The Renegade Merchant (13 page)

“No, no.” Meilyr shook his head forcefully.
“He awoke the next morning to find the woman gone and the baby left
behind.”

Gwen stopped in the middle of the street and
turned so she could see his face. He was only a few inches taller
than she, so she barely had to look up. “You’re telling me that
Adeline’s mother left her with Tom Weaver and didn’t look back? He
never heard from her again?”

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.”

Gareth

“
T
wo 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.