England. By rights, it wasn’t something Rhys should be holding against her. Up until now, she’d been making that hard.
“It won’t be pretty.” He found himself adopting a similar turn of phrase to the one the undercoroner had used with Guy fitz Lacy.
“As if that’s unusual these days. Not that you care.” The last half of what Catrin said was spoken in an undertone, and Rhys didn’t know if he was supposed to have heard. Then she seemed to shake herself and asked, “What about it isn’t pretty?”
“He’s been dead two days.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because he’s cold and not stiff.”
She pressed her lips together, and he began to feel more and more disgruntled with her attitude. They hadn’t spoken in twenty years, but she knew him.
Didn’t she?
Because he himself had doubts, he relented enough to add, “You will understand, I assure you, when you see him. I cannot apologize too much for asking you to come.”
There was no need for them to pass through the great hall, since at the moment it was a free-standing structure, and Rhys escorted Catrin across the bailey to the King’s Gate, which was the gatehouse that faced the town and the one he’d come through earlier. The church was located as far from the castle as it was possible to be and still be inside the town walls. Rhys had learned by now that nothing Edward did was by accident, so he assumed the symbolism was meaningful—he just wasn’t quite sure what it was, since Edward was an openly pious man.
If the church appeared to be something of an afterthought in the town, the laying out room was even more so. It had become a necessary evil, due to the sheer number of deaths that had taken place in Caernarfon over the last year since starting to build the castle. The pace of the work was unprecedented, in that the workers had managed to construct all the walls and gates, and even some of the towers, in a single year. King Edward had called in every mason in England to work on his castles—not just at Caernarfon, but also at Harlech and Conwy. If some lesser magnate or bishop wanted to build his own castle or church, it was just too bad. Every available hand was currently in Wales.
But the unholy pace occasionally meant that proper caution wasn’t taken. Winches weren’t secured, men didn’t take a moment to ponder before cutting with a saw or other blade, and weren’t getting enough sleep. Six months ago, men were dying five days a week, and a fever of fear had begun to envelop the castle. Some said the project was cursed—which was one reason the existence of the incomplete hexfoil was so troubling to everyone.
In the end, although the castellan of the castle couldn’t prove any of the accidents had been on purpose, he’d hanged two Welshmen anyway, and most of the Welsh workers had been ejected from the building works and servant hall.
Rhys had investigated every death that didn’t immediately appear to be an accident, but hadn’t found true intent in any circumstance. Rhys honestly didn’t know if he could have told Guy the truth if he had discovered it. As with Aron, the Welshman Guy had wrongfully arrested tonight, one of the scapegoats had offered himself. He was a man only in his thirties, but he had a wasting disease that would have killed him painfully in a month anyway. The second man had been Guy’s own decision, having come upon him in the dead of night in the old palace on the hill and taken a dislike to him. As he was a wife-beater and had a ferocious temper, he was little missed.
The number of deaths had decreased since then, and with the king here, the master mason had sent off the rest of the common Welshmen. Even the village headman, Gruffydd, had been told his services were not required this month. Only three Welsh people remained: Rhys himself, Dai (the undercoroner’s assistant)—and Catrin.
