The Favored Son

by Sarah Woodbury

  “I’m sorry. I still don’t understand.”

  Adela sighed. “Mabs’s mother was my aunt, Sir Aubrey’s daughter. Mabs is illegitimate, however, whereas my father married my mother.” Then she laughed lightly. “You don’t need to say it: yes, you are not the only one who finds it odd that Earl Robert named his illegitimate daughter after his wife.”

  “Did it help?”

  Again the low laugh. “As you could probably tell yourself, there’s both love and hate there. Mabs’s life would have been very different if my aunt had survived her birth, but she did not.”

  “What was your grandfather’s relationship with Mabs?”

  Adela hemmed and hawed for a moment. “He tried. He blamed himself for his daughter’s death, feeling that he didn’t sufficiently discourage her relationship with the earl.”

  “What could he have done? Earl Robert was your grandfather’s employer and possibly the most powerful man in England, next to King Stephen.”

  “Don’t let anyone else hear you say that!” She dropped her chin. “He was the most powerful man in England. But if Sir Aubrey had come to him and asked that he put aside his daughter, the earl would have done so. My grandfather feels he should have sent Isabeau away. Or, better yet, married her to someone else. Many men would have accepted her.”

  Gwen looked Adela up and down. “If you and Mabs are cousins, what is your role in the household?”

  “I kept house for my grandfather. Our quarters are above the inner gatehouse.” That was typically the location of the steward’s apartments. In some castles, they were as well appointed as the king’s. Gareth had mentioned a desire to inspect them but, with one thing and another, had not yet gained permission.

  “Did you and Mabs get along? She doesn’t seem very happy with her lot.” Taran had fallen asleep nursing, and Gwen adjusted him and her clothes so they were both more comfortable. Gwen didn’t remember Tangwen being so accommodating at this age, but she was grateful that he had so far been a help to the investigation.

  Adela sighed. “Mabs is illegitimate, but she is King Henry’s granddaughter by blood. She allows herself to be stuck in the middle—too lofty for the likes of me, even if we are cousins, but not high enough to be an equal in the earl’s household. She is Earl William’s half-sister! But if they have spoken more than a few words to each other in ten years, you wouldn’t know it.”

  “It must be hard for all of you.” Not for the first time, Gwen was thankful to have been born Welsh where these distinctions were either less evident or nonexistent.

  “It is much easier being me.” Adela paused. “I loved my grandfather.” Her voice was choked off by rising tears, and she looked down at her lap.

  Gwen reached out and took her hand. “Why are you here instead of with your family in their time of grief?”

  “I didn’t want to be at home anymore. I don’t want to cry anymore, and I knew that if I went the tears would fall again.” There was as much pain in her voice as Gwen had heard in Lady Mabel’s, and she herself unstiffened further, scooting closer and putting her arm around her. It seemed her lot to comfort the mourning women of Bristol Castle.

  Eventually Adela calmed and regained control of herself, her face settling back into repose. Gwen had questioned many suspects and witnesses over the years, and while she didn’t feel comfortable milking a grieving woman for information, she would listen as long as Adela was willing to stay with her.

  “You are very kind to sit with me. With all these other deaths, I think nobody wants to talk to anyone else. We are all tired of tears.”

  “Since you worked in the castle, you must have known Jenet and Bernard,” Gwen said.

  “And Rose.”

  The news that Rose’s body had been discovered in the river had spread through the castle like a fire through a stable. People had been openly weeping, so William had left the conference to speak calmingly to everyone, and a priest had come as well to bless and sanctify the hall and pray for a quick discovery of the murderer.

  “Bernard was often in our chambers,” Adela continued. “He and my grandfather were friends, you know.”

  “I didn’t know,” Gwen said. “Weren’t they very different in age?”

  “Yes. My grandfather was much older, but Bernard amused him. And, of course, they were both companions to Earl Robert. Along with Fitzharding, and occasionally Charles, late in the evening they would sit together and drink good wine.” Then Adela frowned. “They had a falling out a few days before he died, however. I heard them arguing.”

  “Before who died?”

  “Bernard. I’d woken in the night and saw a light. I didn’t go out into the sitting room, but my grandfather was speaking in a harsh whisper to someone at the door. I realized it was Bernard, and then my grandfather said something like you made your bed. Now you must lie in it.”

  “Do you know what he was talking about?”

  Adela shook her head. “I drew back before he knew I was listening.” She paused. “Perhaps you’ve been told that my grandfather was struggling with his memory? That’s why he kept lists of everyone who came and went in the castle. If he didn’t, he wouldn’t remember.”

  “We have noticed the lists,” Gwen said encouragingly.

  “After Bernard went away, my grandfather got very drunk. I helped him to bed, and the whole time he was muttering about his lists. He kept saying there was something he should be remembering about them but couldn’t. He even took the name of the Lord in vain.”

  Gwen allowed a suitably shocked expression to cross her face, though traveling with knights and men-at-arms as she often did, few curses could shock her anymore.

  Adela shrugged. “In the morning, as was often the case, my grandfather had forgotten all about it.”

  “Do you have any idea what he’d been talking about?”

  Adela shook her head again, the tears returning, and her words echoed what Gareth and Llelo had concluded. “I’ve gone over those lists of his many times. There’s nothing out of the ordinary in them at all.”

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Dai

  The manhunt was in full swing. Dai felt the excitement of it tingling up and down his spine. Last summer at Dinefwr, he’d been abed and unable to participate, but today he’d spent the last hour poking around the castle, his thinking being that the castle soldiers would operate by brute force rather than cleverness. If Bernard had been smart, he would have been long gone by now, but then, if he’d been smart he wouldn’t have found himself under a debt so crushing he faked his own death rather than face it.

  Why he might have returned to the castle to kill again was anybody’s guess. While Roger was ready to blame Bernard for the deaths of five people, Dai was having serious doubts about any assumption. Earlier that afternoon, before the discovery of Rose, he’d exchanged Evan for his mother, and gone with her to the castle healer, a man named Denis. Even to someone as skeptical as Dai, Denis appeared to know more about his craft than any healer Dai had ever met, including his new grandmother, Saran. Denis had come to Earl Robert twenty years ago from France—and before that the Holy Land—which was an adventure Dai wanted for himself one day. Denis had insisted that Earl Robert’s death was regrettable but natural, and Dai couldn’t help but believe him.

  The second person they’d spoken to was the midwife, who had confirmed Jenet’s troubled pregnancy. Of all the deaths, perhaps Jenet’s was the one least likely to have been murder. They would see what Bernard said about all of that when they caught him. If they caught him. One of the reasons Dai was checking every nook and cranny in the castle was because he was expecting to find not Bernard, alive and well, but his dead body.

  Dai stepped past Aron, who was keeping watch outside the door of the laying-out room, and found Aelfric’s body gone, Rose’s body covered, and his father staring out the tiny window. The plan was to attend the funeral for Sir Aubrey as a family, and now that the day was waning, the designated moment to meet was not far off. Earl Will
iam had contemplated postponing the mass but decided in the end to go forward with it. The possibility that they were close to finding Aubrey’s killer was all the more reason it should continue as planned.

  Gareth turned towards the door as Dai entered. “Your mother was just here. She told me about your day. Were you with her when she spoke to Adela?”

  Dai shook his head.

  Gareth put his hands on his hips. “Bernard and his debts and these damn lists again.”

  “Mother shouldn’t be wandering alone. That’s what I’m for.”

  “She hasn’t gone far; she’s just walking Taran.”

  Dai liked babies, it turned out. He knew his parents had worried he might resent the arrival of a new brother, fearing he would usurp Dai’s place as their son, but they worried needlessly. As Llelo had said to him when they’d first discovered Gwen’s pregnancy, they would both be knights with families of their own before Taran became a man. They had nothing to worry about.

  Dai lifted his chin to point to the covered body. “You’re done here?”

  Gareth sighed. “She was garroted like Aelfric. I’d even say the same laundry line killed them both and was used to tie her to a weight.” He indicated a length of rope trailing from Rose’s ankle to the floor. “Unfortunately for the killer, laundry line is not the sturdiest of rope.”

  “And as we know, it’s very hard to get rid of a body.” Dai gladly moved with his father back to the doorway and out into the fresh air. It had been a sunny day, and Cadoc promised there would be another tomorrow.

  “So it seems.” Gareth gave a mocking laugh. “Unfortunately, notes that say Bernard killed me are rather thin on the ground.”

  “A note wouldn’t have survived the water.” Sometime jests were the only way to make death bearable. “I am distrustful of this sudden rush to judgement anyway.”

  Dai was pleased to see his father looking at him with interest. “Why?”

  “Two days ago, nobody wanted to believe that even Sir Aubrey had been murdered, and now they are ready to hang Bernard for killing five people, including his own wife and Earl Robert. It’s like Hamelin told Llelo: we need a man with means, motive, and opportunity, and I don’t see Bernard as filling those requirements.”

  “He’s good for the first and third, anyway,” Gareth said. “It’s the one reason I haven’t protested openly about the manhunt. Bringing him in, if he didn’t in fact die in the river, could help the investigation enormously.”

  “I just hope the men in the search party don’t string him up before you can talk to him.”

  “I did speak to Harold about that, and he promised to put the fear of God in the men not to harm him.”

  “We know better than to trust crowds.” Dai snorted his skepticism. “Where has Llelo gone?”

  “I sent him for wine.” Gareth gestured back towards the room. “Aelfric and Rose are the loose links in the killer’s armor, Dai. It may be that Bernard murdered five people, but this late in the day, we still have no proof that Earl Robert and Jenet died by anything but natural causes. I have allowed myself to assume murder, and Hywel would have my head for it.” He grimaced. “But Aelfric and Rose? Their deaths were indisputably murder. Theirs are the ones we’re going to solve.”

  His father’s surety had Dai’s spirits rising, despite the fact that they were standing over the bodies of two more people.

  A bell tolled above them. And then again, echoed by a dozen others—perhaps all the bells in Bristol. He looked at his father. “The funeral is about to start.”

  “Find the others. Llelo and I will close up here and then join you at the church.”

  Dai did as he was bid, walking with dozens of other people through the northern gateway towards St. Peter’s Church. Dai hadn’t actually been inside the town of Bristol yet, since the priory was located outside the city proper, and the only entrance he’d used so far was the eastern gate. He allowed himself to be swept along in the flow of people and noted yet again that nobody was writing down names or even checking identities. With the loss of Sir Aubrey and the call of the bell, discipline had broken down entirely.

  Then Gruffydd fell into step beside him. He appeared to have been lurking nearby, standing guard as Aron had been, though from a different vantage point. “I can’t decide if it will be more interesting to note who isn’t at the funeral or who is.”

  Dai tsked through his teeth. “Everybody who is anybody will be there. They wouldn’t dare miss it.” Then he stopped in his tracks. “That’s a problem, Gruffydd, isn’t it? Will they pull the guards off the walls like before? Half of them are gone already searching for Bernard.” He lifted his chin to point back the way they’d come. “Did you see that nobody is keeping track of who’s going in or out?”

  “I did.” Gruffydd’s eyes went to the ramparts of the castle looming above them.

  Dai himself had never seen a castle as tall as Bristol. It was a sight to behold, visible for miles because of the white limestone exterior that shone even when there was no sun. He didn’t see any heads moving along the wall-walk, but that didn’t mean nobody was there.

  Gruffydd set off at a fast walk back to the laying-out room. When they reached it, Gareth and Llelo were just leaving, each with a cup of wine in his hand.

  Gareth tipped up his cup and drained it in two gulps before dropping his chin and saying, “You’re back.”

  “We were wondering if the funeral could be used as an excuse to do more mischief,” Dai said.

  Gareth’s eyes looked past him to the throngs of people heading towards the church. The church bell was bonging again, its warning echoing over the whole of the castle and town. “Find your mother, Dai, and attend the service with her. I still want eyes there. Gruffydd, bring everyone else to me in the guardhouse of the inner ward.”

  Dai was past feeling resentful of being left out of the search. His father trusted him with the safety of his mother and brother. When there was a murderer on the loose, that was no small task.

  Once again, they crowded through the gateway with twenty others and then set off at a faster pace for the church. By the time they reached it, the entire Welsh contingent had arrived, the rest having come into the town directly across a bridge near the priory.

  “I’m here to watch your back, Mother.”

  Gruffydd grinned as he clapped Dai on the shoulder. “I’m glad you’re so cheerful about it. Remember, all work done in the spirit of service pleases God.” He swept out an arm. “Come along, those who are coming.”

  As everyone else walked away, Dai heard Gruffydd explaining to his fellow Dragons, barring Cadoc and Aron, who’d remained inside the castle with Gareth, what had transpired.

  Thus, it was only Angharad, Gwen, and Dai (and Taran, of course) left to attend the service. They entered the church to find the nave packed with people. At the front, Prince Henry, Earl William, Lady Mabel, Roger, and all the high lords who were here for the conference sat on padded benches arranged in rows. Cadwaladr was among them. Other well-dressed people sat in subsequent rows, followed by the castle staff and common folk, who crowded up behind them, standing instead of sitting.

  Gwen herself didn’t feel like she could stand holding Taran for a whole hour, and she led Angharad sidling along the south side of the church to a stone bench permanently affixed to the wall just behind the seated mourners. Mercifully, the bench had room at the end for Gwen to perch. If it hadn’t, Dai might have gone over and asked a well-dressed merchant of the town to stand and give Gwen his place.

  Angharad leaned against the wall beside her, but Dai chose to post himself in the porch, to better watch the comings and goings of the congregation. So far, everybody who should be there was there.

  Taran was awake but not crying, and Gwen rocked him while the people around her hushed and the priest raised his hands. Dai allowed the Latin mass to wash over him—he knew the words by heart, of course, and even what they meant, as he’d been tutored with Llelo—a fact he mostly resented, though not i
n this moment.

  He crossed his arms, eyeing the people in the nave. He had the sense from the shifting feet and dispersed coughing that they were restless and not able to focus their reverence. There’d definitely been too many funerals of late in Bristol. If anything, with the finding of two more bodies, the wards against evil had increased in the last day.

  Whether because the priest realized how nervous his people were or simply because Sir Aubrey hadn’t been as great a lord as all that, the mass was simple and relatively short, taking less than an hour. Nearing the end, Taran began fussing and Gwen put him to her breast, which meant that as the mass ended and the people started to disperse, she didn’t move.

  “It was kind of you to come.”

  Dai had been edging away from the doorway to allow the wave of people to leave, but now he turned around to find Prince Cadwaladr gazing down at him with what he could only describe as a benevolent expression. Dai had no idea what to say, if for no other reason than Dai’s presence at the funeral hadn’t been kind at all. He was here to watch the residents of Bristol mourn.

  But he managed a slight smile. “You as well. Did you know Sir Aubrey?” The appropriate my lord stuck in Dai’s throat.

  Something in Cadwaladr’s expression flickered, like a candle flame in the wind, and then steadied again. “How is the investigation coming? Do you think this valet they’re hunting did it?”

  Again, Dai almost didn’t answer. He knew instinctively that Cadwaladr had sought him out because he was the youngest member of Gareth’s party. The prince couldn’t ask Gwen or Gareth anything, but he would rightfully see Dai as powerless. “We’ll see.”

  Cadwaladr harrumphed. “Will you? I find the accusation of him a typical rush to judgement.”

  “Why?”

  “Your father claims he never assumes and goes by facts that are known, but as far as I can tell, this investigation is based on nothing but assumptions. I’m surprised he hasn’t come for me.”

  Dai glanced towards his mother, who was gazing at him with a somewhat appalled expression. The church was empty but for her, Taran, and Angharad, and none could help him. It was up to Dai to do his best. “As it turns out, my father and I were just discussing this very thing, and we agree completely. You are right that too many assumptions have been made.”