“The body is barely damp, Adda,” Gwen said as gently as she could.
Adda pressed his lips together.
Gwen didn’t know either man well. But while Dewi seemed something of a simpleton, Adda was far from stupid, even if he annoyed her by being pompous and overbearing.
It should have been clear to an experienced man such as he that the woman had been dead long before today, but he was also a stubborn man with fixed opinions. Gwen encountered men like him all the time. They were older, set in their ways, and did not welcome the notion that a young woman might have anything to contribute to a murder investigation.
“Perhaps while we wait for Gareth to arrive, Dewi and Rhodri could survey the beach?” Gwen gestured to the area around the body. “I know that we’ve disturbed the sand with our footprints, but they could look for tracks from a cart or from a man walking as if he was carrying something—her—on his shoulder? Given how dried out the body is, she wouldn’t have been very heavy for a grown man, but his boots should have sunk deeper into the sand than if he carried nothing.”
Adda raised his eyebrows. “Sir Gareth would want the body removed from the beach first.”
Gwen just managed not to grind her teeth. She’d given him a long speech and was trying to be as polite as she could. “My husband, and Prince Hywel, of course, will be very grateful to you when they return for moving the investigation forward in their absence. I’m sure they will personally want to hear from you whatever you discover.” She gave him her sweetest smile and tried to keep her expression as sincere as possible.
Adda’s chin still stuck out stubbornly, but as Gwen had hoped, he grunted his consent. It was unlikely that Adda would tell her anything of what he found now that she’d wounded his pride, but Gareth would tell her what Adda had to say as soon as he heard it. There was only so much she could do here all by herself, and she did need Adda’s help.
Adda motioned for Rhodri to join him and Dewi, and Gwen went back to studying the body, finding it hard to reconcile its condition to its presence on the beach. She fingered the cloth of the woman’s dress. Blue like the cloak, with a close weave that was still fine to Gwen’s touch, it was embroidered at the bodice and had a full skirt, the hem of which would have trailed behind the woman as she walked. Her linen shift and underdress were also embroidered. Even without the garnet ring strung on a gold chain around the woman’s neck, Gwen would have known by her clothing alone that this was no serving girl. She’d been noble or at the very least had dressed like it.
Whoever had left her on the beach hadn’t just dumped her here, either. He’d arranged the woman’s long braid of reddish-brown hair so that it trailed down her right shoulder past her hip. In Wales, girls trimmed their hair until they reached womanhood, keeping it shoulder length and easier to care for, after which they never cut it again. Comparing this woman’s braid to Gwen’s own, and taking into account that not every woman’s hair grew at the same rate, the dead woman had been at least five years past womanhood when she died.
A dirty band of fabric that might once have been white was tied around her head. A dark patch on it—dried, of course—had Gwen carefully unwinding the cloth, tugging on it to unstick it from the right side of the woman’s head and knowing before she saw the mat of blood in the woman’s hair that someone had to have hit her very hard to cause the wound. The same dark stains that Gwen guessed were blood instead of mud or the decay of time marred her dress at the right shoulder too.
Gwen gently worked her fingers underneath the matted hair and found the wound. As Gwen traced the edges of shattered bone, she came upon an abrupt indentation in the center of the wound as if a sharp point had been driven into the bone.
Gwen sat back. Trying to gain control of her thoughts, she blocked out the image of the woman as she was now in order to take stock of what the girl had once been: she was more than eighteen years old, possibly noble, and had been dead for years. Gwen ran her thumb along the woman’s slender wrist. The flesh still adhered to the bones and, like the rest of her arm, wasn’t a uniform medium brown. The skin was mottled all along the arm—darker in some places than others—but a thin band of darker skin went around each wrist. Given the unusual state of decomposition, Gwen didn’t want to speculate if these were bruises or a natural result of the desiccation of the body. Gwen had never seen a body like this one, so she honestly didn’t know what was normal in such a case.
Other than the head wound, of course, which clearly wasn’t.
For the first time in months, Gwen felt her stomach rebelling. She swallowed down the bile at the back of her throat, grateful now that Rhodri had woken her from a deep sleep, and she hadn’t had the opportunity to eat anything before she rode to the beach.
“Gwen!”
She looked up at the sound of her husband’s voice. Gareth had appeared in the gap between two dunes, accompanied by Prince Hywel and ten other men. Gwen had drowsily kissed Gareth goodbye before he’d ridden out of Aber Castle with Hywel. At the sight of him now, her spirits lifted, alleviating some of the sickness in her stomach. Gareth and the other men reined in and dismounted near where Gwen had left her horse and the cart had been parked.
Gwen’s pleasure faded, however, as Adda stepped in front of Hywel, talking quickly. They were too far away for Gwen to make out Adda’s words, and apparently Gareth wasn’t interested in hearing what Adda had to say because he strode past him, crossing the last few yards of sand to where Gwen waited. He was careful—as Gwen had been—to take a circuitous route so as not to disturb the already churned up sand more than he had to.
Gwen rose awkwardly to her feet and gestured to the body in the sand. “As you can see, we have had some trouble here.”
Gareth slipped an arm around her waist, holding Gwen close for a moment while she pressed her cheek to his chest. To Gwen’s dismay, tears pricked at the back of her eyes, and she shook her head to stop them from falling, determined not to lose her composure just because Gareth had arrived and she no longer needed to keep it.
“Are you all right?” He kissed her temple.
“I have lost count of the number of people who have asked me that this morning,” Gwen said. That wasn’t entirely true; in fact, she’d kept a careful count. Gareth was the third.
“You didn’t answer my question,” Gareth said, but he must have decided that if she could talk back to him, she really was fine, because he released her and crouched in Gwen’s place beside the dead woman.
While Gwen related what she’d discovered so far, Gareth went over the body as she had. Hywel, on the other hand, once he dismissed Adda, stood chewing on his lower lip, his arms folded across his chest and every line of his body revealing his tension and unhappiness. Gwen had assumed that the strange state of the body and the length of time since her death would make it difficult to identify the woman quickly, but the prince’s expression said otherwise.
“Do you know her?” Gwen said.
Hywel breathed deeply. “I don’t want to; I shouldn’t be able to.”
Gareth looked up from his examination. “My lord?”
Hywel didn’t answer. He seemed to be struggling with himself somehow.
Gwen stepped closer, looking at him with some concern. “Whoever she is, we’re here to help, like we always are.”
“After all these years, I can’t believe she’s dead.” Hywel scrubbed at his hair with one hand, his gaze never leaving the body.
“Who’s dead, my lord?” Gareth said.
“My cousin, Tegwen,” Hywel said.
_________________
The Fallen Princess is available at wherever ebooks are sold.
www.sarahwoodbury.com
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The Fourth Horseman Page 26