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Day Two
Rhys
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The River Seiont emptied into the Menai Strait on the southern side of Edward’s new castle. Following the river upstream meant at first heading southeast but then the river looped around the entire region, sometimes heading north, sometimes south, but always east, ultimately originating at Llyn Padarn near Prince Llywelyn’s castle of Dolbadarn. Consequently, the road from Caernarfon Castle followed the river initially, but after it merged with the road coming from Llywelyn’s former palace, it turned directly south and crossed the river.
Ancient stone footings, presumably also Roman in origin, had once stuck up from the bank above the natural ford. Llywelyn had never seen fit to rebuild the bridge, since the ford was a good one and impassable only in flood. But since the coming of the Normans, the bridge had finally been rebuilt, using the footings as a base as they had not been for centuries.
Their destination turned out to be the sawmill that lay downstream from the new bridge. Dai followed the mill race before turning into the yard. These days, the mill ran night and day, providing wood for the castle and town. The sawmill was still run by Welshmen, though with an English overseer.
Catrin had again refused to be left behind, but she kept the horse well back as Dai pointed Rhys to the body and Math the Waterman, who was crouched beside it.
Math was seventy years old if he was a day, but he insisted on going out on the river every day, checking his lines and fish traps. Before Llywelyn’s death, he’d kept the palace kitchen stocked with trout and salmon. These days, he had a stall in Caernarfontown’s market, on the green just outside the town walls, and made three times as much—most of which was tithed to the king before he closed up shop for the day.
“They found him among the reeds in the shallows of the mill pond,” Math said in Welsh.
Rhys turned to Dai. “See if you can find the coroner, will you? He needs to know we have another murder.”
“Of course, my lord. Should I bring him here?”
Rhys pursed his lips as he considered the issue. “Just warn him we found it. I’ll notify him when I’ve brought him to the laying out room.”
Dai nodded and urged his horse back down the road to the castle. Catrin chose at that point to dismount from Cole’s mare, but still remained at its head, holding the bridle.
“This is none of my doing!” The overseer of the mill was an Englishman named Robert, a Norman name, but one that was becoming more common among the English populace.
“Please tell me what happened.” Rhys took a few steps closer, making appeasing motions with his hands.
His unaccusatory tone calmed Robert, who dropped his arms, having run his fingers through his hair in his agitation. “We heard a clunking sound, and I sent Owen outside to see what was the trouble.”
“This is in the waterwheel itself?”
“At the entrance to the mill race.”” Robert pointed Rhys to the wooden track that took the water from the millpond and sent it into the waterwheel. One sluice gate, which controlled the water in the mill pond, could be opened and closed, depending upon how much water was needed to fill the pond. A second sluice gate controlled the amount of water running from the pond, down the mill race, and into the waterwheel. Then the water flowed out the bottom of the wheel, down another course, and back into the River Seiont.
It was where the water entered the mill race that the body would have stopped, too big to pass the sluice gate. This told Rhys the body had been dumped into the millpond deliberately because, like Cole, the killer had wanted him to be found. Eventually anyway.
Rhys looked at ‘Owen’, whose proper Welsh name was Owain, and whom Rhys knew from the village where he himself was living. “Is that what happened?” he asked in Welsh.
Owain nodded. “I found the body. The boys and I dragged him out.”
“Do you know who this is?”
“No.”
Rhys glanced at Owain’s fellows, all of whom were Welsh, and all of whom shook their heads. Rhys had the odd realization that he didn’t believe them. A job at the mill paid well and was a skilled position that none of them wanted to lose by being implicated in murder. Rhys had the idea to try again later, when the men were alone and Robert wasn’t watching. Rhys dismissed the mill workers to their jobs.
“You told Dai it was murder. Was he drowned?” Once they’d gone, Catrin spoke from where she stood, a good ten paces back. She seemed to finally realize the less anyone noted her involvement the better.
“He was stabbed, much like Cole.”
Returning to Math, who was still crouched over the body, Rhys looked more closely at the wounds in the dead man’s belly. There were three. Again. “Or rather, exactly like Cole.”
“Was it the same type of weapon?”
“I wouldn’t want to bet against it, though time in the water hasn’t been helpful.”
The man lay as Owain and his fellows had left him, dragged free of the pond, but not far enough to prevent the water from lapping at his feet. The victim was younger than Cole, perhaps thirty, though with a similar Norman haircut—not cropped short and spiky like Rhys’s but longer, with hair past his ears—and shaved chin. Rhys was learning, however, that just because a man looked like a Norman didn’t mean he was one. Cole had been English.
The man was also naked, like Cole had been, and even larger than Cole, with huge muscled arms that could have lifted Catrin one-handed and maybe Rhys himself. His body was cold—not just from the water—and his limbs flaccid. Rhys rose to his feet, and one of his knees cracked as it straightened. “Do either of you recognize him?”
Catrin made no move to come closer, but her view was unimpeded, and she shook her head. “No.”
Math stood too, with a grin at Rhys at how his knees were still spry and said, “No reason why you should know him, my lady, but I do. Those boys should have told you the truth, because some of them must know him too.”
“Who is he?” Rhys said.
Math let out a puff of air. “At one time I would have said no self-respecting Welshman would have worn his hair like that, but he’s one of them ... what do you call them?” He snapped his fingers. “A mason.” He said the word as a Norman would. “His name was Tomos.”
Welsh people, either by custom or cussedness, had always distinguished themselves from the English and Normans by their appearance. Math apparently thought they should continue to do so. But sooner rather than later, it might be increasingly hard to tell a man’s identity by what he looked like. Any man could dress enough like another to be confused for someone he wasn’t—at least until he opened his mouth.
And even then, languages could be learned and accents altered. Rhys already knew of several Welsh noblemen who’d changed their names and appearance when they’d submitted to Edward. Owain ap Gruffydd ap Gwenwynwyn, a former Welsh lord who’d once tried to assassinate Llywelyn, was now Owen de la Pole.
“Do you know anything more about Tomos?” he asked Math.
The riverman shrugged. “The master mason brought him in at the start.”
“I didn’t know any Welshmen were still working on the castle these days.”
“He was the last. The master mason trusted him, and he was a devil with a chisel. He could turn any stone into something beautiful.” He paused. “Tomos had to sleep outside the town at night though, just like you.”
As far as Rhys knew, all the rest of the masons were Englishmen and billeted inside the castle grounds or in the town. Rhys’s brother-in-law, Huw, was a Welsh mason working at Conwy Castle. If Huw had spoken the truth to Simon, he was keeping his head down and doing as he was told. He had a family to protect, in the form of Rhys’s sister, Efa, and their children, so he had more to lose than Rhys himself, which was why Rhys believed him. But Rhys couldn’t help seeing Huw’s face as he looked down at Tomos’s body.
“You also need to see this.” Math made a motion to indicate that Rhys should help roll the dead man onto his stomach.
At the sign of the incomplete hexfoil carved into the man’s back underneath his left shoulder blade, Rhys recoiled.
Catrin could see too, and she gasped. “It is the same hand, Rhys.”
He met her eyes, which silently spoke the same words he was thinking: Oh, that is not good.
Math looked from one to the other. “I thought it was bad, but you two look like it’s worse.”
Rhys made a gesture that he meant to be dismissive, but he nonetheless told Math the truth, even if not all of it. “We’ve seen the symbol before.”
“Underneath the other dead man. I heard.”
That Math had heard wasn’t any kind of surprise. A dead nobleman in their former prince’s barn was catastrophic news, which was why Rhys couldn’t believe a Welshman was the killer. He would not have left him there unless he hated his own people. Rhys had plotted out a hundred ways to murder several of the Normans of his acquaintance. In every case, he would have made sure the body was hidden permanently rather than putting him on display, lest the reprisals from the castle touch everyone he cared about. That would have been contrary to the entire point.
It wasn’t all that easy to get rid of a body, however. Perhaps the killer realized as much and had decided to go in the opposite direction.
“Should we be afeared for our lives, do you think?” Math didn’t seem particularly concerned by the idea, even as he broached it.
“I hope not,” Rhys said, “but someone killed two men in a single night.”
“Two men who, by all appearances, were entirely unrelated to one another,” Catrin added.
This was not going to go over well in the castle, town, or village. In the years he’d served as Prince Edmund’s quaestor after returning from crusade and before he joined Prince Llywelyn’s retinue, Rhys had brought to justice in the vicinity of fifteen murderers—but only a single instance of a killer who was responsible for more than one death. That investigation had been ugly and difficult, with six murders of street urchins over a two month period. In the end he’d caught the man only because the people themselves had ultimately put aside their reluctance to become involved and stepped forward to identify him.
“Do you have a canvas I can wrap him in?” Rhys asked Math. “I’ll get it back to you cleaner than it was.”
Math stumped away, heading to a little hut near the dock where he moored his boat—not in the mill pond but on the adjacent river. He went inside and came out with a folded hemp canvas, which he proceeded to lay out on the bank. Then, with a bit of a struggle, convincing Rhys that Tomos weighed as much as both of them combined, the two men manhandled the dead mason away from the millpond, rolled him in the canvas, and heaved the body onto the back of Cole’s horse, Rhys doing most of the work, despite Math’s determination to help. Rhys could have asked for help from the millworkers, but the less they were involved with Tomos’s death, the better.
Breathing harder than he wanted to admit, Rhys glanced at Catrin. “We’ll have to walk.”
“I am not fragile.”
“I can see that.” On one hand, he didn’t want to encourage her. On the other, she’d been helpful so far, and she was right that she wasn’t a girl anymore. He would be wise to stop treating her as one.
They set off, at first in relatively companionable silence—or so Rhys thought—but as the journey wore on, he sensed a growing tension in Catrin that after two hundred yards finally burst out in the form of anger. “How could you?”
“How could I what?”
He spoke before he thought, which perhaps he shouldn’t have done. He could guess that this question wasn’t about the murder investigation.
“How could you work for them after everything that’s happened? After what they’ve done and are doing daily?”
Rhys was taken aback and didn’t know how to defend himself or even if he should. If he’d thought at all about the consequences of deceiving her, he should have known she would eventually challenge him on his allegiances. But as the afternoon had worn on, he had forgotten she didn’t know.
So he asked carefully, “How is what I do different from what you’re doing?”
“How do you know what I’m doing?”
“You are lady-in-waiting to the Queen of England.”
“Do you think I had a choice in the matter?”
“Do you think I did?”
She’d been walking with him beside the horse as he led it, but now her stride lengthened, and she got ahead of him. He could see Caernarfon’s towers now, so he let her go, though not before calling after her, “Peace be upon you.”
It was an old blessing from his time in the Holy Land, and an appropriate counter point to the well of irritation and anger that had risen within him at the way she continued to question and distrust him—which wasn’t fair of him since he’d encouraged her to do so and had spent the day trying to get rid of her.
She glanced back, surprise and confusion on her face. But she had the required response to hand anyway. “And upon you, my lord.”
Then she hurried off. Rhys kept up enough to make sure she came to no harm, staying within sight behind her. Once she passed into the palisade that protected the tent village on the way to the Queen’s Gate that guarded the eastern entrance to the castle, he felt able to turn towards the town gate, bringing his second dead body in two days to the laying out room.
Cole’s body was gone, having been transported first thing that morning to the new burial ground on the other side of the river from the castle because there was simply not enough room for a graveyard within the town. Edward’s priest had blessed the designated ground, and Cole would lie in his coffin inside another little hut, out of the elements, until his burial as the sun set that evening.
Rhys had attended burials in that graveyard before, and he had to admit that on a fine day like today, with the sun setting into the sea, it felt as if the dead—whoever they’d been and whatever they’d done—were on their way to heaven.
