The Favored Son

by Sarah Woodbury

  Llelo bent to pick up a few chips and fragments of stone that had fallen to the walkway. The large stone had separated from the main wall at a seam, where mortar had been used to attach one stone to another. As he looked closer, he thought he could see chisel marks along the edge, but even if he was right, they signified nothing. The stone had been chiseled before it was put in place, in order to fashion it to the appropriate shape. He was not a mason, and thus was not trained to determine if the marks should be there or not. But he would show them to his father, and his father would find someone who could answer better.

  He took a step back to examine the whole of the area. “The mortar is the same color here as between the rest of the stones, implying that the wall hasn’t been repaired since it was built. Am I wrong about that? Has Bristol Castle ever been attacked?”

  “No,” the young man answered. “If the wall was mended, it wouldn’t have been because it was breached. Not here inside the castle, anyway. Even King Stephen, when he brought an army to Bristol’s doorstep nearly ten years ago now, took one look—and maybe a second—and went away unsatisfied, having determined that taking it would cost him too many resources and men. And even if he’d thought the cost worth the attempt, it still might have withstood him. We are impregnable.” His tone was satisfied, but not overly so, more a confident assessment from a man who knew truth when he saw it.

  Llelo was hardly one to argue, newcomer that he was and a Welshman to boot.

  “What name do you go by?”

  Llelo started, having lost the train of the man’s French for a moment. He bowed, embarrassed that he hadn’t pressed to exchange names sooner. In his country, such a lapse would have been a shocking offense. “I’m Llelo ap Gareth. My father is the man Prince Henry sent for from Wales.”

  “You must be a bastard like me, for your mother is not old enough to have birthed you.”

  “I’m adopted.”

  The man grunted his acknowledgement of the difference. “My name is Hamelin, half-brother to Henry by his father, the Count of Anjou. I have never met a Welshman before.”

  Llelo tipped his head politely. “In Wales, it wouldn’t matter if you were illegitimate. You would inherit from your father before Henry, since you are older than he is, or in some cases your father’s wealth and lands would be distributed equally among all his sons.”

  Hamelin stared at Llelo. “You tell me truly?”

  Llelo grinned. “Prince Hywel, my liege lord, is a bastard but still heir to the throne of Gwynedd. In Wales, parentage is of no matter as long as the father acknowledges the son.”

  Hamelin made a huh sound under his breath. “If that were the case, I’m not sure my father would have acknowledged me. Besides, England would not be mine, since it comes to Henry through his mother.” He paused and then said musingly, “I would inherit Anjou, however.”

  Llelo felt himself warming to the Frenchman. His calm assessment of his relationship with his father was without drama. Llelo’s own birth father had been a hard man, and he could relate to a disapproving father. He was more glad than he could say that Gareth’s way was different.

  “Where were you when the stone fell on Sir Aubrey?”

  “In the stables. I heard the screaming of the woman who found him. By the time I arrived in the bailey, a crowd had already gathered.”

  “Did you see anyone up here?”

  “No.” Hamelin shook his head regretfully.

  Llelo looked around. “There were guards, surely. Someone has to have noticed something. I don’t understand why nobody else is here now except for us.”

  “Well—” Hamelin’s expression remained rueful, “Sir Aubrey is dead. He is the one who would have organized everyone.”

  “What about the captain of the guard?”

  Hamelin frowned. “That I don’t know. The castle’s curtain wall is always manned, of course, and at least one of the towers above, keeping watch for an approaching army, but now that I think about it, these wall-walks are often empty.”

  Llelo allowed his surprise to show on his face. “I would have thought every battlement would be manned.”

  “This is a huge castle, with few threats against it, even with the war against King Stephen.” Hamelin was matter-of-fact in his justification of what Llelo thought was genuine neglect—and the very opposite of what he’d been thinking earlier about Earl Robert’s obsession with security. He didn’t express the criticism, however, since Hamelin wasn’t in charge, and it might only raise his hackles. Instead, Llelo craned his neck to look towards the top of the tower, raised some forty feet above where he stood. He couldn’t make out a guard there, but the angle was bad, so he couldn’t say there wasn’t one. “We’ll have to question everyone.”

  Hamelin pushed out his lips, in a move Llelo thought very French. “Sir Aubrey’s death could have been an accident. It seems incredible that anyone would want to kill him.”

  “It’s best not to make judgements with so little information.” Llelo gestured to the gap in the wall. He’d almost grown used to it while he’d been talking to Hamelin, but it was as if the battlement was a grinning monster that had lost half of a tooth, and it was impossible not to feel a sharp twist in his gut when he looked at it. “Accidental death or murder, you can trust my father to get to the bottom of it.”

  Chapter Four

  Llelo

  Hamelin folded his arms across his chest, not in defiance but contemplatively, as he studied the oddly truncated merlon. “I have rarely heard anyone speak of his father the way you do of yours, with the exception of Earl William, who seemed to have a similar fondness for Earl Robert. You are truly a fortunate man. I can’t wait to meet him.”

  “Llelo!”

  As if on command, his father called his name. Llelo looked down through a nearby crenel, not one adjacent to the damaged merlon, to where his father stood on the ground. “Stay where you are. Your mother is coming—along with a mason who can tell us better what we’re looking at.”

  Llelo nodded with satisfaction, pleased that things were moving along. If there was evidence to be found, this was the way to find it. While they waited for Gwen, Llelo directed Hamelin to pace along the wall opposite him, with the intent of searching for anything someone in a hurry might have dropped.

  But when they reached the next tower and turned back, having found nothing, Hamelin sighed. “That was pointless.”

  “It wasn’t, my lord,” Llelo said. “We had to look, and now that we have, we can turn our attention elsewhere.”

  Hamelin eyed him. “You are a very strange man.”

  Llelo was inclined to take his words as a compliment. “How so?”

  “How can you calmly direct me to look for a torn piece of a cloak or some other talisman that a culprit may have dropped, when a man lies dead practically beneath our feet?”

  Llelo decided to take the question at face value, rather than balk at what was implied but unsaid: that he was uncaring. “Would lamenting help Sir Aubrey? Or explain why he is dead?”

  “No, but—”

  Llelo decided he’d been a little harsh and spoke more gently. “Truly, my parents believe, and I believe, that the best way to mourn a man is to discover the truth of how he died. I apologize if it seems insensitive, but you must remember that the first time I laid eyes on Sir Aubrey was just now. I didn’t know him even to look at, and given how he died, I still don’t.”

  Hamelin wrinkled his chin. “I suppose I didn’t know him more than in passing either. It’s just—” He peered over the battlement. The men below were finally preparing to move the body indoors.

  Llelo didn’t get a chance to respond or inquire further because Gwen appeared in the doorway of the far tower, the same one Llelo and Hamelin themselves had come up earlier. She was still holding Taran, who was awake but not yet restless in his sling, and once they were close, Llelo offered his finger for the baby to clutch in his little fist.

  Then he introduced his mother to Hamelin, who swept out a
n arm and bowed gallantly. “My lady, it is my pleasure to meet you, though I regret that it is under such unfortunate circumstances.” He gestured to the battlement. “Your son and I have examined the gap and pieces of mortar. We have found nothing else of interest. The killer didn’t drop anything or leave a sign of his passage that we could find.”

  “Other than the fallen wall,” Llelo pointed out, trying not to feel disgruntled that his report had been usurped by Hamelin.

  Gwen canted her head. “If a person, rather than God, is responsible for these deaths, he has been invisible up until now. We can’t expect him suddenly to become sloppy, though—” she paused as she thought, “—killing Sir Aubrey in broad daylight within an hour of our arrival serves only to focus our attention more acutely and confirm Prince Henry in his suspicions.”

  Hamelin took a step closer. “I know little of murder—well, nothing until today—but a man could have been so desperate to silence Sir Aubrey that he didn’t care if it exposed him more than he has been up until now.”

  “You would have thought there would have been a more efficient—and surely a more certain—way to kill a man.” Gwen pursed her lips, and then glanced at Llelo. “The last time someone dropped a body at our feet, it was to gain our attention.”

  “This certainly has done that,” Llelo said, “but like Hamelin, I find it hard to believe that getting our attention was the goal.”

  “I know a little of what you speak, thanks to Prince Henry.” Hamelin put his heels together. “I would like to offer you my services in whatever aspect of this investigation you think your husband can use me.”

  Gwen’s eyes skated to Llelo for a single heartbeat and then back to Hamelin. “May I ask what you have in mind?”

  “If I might be so bold as to assert the obvious, you are Welsh, and many of my brother’s men and the men of Bristol might resent being questioned by you.”

  Llelo attempted to swallow down a snort and failed.

  Hamelin nodded. "You acknowledge I speak the truth.”

  Before Llelo could muster an appropriate reply—something mature and adult regarding Prince Hywel’s instruction not to assume anything—a burly man in gray-tinged clothing with hair to match trotted through the tower doorway. As the man drew closer, Llelo realized his hair was not so much prematurely gray as embedded with stone dust that might never come out, so he was nearer in age to forty than fifty.

  “My lord,” the man bowed low before Hamelin and added in heavily-accented French, indicating he was Saxon and it wasn’t his primary language, “the prince asked me to find you. I am Daniel Mason.”

  Hamelin gave him a sharp nod and gestured towards the damaged merlon. “As you can see, we need your assessment of this portion of the battlement.”

  The mason took a cloth and wiped at sweat on his brow. The cloth came away with gray dust. Gwen noticed too and said, “I apologize if we have called you away from your current project, but we really do need your expertise.”

  “I’m always building something, my lady. Today I was overseeing some repairs to St. Philips, the Benedictine monastery near the castle.” Daniel made a deprecatory gesture. “I’m on loan to them from the Augustinians. We are nearing the end of our latest building phase there, and I had a moment to spare.”

  “Were you involved in building this castle too?” Gwen said.

  “Yes, but only at the very end. I was an apprentice when it went up.” He eyed the missing merlon. “I don’t like the look of this.” He put a hand to the mortar that remained. Then, as both Llelo and Hamelin had done, he crouched and ran some of the fallen mortar dust and stones through his fingers. Still crouched, he turned on the ball of his foot so he could look up at Hamelin. “What exactly are you asking?”

  “Was this a deliberate breach or did the stone fall naturally?” Hamelin said.

  “Is that all?” Daniel straightened and took a step back. “The stone didn’t fall on its own.” He pulled a hammer and chisel from the tool belt at his waist and put the chisel to the top of the wall that remained. Even Llelo, who knew nothing about stonework, could see that the mark was a perfect match to Daniel’s chisel. “The one who did this was an amateur, borrowing tools.” He gestured to the chopped-up mortar on the top of the stone. “He made a mess of it.”

  Llelo couldn’t on his own discern what the mason was talking about, and Hamelin, who’d been standing with an arm folded across his chest and a hand to his chin, laughed. “We’ll take your word for it.”

  “So ... you’re saying that the mortar was chiseled out and then the stone was pushed onto Sir Aubrey as he walked across the ward?” Clutching Taran more tightly to her chest, Gwen peered through the adjacent crenel to the ground. “If that is the case, whoever did this had to have been lying in wait and known Sir Aubrey would be crossing the bailey at that moment. It would have worked only with absolutely perfect timing.”

  Llelo couldn’t cope with how close to the edge Gwen was, even with the wall still waist-high, and caught her elbow. “Careful, Mother.”

  Gwen patted his hand. “We’re fine, but I’ll step back now.” She looked at the mason. “How long would it have taken you to loosen the stone?”

  “If I didn’t care about the noise, no time at all, a matter of a quarter hour or less.” He tipped his head. “If I wanted to be quiet about it, as someone would have had to be if he was breaking down the castle, it could have been a labor of several hours of repeated effort, perhaps not all at the same time either.”

  “Are you willing to say this to Prince Henry and Earl William?” Gwen said.

  Daniel bent his head. “Yes, my lady.”

  Gwen thanked the man, who bowed and headed back down the stairs. Then she turned to Hamelin. “Please don’t take offense, but I’d like to speak to my son for a moment in private.” At Hamelin’s nod of consent, she took Llelo’s arm and drew him twenty feet down the wall-walk from the broken merlon. “What do you think? You met him first.”

  “Our Welshness is one of the reasons Henry summoned us, but I have no doubt that Hamelin is right. Until the residents of Bristol get used to us, if they ever do, we are going to have trouble interviewing them.”

  Gwen made a rueful face. “They are never going to get used to us, but—” she looked at him hard, “you must not respond to any insult or sign of contempt. No matter what anyone might do to provoke us, we must remain gracious. We rise above. Do you understand?”

  Llelo wet his lips. “Yes.”

  Truthfully, Llelo was well used to English animosity towards his people. He’d experienced it daily after his father died and he and Dai lived for a time in the monastery at Newcastle-under-Lyme where Gareth had found them. The English mocked the Welsh language, their customs, and even the food they ate.

  Llelo had hated the disrespect as a boy, but as a man he could admit that he felt the same way about the English. They were farmers, whereas most Welsh made their living from herding sheep and cattle. Llelo had grown up with sheep, since his father had been a wool merchant, and he liked the way his family was constantly on the move. The English were set in their ways, it seemed, and few knew anything beyond a mile or two from the spot they’d been born. His new parents rarely stayed more than a month in any one place, traveling as they did with Prince Hywel. Llelo liked waking up every morning not knowing what that day would bring and felt sorry for anyone for whom every meal consisted of wheat and barley and who never saw farther than the field of grain they cultivated.

  “In the meantime, Hamelin could be useful,” Gwen said. “He is Henry’s half-brother.”

  “Does that mean we are more or less likely to trust him? He looks so much like Conall, I almost forget where he comes from.”

  Gwen laughed. “He does at that. You have to wonder if his mother was Irish.” She gave her son a severe look. “Still, you need to remain vigilant.”

  “Of course. Never trust a Norman.”

  She shook her head. “I didn’t mean that, and it would be wrong to treat
them as they do us. I meant, rather, that we can’t trust anyone but those in our immediate party. That’s why Prince Henry asked us here in the first place—because we are outsiders and could have had nothing to do with any of these deaths. That said, I think we can give your new friend the benefit of the doubt in this. If he is a traitor to his brother, then better to keep him close.”

  “All right.” Llelo took in a breath. “Four people are dead, and the killer could be anyone, even Hamelin, though what his motive might be I couldn’t begin to guess.”

  “Fortunately, we are not in the business of guessing,” Gwen said. “Would you be willing to question the soldiers on the wall-walks with Hamelin?”

  “Yes.” And then Llelo added a bit more vigorously, “The mason responded to him, not to us.”

  “If nothing else, Hamelin appears to have the ability to think on his feet. Out of everyone in the castle, he was the only one who came up here. You’ll note that nobody else has, not even to gawk.” Gwen met Llelo’s gaze. “Why?”

  Llelo looked disconcerted. “Because we’re here? Because Hamelin is?”

  “Where’s the officious older man who is offended by our presence? Or the arrogant soldier who thinks he knows better than we do? We’ve met all kinds in our years of service to Prince Hywel, and I never would have expected to have been left to our own devices at any crime scene.”

  “What are you saying?”

  She lifted her chin to point to a symbol scratched onto the stone to the right of the nearby tower doorway. “Do you know what that is?”

  “I haven’t seen it before, but I can guess that it has something to do with evil spirits. Like the wreaths in the hall, and the holly, and the rosemary burning in the tower room.”

  Gwen made a clicking sound with her tongue. “You noticed. Good. Before you came to us, Aber Castle was beset by a series of deaths, and the people responded similarly. We may find interviewing the residents of Bristol Castle is even more difficult than I already fear it will be.”

  “To speak of evil is to call it down upon us.” Llelo’s eyes went to Hamelin, who was leaning out a nearby crenel. Then he returned his gaze to his mother. “You can trust me to follow where this leads, no matter the end.”