The Renegade Merchant

by Sarah Woodbury

  The fresh air and the pointed questions were sobering Meilyr up. He took in a deep breath, looking away as if he was collecting his thoughts, and then said, “He asked at the tavern about her, but nobody there claimed to have seen her before, and Tom only knew her as Rhiannon, which might not have been her real name.”

  “So then what?”

  Meilyr raised both shoulders in an exaggerated shrug. “He decided then and there that he would keep the child and settle down. He came to Shrewsbury and put out that his wife had died at the baby’s birth.”

  Gwen gaped at her father. Of all the outcomes he might have learned, this was the least expected to the point that she had never even considered it. “Where did all this happen?”

  “Down south near Abergavenny.”

  “The weaver is Welsh?”

  “No,” Meilyr said. “He was selling to the lord there. A Norman.”

  Abergavenny had been held by the Normans against the Welsh almost from the day the Normans had come to Wales, and no Welsh king had yet had the wherewithal to wrest it from them.

  “Did-did you ever—”now Gwen was glad her father had drunk too much because she could never have asked this of him when he was sober, “—know a woman named Rhiannon?”

  “No.”

  “Did Tom Weaver describe her to you?”

  “She was a woman. Brown hair, brown eyes. Tom didn’t really remember. It was so long ago, and he’d been drunk himself at the time.” They’d reached the east gate, and Meilyr was now striding along, making it difficult for Gwen to keep up with either him or his thoughts. “I will never know if Adeline was my daughter.”

  “No, it doesn’t seem so.” Gwen saw no reason to pretty up the truth with a lie. “Not unless we find Rhiannon.”

  Her father shot her a sour look. “How am I to find a woman from Abergavenny or thereabouts who may or may not have been named Rhiannon and who left her baby with Tom Weaver over twenty years ago?”

  “It’s impossible, I suppose.” Gwen said. They were almost to the bridge across the Severn.

  “It is the very definition of the word.” Meilyr tipped his head to the street they’d just come down. “Tom would like to meet you tomorrow, if you would. I said I’d bring you by after breakfast.”

  “I would be happy to meet him,” Gwen said, which was no less than the truth. Maybe, thanks to Gwen’s experience with questioning people during the course of her investigations, she could encourage Tom to remember something else, some small detail, that would help them find Rhiannon.

  “Father, what you said to me just now made me think—could Mam and this Rhiannon have been sisters?”

  “Your mother didn’t have a sister.”

  “I know that’s what we thought, but who knows how far back in time this goes? How well did you know her family?”

  Gwen was realizing only now, at the late age of twenty-five, that she knew even less about her origins than she’d thought and far less than she should. The Welsh were known for their preoccupation with family and ancestors, but Gwen’s family had always been a bit of an unknown to her.

  With her father a wandering bard, and all of her grandparents dying before she was born, she’d never had much of an extended family. Gareth, too, was an only child, raised by an uncle after the death of his parents when he was five years old. The uncle himself had died before Gwen had met Gareth. It was as if the two of them existed on a little island of their own, surrounded by a vast continent they could never reach.

  “Her brother, Pawl, was a womanizer and a wastrel. I didn’t want your mother to have anything to do with him, and I feared he would come looking for her if he knew I served King Gruffydd.”

  “So you distanced yourself.” Gwen nodded, determined to get at as much of the truth as she could while her father was still willing to talk. “Is he still alive?”

  “Pawl died when you were young. You wouldn’t remember the mourning.”

  “What about your family?”

  “My parents died before I married your mother. I was already singing by then,” Meilyr said.

  Gwen had known that, but she hadn’t ever asked how they died, and she was horrified at herself for her lapse. At ten, when her own mother died at Gwalchmai’s birth, she’d been too young to ask these questions. Caring for Gwalchmai had fallen to her, at which point, she’d been too busy, as well as too estranged from her father. She’d assumed that his family had died from disease, but from the look on his face now, that wasn’t the case.

  “How did they die, Father?” she said softly.

  “My family was killed in the fighting between King Gruffydd and the Normans. King Henry of England was trying to curb Gwynedd’s power and our croft was in the way—” he broke off, staring unseeing at the ground in front of him.

  Gwen stared at her father, horrified. She’d experienced enough death and war over the years to have some idea what her father was seeing in his mind’s eye.

  King Gruffydd had lost his throne to the Norman invaders three times before ripping it from their hands for a fourth time with the help of his Danish and Irish allies. His ancestry, like King Owain’s and Hywel’s, was a combination of Irish, Danish, and Welsh—and so mixed up with lineages of kings that Hywel could have claimed three thrones at once if he’d had a mind to.

  Then, nearly two decades after Gruffydd had finally achieved the throne of Gwynedd, King Henry, wary of Gruffydd’s growing power and reach, had attacked Gwynedd’s eastern border, much as Earl Ranulf of Chester had done last year. The war had been short, and while Gruffydd had sued for peace, he hadn’t lost any land.

  He had lost people, however—among them, it seemed, Gwen’s grandparents.

  Then Meilyr blinked and looked up at Gwen. “Don’t be sad for me, cariad. It is past—that song has been sung.”

  Gwen took in a breath. Her father hadn’t called her cariad since before her mother died. She leaned forward to kiss his cheek. “Let’s go home, Father.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Gareth

  “Two in one day, a man and a woman.” John sighed. “It’s the same as it was in Clwyd in the autumn.”

  “Heaven forbid this turns out to be anything like the same circumstance.” Gareth’s initial examination had begun with a slightly more cursory mindset than was usual for him, since he found his thoughts returning again and again to whatever might be going on between Gwen and her father. It was just as well that he had planned from the start to leave most of the actual work to John. If John was going to be a competent deputy sheriff, this was something he needed to know how to do.

  And they were trying to hurry, since the monks, whose job it was to prepare the dead for burial and to do the actual washing and laying out of the body, were waiting.

  “We’ve had no sign of Prince Hywel’s uncle, leastwise,” John said. “That has to be good, right?”

  Gareth tsked through his teeth but otherwise didn’t answer. He was focusing instead on getting the clothing off the girl—always a difficult task with a dead body. He ultimately decided to cut the dress off of her rather than try to wrestle her out it.

  “Look at this bruise!” John lifted the girl’s arm, now free of the dress, and spoke with dismay.

  Gareth had already noted her condition and felt equally disturbed. “I wish I could say I’d never seen anything like it, but that wouldn’t be true.”

  “Is there any way this could have happened after she was dead?”

  “Dead people don’t bruise,” Gareth said, with regret.

  “To know that her murder had been preceded by pain makes this all the worse. You can see the imprint of his thumb!” John put his hand to the girl’s upper arm, which he was able to circle almost entirely with his own fingers.

  “Now that you’ve seen her up close, you still don’t know this girl?” Gareth said.

  “I’ve never seen her before in my life.” John looked up at Gareth. “She would have been beautiful.”

  “Yes. Any man would have
remembered her, which makes me wonder why has nobody come forward to say that she’s missing?” Gareth touched the girl’s hair, noting, now that it was drying, the way the blonde highlights in the brown caught the light of the candles burning around the table.

  John’s eyes widened. “You know how Roger and Conall both had red hair, even if Roger’s was much darker?”

  “Many have red hair,” Gareth said, “including your own sister.”

  John raised one shoulder, dismissing that coincidence as immaterial. “What if someone came to Conall’s room to murder him, but Roger was waiting there to do business with Conall, and the murderer mistook Roger for Conall and killed the wrong man?”

  Gareth gaped at John, caught between consternation and laughter—and real surprise that John might be on to something. “That would be a scenario worthy of Cadwaladr.”

  “But it could be true,” John said eagerly, warming to the idea, which undoubtedly he’d thought up only a few heartbeats before he told Gareth about it.

  “It would certainly be coincidental that of all the reasons Roger could be murdered, in the end it was by mistake,” Gareth said.

  “Perhaps the girl died by mistake too,” John said. “We have no reason for her death at all.”

  Gareth shook his head. “Before we make any assumptions about her, tell me why a girl might come to Shrewsbury on her own?”

  John pursed his lips and reined in his enthusiasm. After a moment, he said, “She could have run away—from a husband or a master. Shrewsbury is a free market town. If a churl lives here for a year and a day, uncaught, she is free.”

  Gareth had heard of that law, if only because it was yet another English custom that had no equivalent in Wales. Churls in England were tied to the land and could not leave without the owner’s permission. They weren’t exactly slaves, but they weren’t free to move about either. A lord might lose his position, be hanged or beheaded, but the people who worked his land would stay where they were, regardless of what new lord ruled them.

  In Wales, churls were called taeogion. They owed their lord tithes of food and services. Because of the rugged terrain that made most of Wales poor for crops, being tied to the land was less of an issue. The Welsh were more herders than farmers. Gareth himself owed service to his lord, so in a sense, all men were taeogion, though Gareth appreciated the distinction between choosing that service and being forced into it by birth.

  Gareth also understood that, in his time, King Gruffydd had kept actual slaves, and even traded the freedom of some of his own people in payment to the Irish and Danes for helping him gain his kingdom. By contrast, King Owain had bowed to the precepts of the Church, and since he’d come to the throne, slaves had become few and far between in Gwynedd. Because of the Church, or their own sensibilities, the Normans had forbidden slavery in England from the moment they set foot in Kent eighty years ago, even if, to Gareth’s mind, the difference between an English churl and a slave was a line too fine to draw.

  “But surely, were she caught, she would be hauled back to her home, not killed,” Gareth said.

  “One would think.” John stared down at the girl’s body.

  Gareth sighed. “We should make a record of her injuries and see if we can find any clue among them as to who killed her.”

  “I found nothing in her clothing,” John said.

  They worked in silence for another quarter of an hour, until John turned away. “I have duties at the castle that cannot wait.”

  “Go on. I’ll finish up here.” Gareth pulled out a piece of paper and began to sketch the girl’s face. With Conall’s sketch, he’d had to go off of the memory of the innkeeper. This time, the difficulty was to take her slack features and return them to what she would have looked like in life.

  It took only a few moments and then, his mind full of what had driven the girl to bleed out in the alley, Gareth turned the body over to the monks and left the room. As he took his first step into the fresh air of the courtyard, the bell tolled for supper.

  Gwen was waiting for him in the doorway to the guest house. Vespers—the monks’ prayers at sunset—had come and gone. There would be one more service at nine o’clock before the monks went to bed. Guests were not required to get up in the night for lauds or matins, however, and thus the kitchens had prepared a light meal for them, here at the end of the day.

  Gareth put a hand on his belly, realizing that he couldn’t remember the last time he’d eaten.

  “What did you find?” Gwen spoke at the same instant that Gareth said, “How is your father?”

  Then they both laughed and clasped hands briefly (though Gareth wanted to touch her longer than that). As they walked towards the guest hall where supper would be served, Gwen related the gist of her conversation with her father, including what she’d learned about the deaths of Meilyr’s parents and about her mother’s brother, Pawl. Meilyr wouldn’t be dining with them, having been put to bed with a supper tray in his room, since he needed to sleep off the alcohol he’d consumed and couldn’t be trusted with a meal in the guest hall. Meilyr, thankfully, had given way without protest.

  “Where is everyone?” Gareth said to the monk who put a carafe of wine in front of him. Unlike the previous night, when there had been a half-dozen other guests, only two others dined with them tonight.

  “We are not often as full as we were yesterday,” the monk said. “When the war was at its height, we went weeks without any guests at all, though now that things have calmed down here in the west, that lack has become rarer.”

  Gareth thanked him and looked down the table to the other diners: two men, a few years older than he was, in close conversation. Gareth thought about asking polite questions, simply to know more of them and because he was curious that way, but unless they were involved in these murders they weren’t his concern. He would rather spend the dinner with his family. It would be rude, however, not to say something.

  Gareth stood, a hand to his chest, and bowed. “I’d like to introduce myself. I am Gareth ap Rhys, companion to Prince Hywel of Gwynedd.” Then he introduced Gwen, Gwalchmai, and Tangwen.

  Faced with a knight, even a Welsh one, both stood themselves. “I am Flann MacNeill, of Oxford,” the first man said. He was middle-aged and balding, with the look of someone who’d had enough to eat his whole life, “and this is my companion, Will de Bernard.” Will had the presence of a nobleman, though that might simply be because he was wealthy. He was of similar age to Flann, but leaner, with brown hair and a full beard.

  “You’re Irish?” Gwen said to Flann.

  Flann turned to her with a slight nod. “By birth, only. I have never been to Ireland.” Both men sat, and they all continued with their meal.

  Tangwen perched decorously beside Gwen, having decided at some point in the last three days that she was a lady like her mother and should eat like one. The mind of a two-year-old girl was completely beyond Gareth, but he appreciated the absence of the antics of six months ago, when Tangwen couldn’t sit still for longer than the time it took to cut and butter a slice of bread.

  “Gwalchmai will be singing in church on Sunday,” Gwen said.

  Gareth raised his eyebrows, recognizing Gwen’s ploy for what it was—an attempt not to talk murder in front of Tangwen—and he played along. “Are you, Gwalchmai? That will be something to look forward to. Have you told your father?”

  Gwalchmai, however, knew himself to be a man now and was having none of it. “Gareth, is it true what they’re saying?”

  Gareth scoffed under his breath. They should have known better than to keep anything from Gwalchmai. Given his incredible voice, perhaps it wasn’t surprising that he could hear around corners too. “Probably not. What are they saying?”

  “That a member of the town council is dead, and a girl’s body was found in the river?”

  Gareth glanced at Tangwen, but if his daughter was listening, she gave no sign that she was disturbed. Thus, Gareth spoke normally, so she would continue to think nothing
was amiss. “Yes, I’m afraid that’s true.” He reached into his coat and pulled out the sketch he’d drawn of the girl’s face, along with the one of Conall. “See for yourself.”

  Gwalchmai took both images to study. The two men at the other end of the table had looked up at Gwalchmai’s question. Deciding it would do no good to whisper when their ears were already perked, Gareth gestured to Gwalchmai that he should pass the sketches down the table. “Do you recognize either of these people? The girl had light brown hair, and the man’s hair was red, if that helps. We know he was Irish too.”

  “You don’t say?” Flann took the sketches from Gwalchmai. “They’re both dead?”

  “Only the girl,” Gareth said. “The man is missing.”

  Flann frowned and looked closer. His companion bent nearer too, and some kind of look passed between them before Will sat back in his seat and Flann half-stood, shaking his head, to hand the pictures back to Gareth.

  “You don’t know them?” Gareth had been sure there for a moment that he’d seen recognition in Flann’s eyes.

  “No, no, of course not. You don’t know their names?”

  “The man is named Conall,” Gareth said. “The girl’s is unknown.”

  Again, a look that Gareth couldn’t interpret passed between the man and his companion, but then Flann made a dismissive motion with his head and said, “We live in troubled times.”

  “We do, sir.” Gareth didn’t mention that he was assisting the Deputy Sheriff in his inquiries, though the fact that he had sketches of the two people in question should have given it away. Gareth might believe that Flann had never been to Ireland. He might even find the fact that he didn’t know Conall or the girl credible, but his presence in Shrewsbury as another Irishman when there weren’t that many around, begged for questions.

  Which fortunately, Gwen wasn’t afraid to ask. “What brings you to Shrewsbury? You’re a long way from Oxfordshire here.”

  Flann had started in again on his vegetables. He stabbed a turnip and held it before his lips as he spoke. “We’re merchants.”