The Unexpected Ally

by Sarah Woodbury

  Lwc managed a swallow. His wound was bleeding, and unless he wanted to make it worse, he couldn’t move any part of him but his eyes, which flicked from one man to another. He would find no sympathy in any of them.

  “Rhodri was part of this gang?” Hywel said.

  “Yes. We agreed beforehand not to know each other if we were caught.”

  “What about Deiniol?” Gareth said.

  “He was never one of us.” For a moment, a spark appeared in Lwc’s eyes, and he added, “You almost believed me! You might really have done so, and the timing of finding him in the stable couldn’t have been better.”

  “Better for you. Worse for him,” Hywel said. “What did he say when you came face to face at St. Kentigern’s, and he learned you’d become the abbot’s secretary?”

  “He was confused as to how it had come about, but happy for me. Deiniol really is a simple soul.” Lwc grimaced. “We didn’t know about the peace conference when we planned this.” Hywel sensed that Lwc would have spat on the ground if it didn’t mean moving.

  “Who paid you to steal from St. Kentigern’s?” Gareth asked.

  “Paid? Nobody. It was my idea.” Lwc seemed very proud of this fact.

  Hywel rubbed his chin. “When did you conceive the plan?”

  “Our gain was considerable at Wrexham, even with what we had to give to our masters—Queen Susanna, I suppose, though I believed it was King Owain, myself,” Lwc said. “Why not try it elsewhere?”

  Hywel dropped his hands, genuinely puzzled. “You were raised at the Wrexham monastery from birth. Why did you destroy it?”

  “I hated it there! I snuck out whenever I could. But if I was going to strike out on my own I needed money. I knew people by then. People who could help me get free from the monastery. That’s when he came to me.”

  “Me?” Gareth said.

  Lwc scoffed. “No. That was Rhodri’s contact, earlier.”

  “Then who?” Hywel didn’t know if he could believe anything Lwc had said so far. He’d lied so often, maybe Lwc himself didn’t know the truth anymore.

  “A man named Jerome.”

  “By the fingers of St. Peter, who is Jerome?” Hywel said.

  Lwc made a helpless gesture with his right hand, the only one he dared move. “Jerome was our leader. He organized everything. Before Wrexham, he brought us the surcoats with Owain’s crest, the weapons, and the food, but he disappeared the night Erik died. I figured from the start that he killed Erik and ran off.” Lwc waggled a finger. “I know you were looking for someone with a damaged tenth finger, and that’s what he had.” Lwc tried to gesture again but stopped instantly at the pain that shot through him.

  “Who was Erik to you?”

  “He was nobody to me; he was Jerome’s friend. At times it seemed as if Erik outranked him. When Erik found out that we were planning to steal from St. Kentigern’s, he was very angry. I know he and Jerome argued about it more than once.”

  If Hywel hadn’t been so angry himself, he might have admired the complexity of the plot, and Lwc’s apparent ability to carry it out—if not for ending up caught and most of his men dead. “I think Erik was going to stop you from stealing from St. Kentigern’s, and you killed him.”

  Lwc seemed momentarily dumbfounded by this conclusion. “I—we—had nothing to do with his death. Everything went wrong from the moment he died.”

  “Amazingly, we don’t believe you now any more than we did earlier.” That was Conall again, and his detached amusement reminded Hywel that he would get nowhere with anger.

  “How many times do I have to deny it before you believe me! Neither I nor any of my men killed him! But—” Lwc stopped abruptly, swallowing, as if he hadn’t meant to add the but.

  Hywel had caught it, however, and knew not to let it go. “But what?”

  Lwc didn’t want to answer, and thus it was Gareth who said, “You didn’t kill him, but you cut him open? How did you gather your men quickly enough once you found out he was dead to arrange for that?”

  “I saw the body with Prior Anselm and Abbot Rhys, and then the abbot sent me to fetch you. Before I did, I ran to the village to wake Rhodri, who’d found a girl to stay with a stone’s throw from the monastery.”

  Conall grunted. “You took your secret passage under the wall.”

  Even wounded, Lwc still had the capacity to smirk. “Nobody noticed I was gone, and there was plenty of time for Rhodri to ride to the farm, roust the others, and set up the ambush of the cart, which I knew the monks would need to haul Erik back to the church. I knew exactly the path it would follow.”

  “Why would you do all that?” Gareth said.

  “We needed to have a look at him before you did. We didn’t know who killed Erik, but we feared what Erik might have on him that could be traced back to us. Besides, if he had a token from the King of Gwynedd, that could have been useful.”

  “But why cut him open?” Gareth said, not mentioning that out of all of what Lwc knew, or thought he knew, that Erik worked for Gwynedd was the nearest he’d come to the truth.

  “It was something Jerome said to us about swallowing incriminating evidence if we were caught.” Lwc made a disgusted face. “Anyway, I figured it was worth a look, and it isn’t as if he could be more dead than he already was.”

  “Did Erik have anything in his stomach?” Gareth said.

  “No. Whoever killed him had already taken all his possessions.”

  “Why dump the body?” Gareth said.

  “I was raised in a monastery. I know that monks view such things as the work of devil worshippers. It was to put you off our trail. I knew as soon as I saw you—and with the few things that Abbot Rhys said—that you would dig and dig until you found answers. I couldn’t allow that to happen.”

  “What about the barn?” Gareth said.

  “What barn?” Lwc’s eyes strayed to the barn currently going up in flames as the fire had jumped from roof to roof and nobody had seen fit to try to put it out.

  “Back at the monastery, you denied that you set fire to the monastery’s barn as a distraction so you could rob the treasury,” Hywel said. “Do you deny it still?”

  “With Erik dead and Jerome gone, I decided things were falling apart. One of my men set the fire as a distraction—which would have worked out too if not for those meddling boys.”

  “You destroyed the monastery at Wrexham. Why not wait for the peace conference to be over to destroy St. Kentigern’s?” Gareth said.

  “What kind of sense would that have made?” Lwc’s laugh was disbelieving at the stupidity of the question, even as he was growing paler by the heartbeat. Hywel wanted this over before Lwc passed out from pain and blood loss. “At Wrexham, we had no chance of entering the treasury. With me as the abbot’s secretary, we did. The point of this was wealth, not destruction. Besides, with the peace conference over, you wouldn’t be distracted anymore, and I’d heard by now that you always got your man. I didn’t want that man to be me.”

  Hywel couldn’t look at Lwc anymore. “Get that arrow out of him and bind his wounds. We may have more questions later.” He turned away. Though complex in its implementation, the villainy was unremarkable. He hadn’t encountered a band like this before, but the lengths to which they’d gone for greed were entirely familiar.

  Gareth nudged Hywel’s elbow, indicating he wanted a more private conference. “Do you believe that he didn’t kill Erik?”

  “I don’t want to, but I can’t help but believe him. Jerome must be the man we found burned in the barn.”

  “But who killed him and took Erik’s belongings?” Gareth said. “Your ring is still at large.”

  “Someone we haven’t yet thought of.” Hywel gazed around at the wreckage of the farmstead and the carnage at his feet. “We’re a mile south of St. Asaph, Gareth.”

  “I thought of that as soon as we saw the farmstead. It could be that if Rhodri and Lwc hadn’t led us here—”

  Hywel nodded. “My Aunt Susanna would hav
e.”

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Gwen

  The first thing that was obvious about the burned man was how tall he was. Even in death and slightly shrunken from being burned, his feet hung off the end of the table. His boots were larger than any man’s she’d ever seen, and—his missing fingertip aside—his hands were the size of serving platters. Few men would have been strong enough and large enough to get the jump on Erik, but this man was among those who could have.

  Gwen began by cutting what was left of his coat and shirt off him, and she was immediately struck by a series of cuts on his forearms. She’d noticed the slashes in his coat, but hadn’t looked closely since large parts of it were burned anyway. With a lantern in one hand for light, she lifted up the arm to see it better.

  “Defensive wounds.” Abbot Rhys’s voice spoke from behind her.

  Gwen turned at the sound. “It looks that way to me too.”

  “I won’t bother telling you that you shouldn’t be here and that you promised not to, so instead I’ll just ask if he was more wounded than what we see here? Particularly, did he have a wound that would have made him unable to leave the barn?”

  “He was stabbed in the back.” Gwen swept the light over the man’s body. “I’ll show you if you help me turn him over.”

  Rhys took the man’s shoulders while Gwen pushed up on his hip and rolled the corpse onto its side. The skin was badly charred along the whole length of his back, indicating to her that he’d been face down on the ground when the fire had reached him.

  The abbot sighed. “He could have killed Erik but been wounded in the fight, resulting in his death at a later hour.”

  “It would be convenient if our two murdered men murdered each other.” Gwen settled the body back onto the table. “It might even be true, but we would still be missing the most important piece of the puzzle.”

  “What would that be?”

  “Why he killed Erik and, once he was dead, what happened to Erik’s possessions?”

  Footsteps sounded outside the room, and Prior Anselm poked his head between the half-open door and the frame. “It is almost time for Compline, Father.”

  Anselm’s warning was as much for her as for Rhys. It wouldn’t be appropriate for her to be examining a body while the monks were at their prayers. From the passing sneer on Anselm’s face, he didn’t think her being here had ever been appropriate. It was his right to think so, and Gwen was enough used to that attitude by now that she was able to (mostly) ignore it. “I’ll be off to check on Tangwen.”

  Gwen flipped the sheet back over the top of the dead man, and the two men moved out of the way to let her precede them into the cloister. She walked along the flagstones a few yards and then stopped near a pillar. Alone in the dark, she debated waiting for the monks to leave and then returning to finish her examination.

  Then Rhys and Anselm exited the church, and she heard Rhys say, “How are you feeling Anselm? You’ve been ill for a few days now, haven’t you? You have a strong singing voice that we’ve missed at the last few night vigils.”

  That was pure flattery, but Anselm didn’t seem to know it. “I am much better, thank you, Father. These illnesses befall me every now and again.”

  Rhys and Anselm had turned in the opposite direction, heading towards the dormitory so they could process into the church with their fellow monks. Their voices echoed among the stones, and Gwen stayed where she was so they wouldn’t know that she was eavesdropping.

  “I’m glad to hear you’re better. The other night after Matins, I went to the infirmary to check on you, but you were not there.”

  “What day was this?”

  “It must have been just before King Owain’s party arrived at the monastery.”

  “I was probably in the latrine,” Anselm said. “I’ve been on the mend since then.”

  “I’m sure you’re right.”

  Their voices echoed away down the passage, and Gwen moved out of the shadows, listening and wondering. Anselm might not realize it, but any time a man said, I’m sure you’re right, what he was really saying was, I don’t believe it for a heartbeat, but I’m not going to argue with you about it.

  She stood alone in the covered walkway, hesitating not because she was unsure of what she needed to do but because she was struggling to find the courage to do it. It might even be that Rhys guessed she was still in the cloister and inquired of Anselm’s whereabouts so she could overhear. Anselm hadn’t appeared ill that first morning when Mathonwy had found Erik’s body. He didn’t appear ill now. Was that what Rhys was trying to tell her?

  Anselm was the one man throughout everything that had happened whom nobody had questioned—and yet, he’d arrived at St. Kentigern’s with Lwc only a week ago. He’d been a constant fixture at Rhys’s side since they arrived, and because he was a smaller than average man with perfectly formed hands and fingers, soft and unused to manual labor as appropriate for a prior at a monastery, she hadn’t seriously considered him to be a part of this.

  Maybe it was time to reconsider that assumption.

  The monastery bell began to toll, and then the Latin processional rose in chorus from the monks’ dormitory. The sound decided her. With hasty steps, though on tiptoe so they wouldn’t echo, she hurried down the passage to the west side of the monastery where Prior Anselm had his quarters adjacent to Abbot Rhys’s. The brothers were still processing when she reached his door, looked both ways down the walkway, and slipped inside. In a monastery, no door but the treasury was ever locked.

  As befitting a monk’s sensibilities, the room was neat and clean, with few possessions: a table, stool, and bed, and three hooks on the wall, one empty. A monk’s robe and a fine, soft wool cloak hung from the others. A quick look in the trunk in the corner revealed nothing more than a few spare garments. Gwen swung around to survey the room. She didn’t know what she’d hoped to find, but she wasn’t seeing anything out of place.

  Deciding she could afford a few more moments of looking, she unfolded and refolded the blanket on his bed and then lifted up the pallet to see what was underneath. It was a basic rope bed surmounted by a mattress stuffed with sacking and cloth. Down would have been more comfortable but was inappropriate for a monk, even a prior.

  However, as she moved around the bed to make sure everything was in place, she noted a lump in the mattress near the head of the bed. Lumpy mattresses were more normal than not, but she pulled the sheet away and lifted up the mattress to reveal a mostly flattened leather satchel, which couldn’t have been comfortable to sleep on. It was the kind of bag that a man would wear on his lower back with the strap at a diagonal across his chest.

  On her knees beside the bed, she opened the satchel. Inside lay a packet of letters bound with a ribbon, along with another that was loose. Beneath them in one corner of the bag was a gold signet ring.

  Hywel’s signet ring.

  She clenched it in her fist, her heart pounding, and then slipped it into her purse. For the first time, she understood why a spy might choose to swallow their lord’s token rather than allow it to fall into enemy hands. It didn’t appear that Anselm had done anything with it yet, but he hadn’t had it very long either.

  She eased out a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding and pulled off the ribbon that held the documents together. All of their seals were broken. The first one was addressed simply to ‘A’, which could have been Anselm, but a quick scan of the letter revealed that it was a detailed list of the writer’s activities in England over the last month, some of which Gwen already knew about. It was signed with the words, your devoted husband and a flourished ‘C’. She put the letter aside, and with trembling hands picked up the one that had been loose. It had been sealed with the crest of the Deheubarth and was a letter of introduction for Anselm from King Cadell to the Bishop of Bangor.

  “I should have memorized the contents and burned them. More to the point, I should have left immediately after I acquired them.”

  Gwen h
ad become absorbed in reading and thus negligent of her surroundings. Now she gaped at Anselm as he stood in the doorway. The door was open, so she could hear the monks’ chorus from the church. She hadn’t been wrong to think that Compline was ongoing, but Anselm had left early, and she was frozen on her knees on the other side of his bed. She put her hand on the hilt of her knife and then slowly eased it away again. She didn’t want him to think she was going to fight him. The letters were evidence of wrongdoing but not worth her life.

  She looked past him to the cloister. Nobody moved in it. “Why didn’t you?” It was a stall for time, though she really did want to know the answer.

  “Hubris, mainly, and the feeling that if I left, I would leave too much undone.”

  Anselm gently closed the door, blocking her view of the cloister beyond and dashing whatever hope she might have had of calling for help. The monks were singing so loudly that she could hear them even through the door. If she screamed, nobody was going to hear her.

  Anselm lifted the cloak from its hook, swung it around his shoulders, and then crossed to the trunk. He opened it and removed the clothing, which he rolled into a tight bundle and tucked under his arm. “There was more happening here than I supposed when I first came to the monastery. St. Asaph is the crossroads of Wales.”

  “You killed Erik.”

  “I did no such thing.”

  “I don’t believe you,” she said. “You serve King Cadell.”

  He glanced down to where she knelt by the bed with the letters in her lap. The one from King Cadell was on top, his seal plainly visible. “King Cadell sent me to pick up the trail of Prince Cadwaladr, who betrayed my king as he has betrayed so many others.” He bowed. “I came highly recommended from my king and the Bishop of St. Dafydd.”

  Gwen held up the letters. “One of these is from Prince Cadwaladr to his wife, Alice. What are the others?”

  “Communication between Susanna and Alice; several missives from Cadwaladr to various lords in Gwynedd, asking for their support in his quest to regain his lands; and a letter from Cadwaladr to King Cadell, discussing a return to their alliance.”