Chapter Twenty-four
Gareth
“Where are you going?” Gwen said.
Gareth swung his cloak around his shoulders and tightened down the toggles that held it closed at his chest without answering. He knew she wasn’t going to like what he had to say.
The rain continued to fall, and everything was cold and damp. The funeral service had been followed by a mass for Roger Carter, paid for by his brother Martin, which in turn had been followed by dinner. Gareth and Gwen had invited John Fletcher to join them, in hopes that the two merchants, Flann and Will, would put in an appearance, but they had not.
Afterwards, Gareth had stopped the hospitaller to ask after them and had been told that Will had collected their things that afternoon—during the funeral, in fact.
“Did he say where they were going?” Gwen had asked.
The hospitaller had shaken his head regretfully. “Not to me. He left a generous donation to the abbey, however.”
As he might have.
Now, Gareth said to Gwen, “I need to have a look at that brothel again. If the cart is mended, that’s the only other place we know Flann and Will to have gone, and it’s the only piece of this puzzle that connects all the rest.”
“Is John going with you?”
“He had duties to attend to as Deputy Sheriff.”
“Let me come with you. Please. You should not be going alone.”
Gareth stopped in the act of pulling the hood of his cloak up over his head. “You cried in my arms not four hours ago about your involvement in this investigation. I’m not taking you with me.”
“Gareth,” Gwen said in her most reasonable voice, “I’ve been a part of this from the beginning, and you yourself said that we would see this through together.” She poked his chest with one finger. “That includes now.”
Gareth rubbed at the spot she’d poked as if it hurt. “What about Tangwen?”
“She’s asleep and need have no part of this.”
Gwen’s tears had gone, but even if they’d been a momentary aberration caused by her pregnancy, they still deserved respect. When he’d first stood over the pool of blood, he’d acknowledged within himself the extent to which investigating murders affected him. Gwen was right that they needed to reassess this particular service for Hywel—and with a second child on the way, what it did to them as parents.
Gareth studied his wife for a few more heartbeats and then nodded, if reluctantly. “I suppose, if I’m truthful, it wasn’t my intent to enter the brothel. I simply had a thought to look around the outside of the town wall, where the gate opened onto the river.”
“What are you going to see in the rain and the dark that can’t wait until tomorrow?” Gwen said.
“I won’t know until I find it, but if I wait until tomorrow, there will be nothing to see, not with this rain,” Gareth said.
“I will tell my father and Gwalchmai that I’m off with you.” Gwen snatched up her cloak and hurried from the room before Gareth could protest that he hadn’t given his permission for her to come.
But then, having run only a few yards, Gwen pulled up short and spun around, such that Gareth, who had started down the corridor after her, almost ran her over. “What if the girl wasn’t at the brothel by her own will?”
Gareth caught her by the arms. “We discussed that. She could have run away from the brothel, but John Fletcher has been showing her picture all over town to no avail. If any man visited her there, he won’t admit to it, and the proprietor isn’t talking.”
“No, I mean—” Gwen took in a deep breath. “Conall was Irish, right? And Flann is Irish.”
Gareth felt himself on the verge of laughter. “I don’t believe being Irish is a crime, Gwen.”
Gwen shook her head vehemently. “No, I didn’t mean that. What if the girl came from Ireland too, or even farther afield, and not by her own will?”
“You mean someone stole her from Ireland to be a whore here?” Gareth scratched at his forehead. “It’s possible, I suppose. Though, if she was working at the brothel, it would have been a simple matter for her to tell one of her clients who she was and what had happened to her. It isn’t as if Shrewsbury has a slave market.”
“You and I both know that doesn’t mean all trade stopped. There were still slaves in Dublin when we were there four years ago, even if the slave market was closed. I know it’s a stretch, but I can’t stop thinking about that girl bleeding to death in the alley, and the fact that nobody will admit to knowing her. She was running away, and someone killed her.”
“There are far more reasonable explanations,” Gareth said.
“We just can’t think of any,” Gwen said tartly.
Gareth pursed his lips and stared at the wall above Gwen’s head. “She could simply be an unhappy English girl from somewhere else who ran away from a husband.”
“But what if she isn’t.” Gwen stepped closer. “Just think if she isn’t the only one, just like that brothel isn’t the only one. There could be other girls here against their will.”
“Well, there are other brothels—” Gareth dropped his eyes to fix them on Gwen’s face. “John said that the owners of the brothel to which the coin gained entry had opened a second establishment outside Shrewsbury. It’s to the east of here, just beyond St. Giles.”
“We haven’t even looked at it,” Gwen said, “and with the departure of Flann and Will, I don’t think looking at it can wait until morning.”
Gareth wavered. Gwen had wanted him to discover whether or not the girls at the brothel were there by their own volition, and he’d refused her. Now, however, he didn’t know if he could walk away from her fears again. That girl had to have come from somewhere, and someone had killed her. Others might see her as no different from a hundred other girls, but she was Gareth’s responsibility now. She’d been buried without a name. She might as well have been faceless. She certainly had been afraid.
Still thinking, Gareth nudged Gwen to walk down the corridor towards the stairs. “I’m not taking you to the brothel. We have to respect John’s sensibilities in that regard, but you can come with me most of the way, maybe to that abandoned mill at the edge of abbey land, and wait for me there.”
Gwen wrinkled her nose, indicating she didn’t like it, but she didn’t argue. “Even if I’m wrong, and she was here by her own free will, girls that age don’t wander the countryside by themselves. She had to have come to Shrewsbury with someone, stayed with someone, seen someone.”
Gareth froze in the act of taking a step. “Maybe she did. In addition to Flann and Will, she’s one of two people in this investigation who are complete strangers to Shrewsbury, Gwen. Maybe the reason nobody has come forward to identify her is because the one person she knew was Conall.”
Chapter Twenty-five
Gwen
Since Tangwen was asleep, all that was required was to tell Meilyr and Gwalchmai where they were going. And once Gareth assured them that he wasn’t actually taking Gwen to the brothel, neither objected to her accompanying him as far as the mill. It wasn’t that late even—not even eight in the evening—and even with the rain, people were still out and about. There shouldn’t be any danger. Whether in England or Wales, if people didn’t go out because it was raining, chances were they never went out at all.
The brothel they were going to investigate lay on the main road from the southeast into Shrewsbury, just past St. Giles along the road to Atchem, where there was another bridge across the Dee. According to John Fletcher, the brothel doubled as an actual inn. Travelers seeking to avoid the higher rates in Shrewsbury—or wishing to avoid the town altogether—might choose to stay there instead.
“I don’t mean for us to be long,” Gareth said. “Two hours at most, which means we should return shortly after compline.” Compline was the late evening prayer before the monks retired for three hours of sleep.
“And if you’re not back by matins?” Meilyr said. Matins was the midnight prayer. Monks said prayers every
three hours throughout the day and night.
“We’ll be back. Don’t worry.” Gareth said.
“But if you aren’t,” Gwalchmai insisted.
Gareth rolled his eyes at his brother-in-law’s worried look. “Tell John Fletcher I went to the brothel. Don’t come searching yourself. If we really do find ourselves in trouble, that wouldn’t be the way to help.”
Meilyr and Gwalchmai seemed satisfied with that response, so Gareth and Gwen collected their horses from the stable and led them out the back of the abbey. The path they took paralleled the main road that ran to the east and took them through the abbey gardens and fields to the abandoned mill the abbey laborer had mentioned when he’d told Gwen and Brother Julian about seeing Conall.
Settlements of varying sizes lay to the east of Shrewsbury. First was the Abbey Foregate, really another village in and of itself, which even had its own priest. A hundred yards on, these homes gave way to fields on both sides of the road. If it had been daylight, Gwen could have made out crofts and barns belonging to people who might worship in the Foregate, but who didn’t live in Shrewsbury proper. After another half-mile, they passed the back entrance to St. Giles, which was closed up for the evening, or they might have returned to the road and the front entrance in order to ask about the dead girl’s dress.
As it was, their current mission was more urgent. “The mill is just up ahead,” Gareth said, “and then the brothel is a matter of a few hundred yards to the east, to the right of the main road.
“I thought you said you hadn’t been here before?” Gwen’s eyes narrowed suspiciously.
“I haven’t! Before we left, I asked the layman working in the stable where it was.” Gareth’s expression turned sheepish. “It didn’t feel right speaking to one of the monks about the location of a brothel.”
“I can see why it wouldn’t.” Amusement bubbled up in Gwen, surprising her. It was raining and cold, but she was out with Gareth. Yes, they were investigating a murder, but in this moment, she had to admit that there was no place she’d rather be.
She took in a deep breath, probing in her mind around the edges of what she was feeling. She was starting to think that perhaps the problem wasn’t with her at all, and her detachment from this investigation wasn’t wrong. Maybe what was wrong was murder itself. To feel numb to it after a while was a natural reaction to something so unnatural that nobody could keep doing what they did—feeling what she’d always felt—and stay whole.
That didn’t mean she and Gareth should keep on as they had, however. They would have to make a pact, for starters, that from now on Tangwen and this baby would always come first, and that they would try harder to keep Gwalchmai and her father out of their cases. And maybe not answer when John Fletcher called.
Gareth directed his horse into the trees, and Gwen followed, ducking her head as branches, heavy with rain, dumped water on her head as she brushed past them. Within three paces, she couldn’t see anything at all, and all of a sudden, the illicit nature of this endeavor had her breath catching in her throat. She wouldn’t have said she was afraid, necessarily, but she didn’t like how dark it was, and not being able to see made her heart beat a little faster.
As always seemed to be the case, Gareth was unerring in his ability to find a track that would take them through the woods, though at one point he dismounted and helped Gwen down before grasping the bridle of his horse and leading it forward. By then, they didn’t have far to go, and soon they came to a halt on the edge of a clearing beneath the sheltering branch of an overhanging oak.
The mill lay in front of them on the far side of a large clearing. A torch on a long pole jammed into the ground shone near the front door.
“I thought you said it was abandoned,” Gareth said.
“Who told you that?”
Gwen turned at the voice a moment before a hand clapped over her mouth and pulled her away from Gareth. Before she could bite down on it, the hand was removed to be replaced by a gag, and then her hands were wrenched behind her back to be tied at the wrists, and a bag thrown over her head. All she had was the impression that her captor was a large man with a fierce expression.
She tried to scream, but she choked on the gag instead. She heard shouting and the clash of swords, which she assumed meant Gareth was trying to fight off the attackers, but from inside the bag she couldn’t make out what was happening.
Then the fighting stopped, and the only sound she heard was a thud and heavy breathing. “Put them with the others,” the same voice said.
Gwen experienced a moment of weightlessness before she was thrown over a man’s shoulder. She jounced along upside down, hardly able to breathe through the gag and with all the blood rushing to her head. She was thankful she was only a few months pregnant and the baby so small, since she barely showed and her womb hadn’t grown to the point that being upside down on a man’s shoulder would have been utterly unbearable.
They went a hundred steps, though they felt like a thousand. Then a door creaked, and her captor walked across a wooden floor with clunking steps, made louder and heavier by the weight of her on his shoulder. Then another door creaked, and it actually hit the top of her head as it closed behind them. More footfalls, this time descending wooden steps, and then the footfalls became more muffled. The man dropped her to the ground and pulled the bag from her head.
Gwen blinked her eyes, adjusting them to the light, though it wasn’t a difficult transition since the room was hardly more illumined than the absolute blackness of the bag. What light there was came from the glow of a lantern in the hand of a second man. She took in a breath, and now that she felt a tiny bit more in control, she realized that she recognized him as Flann’s partner, Will.
They’d come down a narrow set of stairs, with only six steps, to a damp dirt floor to end up in a room approximately fifteen feet long and twenty wide. An L-shaped bend hid the far corner. Wooden beams supported the ceiling above her head, and the walls themselves were made of wood, plastered to keep out the wind, though as she leaned back against the wall, she could feel the force of the weather, rattling something loose. A strangely narrow door—closed, of course—was centered in the wall opposite the stairs.
It was an exit, though Gwen didn’t know to where until she noted the rhythmic creaking and sound of splashing water coming from beyond the narrow door. She’d briefly been in a room just like this in Aberystwyth. It made up the lower level of the mill, necessary to give access to the water of the mill race and to maintain the waterwheel, but where nothing could be stored because of the dampness.
These men, however, were storing women here. Crowded together against the rear wall were a dozen women of varying ages, though none looked older than thirty. They were dirty and obviously cold, since they huddled against one another, some sleeping, others merely staring vacantly at the newcomers.
Her initial captor, a man with a scruffy brown beard, stuck his face into Gwen’s. “We have one rule here: if you scream, you die. Do you understand? There’s nobody out there to hear you anyway.”
Gwen nodded, not because she planned to obey, but because she needed him to remove the gag, and she would have promised him anything if only he would do so.
He did.
“What do we do with him?” A third man with a neatly trimmed black beard, who was younger than either Will or the man who carried her, appeared at the bottom of the steps with Gareth on his shoulder. Blood dripped down Gareth’s left arm, and he had blood on his face from a wound at his hairline. If Gwen’s hands had been free, she would have put them to her mouth.
“Is he dead?” Will said.
Blackbeard laid Gareth on the ground ten feet from Gwen. “No. Just knocked out. It seemed a waste to kill him when someone will pay a pretty penny for a warrior like him.”
“If he can control him,” Will said.
Blackbeard jerked his chin to point at Gwen. “Isn’t that his wife?”
Will nodded.
The man smirked. “It
won’t be hard then, will it?”
“We’ll leave it to fate. If he lives, we’ll sell him.” Will stood with his hands on his hips, looking down at Gwen, though he didn’t speak to her but to Blackbeard. “How long until we’re ready to move?”
“Flann hasn’t returned from town,” Blackbeard said.
Will pressed his lips together. “We can wait another hour. Then we have to leave in case someone comes looking for these two.”
Scruffy beard scoffed. “Who is going to care about a couple of Welsh dogs?”
“I saw Gareth with the Deputy Sheriff,” Will said. “Fletcher might care. The girl did see the wheel we fixed.”
“They don’t know anything,” Blackbeard said.
Will shot Blackbeard an unreadable glance. “They know everything now.”
“Fat lot of good it will do them.” That was scruffy beard again.
Gareth’s head lolled to one side, but now that Gwen had managed to blink back her tears, she could see his chest rising and falling. It might even be that the blood on his arm was from a surface wound and not grievous—though if it suppurated, any wound could be mortal.
Gwen supposed it wasn’t surprising that her captors hadn’t questioned her, since she was a woman, and her value was only in what they could sell her for. She certainly wasn’t going to volunteer the information that her father knew where she was. Even if the whole lot of them were leaving this place within the hour, they could hardly travel far undetected, not with this many people to transport. A cart could only move so fast, and she doubted that these women were going to be in any condition to ride horses. Besides, they would have had to be tied onto them, which would be even more noticeable, whether or not it was dark.
All that passed through Gwen’s head as a way to reassure herself. Rhun’s death had shaken her confidence that everything would always turn out all right in the end, because that time it hadn’t. Despair threatened to overwhelm her, but she hadn’t spent nearly ten years as Hywel’s spy for nothing. For Tangwen’s sake, and the sake of her unborn child, she was going to get them out of here—or die trying.
The Renegade Merchant Page 20