The Renegade Merchant (2 page)

Thus, upon arriving in Shrewsbury yesterday
afternoon, Gareth had put in an appearance at the castle. He’d
assumed he would be meeting with Shrewsbury’s sheriff. Instead, it
had been John who’d greeted him with the news that the sheriff and
most of the garrison had been called away in service of King
Stephen. And, unfortunately, John had no news of Cadwaladr to give
him.

Discovering Cadwaladr’s whereabouts couldn’t
bring Rhun back, but it might do something to ease the grief that
had consumed Gwynedd in the months following the prince’s death.
King Owain’s lamentations were ongoing, such that Hywel had
effectively taken over the running of the kingdom. Here it was,
nearly three months past the Christmas feast, and the king had
hardly stirred from his bed at Aber, unwilling to face life without
his eldest son.

Gareth’s absence from Gwynedd had required
him to leave the planning for the assault on Mold Castle in others’
hands. It was a small price to pay for the opportunity to spend
several weeks in the company of his wife and daughter, and Gareth
had been thankful to leave Aber.

Thus, as Gareth stared down at the pool of
blood at his feet, it came to him that if he was to quickly
discover what this whole matter was about, the next and most
important step in the investigation had to be to send for Gwen.

Gwen

“
W
hy are we worrying about a murder
when we don’t even know that someone is dead? Fletcher clearly
doesn’t know what he’s doing, and this Welshman—” Luke, one of the
men at the east entrance to the alley, made a dismissive gesture
with one hand to indicate Gareth, “—how could he possibly
help?”

“I hear he serves Prince Hywel of Gwynedd.”
This was put forth by a second, gray-haired man named Alfred. They,
and men like them, guarded each gate to the city and worked
alongside the castle’s garrison to patrol the streets and
discourage crime in the town.

Except for a quick glance in Luke’s
direction, Gwen kept her attention determinedly on the ground,
forcing her shoulders to relax and resigning herself to the
inevitable curious looks and whispered conferences that were going
on around her.

Gwen’s spoken English marked her as Welsh
from the moment she opened her mouth, but from the years her father
had traveled throughout Wales and the March, she understood much
more English than she spoke. While she didn’t assume Alfred and
Luke were involved in whatever had happened to the poor person
who’d bled in the alley, understanding the undercurrents among the
English who surrounded her could only help her discover who
was.

In truth, Gwen should have
been grateful that neither man was gossiping about
her.
Maybe they had sense
enough not to do so while she was in close proximity. Certainly, a
better question they could be asking would be how
she
might be helpful to
the investigation. Gwen had enough experience with men and their
expectations to understand how unusual she might seem to them. As
always, however, she wasn’t going to let other people’s opinions
stop her from doing what needed to be done.

Turning away from the two useless watchmen,
she swallowed hard, refusing to allow her stomach to revolt at what
lay before her. The blood itself wasn’t vile or terrible
smelling—it was the stench of the whole town that had her holding
her breath from the moment she set foot inside the walls.
Thankfully, a brisk wind had come with the dawn, and if she faced
into it, she could momentarily banish the odors that threatened to
upend her hard-won serenity.

More importantly, she didn’t want Gareth to
regret her presence. As she was newly pregnant with their second
child, he would have been well within his rights to use her
pregnancy as an excuse to exclude her. Instead, he had sent for her
specifically. She loved working with him. She loved being with him,
even when it meant standing over a pool of blood in a stinking
alley in Shrewsbury.

Debris of all sorts lined the street on both
sides. Earlier, sunlight had been shining directly into the alley,
but as the sun had risen farther in the sky, one wall now cast a
shadow across most of the alley’s width. Gwen kicked at the
detritus that had accumulated in the darkness against the south
wall. Then, as she moved within a few feet of the pool of blood,
she saw something that didn’t belong there lying beneath scattered
leaves and sticks of splintered wood.

Bending, Gwen picked up a stick and used it
to move leaves aside to reveal what they were covering: a string of
wooden rosary beads with a simple wooden cross, strung on a slender
leather thong.

“Has John returned yet?” Gwen spoke in
Welsh, so that only Gareth, who was looking at something on the
ground on the other side of the pool, could understand her.

He rose to his feet and came towards her
before answering. “No. He’s still questioning the residents of the
adjacent streets. Did you find something?”

Gwen craned her neck to look past her
husband to the spot he’d been standing over. “You first.”

Gareth gestured past the pool. “Can you make
out the wheel tracks from here? Someone rolled through the blood as
he drove through the alley.”

“Oh good. Maybe they came upon the person
bleeding on the ground and helped him.” Gwen drew Gareth’s
attention to the rosary. “A good Samaritan might wear this.”

Gareth grunted his approval as he crouched
beside her. “I was starting to feel guilty about taking you away
from Tangwen.”

“She’s fine,” Gwen said. “Gwalchmai is
teaching her to sing scales.”

“A worthy endeavor.” Gareth smiled and made
a motion as if to touch Gwen’s belly, though he withdrew his hand
at the last moment, since there were so many people around. “I look
forward to the day that Tangwen can do the same for this child.
Perhaps he will be a great bard like his uncle and
grandfather.”

“That will be a great day,” Gwen said—and
meant it, even as her stomach twisted a bit at the thought.

Until their departure to Shrewsbury, she’d
lit a candle every day that this time she would give Gareth a son.
Gareth swore it mattered to him not at all, but she knew what
having a son meant to him and to every man. Hywel already had two.
King Owain had a dozen, effectively ensuring his legacy into the
next generation. She and Gareth had two foster sons, Llelo and Dai,
both of whom were serving in Prince Cynan’s retinue, but the boys
had come to them at ten and twelve. It would be a different matter
entirely for Gareth to hold his infant son in his arms and name him
for his own.

Gareth didn’t note her sudden silence and
said, “Trust you to be the one to find something useful. If those
fools weren’t moderately helpful blocking onlookers from coming
into the alley, we’d be better off without them.”

Gwen didn’t disagree, and she didn’t tell
her husband that Luke’s and Alfred’s opinion of him was equally
low. Instead, she pointed to the two ends of the rosary. “See how
the ties came undone rather than breaking? This wasn’t pulled off
in a fight—or if it was, it was loose to begin with.”

Because the thong was knotted at the ends
before the two ends had been tied together, the beads hadn’t come
off the string. It was the normal way to make a rosary. Gwen owned
one very much like it, as did Gareth.

“If the rosary and the blood belong to the
same person, he wasn’t wealthy—or at least he didn’t show his
wealth with expensive beads,” Gareth said.

“A rosary and a pool of blood should never
go hand-in-hand,” Gwen said.

“More likely, the rosary has nothing to do
with the blood at all because it belongs to one of the monks at the
abbey.” Gareth was referring to the Abbey of St. Peter and St.
Paul, located to the east of Shrewsbury, outside the city walls. It
also happened to be the place where they were staying, in the abbey
guesthouse.

“We can show it to the hospitaller and the
abbot.” Gareth leaned in to pick up the rosary, his expression
thoughtful, and he let the beads run through his fingers, as if he
was saying his morning prayers.

Gwen shook her head slightly, still somewhat
bemused that they were here in Shrewsbury at all, much less
embroiled in an investigation within a day of their arrival. Ten
days ago they’d been enduring the gloom at Aber when Meilyr, Gwen’s
father, suddenly took it upon himself to wring permission from the
king to travel to England on the trail of his as yet unacknowledged
daughter, Adeline. She’d died alongside Cole Turner last autumn in
the run up to the initial attempt to take Mold Castle.

Permission had been granted, if reluctantly,
and they’d taken the ride from Aber to Shrewsbury slowly, enjoying
fully the leave from their duties they’d been given. The fine
weather had meant that Gwalchmai, despite being fifteen and a man,
had spent much of the journey scampering about, Tangwen either
running after him or on his shoulders as they explored the terrain
on either side of the road. Gareth and Gwen had enjoyed long bouts
of uninterrupted time to talk, and her father had been in full
spate, composing songs while on horseback and regaling them with
the results of his labors in the evening.

In fact, it had been the first time in
nearly four years—since that fateful day when Gwen, Gwalchmai, and
Meilyr had traveled north at the invitation of King Owain—that
they’d been anywhere together as a family.

Gwen could remember, as clearly as if it
were yesterday, the moment when she realized it was Gareth crouched
over the body of King Anarawd. She often thought back to that
day—recalling the way, between one breath and the next, her life
had been transformed. For King Anarawd—and possibly for this poor
person who’d shed his lifeblood on the ground—change had meant
death. But for the living, it was important to remember that change
wasn’t always bad.

“If anyone was going to act like the good
Samaritan and help the victim, it would have been a monk,” Gwen
said. “As far as I know, however, few ever leave the abbey
proper—at least, that’s what one of the guests told me last night
at dinner. And surely we would have heard if one of the monks had
brought a man who was bleeding to death into the abbey.”

Gareth shrugged. “If the
rosary has no connection to the victim, then at least we can
do
our
good deed
for the day by returning it.”

Gwen

G
areth held out his hand to Gwen to help her rise to her feet.
“Before I send you back to the monastery, let me show you the
tracks.”

Gwen went willingly, not because she didn’t
want to be with her daughter, but because she’d barely sunk her
teeth into this investigation, and she wanted to continue at
Gareth’s side.

Two of John’s men were sifting through more
debris that had accumulated on the ground on the other side of the
pool. Recognizing one of them as Oswin, the young man who’d come to
fetch her from the monastery, Gwen spared them a glance and a smile
and then turned her attention to the tracks. They looked nothing
unusual to her. “What are you seeing that I’m not?”

“To begin, these weren’t made by a
handbarrow, of which I’ve seen many in the day we’ve been here. The
distance between the wheels is too wide for that. The cart was
pulled by a horse. You can see hoof prints in between the tracks
all along the road, since the horse got its hooves bloody too.”

“That means the owner is either a farmer who
brought hay or food into Shrewsbury to sell, or a wealthier
resident of the town,” Gwen said.

“Or from the abbey. They have horses and
carts.”

“Or from the abbey,” Gwen amended. “You’re
right about the handbarrows. I have seen far more of them than
horse-drawn carts. They’re easier to maneuver along these narrow
streets.”

“And,” Gareth continued, “like any wheel
that’s been in use for a while, each of the four has a distinctive
rotation.”

Back before she’d started working for Hywel
and had married Gareth, the idea that a wheel track was worth
paying attention to would have seemed a preposterous notion. Now,
as Gareth traced what he’d observed with one finger, she
acknowledged how much they could discern from common things. She’d
learned, over the years, that solving a crime sometimes meant
looking at the everyday and seeing what others didn’t.

“One of the wheels is missing its metal
rim,” she said.

Gareth shot her a grin. “It looks that way
to me too.”

“And one of the wheels is narrower than the
other three—not by much, but enough to notice when you look at them
side-by-side. Maybe at some point the owner had to replace the
original.”

“I don’t know how John will feel about
inspecting every cart in Shrewsbury,” Gareth said, “but if we find
the right one, and it one of the wheels has blood on it, we’ve
found our cart.”

“I must point out that we don’t know if the
owner of the cart had anything to do with this person’s death,”
Gwen said. “It would be helpful if the tracks were left by the
person who took away the body, but they could easily have been made
by a passer-by, who drove his cart through the alley without
knowing what had taken place in it not long before. In the darkness
before dawn, he could have mistaken the blood for a water puddle
and rolled through it without even seeing it—or thinking anything
of it if he did see it.”

“That may be, but even if the owner of the
cart is a complete innocent, he might have seen something or
someone that could lead us to the victim.” Gareth looked around
him. “I’m not used to towns, and I have no idea how many people
might have been out and about at that hour.”