Chapter Six

Gareth

 

 

As Gwen left the hall with Evan, a messenger arrived for Amaury with the news that his men had found indications of Alard’s presence along the Lyme Brook. Relieved, Amaury took his leave to see to his men, with the promise that if Gareth would just wait for him, they could investigate together as soon as he returned. Amaury asked politely, but it wasn’t as if Gareth had a choice in the matter. He was in a foreign land, in a foreign castle. He couldn’t question the residents of Newcastle on his own.

Gareth was glad, nonetheless, to finally have something constructive to do. He collected Gruffydd, who’d waited for him on the steps to the keep, and then both men met Evan as he hastened towards them across the bailey from the chapel.

“Where’s Gwen?” Gareth said at Evan’s approach.

“With the prior,” Evan said.

“Good.”

Evan eyed him. “You’re not finding it difficult to control your new wife, are you?”

Gareth laughed, not at all offended. That Evan felt comfortable jesting on such an issue was testament to their friendship. “The man who tries to control Gwen is a man destined for frustration. No … if she’s with the prior, that means she can have a look at David’s body. We need that to happen before any more time passes. I want to have a better idea of what we’re dealing with.”

“And before one of these Normans gets to him first. They would think nothing of stripping him down and hiding anything of interest from us.” Evan paused. “Did you tell Amaury what she was doing?”

“He noticed that she’d gone, and Gruffydd told him that she’d decided to sit with Prior Rhys,” Gareth said. “If I neglected to mention that she planned to examine the body while she was at it, you can hardly blame me.”

“He wouldn’t understand,” Evan said.

“Who would?” Gareth said. “It’s better to ask forgiveness from Earl Robert if she finds something useful, than permission from Amaury to inspect him, which he might well deny.”

They reached the spot where they’d left the horses. Gareth ruffled the hair of the boy who’d watched over them. “Much obliged, Ifor.”

The boy ducked his head and relinquished the reins of Gareth’s horse. The stables here were full, so they’d arranged for Ifor, a stable boy from Aber, to stay with their mounts. Little had they known that murder would been in the offing and how long their initial visit to the castle would take.

“This way, my lord.” One of Amaury’s men gestured that Gareth should follow him.

Amaury and the soldier who’d brought the message met Gareth, Evan, and Gruffydd at the gatehouse. At Amaury’s nod, the messenger urged his horse into a trot and led them through the open gate. Once on the road that passed in front of the castle, the man turned east. Gareth glanced west, in the direction of the Welsh encampment. If Gwen had been with him, he might even have turned that way to ensure her safety before he continued on with Amaury. But he knew Gwen wouldn’t have liked it, and he supposed she was safe enough with Prior Rhys.

A quarter of a mile from the castle, the gatehouse to the friary appeared on Gareth’s left. Both the Lyme Brook and the road to London bisected the friary grounds, which encompassed lands to the north and south of the road. Amaury rode by the entrance without a glance. Another half-mile on, the small company left the road for the woods that lined the Lyme Brook. Another hundred yards and the scout pulled up in a small clearing.

Gareth swallowed down a grunt of disgust. A man lay face-up on the ground, blood pooling beneath him, though he’d been killed long enough ago for much of the blood to have soaked into the ground. A horse cropped the grass nearby. They all dismounted, careful to step lightly as they approached the body.

“At least one other horse was tethered in the clearing.” The scout pointed to hoof prints set deep in the soft earth under a nearby tree. “It’s gone now.”

“I can see that.” Amaury said.

The man looked down at his feet. Woe to the underling who wasted Sir Amaury’s time with obvious truths. Gareth caught Evan’s eye and nodded. Evan elbowed Gruffydd, and the two Welshmen headed towards the river. The man who’d spoken followed, along with three more of Amaury’s men who’d been waiting by the body for further orders.

Gareth and Amaury contemplated the dead man. Like David, the deceased was twenty years older than Gareth, though from a distance, his blond hair would have hidden the gray at his temples. He’d pulled back his hair and tied it at the nape of his neck with a leather thong, which had since come loose, the ends trailing in the dirt on which he lay.

Gareth crouched beside the body and turned the man’s head towards the sky with one finger at his bearded jaw. The man’s eyes were closed in death, and Gareth wondered who had closed them—the killer or one of Amaury’s soldiers, unable to bear his stare. The killer had stabbed the man’s heart, indicating that they’d fought face-to-face.

“Just what we need. Another dead man.” Amaury ran his hand through his hair and then dropped his arm in a gesture of frustration.

“A dead body is one thing. Murder another.” Gareth felt Amaury’s concentration and glanced up at the Norman knight. “You know him, too, of course.”

“His name was John,” Amaury said.

Gareth licked his lips, debating whether to ask straightforwardly for more information or if it would be better to draw Amaury out gradually. Gareth decided to take the long way around, to see if Amaury would volunteer what Gareth wanted to know. “He knew his attacker.”

“For him to get that close, he had to,” Amaury said.

Gareth waited through five heartbeats and then said, “The killer took the knife.”

“Perhaps it could identify him,” Amaury said.

That Amaury wouldn’t say outright that John was dead because Alard killed him presented Gareth with a dilemma. Amaury appeared reluctant to admit the possibility. It would be an assumption at this point, and assumptions were nothing without proof. Still, Gareth decided it needed to be said. “This looks like Alard’s work.”

Amaury sighed. “My men will comb the countryside for him.”

Gareth straightened, studying his surroundings. The trees were fully leafed, and here in the shade beside the river, the ground remained damp even when the sun was out.

“Over here, Sir Gareth!” Evan didn’t leave off Gareth’s title as he might have done had they been alone.

Gareth turned to Amaury. “He’s found something.” Without waiting to see if Amaury would come with him, Gareth crossed the clearing to where Evan and Gruffydd had entered the woods. Thirty feet on, he reached the two men. Evan crouched near some footprints on the bank, while Gruffydd hovered near a cluster of reeds growing at the water’s edge.

“What have you found?” Gareth said.

“Two sets of footprints.” Evan pointed to the thick mud that bordered the brook.

The print of a boot was sunk deep into the soil, indicating that a man had come out of the water there. Then Gruffydd showed Gareth several damaged reeds, as if something—or someone—large and heavy had passed through them.

The second pair of prints faced the brook, indicating that the man coming out of the water had been greeted by a second man, who’d perhaps grasped his arm to help him from the brook. Following Evan’s pointing finger, Gareth traced the path of the departing sets of footprints as they headed back to the clearing. They followed a different path through the undergrowth than the one Gareth had just taken.

“We’ve got more, Sir Gareth,” Gruffydd said. “Look at this.”

Amaury had followed Gareth from the clearing, and now he peered over Gareth’s shoulder as they looked at the spot on the ground that Gruffydd indicated. “I would say that’s blood.” Amaury waggled a finger at the dark patches speckling the leaves of several plants beside the trail.

“Indeed. Someone is wounded. If it’s Alard, it indicates that David may have fought back.” Gareth turned his head to look at the riverbank. “If I read the signs right, Alard left the brook here. A man greeted him—”

Gareth broke off his sentence without finishing it and ran back to the clearing. John lay as they’d left him, with a lone guard standing over the body. Gareth crouched and ran a finger along the bottom of John’s boot. His finger didn’t come away clean, but it wasn’t coated in mud either.

Just to be sure, he tugged off John’s boot and brought it back to the riverside. Crouching, he placed it in the first print Evan had found, the one belonging to the man who’d gone for a swim. Unsurprisingly, his boot didn’t fit the print.

Then Gareth placed the boot into the second print, fully expecting it to fit, only to find that John’s boot was two fingers’ width larger.

Amaury had watched Gareth’s antics with interest and now leaned in. “Could the print have shrunk?”

“The sun doesn’t shine here. The mud should have preserved the boot’s shape perfectly. If anything, the print should be wider than the wearer’s actual boot and deceive us into thinking it’s John’s.” Gareth straightened and surveyed the water’s edge. “So Alard met a third man, who was not John. I don’t have enough information yet to say how John fits into this story, other than to say that it is likely that either Alard, or the one who met him, killed him.”

The four men moved back to the clearing. Unfortunately, the boot prints around John’s body had been smeared and jumbled by all the activity, and it was impossible to link a particular print to the man who had killed him.

“My bet is on the third man from the wall walk,” Amaury said.

“Provided the one who came out of the water was actually Alard,” Gareth said.

Amaury shot Gareth a puzzled look.

“I’m not rejecting my earlier supposition that Alard killed John,” Gareth explained, “but the additional boot prints and the overall complexity of this investigation have given me renewed resolve not to assume anything.”

Amaury’s expression cleared. “Oh, I see. We have prints and blood, but nothing suggests that either is tied to Alard, except that he went into the water at Newcastle, and someone came out of the brook here.” He pursed his lips. “It is well not to assume. Thank you.”

“We all have assumptions, and sometimes those assumptions prove true, but with two murders now, I think it might be best if we take it one step at a time and focus on what we know,” Gareth said. “The more we learn, the more we can explain, until the murderer reveals himself without us having had to assume anything.”

Amaury gazed towards the river, though Gareth didn’t think he was really seeing it. He was silent through a dozen heartbeats and then said, “May I have a moment of your time, Sir Gareth?”

“Of course.” Gareth turned to Evan and Gruffydd and spoke in Welsh. “Would you excuse Sir Amaury and me? Perhaps if we are alone, he will tell me something of the truth. So far, I don’t know that we’ve heard much of it from anyone.”

Evan and Gruffydd nodded, and Amaury and Gareth returned to the bank so they could be alone by the river. Amaury jerked his head towards a tree that hung over a small waterfall. When Gareth followed him to where he indicated, the rush of the water grew even louder than on the trail. Amaury was right in thinking that the sound would drown out their voices to all but them.

Amaury leaned his shoulder against the trunk of the tree, and Gareth stepped close, such that they stood only two hand-spans apart. Gareth didn’t find it comfortable being so close to the Norman, but if it was the only way to get him to talk, he was willing to endure it. This had the makings of a secret worth hearing.

Amaury thought for another count of ten, his eyes on Gareth’s face, and then said, “What I have to tell you must not go beyond you and your lords.”

Gareth nodded, grateful that Amaury understood that Gareth was honor-bound to report everything he learned to Prince Hywel.

“And if someone asks how you came by this knowledge, it didn’t come from me.”

Again, Gareth agreed. He clasped his hands behind his back, patient and attentive. Finally, Amaury found it within himself to speak, though he didn’t look at Gareth and stood as he had when he’d delivered the bad news about Alard to Gareth earlier in the great hall: “Once there were four men. The empress called them her four horsemen, and to her they represented everything you think of when you hear that phrase.”

If Amaury’s expression had been less anxious, Gareth would have whistled through his teeth. He knew his Bible, of course. At the ending of the world, the four horsemen of the apocalypse would be visited on mankind: conquest, war, famine, and death. That Empress Maud would refer to her men in such a fashion made Gareth’s stomach clench. At the same time, maybe he shouldn’t have been surprised. Unlike King Stephen, who had such a fine sense of honor it was costing him the war, Maud was known less for her piety than for her vindictiveness.

“In what way did they work for her?” Gareth said, more to say something than because he feared Amaury wouldn’t tell him.

Amaury took in a deep breath through his nose. “Remember the rebellion in the southwest of England in the early days of Stephen’s reign? It forced Stephen’s focus away from fighting Maud to fighting his own barons, when he wasn’t at odds with the Scots or the Welsh.”

“I remember,” Gareth said. “I was fighting Normans in Ceredigion around that time.”

Amaury gave him a wry smile. “Who do you suppose were instrumental in helping Earl Robert foster that rebellion? Who infiltrated castles, made promises Maud might never keep, and put steel in those half-Saxon spines?”

“The horsemen, clearly, or you wouldn’t be telling me this,” Gareth said.

“I don’t know where she found them, exactly, or in what fashion she gathered them together, but they were her spies, and by that I mean they were trained to a degree few men have attained. Two were Welshmen, another was a Saxon, and the fourth was a Frenchman.”

“I’d wager that David was one of the Welshmen,” Gareth said, and at Amaury’s nod added, “though Ranulf said he was his man, not Maud’s.”

“Ranulf thought David belonged to him; he was meant to think so,” Amaury said.

“But you know differently?” Gareth said.

Amaury gave him a long look, and when Gareth didn’t add to his question, he said, “You need me to lay it out?”

Gareth chewed on his lower lip, studying Amaury’s face. “Your liege lord is Ranulf as well. Are you implying that your allegiance is also broader, to the empress, just as David’s was? Are you a spy for her too?”

Amaury coughed a laugh. “Hardly. I am a knight, as you are.” He spread his hands wide. “But that does not mean I am not party to certain information.”

Gareth hated such obliqueness, but he didn’t want to throw Amaury off his stride. “I accept that. We were talking about the four horsemen.”

Amaury nodded. “To continue, that man there—” He tipped his head towards the clearing where John’s body lay, “—the Saxon, John, along with the second Welshman who died years ago, were under Earl Robert’s authority.”

“And the fourth, the Frenchman, was … Alard?” Gareth said, seeing where this was going.

“He was a favorite of the empress, a man she’d known for twenty years, ever since he was a boy. He was the most trusted of the four,” Amaury said.

“And Alard has now killed both David and John,” Gareth said, “two of the four horsemen.”

“So it seems,” Amaury said

Gareth eyes narrowed. “We know Alard killed David. How can you think otherwise?”

Amaury sighed and did not answer.

Gareth reminded himself, not for the first time, that Alard had been Amaury’s friend. “At the very least, you have to grant that he is involved in his death.”

“Yes. I grant that,” Amaury said.

Gareth glanced away, thinking. “Could these four men—or rather, the remaining three—have had some kind of falling out?”

“They were never natural friends,” Amaury said, “and if they had a falling out, it was years ago. What people will assume now, if we cannot prove otherwise, is that Alard has betrayed the empress for Stephen, just as Earl Ranulf said.”

Gareth wished his French came as naturally to him as his Welsh. Amaury seemed to feel the need to assume the best of his former friend, despite all evidence that condemned him. Gareth decided to allow his skepticism and ignorance to show. “You don’t believe Alard is a traitor either? Ranulf seemed sure. All of this would make more sense and be quite straightforward if he was.”

“When one is dealing with spies, things are rarely straightforward,” Amaury said. “I don’t believe it. For all that he is a spy, Alard is not a coward. If he had defected to Stephen, he would have told the empress himself. He would have told me.”

In Gareth’s experience, one of the most predictable aspects of intelligent men was how unpredictable they could be. But again, Alard had been Amaury’s friend.

“Yet now we have John,” Gareth said. “He could have been the third man on the tower.”

“Of course he could have. I assumed it, right up until his boot didn’t fit the print, which means that we are looking for a fourth man.” Amaury shook his head. “I am as much in the dark as you.”

“The fourth horseman?” Gareth said.

“He’s dead,” Amaury said.

“What was his name?”

“Why does it matter?”

Gareth shrugged. “I’m just gathering information. I don’t know what might become important later.”

Amaury picked at his lower lip. “Peter.”

“Right,” Gareth said. “Well … if Alard is as intelligent as you say, he had a reason for coming to Newcastle.”

“Ranulf would say it was to murder David,” Amaury said.

“But you still don’t think so?”

Amaury sighed. “I admit that dropping David’s body at your wife’s feet implies that he killed him. But again, Alard is very intelligent. If he were planning to kill David, do you think he would have done it in broad daylight? He’s a spy. He lives in the dark.”

Gareth had thought much the same thing earlier and couldn’t disagree. “It does appear to be an absurd act, and yet I saw his eyes. He knew what he was doing.”

“Perhaps he merely meant to speak to David and their conversation turned to violence,” Amaury said.

Gareth swallowed down a mocking laugh. “David was strangled and stabbed. And then thrown over a battlement. Alard wanted him dead.”

As he spoke, however, Gareth suddenly doubted his surety. Now that he had the chance to think more about it, the determination in Alard’s face might have reflected a decision to drop David at their feet once he was dead, rather than leave him on the wall-walk to be found after Alard escaped. There was still something about that act that nagged at Gareth. It was so public and obvious. Alard had to know that someone would recognize him. And yet, he’d done it anyway.

“Ranulf will say that when David and John refused Alard’s invitation to join him in his service to King Stephen, Alard killed them,” Amaury said.

“Earl Ranulf is your lord, in name if not in fact,” Gareth said. “And yet you—”

Amaury cut Gareth off. “You presume too much, Sir Gareth.”

Gareth blinked, surprised at Amaury’s sharp tone and unsure of what he’d done to deserve it. “Excuse me?”

The tenseness in Amaury’s expression eased. “I apologize for my abruptness, but I have told you all I can, and we shouldn’t linger here any longer. Alard was my friend. I must discover the truth of what happened, for good or ill.”

Gareth nodded. “I will help you, if I can.”

“Thank you for that.” Amaury made his hands into fists. “I have a task I must see to alone, but when I am finished, I will find you.”

Gareth nodded. “In the scriptures, the fourth horseman is death. Whatever happens, we cannot allow Alard to kill again.”