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Day Three
Cait
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The next morning, while most of her companions were consumed with the whys and wherefores of the poisoning of her uncle’s food taster, Cait had remembered the appointment they’d made with Holm to go through the books and other gear Harald had left at his mother’s house. Given the crisis at the palace, rather than assist in the work himself, Holm had dropped off a trunk full of books and relics with Gwen and Cait at Godfrid’s house and left. He’d been polite about it, but she could see he believed pursuit of the poisoner was far more important and interesting.
Gwen picked up a stack of loosely bound papers from the trunk and set it on the empty table before her. “Everybody is going to forget about Harald now.”
“I was thinking the same thing.” Cait glanced at her new friend. “We won’t.”
Now Gwen lifted out a book. “Harald was dressed as a knight and had wounds from fighting. He had the coin. He was involved.” She laid three more books on the table and then put another stack of papers beside them.
The smell of old leather wafted over them. While the leather works, located to the north of the Liffey and thus outside the city, were a blight on the nose if one approached too closely, the smell of leather itself was pleasant—and to Cait comforting. She’d learned to read very young, and it was one of the activities Conall had enjoyed sharing with her.
Then Gwen paused, her head down, having crouched once again to the trunk. Cait noticed and rounded the table to look into the trunk with her. Taking out the last books, Gwen revealed a lower level within the trunk containing a dozen weapons, from slim knives to darts, along with a genuine sword, this one in even poorer condition than the one Harald had died holding, with a rusted blade and a worn leather wrap on the hilt.
“Holm didn’t mention these,” Gwen said.
Cait gave a little laugh. “He saw books, and his eyes glazed over.”
“Harald seems to have been somewhat obsessed with Dublin’s martial past.”
Cait straightened and returned to the books on the table. Several were quite old, and thus not written by Harald, but two were in Harald’s own handwriting: one a work-in-progress translating the Bible into Danish, as Holm had said. The second was a chronicle, with dates and events.
She flipped quickly through the pages. “It’s a record of Harald’s life.”
Gwen looked up from one of the leather folios. “Can you read it?”
She nodded. “My Danish is perhaps not as good as it could be, but it improves daily. It should be good enough for this.”
Gwen returned to what she was doing, though Cait could feel her eyes glancing every now and then towards her. Over the next hour, the servants came and went, bringing food and drink for both of them, though if Cait ate and drank, she hardly noticed. She read in fascination—and also, as time went on, with a bit of acid in her belly. Harald seemed overly interested in himself and his own doings. He even recorded what he ate every day, though at the monastery, it seemed hardly to vary from day to day, even when he transferred from the monastery in Ribe to Dublin.
He was quite frank about his grief at the loss of his brother, but very excited to have returned to Dublin. He documented the start of the Danish translation of the Bible, and then, in June, she encountered the first entry which referenced something other than the daily routine of a monk in the scriptorium: I have today begun to see that my life cannot continue as it has been.
In the subsequent entries, coming daily over the course of the summer, Harald related his submersion deeper and deeper into a world of legend. He attended his first fight and then began training. Though she could only guess at what his voice might have sounded like, she could almost hear his excitement coming through the pages. He was learning to fight. He was becoming the man he thought he should always have been.
He regretted the death of his brother but felt he was honoring his memory. He detailed his growing relationship with Arnulf, who shared Harald’s secret passion for fighting, though Cait never got the sense they actually enjoyed each other’s company. Arnulf had been tasked with bringing communion to the elderly throughout Dublin, and the pair used visiting Harald’s mother as a way to sneak away to practice. They found an abandoned warehouse by the docks and were soon joined by others. They never wore their church garb to these sessions nor used their real names, relying upon the desire of everyone to keep what they were doing a secret to protect themselves.
Then, on the twentieth of July, came the first mention of Bishop Gregory: The bishop seeks to unite the Danish church with the Irish. He cannot. It would be a betrayal of our ancestors.
Cait gave a little gasp at the boldness of the statement, at which point Gwen, who had long since given up on the books and was nursing Taran in the chair Godfrid had provided for her, met Cait’s eyes.
“I was wondering when you’d come back to me. The journal is obviously fascinating.”
“I have many pages still to read, but listen to this.” Cait translated what Harald had written.
Gwen pointed to the table. “I didn’t want to disturb your concentration, but look at the top paper in the folio on the left.”
Cait did as she bid. The top of the paper had been torn off, but the rest of the paper showed quote after quote from the Bible, all written in Danish. With the paper in her hand, she turned to look at Gwen. “I read this as possible Danish translations of Latin passages from the book of Luke.”
“The quote we found in his room was from Luke.”
“And the top of this paper is torn.”
“You can even see a bit of ink if you look closely, as if something was written and incompletely torn away.”
“Like the quote in his room.”
Gwen canted her head. “If we do, in fact, know now where it came from, the question remains why that quote? I would ask now too if Harald himself left it there as a message or if someone left it there for him—someone who knew about his books and his writing at his mother’s house?” She paused. “Perhaps the man who killed him.”
“Arnulf?”
Gwen shrugged one shoulder. “After Gareth is done using him to paint the bigger picture, probably he ought to ask him about this too.”
