A Gareth & Gwen Medieval Mystery
The Fourth Horseman
by
Sarah Woodbury
Copyright © 2013 by Sarah Woodbury
Cover image by Christine DeMaio-Rice at Flip City Books
The Fourth Horseman
May 1144. Newly wedded, Gareth and Gwen travel across the border into England on a diplomatic mission with Prince Hywel of Wales. Within moments of their arrival, however, the mission goes awry and a murder case drops (literally) at their feet. Hindered at every turn by a climate of civil war and constantly shifting political alliances, Gareth and Gwen race to solve the murder and expose a plot that threatens not only their lives, but the life of the future King of England himself.
Murder, intrigue, and treachery take center stage in The Fourth Horseman, the third Gareth and Gwen medieval mystery.
To my mom
The Gareth and Gwen Medieval Mysteries:
The Bard’s Daughter (prequel)
The Good Knight
The Uninvited Guest
The Fourth Horseman
The Fallen Princess
The Unlikely Spy
The Lost Brother
The Renegade Merchant
The After Cilmeri Series:
Daughter of Time (prequel)
Footsteps in Time (Book One)
Winds of Time
Prince of Time (Book Two)
Crossroads in Time (Book Three)
Children of Time (Book Four)
Exiles in Time
Castaways in Time
Ashes of Time
Warden of Time
Guardians of Time
The Lion of Wales Series:
Cold My Heart
The Oaken Door
Of Men and Dragons
A Long Cloud
The Last Pendragon Saga:
The Last Pendragon
The Pendragon’s Quest
The Paradisi Chronicles:
Erase Me Not
www.sarahwoodbury.com
A Brief Guide to Welsh Pronunciation
c a hard ‘c’ sound (Cadfael)
ch a non-English sound as in Scottish ‘ch’ in ‘loch’ (Fychan)
dd a buzzy ‘th’ sound, as in ‘there’ (Ddu; Gwynedd)
f as in ‘of’ (Cadfael)
ff as in ‘off’ (Gruffydd)
g a hard ‘g’ sound, as in ‘gas’ (Goronwy)
l as in ‘lamp’ (Llywelyn)
ll a breathy ‘shl’ sound that does not occur in English (Llywelyn)
rh a breathy mix between ‘r’ and ‘rh’ that does not occur in English (Rhys)
th a softer sound than for ‘dd,’ as in ‘thick’ (Arthur)
u a short ‘ih’ sound (Gruffydd), or a long ‘ee’ sound (Cymru—pronounced ‘kumree’)
w as a consonant, it’s an English ‘w’ (Llywelyn); as a vowel, an ‘oo’ sound (Bwlch)
y the only letter in which Welsh is not phonetic. It can be an ‘ih’ sound, as in ‘Gwyn,’ is often an ‘uh’ sound (Cymru), and at the end of the word is an ‘ee’ sound (thus, both Cymru—the modern word for Wales—and Cymry—the word for Wales in the Dark Ages—are pronounced ‘kumree’)
Cast of Characters
Owain Gwynedd – King of Gwynedd (North Wales)
Rhun – Prince of Gwynedd
Hywel – Prince of Gwynedd
Gwen – spy for Hywel, Gareth’s wife
Gareth – Gwen’s husband, Captain of Hywel’s guard
Mari – Gwen’s friend
Rhys – Prior of St. Kentigern’s Abbey (St. Asaph)
Evan – Gareth’s friend
Gruffydd – Prince Rhun’s captain
Empress Maud – daughter of King Henry (deceased), claimant to the throne of England
King Stephen – nephew of King Henry (deceased), King of England
Robert – Earl of Gloucester, illegitimate half-brother to Empress Maud
Prince Henry – Maud’s son
William of Ypres – Stephen’s right-hand-man
Ranulf – Earl of Chester
Amaury – Norman knight
Stephen de Blois came to London,
and the people received him
and hallowed him to king on midwinter day.
But in this king's time was all dissension, and evil, and rapine;
for against him rose soon the rich men who were traitors.
Then was England very much divided.
Some held with the king and some with the empress;
for when the king was in prison,
the earls and the rich men supposed that he would never more come out,
and they settled with the empress,
and when the king was out,
he heard of this, and took his force,
and beset her in the tower.
By such things, and more than we can say,
we suffered nineteen winters for our sins.
To till the ground was to plough the sea:
the earth bore no corn,
for the land was all laid waste by such deeds;
they said openly that Christ and his saints slept …
–The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
And this time shall be known to history as … the Anarchy.
Chapter One
May 1144
Gwen
“You two keep your ears and eyes open,” Hywel said. “Earl Robert may be courting friendship with Wales, but I want everyone to remain on their guard nonetheless. I don’t trust these Normans.”
Gwen glanced at Gareth, who laughed. “Of course,” they said together.
Gareth’s eyes glinted, and if Gwen hadn’t been married to him for five months already, she would have blushed. It wasn’t the first time they’d spoken in unison.
Hywel mumbled something Gwen didn’t catch—half-laughing too—and led the way into the bailey of the enormous Norman castle at Newcastle-under-Lyme. In its shadow lay a prosperous village which, according to Hywel, had grown in recent years. What had once been a few huts planted in the lower bailey of the original timber castle was now a thriving market town beyond the new castle’s stone walls.
The castle bailey teemed with soldiers, and Gwen knew why: the war between King Stephen and Empress Maud was in its ninth year. The man they had come to see, Robert, Earl of Gloucester, was Maud’s brother and led her armies. Although most men agreed that Robert would have made a better king than either Stephen or Maud, he was a bastard, so he could never claim the English throne for himself.
The steps up to the stone keep, which had replaced the original motte and bailey castle, lay two hundred feet in front of them, on low lying ground to the north of the Lyme Brook. Hywel and his brother, Prince Rhun, urged their horses through the crowd. Gareth and Gwen followed, along with their other companions: Evan, Gareth’s second-in-command; Gruffydd, Rhun’s captain; and Rhys, the prior of St. Kentigern’s monastery in St. Asaph, who had befriended Gareth last winter.
Three Normans waited for them on the flagstone pathway that ran from the gatehouse to the keep. The men stood with their hands behind their backs and bowed at the princes’ approach. Then one stepped forward and spoke in French. “Welcome to Newcastle. Earl Robert sends his greetings. Please dismount, my lords.” He caught sight of Gwen. “Madam.”
Gwen waited for Gareth to get down first so he could help her. He always wanted her to wait for him, even when she didn’t need his help. When he held her a moment longer than was strictly necessary, once she was on the ground, she smiled up at him. She would have kissed him, too, but for the large audience around them.
After a long look, he let her go, and Gwen swished her skirt into place. She was wearing finery today, as were they all. They had d
ressed well and deliberately that morning in their camp, located less than a mile from Newcastle, in order to present the Welsh cause to Robert in the best light possible.
Hywel, with his deep blue eyes, broad shoulders, and handsome face, would do well wherever he went. Rhun, with his thick shoulders and shock of blond hair, looked more like a Dublin Dane than a Welsh prince. As the Normans were themselves descended from the same Viking ancestors as the Danes, his visage was one the Normans could respect. King Owain of Gwynedd, the princes’ father, knew what he was doing when he sent his sons to foster diplomacy between the two kingdoms.
The stable boys led the horses away, and the companions turned towards the keep. Built into the curtain wall of the castle, it had towers on every corner and loomed above them. “Here comes Earl Ranulf himself,” Hywel said, leaning in to speak to Gareth and Gwen.
“Sir Amaury de Granville walks with him, my lord,” Gareth said. “I told you about him. He is Ranulf’s man at Chester Castle.”
“I remember,” Hywel said.
It was good news that Ranulf had come to greet the Welsh princes. He wasn’t Earl Robert himself, of course, but he was Robert’s son-in-law and the Earl of Chester. Maybe Earl Robert truly had invited the princes to visit Newcastle out of goodwill and a genuine interest in an alliance with Wales, not as a ploy to put the Welsh at a disadvantage and intimidate them with Norman power.
Gwen tried to watch Ranulf without staring at him. He appeared slightly unkempt. The brooch holding his cloak closed at the neck had drifted towards his left shoulder, he had mud on his boots, and a dark stain marred his brown breeches. Then a ray of sunlight shot over the castle wall, forcing Gwen to blink and turn her head away.
She put up one hand to block the light and nudged Gareth. “I can’t see. Let’s move over here.” She tugged him to the right of the steps that flared out from the keep and into the long shadow cast by the castle’s old motte, which rose up on the east side of the bailey.
Several men who’d been milling about in the courtyard pressed forward, eagerly filling the space which Gwen and Gareth had vacated. These onlookers seemed to want to hear the princes’ exchange with Ranulf, or maybe they were Ranulf’s men and had been waiting for him to appear from the keep.
“Thank you.” Gwen squeezed Gareth’s hand, glad she was with him, even if visiting a Norman castle had never been something she’d wanted to do.
A dozen yards away, Rhun and Hywel bowed slightly, as did Ranulf in return. “Welcome,” Ranulf said, in French.
From where she stood with Gareth, Gwen couldn’t hear Hywel’s response, though she could see his lips move. She stepped closer, trying to make out what the men were saying, but then a movement on the tower at the top of the keep distracted her. She glanced up and saw two men, their faces clearly visible in the sunlight.
They looked down on the Welsh party for a heartbeat, one man clutching the other’s shoulders. Then they separated: one to disappear from view, and the other to fall head first over the battlement and land flat on his back at Gwen’s feet.
Chapter Two
Gareth
When Gwen had squeezed Gareth’s arm, drawing his attention away from the princes and up to the battlement, he’d seen two men, one with hair blonder even than Rhun’s and a beak for a nose, and the other with dark hair, a pale face, and blank eyes. While he watched, the first man reached down and flipped his companion over the battlement.
Time didn’t stand still and Gareth, choking on his own breath, had been helpless to stop the headlong plunge or the nauseating thud! that followed. The man’s body hit the hard-packed earth of the bailey like a cabbage thrown against a stone wall. Sickening.
Last winter, Gareth had saved King Owain from a murderer’s knife. He’d seen the danger and moved. But Gareth hadn’t the power to stop this murder. Gareth stared at the body and then looked to Prince Hywel. The princes had been exchanging pleasantries with Ranulf. Now, all three men looked Gareth’s way, disbelief and horror on their faces. Gareth brought his gaze back to the dead man at his feet.
Gwen stood with her hand to her mouth, not saying anything. Gareth had killed men and seen them killed, but he’d never seen a man murdered right in front of him. Gareth’s immobility lasted long enough for him to breathe in and out three times, and then he wrapped his arms around Gwen and pulled her to him.
She pressed her face into his neck for an instant before collecting herself. “Did you see the man who pushed him?”
Gareth nodded. The murderer’s cold blue eyes were burned into his memory. “Someone needs to stop him,” he said.
Gwen clenched Gareth’s arms. “Look around. Nobody is moving. We may be the only ones who saw what the man looked like or what he did. It’s you who needs to go!”
This wasn’t Gareth’s castle. This wasn’t his fight, but he had no difficulty following his wife’s direction. As usual, she made immediate sense. He thrust past the other onlookers and took the steps up to the keep two at a time. Two men guarded the door. A Welshman racing into a Norman keep was something they were trained to prevent, but neither responded quickly enough to stop Gareth nor asked what he was doing. Likely, they were as stunned as the other bystanders by what they’d just seen.
Gareth skidded to a halt in the anteroom to the great hall, though the room was bigger than the main hall at Aber Castle. Two dozen people who clustered on the margins of the room stared at him. Gareth took in their expressions, ranging from stunned surprise to haughty condescension. His plain cloak, tunic, loose breeches, and low boots marked him as Welsh. At the same time, the men waiting to attend to Earl Robert looked foppish to Gareth, with their floppy hats and high, fringed boots into which they’d tucked the ends of their too-tight breeches.
“Which way?” Rhun’s voice rang around the room. The prince bumped into Gareth as he, too, tried to stop his headlong rush.
“One way or the other, the man has to come down from the tower,” Gareth said. “We should split up, my lord. If you could go that way.” He pointed to a stairwell to the right. “You’re looking for a man with a shock of hair so blond it’s nearly white. And tall.”
“Right!”
Rhun and Gareth took off in opposite directions. Gareth raced up the left stairwell, keeping his hand on the hilt of his sword so it wouldn’t slap against his thigh. Gareth judged that the murderer would be looking for a less obvious exit than the front door to the keep: if Gareth had just thrown a man over the battlement, he wouldn’t have walked down a main stairwell afterwards. Then again, it puzzled Gareth as to what the man could have been thinking, killing in broad daylight in front of so many potential witnesses. While Gareth had never murdered anyone, he’d had more experience with it than was probably good for him, and in his estimation, murder was best accomplished in the dark.
He came out of the stairwell into a corridor, empty but for two maidservants gossiping at the far end. They leaned against opposite walls, their buckets of water on the floor and their washing cloths forgotten. Gareth fumbled for a moment with his English and then managed, “Did a man come through here? One with light hair?”
They gaped at him. One girl put her hand over her mouth and giggled. Gareth got a grip on his impatience and tried again, this time in French. The second girl—woman, really, as she was older than Gwen—shook her head and added a very French, “Non!”
“Thank you!” Gareth continued up two more flights of stairs and came out at the top of a tower. A weathered roof protected the thirty feet of wall walk between his tower and the one opposite, from which the dead man had fallen. That was the stairwell he’d just sent Rhun up, but perhaps Rhun had found either more luck or more trouble, because Gareth saw no sign of the prince.
Gareth took a moment to peer over the battlement into the bailey of the castle. So many people were clustered around the body, Gareth couldn’t see it. He could see Gwen, however, standing with Prince Hywel and Ranulf, and nodded to himself. He could leave the dead to his wife and Hywel. Gar
eth had a living man to catch.
He pushed off the embrasure and raced along the wall walk of the castle, dodging past two guards who paced it, pikes resting on their shoulders. Gareth couldn’t guess where this pair had been when the murderer had dropped the dead man from the tower. He wouldn’t like to be in their boots when their captain got wind of their negligence.
As Gareth neared the southeast tower ahead of him, still without seeing the culprit, what little hope he’d had that he might catch him faded. If he hadn’t met the murderer yet, the man had already descended to a lower level and Gareth was too late. The murderer could lose himself in the castle, and nobody would be the wiser. Newcastle was so huge, it might have thirty rooms in which a man could hide until such a time as he felt it was safe to depart.
At least Gareth knew what the man looked like, which should help Earl Robert identify him and track him down. Gareth reached the southeastern tower that overlooked the Lyme Brook, intending to find stairs that would take him down again, but then skidded to a halt at the sight of a rope looped around one of the merlons that formed the battlement. Gareth touched the knot, noting how tightly it had been tied, and then peered through the crenel (the gap between two merlons). Thirty feet below him, a man hung above the river.
Gareth looked around for the guards he’d passed, but when he didn’t see them, he waved a hand to a man who stepped from the southwestern tower. And then he realized that the man was Prince Rhun. “My lord!”
As Rhun crossed the wall walk that separated them, Gareth looked down at the murderer again. He was almost at the water. Even with Rhun’s help, Gareth wouldn’t be able to haul him back over the battlement. Gareth pulled out his knife and began to saw at the rope.
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