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Day One
Catrin
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“I thought Welsh people weren’t allowed in the town after dark.” As they passed through the gate, Catrin’s eyes tracked to the guard as he waved the pair through. She hadn’t ever tried to enter the town before.
“They’re not.” Rhys eyed her for a moment before explaining. “While the coroner cleared the way tonight, I have worked to cultivate the guards throughout Caernarfon.”
She stared at him. “You’ve done what?”
He threw out a hand to stay the protest on her lips. “I never bribed them or played favorites, but I have access to the countryside in a way they do not. So if a man wants anything—from a new cloak to a packet of fresh butter to flowers for his sweetheart—he can get them from me. Initially, I gave these items away as gifts, and then later I came to be known as someone who could get a man what he needed if he could pay.”
Catrin didn’t like the sound of that at all. What he was doing felt dishonorable. “So if I’d been alone, I would have been turned away, but because I am with you, they let me in?” She was disgruntled, and it showed in her face and voice.
“I have been very careful not to hide what I’ve been doing. I’m not a smuggler, and if I was ever told to desist, I would.” He shrugged. “Since no Norman speaks Welsh, I was already the middleman between every Norman in this town and every Welshman outside it anyway. This is just an added service.”
She could feel Rhys’s eyes on her, and her lip curled for a moment before she managed to smooth her expression once again. But otherwise she bit back any further comment. Rhys really had changed, and if that was the case, better he didn’t know what she really thought. As an adult, she had learned to hide her emotions from those around her. She’d just never had to do it with Rhys, and she was finding the ability didn’t come naturally.
In the last six months of the war, after her husband’s death and once Prince Llywelyn had thrown his support behind the rebellion started by his brother Dafydd, Catrin had begun tapping into her network of friends and, for lack of a better word, spies, who over the years had kept her informed about what was happening in Wales. She’d reversed the communication network such that she was able to send news to Llywelyn himself, to the point that she was conducting her own private campaign. It had been heady work, and rewarding, knowing she was one small thread in Llywelyn’s network of patriots that stretched from Holyhead to London. Any news she thought might be of use to him, she sent, wending its way from Welshman to Welshwoman, all the way to Gwynedd.
In retrospect, the work she’d done for Llywelyn could have gotten her—and everyone who helped her—killed. But she had needed to do her part for her people, and it had given her purpose and strength.
After the war ended, Catrin had found herself faced with an uncertain future. Her son had married, agreeing with Gilbert de Clare that he was obligated to ensure the future of his name, which resulted in Catrin no longer being the mistress of her own household. When the invitation to join the queen’s retinue had come within weeks of the marriage, it had seemed like a gift from God—until it became clear to her that, although she technically was well-favored and enjoyed a high station, in joining the queen’s household, she’d become a servant. It was a new experience for her. She’d been born the daughter of a powerful Welsh lord. Though her marriage had been to a less powerful Norman, she had been queen of her own castle, so to speak. As a lady-in-waiting, she had no maidservants, no household to run, and no villagers to protect and oversee. Her entire purpose was to serve the queen.
She’d been unhappy in her new service—until she realized it made her invisible. As during the war, she began to use her role to protect her people: a servant girl being molested by a nobleman; a brewer who had been wrongfully accused of theft; an orphan for whom she found a position as a baby minder. It wasn’t quite as meaningful as when she’d been working for Llywelyn, but it was what, with her limited reach, she could do.
Rhys, on the other hand, appeared to be helping Normans. She couldn’t understand it. She had wondered since the prince’s death at Cilmeri if Llywelyn’s network of spies had a traitor in its midst, else how could he have become separated from the body of his army and killed? That someone close to him was feeding him false information made sense.
She didn’t want that traitor to be Rhys. She didn’t know if she could bear it if it was. But she had to know the truth.
To do that, she would need to get close to him and gain his confidence. By that light, her abrasiveness up until now was ill-advised, and she resolved to be more accommodating in future.
With hundreds of laborers working on the castle and town wall, plus the regular townspeople, more of whom arrived every day, the streets of the town were narrow and lined with huts. Ultimately they would be converted to stone or milled wood, but for now, they were akin to what her people built in the hills: round wattle-and-daub dwellings with thatched roofs. She didn’t know exactly what incentives the king had dangled before these English immigrants, but they must have been desirable indeed—or their circumstances in England so dire—that they’d agreed to locate to what to them had to be the ends of the earth.
Either that, or, like the Welsh people within the communities he’d destroyed to build his castles, the king had moved them by force. She honestly didn’t know which was the more likely.
Looking at Rhys now as they passed through the deserted streets of Caernarfon, the only two Welsh people in the entire place, she wondered how long she could continue in the queen’s service, even for the slight benefit she could still provide her people, if the only Welsh people left for her to work with were people like Rhys.
Although, if her brother was right, and he usually was, with the world the way it was now, she didn’t actually have a choice.
Again, and uncomfortably, she didn’t share what she was thinking with Rhys, merely nodded her thanks as he propped open the door of the laying out room with a rock. Rather than gesturing Catrin inside, he did the polite thing, which in this case was to enter first to give her time to adjust to the smell and the idea of looking into the face of a dead man. He’d brought a lantern from the castle, and now he hung it on a hook above the table where the body had been laid.
Fortunately, the smell wasn’t as terrible as she’d feared by his description. The dead man hadn’t been in the shed long, and the building wasn’t well constructed, so gaps remained between the slats that made up the walls. Even so, she hovered in the doorway, as yet unwilling to fully commit to the endeavor.
“Can you see his face well enough from there?” Rhys said.
“No.” Catrin put to her nose the lavender sachet Rhys had provided for her but still didn’t move closer.
It wasn’t as if she hadn’t seen a dead body before, but she didn’t know that she’d ever seen a murdered one. Thankfully, he didn’t push her nor tell her again how much he regretted asking her to come. They needed to determine the dead man’s identity, and she knew as well as he did that he had no good way to do that without her. Of course, he could have left Catrin to Guy, and it occurred to her only now that this really should have been Guy’s job. Perhaps Guy had bowed out because of her earlier treatment of him. It seemed unlikely that Rhys had asked Guy for the honor.
With that thought, she stepped back outside and, for a moment, leaned her head against the rough planks of the wall, striving to get her bearings. She didn’t want Rhys to think she’d left entirely, so she reached out her arm and waved a hand in the doorway. “Give me a moment, please.”
“Of course,” he said, as he would. He was absurdly understanding, and she found herself irritated by it. He was trading on the fact they’d spent the first sixteen years of her life together. But he didn’t know her, and she didn’t know him either.
She had to admit, however, even with her distrust of him, that he was still a better option tonight than any of the men in the castle, namely the newly arrived John le Strange, whom she despised, or Guy fitz Lacy, who was downright menacing. As a Lacy, even a bastard one, Guy was associated with the royal court. She’d met him once during her marriage and many times after, most recently a month before this current visit to Caernarfon.
In that instance, he’d behaved a little too familiarly for her liking and hadn’t appeared to understand or care that she wasn’t interested in his affections. Thus, she’d been more straightforward in rebuffing him here than she’d been before. He, of course, had been offended, and Margaret had given Catrin a cold look for what she perceived to be unseemly behavior from a noblewoman.
What Margaret didn’t know was that Guy was the man who’d forced himself on a maid at Gilbert de Clare’s castle in Bristol. Afterwards, the maid had come to Catrin in tears, and she’d helped her get a new position elsewhere, well out of his range. What Guy had done was commonplace, but his behavior had ruined any chance with Catrin.
Better to deal with Rhys than Guy, and that meant facing what lay in the room. Holding her breath, she forced herself through the door and up to the table, in order to look down at the man’s face. Then she gave a single nod and walked back outside.
Rhys followed, eventually guiding her to the wooden front step of the church. She sat abruptly and put her head in her hands.
He sat beside her, close enough to provide comfort but not enough to touch her. “I gather you know him?”
“He was one of my husband’s men, as you suspected, though I should point out that he’s English, not Norman, if it makes a difference to anyone. Cole de Lincoln he called himself, descended from one of the few Saxon barons who managed to survive William the Bastard’s conquest and subsequent purge of noble Saxon families.”
“Do you know what he was doing here?”
She shook her head. “As far as I know, he was supposed to be in the south with Justin.”
She glanced at Rhys, noting the momentary question in his eyes—before his expression told her he’d just connected the name Justin with her son. He gave her a nod. “Thank you.”
“You met him, you know.”
“Did I?”
“It was a few years ago. Justin accompanied my husband and Gilbert de Clare to a conference of barons during the five year peace between England and Wales.”
Rhys’s mouth quirked. “I’m sorry you weren’t there to introduce us.”
She gave him a wry look. “My husband didn’t even think about bringing me, even knowing my family might attend.”
Catrin was immensely proud of the man her son had become. He was brave and honest, upright in every way that mattered. For all that he resembled her husband, Robert, with a very Norman-looking face, light brown hair, and eyes to match, he had a kind heart and delighted in singing, as any Welshman should.
Thankfully, Justin hadn’t been at the Battle of Llandeilo Fawr where Robert had died, though, like Robert, he’d fought against her people.
Still, he spoke Welsh like a native and had never tried to hide his origins. As far as she knew, he’d been smart enough and capable enough to make his origins not matter. If he continued to rise in Clare’s service, despite the fall of Wales to Edward, he would be among the few nobles with Welsh blood who did so. Likely, he had benefited from the fact that her brothers had pledged their loyalty to Edward without reservation.
“Who was Cole to you?” Rhys said.
“Nobody.” And then at Rhys’s skeptical expression, she looked at him more directly. “Really. He is one of a dozen knights who served my husband but survived the slaughter at Llandeilo Fawr. Now he serves my son. I haven’t seen him in a year. I have no idea why he was riding to Caernarfon.”
“If I had to guess, he had a message for you.”
Catrin found her hand clutching the fabric of her cloak as it lay over her heart. “Justin was well when I last saw him. The war is over! It couldn’t be—” She stopped and tried again, fear constricting her throat, “I would know if—”
Rhys had been visibly hesitating about how to make her feel better, but he finally put his arm around her shoulders, squeezed once, and said soothingly, “It need not be something dire. Perhaps his wife has given him a son.”
Catrin had her fist to her mouth, trying to calm her breathing, and barely noticed that he touched her. It felt natural, in truth, disturbingly so.
Rhys was still trying to comfort her. “If Cole serves your son, that means he also serves Clare. He could have been carrying a message for the king, and it could have nothing to do with you or Justin at all.”
Catrin closed her eyes briefly, and when she opened them, the tears that had threatened to fall had receded. “I’m sure you’re right.”
Rhys made a disgusted sound at the back of his throat. “You don’t have to pretend with me. I have no children, so I can’t know what it’s like to be a mother, but I know grief. And I know loss.”
Catrin turned her head to look into his eyes, trying to really see him, to figure out what with him was a mask and what was real. He looked back at her with a calm expression, and she could see neither condescension nor deceit in him. She gave him a rueful smile—the first one she’d bestowed on him, in fact. “I have no idea what that message might have been. Did you find anything on the body besides that tunic?”
“No. And the barn was empty of everything else but hay.”
She thought about that for a moment. “Does the coroner know what you know?”
“If he drew the same conclusions, he said nothing to me about it. He doesn’t know Cole’s identity yet, of course, since I just learned it from you.”
She bit her lip. “The man he took into custody, could he be responsible for Cole’s death?”
“It is highly unlikely,” Rhys said. “I will question him in the morning and let him go if I can.”
She glanced at him sharply. “You said that before. The coroner will want a scapegoat.”
“He will, which is the reason Aron volunteered for the job. But I will do everything in my power to find the killer before Aron suffers for another man’s crime.”
Rhys was a bundle of contradictions, and Catrin didn’t know how to interpret what he’d told her. On the one hand, the smoothness with which he interacted with the castle guards, bowed to the king, and stood at Guy’s right hand was disconcerting. On the other, he’d just boldly confessed that Aron had volunteered to be arrested, he knew it, and was using the false incarceration as breathing room to find the real culprit.
The Rhys she’d known twenty years ago had been unable not to tell the truth in full at all times. This Rhys was apparently very good at hiding his real self, in that he was telling both her and Guy what each wanted to know. He still might not ever tell an outright lie, but one or the other of his faces had to be false.
She gave Rhys another piercing look, but he merely looked blandly back at her before he stood and held out a hand. “I will escort you back to the castle.”
She didn’t move. “And then what?”
“What do you mean?”
“What will you do after that?”
“I’ll return here to see if there’s anything else to learn from the body. Tomorrow I will go back to the barn and see what I might have missed in the dark. Now that I know who he is, I can work towards reconstructing the series of events that led to his death.”
She took Rhys’s offered hand but, as she rose to her feet, said, “Then I’ll stay too. There’s no sense in you going all the way to the castle only to come back again to finish your work.” She gave him a quick nod. “Do what you have to do. I’ll wait.”
Catrin could tell that Rhys wanted to protest or even go so far as to override her entirely. But as he hesitated, she walked back to the laying out room. She was a grown woman, and she was right that it was already very late. If he wanted an early start tomorrow, the sooner he finished, the more likely he was to get one.
A moment later, he passed her, going right to the body and picking up one of Cole’s hands.
Catrin had let him enter the room first, and now she slung the sachet around her neck, no longer holding her nose, and braved the smell and the sight of the dead body of the man she’d once known. “Please tell me what I’m looking at.”
The proper reaction to such a request from a lady should have been you’re mad, but Rhys seemed to have given up sparring with her, and he treated her request seriously. “As I told you, it is possible to know how long a person has been dead by the condition of the corpse. If it’s been a few hours, the body is warm and not stiff. Closer to half a day, it’ll be warm and stiff. By a day old, it’ll be cold and stiff, and by two days, it will be cold and no longer stiff. That’s poor Cole.”
“What if it had been snowing this week?”
Rhys shot Catrin an approving look. “Very good. Yes, that would make a difference. And being completely frozen would make the timing of his death impossible to determine.”
She smiled, not displeased to have reached a correct conclusion. “We arrived at the castle only yesterday.”
“Indeed,” Rhys said, “implying Cole rode all this way to see someone already here or someone who would be. Like the king.”
“Or me.”
Rhys pressed his lips together before nodding. “Is that why you’re staying?”
“I’m staying because I have to know what happened. Does his death have something to do with me? Is it, in a sense, my fault?”
“You can’t take that on,” Rhys said immediately. “The man responsible for Cole’s death is the one who wielded the blade. Nobody else.”
She tipped her head back and forth to silently say maybe. “What else do you see?”
“Some things that don’t matter, now that we know who he is.”
“Such as?”
He lifted one shoulder. “He has long limbs. Longer than mine.” He met her eyes. “He was a tall man?”
“Taller than most everyone I know.”
“He might even have been taller still if he wasn’t so bow-legged, I presume from so many hours in the saddle. Just as well he was a knight because those feet would have hurt.” He gestured down the table to where Catrin stood.
She hadn’t known how interested she would be, once she got past the fact that Cole was dead, but now she peered at the poor man’s toes. He had protruding bunions, with big toes that turned unnaturally in. “He did often wear pointy-toed shoes.”
“It can be better for shoving your feet into stirrups, but I prefer mine more rounded.” Rhys drew her attention to his boots, which, though much scuffed, appeared of high quality—and rounded in the toes, as he’d said. She had a moment’s gladness that he had landed on his feet, before she remembered her suspicions of him, and the corners of her mouth turned down again.
Meanwhile, Rhys had more to tell her. “From the depth of the wounds and the nature of the incision, I’d say we are looking for a knife with a four- to five-inch-long blade serrated on one side.”
“Like might be used in a kitchen for cutting meat?”
Rhys turned his hand back and forth. “It’s double-sided, with one side a regular sharpened blade.”
“Why would a dagger be serrated on one side?”
“Serration is expensive when done well, but it protects the edge of the blade from damage when it cuts through armor, as seemingly occurred in this case. And it rips flesh.”
Catrin shivered. “Ugly.”
“Because of the location of the wounds on the right half of Cole’s belly, it’s possible the dagger was in the killer’s left hand.”
“That would be unusual, wouldn’t it?”
“It’s something to consider.” He pursed his lips. “I’m not seeing any damage to Cole’s hands. Either he didn’t fight back, or he wore gloves.”
Catrin allowed her eyes to travel slowly from the top of Cole’s head to his toes. “To have stabbed him thus, the killer must have moved in close.” She glanced up at Rhys to find him looking back at her with interest. “That says to me Cole knew his killer or, at the very least, thought he had no reason to fear him.” She paused. “Somehow, that doesn’t sound like a Welshman to me.”
