The Irish Bride

by Sarah Woodbury

  “You’re a good boy to come. Marta was here last night. She brought me dinner from the feast and ate it with me.”

  Holm was suddenly ashamed he hadn’t known that—and that nobody official had thought to follow up with Agnes, after whatever priest Bishop Gregory had sent to inform her of her loss had done so. In his experience, churchmen were prepared to tell you at any hour of the day or night where you’d gone wrong, but they weren’t very good with the aftermath.

  Holm had attended the feast with his family, but his official duties had kept him from their table except in passing. It had been late when he’d returned home, long past the time his wife had settled the children and gone to sleep. That was normal for her and for him, because of his job, and overall they were getting along much better than they ever had when Ottar had been king. His wife herself had commented that he was happier at work and thus more content outside of it. As the saying went, happy husband, happy home.

  Agnes’s hand came down on his shoulder. “You must thank your mother for sending you to me.”

  Holm rose to his feet, deciding in that instant Agnes deserved the truth, and he wasn’t going to ride the tail of his mother’s cloak, even for better answers. “I am here as sheriff, mother.” He lowered his voice. “I must speak to you of your son Harald.”

  Agnes’s lips turned down slightly, but otherwise her expression didn’t change. “I did know that, my dear. Ladle me a bowl of porridge, and I will answer all your questions.”

  Holm did as she bid, ladling one for himself as well, half the amount, just to be polite, and they sat on stools across the hearth from one another.

  “Harald was always a good boy.”

  Holm opened his mouth—but to say what, he wasn’t sure. Certainly something agreeable, but then she made a dismissive gesture with her spoon to cut him off.

  “I know what they’re saying up at the cathedral, but Harald would never have taken his own life. It’s a mortal sin! When he returned to Dublin, a full Benedictine, I’ve never seen him so happy and proud. He worked in the scriptorium, you know.”

  Holm nodded. “Bishop Gregory himself commended his writing.”

  “Harald was more than just a scribe, of course.”

  Holm carefully put a spoonful of the flavorless porridge into his mouth and swallowed before following up, making sure his tone was merely curious. “What do you mean?”

  “Ever since Harald was a boy, he enjoyed stories. Since he returned to Dublin, he would bring candles and work here until all hours of the night.”

  To learn information like this was the reason Holm had come, and he didn’t make the mistake of asking Agnes to elaborate. She was lonely, and she trusted him (a twinge of guilt there), so he let her ramble.

  “Even as a boy, his head was in the clouds, thinking of legends and the days of old. His uncle gave him a wooden sword when he was only three, and he carried it everywhere.”

  This was an opening Holm had been looking for. “Did he own a sword himself, now that he was a man?”

  Agnes frowned. “What would he need a sword for? He was a monk.”

  “After the battle at the Liffey were you given Tiko’s sword?”

  Agnes took an unsteady breath. “The captain of the town garrison himself brought it to me.” She drew Holm’s attention to a sword in its sheath set above the door. “Every day I remember him.”

  Up until now, Holm had been assuming the sword with which Harald had died had been his brother’s. It was the obvious thought, but he was reminded of Godfrid’s warning not to take anything about a death he was investigating for granted. “Who came to see you yesterday to tell you Harald was dead?”

  For a moment, Agnes looked proud. “Bishop Gregory himself!” Then her expression saddened. “He was very kind.”

  “Was he the one who told you Harald killed himself?”

  “He didn’t say a word about it, and I had no reason to think it until my neighbor came to see me with a basket of apples to leave me, along with her condolences.”

  “How did she hear of it?”

  “I don’t know. I confess I sent her away with her apron over her face.” Agnes stuck out her chin. “I kept the apples.”

  Holm set aside his half-eaten porridge in order take Agnes’s hand. “I have to ask, you understand. If he didn’t kill himself, and he didn’t die by natural causes, we must discover what did happen and find the man responsible. We can’t have a murderer walking free in Dublin! Especially not a man who would murder a monk.”

  Agnes looked down at their joined hands. “I don’t know anything about how or why he died. I do know nobody understood him at the church.”

  “Why would you say that? I thought Harald was pleased to have become a Benedictine.”

  “He was! But Harald said to me more recently that he came home because he needed the peace of this house to work.”

  “How did you feel about that?”

  “Toki never more than tolerated him, but I loved having him here, especially since Toki was gone. It was like when Harald was a boy and had first discovered how to read. It was a new world opening up for him.” She shrugged. “He tried to teach me, but I never saw the point.”

  “Do you know what he was working on?”

  Agnes shrugged again. “Stories, he said. Legends of our ancestors.”

  “Will you show me where he worked?” Holm was a little confused about what Agnes meant, but he hoped if he saw Harald’s workspace, he would understand. He had a great deal to tell Godfrid already, but he wanted to be thorough.

  Agnes stood and led him to the back corner of the house. As Harald had worked late at night, he hadn’t needed a window to let in extra light, and the table was littered with candle stubs and wax. Laid neatly to one side were pen and ink and a stack of paper, the latter held down by a smooth stone.

  “His work was here.” Agnes lifted the lid of a wooden box, two feet wide and a foot high, located on the floor beside the table. Inside were stacks of more paper (not parchment) with writing on them, some bound into books.

  Holm knelt before the box, initially in awe at what it contained and the effort Harald had made by collecting the documents—and then made more so by the actual writing on the paper. He scanned quickly through the books underneath and then came back to those on top to read more slowly.

  “He tried to share his enthusiasms with us, but neither I nor Toki could ever do more than make a mark for our names. We were poor students. Not like Harald.”

  Holm himself was no scholar, but still his hands trembled as he turned the pages of the latest book he’d come to. What he held wasn’t simply a copy of another book, like the scribes worked on in the scriptorium at the cathedral. It was a translation into Danish of a book titled Historia regum Britanniae by someone named Galfridus Monemutensis. That part was written in Latin as well as the Danish name, Jófreyr Monmund.

  He flipped through the pages, stunned by the effort involved. It wasn’t the only book either. There was another that appeared to be the story of Skjöldr, son of Odin and the first king of Denmark. It was a common skald’s song but not anything Holm had ever seen written down. At the moment, Harald seemed to be working on a Danish translation of the Book of Luke. Holm had never seen that done either. It hadn’t occurred to him that the Bible could be translated into Danish. The priest always spoke the mass in Latin, and for most of the citizens, the words washed over them without understanding.

  He turned to Harald’s mother. “Has anyone else seen what Harald was working on?”

  Marta frowned. “I wouldn’t know. He takes a book and brings it back. I don’t know if he showed what he was doing to anyone else.” Then her expression brightened. “That nice young priest, who came with Bishop Gregory to tell me Harald was dead. He knew.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Of course, I’m sure. Just last week he dropped by to return a book Harald had loaned him.”

  Holm’s pulse quickened. That certainly wasn’t something G
areth and Conall had been told the previous day. “Which one?”

  “Ach, I don’t know. I put it in with the rest.”

  He realized she was talking about the book not the priest. “Can you show me which one it was?”

  She shook her head. “They all look the same to me. Harald always liked to keep the books in a particular order, but I never understood what it was. I went through his things last night and made the books neat.”

  “Neat? What do you mean by that?”

  She blinked, looking surprised as if the answer should have been obvious. “I stacked them so the largest was on the bottom. I think the one the priest brought is somewhere in the middle.”

  Holm tried not to grind his teeth at how unhelpful that news was. Agnes had been wonderfully forthcoming and trusting, and he didn’t doubt she was speaking the truth. He couldn’t tell by looking which book was most important, but he knew Godfrid would want to know what he had learned here. Immediately.

  “The priest’s name?” Holm tried again.

  “Arnulf.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Day Two

  Dai

  Early morning found Cadoc, Jon, and Dai standing a few paces from the swordsmith’s works within the walls of Brodar’s palace. The swordsmith, named Gren, was as big a man as Dai had ever seen—and that was saying something in Dublin where, as far as he could tell, a disproportionate number of men were larger than average. Gren’s arms bulged from wielding hammer and tongs all day. His apprentice, by comparison, was half his size, and he ran from bellows to woodpile to water bucket, fetching and carrying at Gren’s command—and often without needing any command at all.

  Godfrid’s captain, Jon, leaned against one of the thick wooden posts that supported the roof and spoke in Danish. “We have with us the sword of the monk who died yesterday. We were hoping you could take a look at it and tell us if you were the one who made it.”

  Gren shot Jon something of a caustic glance. “What do you know of swords, Jon?”

  “Not much,” Jon admitted cheerfully. He was typically Danish in that he was all about the axe. Even when deep in his cups, Godfrid’s captain could throw his weapon with accuracy fifty feet and hit his target square on—as he’d shown Dai after the feast last night.

  “And you?” Gren lifted his chin to point to the great bow Cadoc never went anywhere without if he could help it.

  Instead of answering, Cadoc looked at Dai for translation. This was an easy one, so Dai quickly obliged.

  Cadoc grinned. “Nothing.”

  Gren then looked Dai up and down. “You’re Welsh, eh? But you speak Danish?”

  “A bit.”

  Cadoc made a motion to get Dai’s attention. “What did he ask you?”

  “If I spoke Danish.”

  Cadoc looked as if he didn’t want Dai to answer that, but since he already had, it was too late.

  Gren continued, “Then what’s your story? You’re young to be a knight, but the blade you wear is worthy of the name.” He’d been looking at the sword at Dai’s waist, though how he knew its quality, when it remained in the sheath, Dai didn’t know.

  Dai found he did better with Danish when his brain didn’t get in the way of his mouth, so he just let the words spill out: “My father is a knight, and I am squire to the Dragons. My name is Dai ap Gareth.” Holding Harald’s sword horizontal to the ground, with his palms up, Dai approached. “This is the sword of the man who died—” he glanced back at Jon. “How do I say yesterday?”

  “I går.”

  Dai nodded and looked back at Gren, who gave him something of a side-eye glance. “I går.”

  “A squire, eh?” Gren took the sword by the handle and walked with it out from under his roof into the yard. The sun was shining brightly for the second day in a row, which likely meant it was going to rain for the wedding. Rain on a wedding day was good luck in Wales. To Dai’s mind, the superstition was trying to make the best of a bad job. From what his parents told him, it rained even more in Ireland than in Wales, though he had yet to see it, so likely a wet wedding day was lucky here too.

  Dai followed. “Yes, sir.”

  Gren laughed. “You don’t have to call me sir. In my time, I was a lowly man-at-arms. Not someone you have to bow to.”

  “Pardon me, sir—” Dai went right ahead and continued the designation of respect, seeing no harm in being exceptionally polite, especially as he knew his Danish wasn’t quite right, “—but I bet you could still wield a sword.”

  Gren’s eyes really lit now and put his free hand on the top of Dai’s head and ruffled his hair. These days, at fourteen, with his voice moving in and out of its change, Dai was taller than some of the men in Prince Hywel’s teulu, but he was still dwarfed by Gren. Dai hoped to eventually surpass Llelo, who seemed to have stopped growing at a finger’s width shorter than their father.

  “I don’t know if I’d want to wield this one.” He held the sword on a finger placed under the blade above the hilt, but it took a few tries to get the sword to balance. “Not one of mine.”

  “Is it not a good sword?” Jon asked.

  “Not good enough for me. Not terrible, but not what a knight would want.” Gren snapped his fingers at Dai. “Let me see yours, boy.”

  Dai drew out his sword, which his father had given him on his fourteenth birthday, the day he’d become a man. The sword had belonged to Gareth’s uncle, a man Gareth had loved and honored. When Llelo had become a man, Gareth had made him a gift of Gareth’s own first sword, the one he’d worn before Prince Hywel raised him to captain of his teulu. While that weapon had been special, in that it had been his father’s, Llelo respectfully replaced it last November with one bestowed upon him by Prince Henry himself upon their departure from Bristol, because of Llelo’s service and sacrifice. It wasn’t quite a knighting, which would come soon enough, but it was a huge honor nonetheless.

  Gareth could have repurposed his old sword again, now that Llelo didn’t need it. The fact that he hadn’t, that he’d given Dai his uncle’s sword instead of saving it for Taran, his natural child, still left Dai with a twisting in his stomach and heart. Thus, he held it out proudly to Gren, who, gratifyingly, raised his eyebrows at the sight of its quality.

  “Where did you get this?”

  “It was my great-uncle’s.”

  “He must have been a fine swordsman.”

  “I never knew him, but so my father says.”

  Gren’s eyes were the most expressive part of him. They’d been bright before, and now they almost twinkled. “You are Gareth the Welshman’s son, yes?” And then at Dai’s nod, he added, “When did you learn to speak Danish?”

  “This week,” Jon said, with a scoffing laugh, before Dai could answer.

  “We have a live one here, don’t we, men?” Gren now held a sword in each hand. At first, he appeared to weigh them, one after another, and then he started doing two-handed moves that Dai could only aspire to. Dai’s sword was in Gren’s left hand, and he could see by the way it flashed and moved that it was indeed the better balanced of the two.

  In order to work with the swords, Gren had moved twenty feet away from his workshop into a more central position in the palace yard. Others who were about stopped to watch him work through the moves, some of which Dai recognized from his own training.

  After working up a sweat, Gren came back to where Dai stood. Flipping Dai’s sword around, he returned it to him, hilt out. “Take care of that.”

  “I will.” Dai took back his sword and slid it into its sheath.

  “This one,” Gren held up Harald’s weapon, “was made by a swordsmith, but not an expert one. Regardless, the balance is off, and the hilt is coming loose from the blade. It has not been cared for, either. With oil and sharpening, it could be a useful tool. As it is—” he made a pfft sound with his lips, “—I would not take it into battle.”

  “Do you have any idea as to who might have made it? Or barring that, where he could have acquired it?” Jon a
sked. “You are the only swordsmith I know in Dublin.”

  “I am the most skilled, certainly.” Gren didn’t give the impression of being immodest. He was merely stating a fact. “I would ask Vigo, down by the dock gate.”

  Jon’s expression darkened. “He is not a good man.”

  Gren barked a laugh. “He is not, but he is an accomplished trader, and he deals in weapons. They are not usually of the first quality, which is why we don’t work with him here, even when I am overbusy. If he didn’t supply this sword, he is your best bet for finding out who did.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Day Two

  Gwen

  Gwen left Taran and Tangwen in the kitchen with their nanny and Godfrid’s cook, who was determined to teach Tangwen a few words of Danish in between popping pieces of honeyed roll into her mouth. At least the cook wasn’t feeding her daughter salted herring, which the Danes ate in quantity and served at every meal. Gwen hoped she could manage the rest of the visit without eating any more.

  Gareth had returned to the monastery to question the clerics about when they’d last seen Harald and what they knew about him, and Llelo had joined him once he got over his outrage at being left behind in the first place. While Gareth had, in fact, woken him, Gwen decided she’d let Gareth tell Llelo that rather than getting involved. Llelo was a man now, and she was learning (slowly) to keep her parenting and interference to a minimum.

  For her part, knowing that churchmen were often reluctant to be interviewed by a woman, Gwen had resolved to leave the monks’ and priests’ activities to the men to sort out and herself take a different tack. Though Gwen hadn’t yet asked Cait about her experience as a slave, she knew the outline of it from Abbot Rhys. Cait hadn’t known the origin of the wooden coin or the door it unlocked, but she had lived amongst the lowest levels of Dublin society. If Cait was willing to talk to the people she knew, they might be able to tell Gwen about the wooden coin.

  Once at Conall’s house, Gwen found Cait standing on a stool with a seamstress crouched at her feet, hemming a shimmering rose silk dress. At the sight of Gwen coming up the stairs to the loft, Cait looked woeful. “You would think getting the dress exactly right wouldn’t have come down to the last moment, but inevitably it has.”