Gwen
“Why are we worrying about a murder when we don’t even know that someone is dead? Fletcher clearly doesn’t know what he’s doing, and this Welshman—” Luke, one of the men at the east entrance to the alley, made a dismissive gesture with one hand to indicate Gareth, “—how could he possibly help?”
“I hear he serves Prince Hywel of Gwynedd.” This was put forth by a second, gray-haired man named Alfred. They, and men like them, guarded each gate to the city and worked alongside the castle’s garrison to patrol the streets and discourage crime in the town.
Except for a quick glance in Luke’s direction, Gwen kept her attention determinedly on the ground, forcing her shoulders to relax and resigning herself to the inevitable curious looks and whispered conferences that were going on around her.
Gwen’s spoken English marked her as Welsh from the moment she opened her mouth, but from the years her father had traveled throughout Wales and the March, she understood much more English than she spoke. While she didn’t assume Alfred and Luke were involved in whatever had happened to the poor person who’d bled in the alley, understanding the undercurrents among the English who surrounded her could only help her discover who was.
In truth, Gwen should have been grateful that neither man was gossiping about her. Maybe they had sense enough not to do so while she was in close proximity. Certainly, a better question they could be asking would be how she might be helpful to the investigation. Gwen had enough experience with men and their expectations to understand how unusual she might seem to them. As always, however, she wasn’t going to let other people’s opinions stop her from doing what needed to be done.
Turning away from the two useless watchmen, she swallowed hard, refusing to allow her stomach to revolt at what lay before her. The blood itself wasn’t vile or terrible smelling—it was the stench of the whole town that had her holding her breath from the moment she set foot inside the walls. Thankfully, a brisk wind had come with the dawn, and if she faced into it, she could momentarily banish the odors that threatened to upend her hard-won serenity.
More importantly, she didn’t want Gareth to regret her presence. As she was newly pregnant with their second child, he would have been well within his rights to use her pregnancy as an excuse to exclude her. Instead, he had sent for her specifically. She loved working with him. She loved being with him, even when it meant standing over a pool of blood in a stinking alley in Shrewsbury.
Debris of all sorts lined the street on both sides. Earlier, sunlight had been shining directly into the alley, but as the sun had risen farther in the sky, one wall now cast a shadow across most of the alley’s width. Gwen kicked at the detritus that had accumulated in the darkness against the south wall. Then, as she moved within a few feet of the pool of blood, she saw something that didn’t belong there lying beneath scattered leaves and sticks of splintered wood.
Bending, Gwen picked up a stick and used it to move leaves aside to reveal what they were covering: a string of wooden rosary beads with a simple wooden cross, strung on a slender leather thong.
“Has John returned yet?” Gwen spoke in Welsh, so that only Gareth, who was looking at something on the ground on the other side of the pool, could understand her.
He rose to his feet and came towards her before answering. “No. He’s still questioning the residents of the adjacent streets. Did you find something?”
Gwen craned her neck to look past her husband to the spot he’d been standing over. “You first.”
Gareth gestured past the pool. “Can you make out the wheel tracks from here? Someone rolled through the blood as he drove through the alley.”
“Oh good. Maybe they came upon the person bleeding on the ground and helped him.” Gwen drew Gareth’s attention to the rosary. “A good Samaritan might wear this.”
Gareth grunted his approval as he crouched beside her. “I was starting to feel guilty about taking you away from Tangwen.”
“She’s fine,” Gwen said. “Gwalchmai is teaching her to sing scales.”
“A worthy endeavor.” Gareth smiled and made a motion as if to touch Gwen’s belly, though he withdrew his hand at the last moment, since there were so many people around. “I look forward to the day that Tangwen can do the same for this child. Perhaps he will be a great bard like his uncle and grandfather.”
“That will be a great day,” Gwen said—and meant it, even as her stomach twisted a bit at the thought.
Until their departure to Shrewsbury, she’d lit a candle every day that this time she would give Gareth a son. Gareth swore it mattered to him not at all, but she knew what having a son meant to him and to every man. Hywel already had two. King Owain had a dozen, effectively ensuring his legacy into the next generation. She and Gareth had two foster sons, Llelo and Dai, both of whom were serving in Prince Cynan’s retinue, but the boys had come to them at ten and twelve. It would be a different matter entirely for Gareth to hold his infant son in his arms and name him for his own.
Gareth didn’t note her sudden silence and said, “Trust you to be the one to find something useful. If those fools weren’t moderately helpful blocking onlookers from coming into the alley, we’d be better off without them.”
Gwen didn’t disagree, and she didn’t tell her husband that Luke’s and Alfred’s opinion of him was equally low. Instead, she pointed to the two ends of the rosary. “See how the ties came undone rather than breaking? This wasn’t pulled off in a fight—or if it was, it was loose to begin with.”
Because the thong was knotted at the ends before the two ends had been tied together, the beads hadn’t come off the string. It was the normal way to make a rosary. Gwen owned one very much like it, as did Gareth.
“If the rosary and the blood belong to the same person, he wasn’t wealthy—or at least he didn’t show his wealth with expensive beads,” Gareth said.
“A rosary and a pool of blood should never go hand-in-hand,” Gwen said.
“More likely, the rosary has nothing to do with the blood at all because it belongs to one of the monks at the abbey.” Gareth was referring to the Abbey of St. Peter and St. Paul, located to the east of Shrewsbury, outside the city walls. It also happened to be the place where they were staying, in the abbey guesthouse.
“We can show it to the hospitaller and the abbot.” Gareth leaned in to pick up the rosary, his expression thoughtful, and he let the beads run through his fingers, as if he was saying his morning prayers.
Gwen shook her head slightly, still somewhat bemused that they were here in Shrewsbury at all, much less embroiled in an investigation within a day of their arrival. Ten days ago they’d been enduring the gloom at Aber when Meilyr, Gwen’s father, suddenly took it upon himself to wring permission from the king to travel to England on the trail of his as yet unacknowledged daughter, Adeline. She’d died alongside Cole Turner last autumn in the run up to the initial attempt to take Mold Castle.
Permission had been granted, if reluctantly, and they’d taken the ride from Aber to Shrewsbury slowly, enjoying fully the leave from their duties they’d been given. The fine weather had meant that Gwalchmai, despite being fifteen and a man, had spent much of the journey scampering about, Tangwen either running after him or on his shoulders as they explored the terrain on either side of the road. Gareth and Gwen had enjoyed long bouts of uninterrupted time to talk, and her father had been in full spate, composing songs while on horseback and regaling them with the results of his labors in the evening.
In fact, it had been the first time in nearly four years—since that fateful day when Gwen, Gwalchmai, and Meilyr had traveled north at the invitation of King Owain—that they’d been anywhere together as a family.
Gwen could remember, as clearly as if it were yesterday, the moment when she realized it was Gareth crouched over the body of King Anarawd. She often thought back to that day—recalling the way, between one breath and the next, her life had been transformed. For King Anarawd—and possibly for this poor person who’d shed his lifeblood on the ground—change had meant death. But for the living, it was important to remember that change wasn’t always bad.
“If anyone was going to act like the good Samaritan and help the victim, it would have been a monk,” Gwen said. “As far as I know, however, few ever leave the abbey proper—at least, that’s what one of the guests told me last night at dinner. And surely we would have heard if one of the monks had brought a man who was bleeding to death into the abbey.”
Gareth shrugged. “If the rosary has no connection to the victim, then at least we can do our good deed for the day by returning it.”