The Fourth Horseman (35 page)

The dispute over the succession came about
after King Henry’s only legitimate son died when ‘the White Ship’
went down in the English Channel in 1120, leaving Maud as his only
other heir. Because of the prejudice against crowning a woman, King
Henry subsequently arranged for his barons to swear an oath to
support Maud’s claim to the throne upon his death, but as the years
went by, discontentment with that oath developed and grew.
Eventually, Maud and her husband, Geoffrey of Anjou, grew concerned
enough about the dissent to urge King Henry to bestow Normandy (a
region of France) upon Maud in advance of his death. He
refused.

King Henry died on 1 December 1135,
allegedly from eating ‘a surfeit of lampreys’—that is, he ate too
many fish—while he, Maud, and Stephen were all in France. It is
important to remember that the rulers of England at this time,
including these three, were Norman French, not ‘English,’ and were
as much interested in maintaining their hold on their lands in
France as they were in ruling England. Maud had married Geoffrey,
Count of Anjou, and was pregnant with her third child. Stephen was
visiting his estates in Boulogne, acquired when he married his
wife, Matilda. His elder brother, Theobold, technically the next
male in line for the English throne, had never set foot in England.
He ruled Blois, a region in France.

Stephen had spent many years in King Henry’s
court, however, and had developed a following among the
Anglo-Norman barons. When he learned of Henry’s death, he
high-tailed it across the English Channel and was was hailed king
by the citizens of London. Stephen was crowned by another of his
brothers, Henry, who had become powerful in the English Church as
the Bishop of Winchester and was the second richest man in England,
after King Henry himself.

Meanwhile, Maud and Geoffrey maintained a
hold on Normandy, eventually controlling the entire region. After
several years of inciting rebellion against King Stephen and wooing
allies in England, Maud crossed the English Channel with an
invasion force in 1139, beginning the active phase of the civil
war.

By 1144, when
The Fourth Horseman
takes
place, England had experienced five long years of war. It wasn’t
until 1153 that the issue of the succession was finally settled and
a treaty signed. Empress Maud renounced her right to the throne in
favor of her son, Henry, whom Stephen agreed to name as his heir.
Oddly, like King Henry, whom he’d succeeded, King Stephen died
unexpectedly of a ‘stomach disorder’ in October of 1154, only a
year after the treaty was signed.

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The Fourth
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The next
Gareth & Gwen Medieval
Mystery
,
The Fallen
Princess
, is now available wherever ebooks
are sold.

The Fallen
Princess

Hallowmas
1144
. With the harvest festival
approaching, Gareth has returned from fighting in the south, hoping
for a few months of peace with Gwen before the birth of their first
child. But when an innocent foray to the beach turns up the
murdered body of Prince Hywel’s long lost cousin, a woman thought
to have run away with a Dane five years earlier, it is Gareth and
Gwen who are charged with discovering her killer. The trail has
long since gone cold, or so Gareth and Gwen think, until their
investigation threatens to expose dangerous truths that everyone
else from king to killer would prefer to keep buried.

No secret is safe, and no
man, whether lord or peasant, can escape the spirit of Hallowmas
in
The Fallen Princess
, the fourth Gareth and Gwen medieval mystery.

Sample: The Fallen
Princess

Chapter One

Gwen

“
T
his won’t be a pleasant sight, my
lady.” Rhodri helped Gwen dismount. He’d come to Aber Castle to
find Gareth, but Gwen’s husband had risen from his bed long before
dawn, leaving to ride with Prince Hywel and his men on
patrol.

“
It never is,” Gwen
said.

Rhodri set her gently on the soft sand, its
usual yellowish-brown color turned to gray in the pre-dawn light.
The cart intended for carrying away the body rumbled to a halt
behind them, and another soldier, Dewi, jumped off the seat,
leaving the stable boy who’d been driving the cart to wait with it
and hold the horse’s head.

The tense expression in Rhodri’s face didn’t
ease, so Gwen added, “I’m well, Rhodri. Truly.” Many women
struggled with their health during pregnancy, but other than an
annoyingly strong sense of smell, Gwen hadn’t had any difficulties
so far beyond a few unpleasant mornings, particularly in the
beginning, and an increased need for sleep. Even at this late
stage, with the baby due at the end of January, some people still
didn’t notice right off that she was carrying a child.

While the men shooed away the crowd of
onlookers, Gwen circled the body, trying to disturb the scene as
little as possible. She considered the corpse from all
angles—though as it was well wrapped in a cloak, there wasn’t much
to see. From the closeness of the weave, the cloak had once been
very fine. It was dirty now, of a color that she thought should
have been blue. The hood half-covered the face, implying that one
of the onlookers had drawn it back and then, when death had been
definitively determined, hastily thrown it over the face again.

Gwen braced herself for the need to see who
this was and bent to lift away the cloth.

At the grotesque appearance of the face,
Gwen’s breath caught in her throat. Then a hand touched her
shoulder, and she jumped a foot. “By all that is holy—”

“
I’m sorry! I’m sorry!”
Llelo said. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

Gwen let out a burst of air. “What are you
doing here? Is Dai here too?”

“
He’s a laze-about,” Llelo
said, answering her second question first. “I came for the clams.
Are you all right?”

“
Why does everyone think
I’m not well? I’ve seen dead people before.”

Llelo frowned, staring past her to the body.
“Not like this one, I don’t think.”

Gwen deliberately hadn’t looked again at the
dead woman’s face. Instead, she gestured towards a group of
children looking anxiously in their direction. “They shouldn’t be
here.”

“
They’re the ones who found
her,” Llelo said.

Gwen inspected her young
charge. He’d grown four inches since he’d come to live with them
and loomed over her. If she were to stand, he’d be taller than she
was.
Thirteen years old going on
twenty
, as Gareth had said privately to
her more than once. Upon the death of his father, Llelo had needed
to grow up quickly in order to care for his younger brother, Dai.
Gareth had discovered both boys in an English monastery last May
and taken them under his wing.

The boys had spent most of
the summer with Gwen on Anglesey while Gareth was in Ceredigion
serving Prince Hywel, but they had all gathered at Aber this week
to celebrate
Calan
Gaeaf
, what the Church called All Saints’
Day. It was the end of the harvest season and the beginning of
winter. In the traditions of her people, at this time of year the
veil between the next world and this one thinned. Tomorrow
night,
Nos Galan Gaeaf
, or Hallowmas, the spirits of those who’d died would walk
the earth. Gwen shivered to think that this poor soul could be
among them.

“
Since you’re here, you
might as well help,” Gwen said. “The children will talk to you.
Find out what they know while I see who this is.”

“
You can tell it was once a
woman,” Llelo said, with all the morbid fascination of the
young.

Gwen waved her hand at him. “Off you go.”
Asking Llelo to help her might turn out to be the worst idea she’d
had this month, but since he was here, it was better to keep him
busy.

Gwen turned back to the body, no longer able
to avoid looking at it. As Llelo had said, it was that of a woman,
but beyond this simple observance, Gwen didn’t know that she’d ever
seen a stranger circumstance. For starters, the woman’s body wasn’t
bloated with water like it should have been had she drowned.
Instead, her skin was dried out, leathery and brown like an old
apple, more bones than flesh, though flesh still adhered to the
bone. The woman could have been dead for months, if not years. The
cloak that wrapped her wasn’t wet either, which Gwen would have
noticed earlier if she hadn’t been so distracted.

On the ride to the beach, Gwen had conceived
two scenarios that would have put the body here this morning. One
would have been a drowning, though the sea had been calm last
night, despite three weeks of solid rain. The second and more
complicated possibility had been that the body had been buried in
the sand somewhere—a dune or a cliff face near the water’s edge—and
over time, wind and tide had worn away the sand that covered her
grave until it was fully exposed and the body fell into the
sea.

In that case, the body
could have washed up here because of the way the water moved in and
out of the Menai Strait. Both possibilities would have involved a
recent death, because that was the only way the body would have
remained intact enough to
wash up on the
beach in the first place.

And if the body had washed up on the beach,
even many hours ago, it would have been wet from head to toe. That
wasn’t the case, which meant that someone had placed it here.

With these thoughts spinning in her head,
Gwen put her hand flat on what remained of the woman’s belly. The
fabric of her dress was damp, like laundry left out on the line all
night, but it wasn’t sopping. Gwen looked up, meeting the eyes of
several villagers, who gazed at her with expressions ranging from
curious to revolted to worried. She, herself, was among the
worried. She didn’t know who this was, but she knew nobody was
going to be happy when she discovered the woman’s name. Somewhere,
sometime, someone had lost a daughter. It would be Gwen’s task—and
Gareth’s and Hywel’s—to find out who that was.

“
Who found her?” she
said.

Llelo lifted a hand to gain Gwen’s attention
and brought the group of children closer. “They did, all
together.”

“
Did you touch her?” Gwen
studied the children’s faces as they shook their heads vehemently
in turn. She ended up looking intently at a medium-sized boy of
about nine with a mop of dark hair and dark eyes.

“
No, my lady.” He shook his
head too.

Gwen looked sideways at him. “Not even a
little?”

“
It was I who pulled back
her hood, Lady Gwen.” A burly villager stepped forward. “Once I saw
that she was dead—long dead from the looks—I went to find Rhodri,
there.” He gestured to where Rhodri guarded the pathway between the
body and the cart.

If he’d come to the same conclusion Gwen
had—that the woman hadn’t drowned—he’d realized that it was along
that trajectory that evidence, if there was any evidence, would be
found. All of the men-at-arms at Aber, whether they served Prince
Hywel, his brother Rhun, or King Owain, knew from experience that
Gareth would want to inspect the entire area personally and would
be displeased if it had been marred by the curious and the
careless. Beyond Rhodri, Dewi had gone back to the cart and was
talking to someone, though since the man had his back to her, Gwen
couldn’t tell who it was.

She glanced up at the sky. The sun was
coming up over the hills to the southeast, revealing a cloudless
sky, unusual for so late in October. A warm breeze was blowing into
her face from the south. She’d woken to dozens of mornings like
this on Anglesey over the summer, and for a moment she wished that
she was back at her little cottage, wiggling her bare toes in the
warm sand instead of on this windswept beach crouching over a dead
body. “When is low tide, Llelo?”

“
Just now, Ma,” Llelo said.
“That’s why we all came down here this morning. After the rain
we’ve had, we were looking forward to a good haul of
clams.”

Gwen focused on the damp sand around the
body. The high tide mark was another ten feet further up the beach,
beyond where the woman lay, which meant that she’d been laid down
on this beach sometime after midnight. Otherwise, she would have
been washed away with the tide. That led Gwen to conclude—though
Hywel would say it was far too soon to conclude anything—that
whoever had laid her here had wanted her to be found. Otherwise, he
should have left her where he found her, wherever that was, or put
her closer to the water’s edge so the tide could have taken her out
to sea.

“
Can we move her
now?”

Gwen looked up and struggled not to let
dismay show on her face. Adda, the commander of one of King Owain’s
companies, had arrived at Gwen’s side with Dewi in tow. Adda bent
over the body, his hands on his knees. Dewi wore a look of
revulsion on his face.

“
I’m sorry, sir, but we
really can’t,” Gwen said.

“
Why not?” Adda
said.