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Day Two
Rhys
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Rhys was looking forward to some moments to himself at the barn, grim as the scene would be in the daylight, to consider his predicament, and was thus justifiably horrified to discover Catrin had arrived before him.
“What are you doing here?” The words came out of his mouth before he could stop them, a duplicate of what he and Simon had said to each other an hour before.
It was the second surprise encounter of the day, and Rhys couldn’t say he was completely happy about either one, as much as he had once loved both Catrin and Simon.
He refrained from cursing like he wanted to, not because she was a lady, but because it would have betrayed his emotions too profoundly. When Catrin was nine and he eleven, in the loft of this very barn, they’d practiced saying every curse word they could remember, both crude and blasphemous, as emphatically as possible. As a soldier, Rhys had employed profanity many times since then. He was sorry he’d missed the last twenty years of Catrin’s life, because he didn’t know if she even remembered their escapades, much less allowed a choice curse to escape her lips every now and then.
She turned on him, ready to go on the offensive in an instant. “You are wearing Edmund’s sigil and your sword today? I thought you weren’t supposed to do that in Caernarfon.”
She surely knew how to get to him. She always had. Despite his irritation—and her outrage at being questioned—when he looked at her she could have been that young girl in pigtails again, running after him and her older brothers.
So he didn’t answer her question any more than she had his. “You shouldn’t have come.” He looked around. Fortunately, she’d arrived moments before he had, so she hadn’t yet entered the barn. “Have you no escort?”
“You’re saying I’m not safe outside Caernarfon’s walls?”
“I don’t know.” He couldn’t stop himself from being sincere with her. “A man was found murdered yesterday. I can’t guarantee anyone’s safety.”
She didn’t appear in the least bit concerned. “I have as much right to be here as you. And I expected you sooner. You slept later than I thought you might.”
Rhys swallowed down another retort, which wouldn’t have helped matters in the slightest, and attempted to rein in his ire. In truth, he wasn’t angry at Catrin so much as at the circumstances in which he found himself. “The delay wasn’t because I lay late in bed. My new captain arrived, and I was required to meet with him.” He made an expansive gesture with both hands. “Thus the sword and surcoat.”
Some of the obstreperousness left her, perhaps because she saw something different in Rhys’s face. “He’s that bad?”
“He’s that good.” Rhys didn’t add unfortunately. Even if he should have meant it, he didn’t.
His love for Simon had never turned to hate, no matter how hard he tried to make it so. That inability threw into sharp relief the fact that he shouldn’t actively hate every Norman who crossed his path. Most were simply doing as their masters bid them—just as Rhys was and always had done. In truth, both sides were ignorant of each other. In the Holy Land, Rhys had come to learn that, at some point, every man was responsible for his own soul—and it was up to each man to decide what he would and would not do—what he could and could not do.
Catrin bit her lip. “Who is he?”
“Simon Boydell.”
She shook her head. “I’m sorry to say I know very little about the life you led after I married. I don’t know him.” She paused. “But you obviously do.”
“I served with him in Acre.” Rhys didn’t want to talk about that, and to head off whatever Catrin’s next comment was going to be, he said, “How is the queen? Won’t she be missing you?”
“I am among the lesser of her ladies and am not one who will be attending the birth. She was meeting with the midwives this morning and was so out of sorts she sent everyone but them and her kinswomen away. Likely, the birth is close. It’s a relief, really. She has become so snappish.”
From Rhys’s personal experience, the queen was often snappish, though he supposed he would be too after giving birth to fifteen children, only six of whom still lived, and suffering now under pressure to produce another son, as a backup to ten-year-old Alphonso.
“Even if you are safe outside the walls, that doesn’t explain why you are without an escort.”
“I am a widow, which means I am not a little girl anymore. When the queen does not need me, I can do as I like.” But then she relented. “I knew you’d be here, which is what I told the guard who let me out the castle gate. He knows you, apparently.”
Rhys didn’t think he was mistaken to see her lip curling again.
“As I told you last night, they all do.” Rhys didn’t want to talk about his relationship with the guards, fearing the more he said, the more likely he was to defend himself against her disdain, which he’d resolved not to do.
Instead, he swung open the one intact barn door and then carefully propped wide the door that was partly off its hinges to let in daylight and as much fresh air as possible. The barn doors faced east, and with the sun shining today, he was able to see quite clearly the hexfoil drawn in the dirt in the middle of the floor.
Catrin frowned. “I thought you said it wasn’t completed.”
Rhys crouched before it, touching the ridge of soil thrown up by the knife that had carved the circle. “Last night, it wasn’t.” He swiveled to look up at her. “Likely one of the villagers returned and finished it.”
Catrin glanced down at his face. “Doesn’t that make you angry?”
He looked up at her, puzzled. “Why would it?”
“I was wondering if you were irritated to discover how far your authority extended—or didn’t extend, in this case.”
“Clearly not far enough, regardless. Though, as I said, I don’t object because I understand.”
“What if it was the killer?”
“Why would he return?”
“To finish what he started? Perhaps he was interrupted before he was done.”
“Cole has been dead nearly three days now.” Rhys let out a sharp laugh. “Believe me. The killer left the hexfoil unfinished on purpose.”
“Are you troubled that whoever finished it disturbed the scene of the crime and made you less able to see what really happened?” She gestured to the interior of the barn. As Rhys had seen last night with the help of a lantern, there was very little left in it.
These were all good questions, actually, but Rhys didn’t want to reward her by telling her so. “I suppose I could be, but it is also clear that Cole wasn’t killed here anyway.”
“How do you know that?”
“There are only a few drops of blood on the ground.” He walked away from her and the hexfoil to a clump of hay and swept it across the floor to see what might be under or within it. The barn was still solid, so the hay was dry, but his action revealed nothing hidden. Everything from Prince Llywelyn’s time that could be used had been taken away long before King Edward had started building his castle.
Rhys circumnavigated the room anyway, more thoroughly than he’d done the previous night, and then climbed the ladder to the loft. A few more wisps of hay remained here too, along with a rumpled blanket, which told him where Iago and Mari had been lying before they discovered the body.
“I’ll just have a look around the outside, shall I?” She exited the barn.
Rhys didn’t like the idea of her going off by herself any more than he did her staying by his side. Thus, after another long look at the hexfoil, he joined her and found her crouched before a blackberry bramble, carefully moving a few of the prickly branches aside. Here in April, it wasn’t fully leafed yet, and the berries wouldn’t be ripe for many months.
“What have you found?”
“A boot.”
Gingerly she reached among the branches and came up with a soldier’s leather knee-high boot, longer and narrower at the toe than the one Rhys himself wore. The top of the boot would have ended just below the wearer’s kneecap, and was similar to the boots he and every other knight of his acquaintance wore, whether they were Welsh, English, or Norman.
Catrin rose to her feet with the boot in her hand. “A man would not have left this behind over the course of a romantic evening.”
“That does sound unlikely,” Rhys agreed before turning the boot upside down to examine the sole. “No one would discard such a valuable item on purpose. At a minimum, he’d be walking around with one boot.”
The boot was well-scuffed, but solid. If it belonged to Cole, and he’d lived, it would have served him another six months at least, depending upon how much walking his life required. For many knights, that was as little as possible. Rhys himself no longer owned his own horse. Last night, to keep up with Guy and because the summons had been urgent, he’d ridden to the barn on a mount borrowed from the castle garrison. Today, he’d walked. These days, his boots were well broken in.
“Could the killer have dropped it by mistake from the bundle of gear he took off Cole?”
“That’s the obvious conclusion for me too.” Rhys tried to look severe, but he was finding it helpful to have someone else with whom to talk things through, though he would never say so to Catrin.
In order to have removed Cole’s clothing and gear, the killer would have had to have space and time undisturbed. As an Englishman and a retainer to Catrin’s son, in what he would have viewed as a hostile land, Cole should have been wearing mail armor consisting of at least a mail vest if not a full hauberk, like the one in Rhys’s trunk that no longer fit him. Mail was expensive, however, and worth the effort to the killer to remove if the goal was monetary gain.
Then Catrin looked down at her feet, a rueful expression on her face. “I’m sorry to say I’m as much to blame as anyone for how muddled the tracks around the barn have become.” “We mucked it up last night, so it is hardly your fault.” Rhys grimaced, more to remind himself of how he should be behaving than because he was particularly upset about the tracks. He had learned, belatedly, how little there was to gain from regretting what couldn’t be changed.
Then he held out his arm to her. “May I escort you back to the castle?”
She blinked. “That’s it? We’re done?”
“Well ... I’m not. But it’s time you were.”
“Oh no, you don’t! Cole could have been carrying a message for me. It will take weeks to learn what it was by sending to Gloucester for answers. Better that we discover it ourselves.” She folded her arms across her chest. “What’s next? What would you do if you weren’t wasting time trying to get rid of me? After last night, you should know better.”
For a moment, she was so completely herself it left Rhys breathless, and despite his best intentions, he found himself smiling. “I’m not trying to get rid of you. But you’re a lady now and should not be companionable with one such as I.”
The instant he spoke, he realized what a telling choice of words he’d used. He should have told her she shouldn’t be tagging along after him like a puppy or some other more derogatory phrase that implied he didn’t want her with him. It was certainly how her mother had described their relationship more than once. At that time, Catrin had declared she was doing nothing wrong and had come storming to him about it.
Today, he’d made it seem instead as if he thought he wasn’t worthy of her.
By way of reply, she kicked out with one toe to show him her sturdy boots hidden underneath her dress. “No dainty slippers for me. I came prepared.”
He couldn’t help himself. He laughed.
