The Fallen Princess (35 page)

“She is well, Gareth.” Seeing the way things
were going, Hywel had brought a chair to the end of the closest
table and reclined in it, his ankles crossed and his boots on the
table top. He sipped at his cup of mead. “They would have told you
if she wasn’t.”

“It’s gone on so long!” Gareth stopped his
pacing and gazed at the empty doorway. He couldn’t hear anything
that was happening upstairs from here.

“God isn’t going to take her from you now,
not when He and Gwen have conspired so perfectly to keep you here
for the birth,” Hywel said.

Gareth glanced at his lord, worried that
this comment had been accompanied by discontent, but Hywel was
smiling.

Hywel and his men, Gareth among them, had
intended to begin the journey to Ceredigion after Epiphany. That
was nine days ago. Although the weather had stayed mild through
December, it had turned to winter in January and here it was, the
middle of the month, and the snow fell as heavily today as it had
fallen a week ago, making the roads impassable and ensuring
Gareth’s presence for the birth of his child.

“Laboring this long is normal.” Hywel
dropped his feet to the floor and joined Gareth for a circuit
around the hall. “When Eira died, they told me hours earlier that
it wasn’t going well. Gwen’s mother too.”

“If she’s going to die, I can’t be out here
and her in there.”

“She’s not going to die.”

“You don’t know that!” Gareth shook Hywel
off. He’d reached the breaking point and was going to start
throwing chairs like King Owain. Before he had to choose a chair to
throw, however, one of the midwives appeared in the doorway and
canted her head. Gareth bounded towards her.

“If you would come with me, my lord, your
wife would see you now.”

Gareth’s breath caught in his throat. In
later years, he would say that he had no memory of the journey from
the great hall to Cristina’s door, which the midwife opened for
him. A second midwife, a woman twice Gareth’s age, turned as he
entered. Gareth drank in the sight of the child in her arms and
then looked past her to Gwen, who rested in the bed. She lifted her
head to smile at him, tears fresh on her cheeks.

“It’s a girl, Gareth,” she said.

The midwife adjusted the baby’s blanket and
placed her in Gareth’s arms. Wiping away sudden tears of his own,
he sat beside Gwen on the bed and put his forehead to hers, finding
himself unable to speak.

“Your lady wife did very well,” the midwife
said. “Both she and the child are strong and healthy.”

“Thank you,” Gareth said. “Thank you for
everything.”

With a knowing smile at Gareth’s near
incoherence, Gwen reached for the baby, who’d begun to root around.
“Let me feed her before she cries.”

Gareth settled beside Gwen with his back
against the headboard. A servant finished bundling together the
used linens and departed, leaving the door half-open.

“Is it safe to see her?” Hywel’s voice came
from the corridor.

“Yes, my lord,” the servant answered.

Hywel appeared in the doorway, bracing his
shoulder against the frame and smiling. “Have you chosen a name? My
father waits in the hall.”

Gareth gently stroked the back of his
daughter’s head. “Tangwen.”

“The king won’t mind that we want to honor
Tegwen with a piece of her name?” Gwen said, looking quickly up at
Hywel. “Given all that happened, we didn’t feel right about taking
it entirely.” Both names—as well as Gwen’s own—had the same root,
which meant ‘pure’ or ‘white’, but while Teg meant beautiful, Tang
was the word for peace.

Hywel blinked, and then he bowed. When he
looked up again, Gareth thought he saw tears on his cheeks too.
“Tegwen
was
beautiful, and so is your daughter. But I would
choose peace too.”

As Hywel departed, Gwen leaned against
Gareth. “I’m so glad you’re here.”

Gareth kissed his daughter and then his
wife. “I swear to you now that I always will be.”

I am often asked what parts of my books are
‘true’ and what are not. I jokingly say that my stories are as
historically accurate as I can make them except when they aren’t,
but the research that goes into them is extensive in order for them
to represent medieval Wales as accurately as possible. While Gareth
and Gwen themselves are fictional characters, the court of Owain
Gwynedd, his sons, wives, and their circumstances, really
existed.

The problem with researching this era is
that so few contemporary documents remain.

We do know, for example, that Kells was
sacked by the Dublin Danes in the summer of 1144. We know that
Hywel burned Cardigan that same summer. We also know that Cristina
gave birth to a son, Dafydd, very shortly after her marriage to
King Owain. What we don’t have access to is the rest of the story.
Imagining what might have been is why I write these books.

Gilbert de Clare, the Earl of Pembroke, had
to wait a little longer for the chance to invade Ireland, and in
the end, it was his son, Richard, who accomplished it. The deposed
King of Leinster sought help regaining his kingdom and invited the
Normans in. As Gwen pointed out in
The Fallen Princess
,
however, once the Normans laid eyes on the prize, it was all but
impossible to get them to leave.

As a side note,
Calan Gaeaf
(or All
Saints’ Day) and
Nos Galan Gaeaf
(or Hallowmas), which take
center stage in
The Fallen Princess,
are just two of many
traditions that were incorporated into the Church as Christianity
made inroads into Wales.
Nos Galan Gaeaf
is the Welsh
equivalent of Samhain, which has become our Halloween, a
traditional day within Celtic societies when the veil between the
human world and the Otherworld thins. The Church in the medieval
era was ever-present and laid its own traditions over the top of
older traditions that it inherited.

Calan Gaeaf is one of those traditions. See
my post here for more information:
http://www.sarahwoodbury.com/calan-gaeaf/

____________

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Keep reading for the first chapter of the
next Gareth and Gwen Medieval Mystery,
The Unlikely Spy
,
available wherever ebooks are sold.

August
1146
. Prince Hywel has called all the
bards of Wales to him for a music festival to mark the third
anniversary of his rule over Ceredigion. He has invited all the
lords of Wales too, including his father, his uncle, and his
neighbor to the south, King Cadell. But with the highborn also come
the low: thieves, spies, and other hangers-on. And when a murderer
strikes as the festival starts, Gareth and Gwen are charged with
discovering his identity—before the death of a peasant shakes the
throne of a king.

Late August 1146

Gwen

G
wen peered into the courtyard of the monastery before
venturing across the hot cobbles into the mid-afternoon sun, which
shone out of a rare deep blue sky, unhampered by even a single
cloud. Heat radiated off the stones, and Gwen moved in the
direction of the gardens, desperate for a taste of the breeze
coming off the brook that flowed through the monastery. She’d swept
up her brown hair into a chignon, but sweat clung to the tendrils
of hair at the back of her neck.

The guest house lay to one side of the large
square, which was fronted on the road by a gatehouse and a long
stone wall that blocked her view of the fields beyond. The monks’
quarters, church, and college of priests were opposite, as far from
the guest house as it was possible while still remaining in the
same compound. Given her hour-long struggle to get her daughter to
go to sleep, Gwen had to admit the genius of that decision.

In point of fact, that distance was not
because the monks feared to hear a crying child but was left over
from when Norman monks had occupied the monastery. Now that Hywel
(and to be fair, Cadwaladr before him) ruled Ceredigion, the
monastery had been restored to the native Welsh Church, which
viewed women and their children with less hostility than the Norman
religious orders. Still, the presence of young women and children
in the guest quarters made some of the older monks uncomfortable,
and Gwen had been trying as best she could to keep Tangwen
relatively quiet and out of the way. She’d failed utterly at both
today.

For the moment, however, Tangwen was asleep
and Gwen’s fourteen-year-old maid, extravagantly named Elspeth,
remained with her. Gwen hoped her daughter would sleep for at least
two hours. To say she was overtired after all the activity of the
last few days was an understatement.

Unfortunately for the monks’ peace of mind,
Gwen’s adorable baby girl was the least of the monks’ problems this
week. An increasing number of guests had filled the guesthouse,
with more coming every hour. At Prince Hywel’s request, the abbot
had agreed to suffer through the presence of whatever women came to
stay with them, regardless of their seductive beauty.

It wasn’t just the guest quarters at the
monastery that were filling up. Aberystwyth castle, the villages of
Aberystwyth and Llanbadarn Fawr, and the entire surrounding area
were full to bursting with travelers who had arrived at Prince
Hywel’s invitation. He’d put out a call to every corner of Wales
for bards to travel to Ceredigion for a music festival with him as
the host. Even King Owain—along with Gwen’s father, Meilyr, and
brother, Gwalchmai—were journeying from Aber for the
celebration.

Gwen (and Prince Hywel too) had hoped they
would have arrived already, since the festival had opened that
morning. Given the distances involved and the number of people
traveling, however, it was hard to judge how long any journey would
take. Regardless of when they arrived, they would stay for a week
afterwards, which was some consolation. Gwen had missed her father
and brother in the two months she’d lived in Ceredigion.

As Gwen stood in the shadows of the
guesthouse, a party of riders entered through the monastery gate
and halted on the cobbles. Gwen stood on tiptoe to look past them,
hoping Gareth might be among them if he’d had a momentary pause in
his duties to Prince Hywel. But he wasn’t, and Gwen sighed in
disappointment. A frazzled stable boy ran to hold the bridle of the
lead horse. The hosteler, a fat, balding monk in charge of the
wellbeing of guests, waddled out of the chapter house to greet
them.

Although Gareth had not come, Gwen smiled
when she recognized Prior Rhys riding at the tail end of the group.
His soldierly bearing was unmistakable even underneath his bulky
monk’s robe. He wasn’t in Aberystwyth for the festival but had come
because his abbot had sent him to St. Padarn’s to consult with the
members of the college of priests on a spiritual matter. Gwen
hadn’t seen him since the evening meal the night before, and at the
sight of him, she lifted her hand and finally stepped into the hot
sun so she could greet him.

But instead of allowing her to come to him,
Prior Rhys dismounted and ran to her, hitching up his robe to
reveal the breeches and boots he wore underneath. Just looking at
the weight of his clothing made Gwen hotter. His behavior was
unusual enough to turn her expression turning from a smile of
greeting to a frown of concern.

“Where might I find your husband?” Rhys said
when he reached her. He was of the same generation as Gwen’s
father, but unlike Meilyr, Rhys’s age was revealed not in a
burgeoning paunch but in the lines on his face, evidence of many
years spent outdoors in the wind and sun. At the moment, his bushy
eyebrows had drawn together, making the lines on his forehead more
pronounced than ever.

“He was at the castle last I heard.” Gwen
sidled back to the guesthouse wall so she could stand in the shade.
She also wanted to put a few more feet between Rhys and the new
arrivals, who were shooting curious glances at the prior. She
didn’t want him to be the subject of anyone’s entertainment, and,
had they known him at all, they would have realized that something
was very much wrong for him to behave with anything less than
absolute dignity.

“I already checked. Both he and the prince
were absent. I had hoped to find them here.”

Gwen shook her head. “I haven’t seen Gareth
since this morning. What’s wrong?”

“Do you have someone to keep an eye on
Tangwen?” Rhys said.

“Elspeth is sitting with—”

“Good. You must come with me.” He took her
elbow and urged her across the cobbles to his horse without waiting
for her to finish her sentence. He paid no attention at all to the
guests, who were now openly staring as they passed. Hoisting
himself into his saddle, he held out his elbow for Gwen so she
could mount behind him.

She didn’t question him, merely took his
proffered arm.

The hosteler, however, gazed up at both of
them, open-mouthed. “Whatever is the matter? Where are you taking
Lady Gwen? What should I tell the abbot?”

Rhys made an exasperated sound at the back
of his throat. Glancing at the guests, none of whom were making any
pretense of minding any doings but his, he leaned down to speak to
the hosteler so nobody else could hear. “The body of a man has been
found in the millpond.”

“He’s dead?”

Generally ‘body’ implied ‘dead’, and Rhys
didn’t deign to answer in words but simply nodded.